May 08, 2008
Media Glutton, April 29th 2008
OK, let's talk Iron Man. Iron Man freaking rocked. It was, for me, a great, great super hero movie, which is saying something, since there haven't been a lot of those. Moreover, it's a great super hero movie about a character that I've always liked in theory but seldom actually enjoyed in reality. But this movie takes the coolest, most interesting parts of Tony Stark/Iron Man and then puts them in the hands of RobertDowney Jr who just knocks the ball out of the park. When he was cast I thought he was perfect, but in reality he was more than perfect - he was transcendent. I mean that almost literally. His performance lifted the character into something more interesting than he's ever been in the comics. Plus he really pulled off what I think is one of the most appealing (to me) aspects of Tony Stark - he's a super sexy nerd. He's rich and famous and a sex symbol because he's a technological genius and a funny, personable, sarcastic dude. Geek as alpha male - what more can I ask for in a hero. So go and see the movie, and don't forget to stay through the credits to the very end.
I'm going to turn now to a twenty year old novel that I read over the weekend and just loved. I'm currently working my way through a low-residency MFA program and have been reading almost exclusively more "literary" novels on assignment. Most of it is stuff I would probably never have read on my own, which is great, because almost all of it has been really great. But Ian M Banks' sci-fi novel The Player of Games is definitely something I would have picked up, school or no school. I mean come on, it's a science fiction epic with a hero whose sole heroic qualification is that he's the greatest game player in the galaxy. And since it's set so far in the future, it had aged quite well - no embarrassing technological "innovations" that seem quaint by today's standards. But most important of all, it's a great, expertly told story that drives you right through to the end. And while its prose is not overly baroque or complicated, Banks' playful use of language and thrilling descriptions of invented games we never know the rules for make the tale all the more enchanting.
The past couple weeks also offered me a double-DVD helping of one of my favorite actors, Philip Seymour Hoffman. First I watched Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, which is quite an experience. The movie is a crime drama of sorts, although the drama comes not from pulling off the crimes but from screwing them up in a tragic way and then suffering the consequences. the emphasis here is definitely on the drama, and the rapid, totally believable disintegration of both Hoffman's character and that of his brother, played expertly by EthanHawke . It's not a tough movie to watch, but it's definitely a tough movie. Not a lot of smiles and giggles going on here, but plenty of great acting, directing, and writing. The other film was Charlie Wilson's War, which stars Tom Hanks. I really enjoyed this movie as I was watching it, moving along from moment to moment, scene to scene, it sucks me right in and I liked it all. In retrospect it feels a little scattered in focus, and the end comes rushing on too quick. The plot, about a playboy congressman wheedling and conniving to provide arms for theAfghans to fight the Soviets in the 80's, rambles around a bit, focusing on one thing and then another. But the performances and writing are top notch (but then, I'm a huge AaronSorkin fanboy), and I definitely recommend renting it. Plus, hey, true story with relevance to our current life. What more could you ask for from a political thriller/comedy/drama?
This week Speed Racer opens, and originally I'd had no intention of seeing it. But it's been getting a lot of interesting, positive reviews from sources I generally trust, plus it's apparently an incredibly novel and maybe even strange film going experience, which makes it very hard for me to turn down. Now, I've always actually kind of hated everything about Speed Racer except for the theme song, so I'm still going in with low expectations. Plus it's a kids movie, which is fine in theory, but it means the theater might be full of kids, which may or may not be fine in practice depending on howcurmudgeonly I'm feeling.
Next week I'll give you a longer review of Matt Taibbi's new book, The Great Derangement, which I'm finishing up now. It's quite a ride. Until then, see Iron Man! Read Player of Games! Rent Before the Devil Knows You're Dead! Go forth an be gluttons.
May 03, 2008
Future Compliant, May 3, 2008
Future Compliant May 3 2008
I'm computing in the clouds right now. I've written about this new buzz-word trend before - the idea that all your computing needs will live in the data clouds of the internet, available to you anywhere where you have some bandwidth at your disposal. I'm on record as loving the idea. As much as I like my various computers, I hate being tied down to any single one of them. I've got three different machines that I use for different purposes (although really that could be 2, maybe), and I've had to either move files back and forth between them or just limit one kind of work to one particular machine. For some annoying software (looking at you itunes and audible.com), I'm mostly stuck on one device, but the more I can free my data up, the happier I am.
This week I dived full on in to Google Docs. Indeed I'm using it right now in the coffee shop with my EeePC running linux and using downtown Sarasota's free wi-fi. I'll finish it up later on my other, bigger Ubuntu laptop when I get home. Google Docs made the crucial leap for me recently when they added an off-line component to the software. Up until that point hated the idea that I'd have to be online in order to get work done. That would be pretty worthless on a plane or in an airport that doesn't have free wi-fi or, well, sometimes this coffee shop. That free internet is less than 100% reliable. I didn't even consider using the software before Google remedied that oversight.
Now I've been using it for a week solid, writing not only these blog posts, but also working hard on starting my new novel, the third in my Geek Mafia series. I intend to write the whole first draft of the new book on Google Docs, although I'm saving off a copy in Open Office to my local hard drive every day, just to be safe. Google Docs doesn't have nearly the functionality of a full-on word processor, but it turns out it has all the functions I actually use on a regular basis. I can seamlessly edit the book from each of my computers and not have to worry about synching up different versions. I do have to be a little careful when I work offline that I make sure I upload the latest version from my offline computer before I edit it with another one, but so far that hasn't been a problem.
I'm also interested to see how well the sharing tools work. You can open the documents to other google docs users to either just read or also edit. Since I rely a great deal on the kind and helpful input of friends ad family on my early drafts, it will be interesting to see how many of them I can suck in to using Google Docs' collaborative tools and how useful I will actually find them. I have a couple of other, smaller projects (and one far off, much larger one) that I plan to work with co-authors on, where we would both have access to the document and would build it up together. Google Docs then tracks who made what changes so you can keep on eye on each other's progress and additions. I think that's how it's supposed to work anyway. I'll let you know how it goes.
There are down sides of course. The first one that springs to my mind is privacy. The fact that all my documents and data are sitting on Google's servers somewhere, subject to internal or federal inspection (with or without a warrant?) cannot be ignored. I can say that I would never put anything up on Google Docs that I didn't intend to some day be public. I consider the early drafts of a novel to be private of course, but there's not going to be anything in there that I really want to be forever private. Although in this day in age, if it's something I really want to keep private, then I just never commit it to digital form at all - it's the only way to be safe.
Since I've spent all this space and time recommending a privacy smashing but useful Google app, I want to assuage my paranoid guilt and point you in the direction of a cool tool from the Chaos Computer Club that you can use to help actually preserve your privacy some. It's called anonbox, and it's a private server that lets you set up totally anonymous, one time e-mail programs that you can use to sign up for Web sites and other services that require a real, working e-mail address to use. For example, some government archive sites, many newspaper archive sites, and a wide variety of others all require an e-mail address to set up a "free account." Maybe you have no interest in living forever in their databases, on record as having downloaded a specific file. I can certainly understand that. Anonbox offers a great, free work around for those situations - another fine service from the kings of future compliance, the Chaos Computer Club.
April 30, 2008
Media Glutton, April 30, 2008
I hadn't really planned on playing, much less buying Grand Theft Auto 4. I'd tried the last two games, and while I could see that they were well made games and had a certain appeal, they just didn't do anything for me. It wasn't the violence or the language or the protagonists fundamental lack of morals or sociability. I'm cool with all that stuff in games. Nor was it the sex and language. I'm cool with that even outside of video games. No, for me it was the driving. I just don't much care for driving games. I'm not good at them, I don't have fun playing them, and, well, I just don't care much. I put up with all the driving in the great Simpson's Road Rage game because the character and story and humor content was so great, but I never got far enough in the previous Grand Theft Auto games to get sucked into the stories or care about the characters, which just left the driving. Which in turn just left me playing something else.
Despite my studied indifference to the new release of GTA 4, the hype started to get to me. First came all those reviews with the perfect scores. Best game in years according to some. An experience not to be missed. OK, I started to feel some sort of obligation to try it out and see what all the fuss was about. Then G4 TV tarted giving it wall to wall overage and I got even more sucked in. Then they were saying it was going to be the biggest, best selling release in video game history - maybe even in media history. They expected to sell 9 million copies in the first week, which by my calculations would be a gross sale number of over $500 dollars. That's crazy! But also cool. Good for video games. And then something snapped in my brain. Maybe it was the fact that it was also the 4 year anniversary of the release of the video game I helped design, City of Heroes. Maybe it was just media saturation. Maybe I've developed an addiction to release-day lines at my local Game Stop. Whatever. With 30 minutes before they closed I drove over Monday night and put my money down so I could be one of the lucky millions to have a copy on day one.
And yesterday morning at 10:30 there was a line, and I waited in it. I waited and texted about the fact that I was waiting, which seems sort of digitally decadent of me. There were 30 or 40 of us total in the otherwise mostly empty mall. I then proved my adulthood by actually going home and working on my new novel for a few hours before I actually loaded the game into my X-Box 360 and fired it up. I was excited. The intro was cool. It looked great. The first thing you do is drive a damn car...
You drive a car and for five minutes I hated it. But all the time the story is unfolding around you, as is the really well designed and rendered city you're driving through. The voice acting and dialog are both top notch - as good as I've ever experienced. The characters may be very familiar in tone and spirit, with little that seems groundbreaking at first but they're familiar in a way that feels right rather than cliched. They have depth and dimension and, while I'd hate hanging out with them in real life, they're immensely compelling as protagonists in a crime drama. As the story eased me into the world, the game play eased me into the whole driving, and later the car jacking and the shooting. It all builds up seamlessly, one element after another. I drove my cousin to a poker game. I went out on some dates. I drove a getaway car, I helped run a protection racket, I became a gunman for a drug dealer, I killed someone in cold blood. It all fit, it all made sense in the game's twisted world, and most importantly of all, it was all a hell of a lot of fun. By the time I went to bed, I'd played about 5 and a half hours of Grand Theft Auto 4, and if I hadn't come here to the coffee shop to get work done, I'd probably be fighting the urge to play some more right now.
At 5 or so hours, the game tells me I've completed about 10% of the game's content. I'm going to take my time with it and really let myself explore some of the smaller, hidden moments in the game, because often that's where the humor is hidden. Like the TV shows you can sit and watch in your apartment (including a great Halo goof), or the DJ's on the radio stations as you drive around, or the little mini-games. And oh my god, the magic show I went to on my third date with Michele - hilarious. A lot of the game is hilarious in fact, even in some of its darkest moments. It never takes itself too seriously, but it also doesn't undermine its own drama either - that's a fine line to walk, and I congratulate the writers/designers for bringing it all together so adeptly. I've now played more of GTA 4 than I did of the predecessors combined, and there's no way I'm stopping now. Hell, I even like the driving parts now.
April 25, 2008
Future Compliant, April 25, 2008
Here's another installment of my Future Compliant blogging from allvoices.com:
Continuing the trend I started last week, I'm going to once again rant (although not as much) about another prime example of future non-compliance: Astrology. Now there's not a thing in the world that I've ever seen, read, or heard that makes me think there's a lick of sense or truth in astrology. The fact that it's so widely accepted makes me cringe in embarrassment for people. There's nothing sillier than a sentence that begins with something like, "I'm such a Libra, I always..." Man oh man oh man. But I've had several good friends who believe in it whole heartedly and have assured me that there's lots of good evidence for it and a long tradition of scholarship and science behind it. I agree there's a lot (a LOT) written about the so-called "science" of astrology, but it's one of those cases where I don't think that word means what they think it means. Astrology is not science. But science has taken a good, hard look at astrology, and recently published their findings. The result - looking at 2000 people born within minutes of each other (time-twins as they're sometimes referred to), researchers found no correlation at all between their astrological birth circumstances and their real, actual lives. No surprises there, although I'm glad they did the research...
Read the rest here.
April 23, 2008
Media Glutton April 23, 2008 Plus Future Compliant
Well, here it is, another Media Glutton entry, this time mostly about Frontline's great piece on universal health care systems around the globe:
I really do like PBS. It makes up a surprising amount of my TV watching each week, pretty much entirely for their non-fiction and commentary shows like Charlie Rose, Nova, Bill Moyers, and Frontline. Those are all great, interesting, high quality programs. Nova in particular is the gold standard of science television, and puts most of what you see on other science channels to shame. And let's not eve talk about the alien-loving, ghost-mongering, sensationalist claptrap that is The History Channel (the gold standard for low standards). But Frontline is probably my favorite. Even-handed, well researched, compellingly produced, it makes even subjects I'm not interested in fascinating. When they cover something I really care about, I'm beyond sucked in - I'm enthralled. And here's the other great thing about Frontline - they put their whole shows up online, plus lots of bonus material, making the information available all the time to anyone.
Last week's great episode was about a topic that I care a great deal about, a topic that is a national embarrassment here in the United States - health care. Many Americans who really should know better have some sort of visceral objection to nationalized or single payer health care systems. They cling to the delusion that the US system is the best in the world and that universal health care means endless waiting lists, low standards of care, and lack of choice. They cherry-pick the worst anecdotes they can remember and extrapolate the rest, forgetting that the plural of anecdote is anecdotes, not data. Thankfully Frontline, along with many actual researchers over the years, has gone out and collected the data and hopefully dispelled many of the myths about universal health care programs around the world....
Also I've got a new Future Compliant rant against Ben Stein up here which I couldn't post a link to last week because I was having site issues.
Future Compliant April 19, 2008
Yesterday marked the official release of a movie that is the antithesis of future compliance an anti-science, ignorant, biased piece of propaganda called Expelled. The film claims to be about academic freedom and open discussion of scientific controversies, but that's all just a smoke screen that thinly veils its real purpose: to promote the religion based, utterly unscientific proposition known as Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design is merely warmed over, watered down creationism and i not a scientific theory, much less a hypothesis. It's the latest gambit from religious radicals trying to sneak their god into classrooms, a desperate, hopefully futile attempt to block true science (and real facts) from impinging on their superstitions and un-founded beliefs. It's been debunked and destroyed time and again, but it keeps rearing its ugly head, and this time that head is Ben Stein.
Ben Stein has never held much of my esteem, although I did used to watch his game show and enjoyed it. But here he's either shown he's an idiot or a total sell out. I don't think he's an idiot, although he might well be, so I'm inclined to believe he's just a sell out, willing to hitch his wagon to the creationist gravy train for a while. Either way, he should be ashamed of himself for his role in this film. The fact that the film explicitly states that there would not have been a holocaust if not for Nazi's getting inspiration from Charles Darwin is not only stupid, wrong, and ignorant, but also hateful, arrogant, and dismissive of the real causes of one of history's worst tragedies. Plus here's the worst part - even if it were true (and it isn't) the idea that Hitler might have been wrongly inspired by Darwin DOES NOT MEAN DARWIN WAS WRONG. This is a pure propaganda move on the film makers' part, a huge logical fallacy that's utterly embarrassing, or would be if the film's creators were capable of embarrassment....
April 16, 2008
Media Glutton April 16, 2008 and others
OK, well, I was lazy last week and didn't actually post the links to my blog entries, even though I wrote them. Lame of me, I know. So here's the new Media Glutton:
This past weekend I went up to New York City to do some readings and help promote my Geek Mafia and Geek Mafia: Mile Zero at the NY Anarchist Book Fair. It was a pretty interesting experience all things considered. I did two events at the wonderful Blue Stockings Books, a collectively run radical book store that is a great locus for reading, activism, and hanging out. I had a reading there Friday night which was, well, not packed. Still, it was fun. Then the next night wa part of a group salon of authors and artists and we had the place filled to the gills, which was awesome. I had a great time ad encourage anyone in NY to stop by the store and see what other events they've got coming up - they're always doing something cool.
The book fair itself was a little smaller than the one in San Francisco, but it's only in it's second year. The room got to sauna-levels of heat and humidity by the afternoon, but the location across the street from Washington Square was nice and let me slip out and get some air (and delicious street food) pretty much at will. Again, I was almost the only novel there and I'm not sure the attendees come looking for much in the way of fiction. I didn't do a reading or presentation this time, so without that to drive some interest there wasn't a whole lot. There was one other novelist there that I saw, but he was giving away copies of his book. I talked to him for a while and was surprised to find he'd printed up 10,000 copies and had been giving them away for a while now. It wasn't even really a marketing gimmick as far as I could tell - he just wanted to get his story out there. I'm sad to say the story didn't grab me at all as I tried to get through it that afternoon, but I admire his mad devotion to his art.
And Here's Last Week's Future Compliant
April 02, 2008
Media Glutton, April 2 2008
Here's my latest Media Glutton from AllVoices.com:
So I've been reading a lot this past week, mostly for my MFA program and thus nothing you would call new or even terribly recent stuff. Great stuff, but nothing you haven't heard about a bunch of other places before. I'm more interested here in highlighting new and/or relatively unknown content, although I might write up the book I'm reading (and enjoying) now once I'm finished later this week.
But I did get to see The Mist on DVD, written and directed by Frank Darabont, based on Stephen King's novella. I'd listened to a really great audio version of this story many, many years ago, but all I remembered was people trapped in a grocery store by some creepy mist with crazy monsters in it. As it turns out, that's about all there is to remember, but it's also enough. This is a really solid, fun, survivor/horror movie, with some cool monsters, some unusual and interesting character arcs, and an ending that some people probably hate but I really love (although you couldn't call it the feel good hit of the summer by any means). The special effects are OK. Apparently the Blu-Ray disk has a black and white version on it, which I think might actually be pretty cool. I don't know that I've ever seen black and white CGI monsters before, but maybe that would make them look a little more realistic. If you like monster movies, check this one out.
I also saw this announcement about doing a big budget movie version Huxley's Brave New World. I'm pretty excited about this one. It's great to see Ridley Scott doing sci-fi again of course, and I like the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio's behind it as well (read the article linked to to see why). I know a lot of people are anti-DiCaprio, but they're just being weird and reactionary, probably a hangover from the horrifying Titanic-phenom days last decades. The fact is, he gives good to great performances in good to great movies again and again, and usually takes on pretty interesting roles. I loved him in The Aviator for instance, and Blood Diamond is a really solid, entertaining-yet-thought-provoking flick.
March 29, 2008
Future Compliant, March 29, 2008
Here's my new Future Compliant post on allvoices.com. Next week I'll have some "just for rickdakan.com" stuff as well...
If I were to name one area where the future and the present have clashed in really interesting and unpredictable ways, well, I couldn't name just one. That's sort of the thing about the future, it's always surprising us - or at least me. But one area I pay a lot of attention to and which has a big impact on all of us is politics. There's the bad stuff, like hackable voting machines that leave no paper trail that piss me off. There's the other bad side, where politicians bow to industry pressure to mess with things like Net Neutrality or try to censor the internet. And then there's the good stuff, first and foremost being (in my opinion) how much easier it has become to organize and communicate your political message. Nothing new there, lots of people have been saying that for years, but I wanted to point out one site in particular that came on line recently because I think it's worth checking out. The widely recognized problem with everyone having a voice is that it can sometimes be hard to figure out which voices are worth listening to. I actually don't think that's much of a problem compared to the enormous benefits, especially since it means people get judged by their individual merits and reputation rather than being fed to us by some large media conglomerate. Word of mouth becomes vital...
read more here at allvoices.com
March 25, 2008
Media Glutton, March 26, 2008
New Media Glutton post at allvoices.com:
So I had a rather unusual but quite exciting media overload experience this past weekend - spoke and worked my publisher's table at the San Francisco Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair. It was, in fact, a lot of fun, and really quite strange on occasion. Not that I'm unfamiliar with the strange. I've been to gaming conventions and hacker conventions and sci-fi conventions and comics conventions and academic conferences. I've seen people in weird costumes, history professors doing "this little piggy" in latin with their infants, and impassioned, glorious rants on everything from civil rights to secure computing to what makes a good gaming experience. So from that point of view, the Anarchist Book Fair was very familiar, although all the details, issues, and glorious rants were new to me (in person anyway - I've read quite a bit of anarchist writings and written some myself in a way).
I was there promoting my own books, Geek Mafia, and the sequel, Geek Mafia: Mile Zero on behalf of myself and my wonderful new publisher, PM Press. New not only to me, but to everyone else as well, as they're only a few months old (although the people who make up PM have decades of publishing experience and contacts). I gave various version of my one-line sales pitch for Geek Mafia that I've said thousands of times before, although I tried a couple variations in an effort to appeal to this crowd's particular tastes. There wasn't a lot of other fiction at this predominantly serious-minded event, so I think my book there was both a little bit of fresh air and maybe a little confusing. People seemed a little unsure as to how fiction fit into the broader themes and politics of the event and movement, but once we explained out goal of coming at those same themes from another angle and perspective, most people really liked the idea. In one of my talks this weekend I likened my books to a big helping of ice cream with some little vitamins of politics and inspiration slipped in there. Mostly they're about the fun and the exciting stories, but there's stuff in there to make you think too.
With that in mind, I thought I'd highlight a few other forms of radical fictional ice cream that I particularly admire and would encourage anyone to go out and read (right after they go out and read my stuff of course).
Read the rest here, at allvoices.com.
March 18, 2008
Media Glutton, March 17, 2008
My latest Media Glutton post is up at Allvoices.com:
he media, I can't stop it. It keeps on coming into my brain and I love it. I was talking with a friend last week who's reading a book designed to inspire creativity. It encourages the reader to try taking a week long media-fast, avoiding all books, movies, TV, and anything else that might smack of the creative so as to give your own mind a chance to expand into the empty territory (or so I suppose). Well, I can see in some theoretical world where that might work, but I'm never going to try it. I'm 99% sure I'd go nuts. I'm 100% sure I'd be bored out of my skull.
Having said that, it was a slightly less media filled week for me. I didn't make it out to the movie theater and I somehow managed to sleep right through going to the Bradentucky Bombers women's roller derby match on Sunday night, which was a bummer, as I always love me some roller derby. But I did manage to catch the first two episodes of HBO's new mini-series, John Adams. And I have to say I'm a little disappointed. I was hoping to be able to cancel my HBO subscription after The Wire ended, and now I'm not going to.
Read the Rest Here at Allvoices.com
March 13, 2008
Future Compliant March 13, 2008
Latest future compliant post up on allvoices.com...
The last couple weeks have been a busy time for the future, or at least for people talking about it. Two big conferences took place, South By Southwest Interactive and the Emerging Tech Conference. I was at neither of them. But one of the many joys of all this emerging interactive tech is that, except for the parties and the people, you can learn almost as much as a real attendee just from what's posted online by the people who're actually on the scene. Full disclosure: I would have happily attended either event, but my travel schedule already overfloweth with hacker cons and anarchist book fairs, so anything disparaging I might write or say about people who did attend is purely out of jealousy.
There was so much going on at SXSW: Interactive that I haven't really wrapped my head around it yet, but to be honest ETech seems more my cup of tea anyway. Maybe that's just because it had a few people I've actually met or interacted with speaking there, but also it's a little more academic/philosophizing based and less about the business stuff. Plus Valleywag hardly paid any attention to it by comparison, so that's a point in its favor for me. For purposes of being future compliant then, I'm going to skip over Austin and head to virtual San Diego to pick out some highlights.
Read The Rest Here At Allvoices.com
March 11, 2008
Media Glutton Monday, March 11, 2008
March 10, 2008
Daylight Savings Sleep Deprivation
I've gotten into this totally weird sleep cycle since Friday night. I ended up having this long phone conversation with a friend of mine that started kind of serious but ended up being really good and energizing but left me at 1 am not feeling tired at all. I ended up reading the past year's worth of both Daredevil and DMZ, both comics that I enjoy but have obviously fallen way behind on. And hey, guess what? They're still both quite good. Now someday soon (maybe another sleepless night?) I'll go through that huge unread pile of 100 Bullets issues, which I might even be two years behind on.
Then Saturday night my brother Matt and I went out to get Smash Brothers Brawl for our Wii's. We'd bought them earlier in the day but couldn't pick them up 'til midnight. I'll talk about that more in my Media Glutton tomorrow, but while we were waiting we went to Passtimes over in Gulf Gate and saw two really fun punk bands play. We missed the first band, but the second, The In-Crowd is a local Bradenton band and they were fun. Then came on Whole Wheat Bread, an awesome trio from Jacksonville who rocked. I'd forgotten how much I love the energy of a good live punk show, almost more than any other kind of musical experience.
So of course Matt and I stayed up late playing Smash Brothers. And then got freaked out by the time change which happened on my tivo and cable box automatically so we didn't notice and thought we'd been playing a lot longer than we actually had been. Didn't get to sleep 'til after 4 that night either.
Then last night I went over to Kent's to run my usual Call of Cthulhu/Adventure! RPG session, which never runs too late. Home by 11, answered some e-mails, and then watched the final hour and a half of The Wire. It was of course great, more on that tomorrow too, but I was so keyed up about the whole thing, so sad and excited and unsure what to do next, that again I couldn't get to sleep until like 3.
And I know everybody loves the daylight savings time because there's more light in the evening after work, and I guess this is where the whole writer-who-works-at-home thing shows through, because I actually like the non-savings time. I like having more night at night, as I get plenty of day during the day. But that's just me. And it's also just because I live in Florida and don't have to deal with long, dark, gray, evil winters. I know when I lived in Ohio I felt the exact opposite for sure...
March 06, 2008
New blog at allvoices.com
So I'm now doing some regular blogging for a new site called allvoices.com. I'll continue to post the more personal stuff here and use that forum for my more well thought out musings. Yes, I do too have well thought out musings.
March 03, 2008
Listen to Me Babble On About Stuff
Hello, World.
So, over the weekend I did a fun interview for a podcast called The Biblio File talking about Geek Mafia and City of Heroes and various other projects I'm working on, including a little but about the new Cthulhu-related book I'm finishing up.
February 27, 2008
No Relief From Homeopathy
So my back's still hurting and maybe getting better. Maybe. But my friend Heather and I were talking about possible treatments and both had a good laugh at the thought of using some sort of homeopathic nonsense. I'd also been discussing this same topic with my friends Hillary and Jeff last week, and none of them had seen this awesome Richard Dawkins video explaining how homeopathy "works"
February 26, 2008
Stupid Socks
So, I hurt my back picking up a pair of socks on Sunday. How lame is that? I'll tell you how lame - it's all the way lame. Thus now I'm moving around at a snails pace and spending a lot of time on my back. My office chair is apparently secretly some kind of torture device and I just never noticed, because any time spent in it leaves me feeling particularly nasty, so I've relocated down to the dining room and its nice, firm, straight backed (but well padded) chairs. It still throbs a little, but at least I'm getting work done.
Every year I actually watch the Academy Awards. I really do. Have for years. Don't really know why. This year I was out running my weekly Call of Cthulhu/Adventure! game, so I didn't watch it until later that night on Tivo. Now that's the way to watch the oscars - mostly in fast forward. Saturday I'd gone to see There Will Be Blood, and I'd already seen Michael Clayton and No Country For Old Men. I really like all three of the movies, but maybe just because I'd seen it so recently I was really rooting for There Will Be Blood. That movie just blew me away. So did the other two come to think of it, but there was just something extra special about There Will Be Blood. Plus it's based on an Upton Sinclair book called Oil! and I really like the idea of book titles with exclamation points in them. I think I'll have to write one some day.
Speaking of writing, I'm off and running on my new novel, which is set in a video game company. It's nothing like Geek Mafia really, in that it's actually set in the company and focuses on a low to mid-level employee and all takes place in one long night. There's a lot more to the idea than that and I'm purposefully not telling you the actual big hook that gets it going. This is an interesting experience for me because I'm working on it as part of my MFA program and this is the first time I've ever shown anyone any of my ideas or chapters before I've completed a first draft. It's kinda exciting that way.
And hey, Lost is awesome this season. Just awesome. So awesome I might even buy the video game that comes out today just to get more Lost in my daily diet. Although the fact that I can't find any reviews at all is probably not a good sign. I'm going to wait for at least some hint that it's ok, but I'm willing to buy it even if the average rating is only around 7 out of 10, which is my low threshold for games that have a topic that especially interests me (whereas there doesn't seem to be a score high enough to make me buy a racing game that's not Mario Kart). Well, my back needs a break - not that kind of break! - so I'm signing off.
Go see There Will be Blood!
February 21, 2008
Lunar Eclipse Eclipsed
So, last night was a full lunar eclipse, which is always cool. Especially cool because I myself was born during a lunar eclipse. If I believed in Astrology even the tiniest bit, that would probably carry great import, but since Astrology is utter nonsense, it's of no import at all. Except that it's cool. Other tidbit: the U2 song, Sunday, Bloody Sunday is also about my birthday. Sort of. Maybe. The point is, I went out last night to watch the wonderful lunar eclipse while listening to Dave Brubek's Take Five on my ipod but all I saw were clouds, clouds, clouds. At least it was a nice night for a walk.
Speaking of Astrology being nonsense, I'm reading Richard Wiseman's excellent book, Quirkology. Check out that web site I just linked to also, as there's lots of cool stuff there, particularly in the videos section. The book' s sort of all over the place when it comes to topics, although it call comes under the general heading of "weird and interesting stuff about how our brains interact with the world." On Astrology he points to several studies showing that if people believe they're born under a bad sign then they end up having more problems or live shorter than those who firmly believe they're born under a good sign. Those who realize it's all nonsense don't suffer any ill effects nor receive any benefit based on their sign. The book's full of great stuff like that. Check it out.
What the heck: here's my favorite of the videos:
Pretty cool huh? Your brain hates you.
February 18, 2008
Back From Shmoocon
Well, I'm back from Shmoocon which was, as always, super awesome.
This year was a little different for me, as I had a table in the vendors hallway and was selling books. Lots and lots of books! I had the first copies off the press of the new edition of Geek Mafia and of course copies of Geek Mafia: Mile Zero as well, plus the new t-shirts. Sales were great and people were nice. I love it when they come back by the next morning after having been up late reading the book. My favorite was when hacker extraordinaire Johnny Long (who's written some great books of his own) came up and said "I read the first 50 pages last night. Chloe's hot." Yes, yes she is.
The down side of being at the table all con selling books was that I didn't see a single talk. Well, I saw one, but that was because I was on the closing plenary session panel. I was actually a little nervous beforehand, after all I was sharing the stage with Johny Long, Bruce Potter, Hackajar, and Simple Nomad - a formidable and diverse crew of hackers if there ever was one. But I held my own I think and did my duty by giving the "interested outsider's" thoughts and opinions. The talk was really interesting and a hell of a lot of fun.
Also fun were of course the parties, especially Saturday night's dance madness. As is my wont, I got my groove on for about 5 hours straight and boy are my quads sore now. Hopefully Skydog will send me some of the pics he took and if they aren't too embarrassing I'll throw some up here on the blog.
So, hello to all my new friends I met, and thanks to all of you who bought books and/or shirts. And of course thanks to Heidi Potter for hooking me up with the table and generally being super cool! Only 362 days until the next one...
February 13, 2008
Going To Shmoocon Tomorrow!
Haven't blogged in a while because, well, I had a whole blog entry planned about how much I loved the hit documentary, The King of Kong. I rented it and watched it and watched both commentaries all in a row and was just so enthused by the whole experience. I went around all the next couple of days telling people about how cool the movie was. Then, as is so often the case, Jason Scott went and ruined everything by pointing out that it's full of lies. There are three other entries after that first one I just linked to on the subject and they're all worth reading, especially the 8000 word essay where he goes into dire detail about his issues with the film makers and the choices they made. So, yeah, can't really recommend it so much anymore. Disappointing.
I actually just got off the phone with Jason, who'll be at Shmoocon as well, showing scenes from his newest documentary, Get Lamp. Hopefully I'll be able to sit in on the session, although I'm chiefly going to sell me some major bookage, so I'll be out in the vendors area, hawking my wares. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, Shmoocon is a hacker convention in Washington DC that is one of my absolute favorite cons. It's a good size - about 1000 people this year, and full of smart, interesting talks. Plus the Saturday night party always rocks.
Otherwise I've mostly been plugging away on writing stuff for school and finally getting going on the new novel - although I won't pick that up again until next week at this point. Still, it's off to a fun start, and I think it's going to surprise people when it's ready.
January 31, 2008
So Long MySpace
Well, just when I come out from hiding, this happens:
http://www.secularstudents.org/node/1933
http://www.cleveland.com/living/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/living-0/1201772086310820.xml&coll=2
MySpace bans a large, well-established atheist group for no good reason, signaling to me at least that they don't want me here anyway. So, I'm canceling my account. I'm going to wait a day so this bulletin can go out and then I'm gone.
I'm on Facebook now as well, at least until they do something equally crazy (or repeat something as bone headed as their obnoxious Beacon advertising fiasco).
so long...
Rick
January 30, 2008
Happy Birthday To Me
Well, there you go, thirty-six years down. An unknown number of years to go. I did most of my public celebrating over the weekend with friends and family, so I guess I'm going to take today and be all reflective and such. Or maybe I'll go see a movie. Who knows? I might find time enough for both!
So what happened this past year? It was a weird year to be sure, chiefly because of my whole privacy game with Steven Rambam where I was in quasi-hiding for so many months. That definitely made things weird, but also exciting and unpredictable. I've been working on writing the book for which all that effort was exerted, and I think readers will both get a kick out of it and be properly scared/sobered up about how transparent the world is becoming.
Speaking of books, I got my newest one out the door, Geek Mafia: Mile Zero, which also marked my new relationship with my cool new publishers, PM Press, which I continue to be super excited about. It's especially nice to have that book out since, on balance, I did a lot of spinning my wheels this year in the writing department. My much-delayed and deflected hacker book (still in the works!) got reshaped and put aside and picked back up and reshaped again, and much of what I wrote last year isn't really usable anymore. Likewise I put some serious time and effort into some other projects that didn't pan out, but from which I learned a lot. I did write my third novel this year, the one about Cthulhu, and that's probably coming out this year sometime, which I'm excited about. This year is shaping up to be a pretty damn productive one, and I have big plans for two new novels - a third Geek Mafia book and another novel (which I'm starting on now), which I think has real potential.
In the name of research and writing I did some interesting travels this year as well. There was my first Shmoo Con last year, which was great, and now I'm gearing up for my second one in just a couple of weeks. I only got to one other hacker con, which was PhreakNIC, but that was amazing because it was my first time giving a talk at a con and it seemed to go over pretty well. I also had my magician-filled tour of Las Vegas and LA over the summer, which was super interesting, especially the night at the Magic Castle in LA. Then of course there was my journey to Belize, about which you'll read much more in the privacy book. And of course I started my MFA in creative writing program this year as well, and spent a couple weeks in Washington state for that in August. I feel like I'm forgetting some other trip I must have taken, but maybe not. Compared to the year before, it was a pretty light travel schedule. This year's shaping up to be much busier, with some trip almost every month between now and August when I take the Queen Mary 2 across the Atlantic to Germany and return to Berlin for several months (to, of course, write another book).
I've read a bunch of great books, seen some cool movies, played some amazing video games (Bioshock! Portal!) and listened to about a trillion hours of podcasts. And of course there was all that television... Media Glutton that I am, enough is never enough of all these things, even though so many of them disappoint on some level. I switched over from Windows to Ubuntu Linux for most of my computing needs and am planning on never buying another Windows machine again if I can help it. I lost a bunch of weight, which is great (and literally vitally important) and am now looking to make another big push and move down another weight class or two this year. All in all I suppose I'm better off this year than I was last (except financially of course), and I'm looking forward to making the most of this one.
So there you have it. Rick in Review. Happy Birthday to me...
January 28, 2008
Media Glutton Monday, Jan 28
Happy media Monday everybody. Although I didn't get out to see and movies this weekend, as I was busy celebrating various family birthdays, including my own (which is coming up on Wednesday). But that didn't stop me from my usual gorging on media.
Let's start out with a plug for my friend Amy's new web show, Great Ideas. Here's the trailer:
You can see the whole first episode and then a new one each week at their web site here.
I'm a bit fan of the idea of this sort of internet micro-media thing, although I don't imbibe as much of it as I'd like to as it's sometimes hard to find good stuff and I spend so much time in front of my computer anyway that I don't often want to watch shows on it either. That's why I never stick with video podcasts for very long. Something short like these though makes for a great break when I need to rest from surfing my list of a million blogs that I read while taking a break from working.
Video Games!
So, much of my media intake of late has involved video games. Nothing new there of course, but I've got something for every system I own that's sucking up my time these days. The thing I play the most is actually my Nintendo DS, because I can play it and watch TV at the same time, thus doubling my rate of intake and fending off boredom twice as effectively. I played a hell of a lot of Geometry Wars: Galaxies, which is awesomely addictive in a way that Asteroids never was for me. Plus it lets me live out my fantasy of a never-ending jihad against the hated forces of geometry. Stupid two-dimensional shapes! I hate them soooooo much. Lately I've moved on to Panzer Tactics DS, which is a pretty cool WW II turn based strategy game that strikes just the right balance of complexity and ease of play for me. I like that one a lot.
For my birthday I got Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation for the x-box 360. This is a weirdly cool air combat simulator game. The Japanese company that makes the series did an interesting mash-up of modern air warfare and their own invented mythology. So you have two totally made up countries at war, using real planes from our world like F-16's and what not, which is kind of cool. And luckily for me, it's not a totally faithful simulation of air combat - they designers obviously realized that in the real world fighters only carry a handful of missiles and would rarely win out against superior numbers in comparable aircraft. In this one you've got over a 100 missiles of various types and blow away scores of enemy jets, helicopters, tanks, artillery pieces, bunkers, and even a tent or two. It's fun stuff, although I find the story that binds the missions together kind of onerous. The cut scenes look good and the plot itself seems interesting enough, but they're all done in these dreary, slow-paced, depressing voice-overs where the actors s p e a k v e r y s l o w l y which is like hitting the breaks after you've been zooming around at 700 mph shooting missiles at things. I've heard that the earlier storylines ended up involving demons and magic and stuff, which will make the game even stranger.
Saturday my brother and I picked up the new game No More Heroes for the Wii, which is as wild and over the top as advertised. I've only played a few hours of it, but basically you're a goofball guy with a laser katana who's looking to slice is way to the top of the assassins ranks. In between boss battles you do little missions a-la-Grand Theft Auto style play. It's a fun, funny, incredibly bloody (in a cartoony way) game. So far so good.
Television remains uninspiring apart from The Wire. I have caught a couple episodes of Reaper, which have been pleasant enough. I like it better than the awful Chuck, which is most closely resembles. But hey, this week we get new episodes of both Lost and House, so I'm excited about that. I've also started regularly watching the new version of X-Play on G4 TV, and that's actually pretty interesting. I like that they've gone to a more kind of newsy format covering the video game industry in general rather than just doing reviews of obscure PSP games I'm never going to play. You can also get the show as a podcast or maybe on their site if you're interested. It doesn't suck and is sometimes pretty interesting.
January 23, 2008
Writer Rick Rants: January 23, 2008
So I've been trying out these different recurring titles for types of blog entries. There's the Media Glutton, which I've been using off and on for a while. And then there's Geek Bomb, which I used last week and plays on the bombo logo that Austin came up with for Geek Mafia and is my generally catch all for geeky stuff I think is cool. And then there's this new one, Writer Rick, which is how my friend Brian refers to me when I merit a mention in one of his restaurant reviews. I like that the alliteration is phonetic but not literal. A sort of Difference/Differance thing (to make an egregious Derrida reference that isn't even really apropos).
The plan is to talk about writing in these segments, particularly whatever writing I happen to be working on at the time. I've got a lot of different irons in the old word fire right now, so I'm jumping around quite a bit. I've fond this to be an excellent way to keep myself from ever finishing anything while still feeling productive. But it also keeps me from getting bored, so at least that's good. Seriously though, I really do think I need to focus a lot more and start finishing some of these projects off so I can clear my mind and my plate.
Which is why I started a brand new novel last week. Yeah, yeah, I know. But this one's an idea I've had kicking around for a while, and besides, it's for my MFA program! So it counts twice! It's both homework and a cool book I think I'll have no problem selling when it's done. Now of course it's way to early to say anything about it since it's jut in the outline stage, and that's one of the things I'm so excited about - for the first time ever I'll actually be getting feedback from someone (in this case my mentor for school, Jess) at such an early stage. Usually I don't show anything to anyone until I've completed a first draft. So this is going to be an interesting experience and, I hope, really useful.
I'm also working on finishing up an actual first draft of the privacy non-fiction book I've been doing with Steven Rambam all last year. Our game is at an end (finally!) and now comes the writing part. Luckily I've been writing as I went along, so I have a fair chunk of a first draft done, at least 75%. Still, it's hard shifting into non-fiction gear and trying to build back up some momentum on the project again from a writing perspective. I'm still not in a groove on it yet, but I'm getting there. Of course that's the problem with nonfiction for me - you've got to get all the facts right and put in details that tend to slow everything down. Still, it's going to be a really interesting book once it's all done, assuming I ever stop blogging and get back to writing it.
My Cthulhu-related novel is flitting around to various choice readers right now. It's an odd book that doesn't quite fit into the genre you would think it would, so it's interesting to see how people react to it. So far it's been mostly positive. I worked on it last semester for school and got some great feedback that resulted in some really useful (and pretty major) revisions that made it much stronger. It still needs at least one more serious pass, but I'm waiting to get more feedback from the current crop of readers (most of whom I don't know, which is exciting) before deciding exactly what kinds of changes are needed. I mean, I like it a lot as is, but there are ways that could make it maybe a little more accessible or compelling if I can figure out how to do them without destroying the point I was originally trying to make with the thing (I'm always trying to make a point).
And then there's Geek Mafia 3 (title still a secret). It's all outlined and I even wrote the first chapter a while back, and I plan to come back to it late this spring and get it done over the summer for hopefully another fall release. It's pretty cool I think, or at least the plot is pretty cool. I'm just assuming I can pull it off, although it's the most complicated plot I've tried yet, with the most moving parts, so it's definitely going to be a bit of a challenge, which is of course the whole point.
January 21, 2008
Media Glutton Monday, Jan 21
First of all, Happy Birthday Matt!
Ok, so my plan to blog three times last week ended up being only 66% successful, so hopefully this week I'll do a little better. But I have not been idle all that time. Oh no. I've also been consuming me some mad media.
Cloverfield
Luckily I've had a few months to get over my disappointment over the debunking of the rumor that flew around the internet for a couple of days last year that this was a movie about Cthulhu attacking New York. Sadly, there's no Cthulhu, but there is a giant monster attacking New York. Actually, I guess it could be Cthulhu since we never learn anything about the beast at all, much less it's name, but it doesn't have enough tentacles really. So I'll call it Larry. I quite enjoyed this movie. I don't ask much from a monster movie any more, mostly because they're almost all really awful. In fact, coming out of the theater I was trying to think of the last time I'd really enjoyed a monster movie and I couldn't. In retrospect I enjoyed the recent Peter Jackson King Kong, but it's undeniably a bloated movie sprinkled with some awesome monster scenes. Cloverfield is anything but bloated, coming in at about 90 minutes. As I've been writing this I struggle and struggle to find a better way of saying it, but the fact is there's only one perfect four word description of the film: Blair Witch Meets Godzilla. Sadly it's the one everyone's using. It's probably the words they used to sell the movie to the studio in the first place. And it's exactly that. Shaky cam, people running around lost. A giant monster tearing apart the city and eating people. Depressing ending. So if you can handle the occasional nausea inducing camera work and let yourself just go with the plot while not asking too many questions, the whole film is a fun ride. Definitely worth seeing in a theater with a good sound system too, as they use those bass speakers to good effect.
No Country For Old Men
Now this movie is just awesome. Just awesome. I don't even know what else to say. I guess some people are pissed off about some of the choices made at the ending of the film about what you see and what you don't, but that really worked for me, and I hear that's how the book ends, so extra kudos for standing up for the original writer's vision. The villain in this movie is the baddest of bad asses and everything else is great too. Just see it.
I did have one other thing confirmed for me though - seeing a movie in a theater full of old people can be just as annoying as seeing a flick with a bunch of kids. The old people in this theater anyway talked a hell of a lot more during the movie than most other films I go see and they didn't seem to have any shame about it at all. And this was not the first time I've noticed this. It was still only a small percentage of the audience, but man, they got on my nerves.
TV Musings
So I watched the first episode of the new Terminator: Sarah Conner Chronicles TV show and I'm of mixed feelings about it so far. I'll reserve judgment on it except to say that I think the world of all media needs to just give up on the tired old trope that unstoppable killing machines don't like to run and take their time putting that final bullet in you. It just rings so false. Sometimes the evil robot can run as fast as a car or, hell, even as fast as a human. But instead they stride around with what's supposed to be menacing focus of intent but which is in fact a lame excuse for the show to keep the hero alive. And really, the terminator keeps Sarah Conner alive after catching her for absolutely no reason at all. None. I mean, they let you think it's so she can be bait to lure John in, but then he just pretends to be her on the phone anyway, so what's the point? I dunno, that shit just pisses me off. Still, I'm not ready to say yay or nay on the whole show yet.
I am ready to give up on Law and Order, which recently returned sans Fred Thompson. The show is now just awful and panders to some sort of weirdly conservative, unthinking audience I can't imagine. Conservative's probably not the right word, as I don't think it's a political thing. It's just a lazy thing. Maybe The Wire has spoiled all other cop hows for me, but these new episodes are so contrived, the actions of the characters so wooden and lame, that I turned the second episode I watched (which was actually the first new one) off halfway through. Even my favorit, Criminal Intent, has gotten unbearable this year. What's up with that?
So, other than The Wire, there's not much that's exciting me on TV these days. Daily Show is back, but I get the feeling that all the liberal and moderates are avoiding crossing the strike line (good for them!) and so we've gotten this string of unbearable conservatives. Jonah Goldberg! Fuck! He's as awful as they come, as witnessed by the train wreck of an interview that the show had to cut down to even air. And John Bolton, again. Ugh.
Game wise I'm still playing Super Mario Galaxy, which continues to have a non-existent, stupid story and amazingly fun gameplay. Reading a couple books at once, both of which are good - Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes and Master and Margarita by Blugakov, which is excellent so far.