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Thursday, October 23rd, 2008
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8:02 pm - In Which My Precious, We Makes the First Move
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| Thursday, April 24th, 2008
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11:42 pm - In Which There are Visitors from Far Away
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| Sunday, March 30th, 2008
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10:58 pm - In Which Long-Standing Projects are Resurrected
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I've been tooling on an idea for a short film off and on for a couple of years. I finished storyboarding it not too long ago and I’ve been filling out the dialog and all that lately. Inspired partly by La Jetée, partly by Jim Munroe’s advice, and mostly by lack of resources, I’m shooting the whole thing with a still camera and assembling it in Premiere.
Now don’t accuse me of going all avant-garde and weird. This is (almost) entirely a cost-based decision. I don’t own a movie camera other than an old 8mm (which wouldn’t give me the right look) and I don’t have the money to buy a new one.
Most of the shots are done, there’s still a few scenes I’ll need to get on my days off in various locations around town. What I can’t shoot here, I can supplement with CC-licensed images since the whole film will be released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license anyway – most of my works are. For sounds I can raid freesound; music can also be easily had. But I've got enough completed that I can start putting it all together.
Figured out that if I can work an hour a day on this computer I could have it done by festival season...
Okay, I know Flickr does Creative Commons, do any of the other photo archives?
current mood:  accomplished
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(comment on this)
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| Sunday, March 23rd, 2008
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6:20 pm - In Which Our Narrator Surfaces for Air
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As of twenty days ago, the gavel came down on the divorce.
As of nine days ago, I am thirty-four.
And according to the political quiz my old friend Philip sent me, I'm a "Left-Leaning Freedom Lover" which I guess puts me somewhere between the monkeywrenchers and NORML. Should I get a subscription to Do or Die? High Times? Grist?
I couldn't pick the answers I wanted, they weren't there. The quiz presupposed permanent government, which I don't believe in.
current mood:  optimistic
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(6 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, December 22nd, 2007
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9:57 pm - In Which a French Meal is Eaten with Loved Ones
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| Friday, December 14th, 2007
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11:51 pm - In Which Friends Are Really Neat
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After reading the interview with Henry in Computerworld, I’ve come to the conclusion that everybody I know is way more interesting than I am. For example, Dirk teaches music at the Bilgi University in Istanbul.  michaelduff works for a real, honest-to-Eris paper newspaper. mbartell and company do super-nifty stuff up in Eugene. Brand designs video games last I heard.
I have friends who are retired Marines, inventors, musicians, writers, decorated combat veterans (Gulf Wars I and II), and programmers.
They make sick people well, design boardgames, coordinate the computer networks of massive hospitals, manage internationally famous gourmet pizza parlors, you name it.
I, on the other hand answer the phone for Mother’s Little Empire and make sure that phone services don’t stay in the names of dead people.
As soon as the writer's strike is over, I’m going to create a Web-based interview show called Everybody I Know is Cooler than I Am. Each episode will be a fifteen-minute chat with somebody with whom I went to high school, college or whatever with and who is vastly more spiff and wow than I’ll ever be.
However, having my own TV show would make me interesting too, though, wouldn't it?
Ah, paradox.
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11:42 pm - In Which Fifty Thousand Words Were Not Written, Yet Again
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Didn’t finish NaNoWriMo this year. Didn’t even come close. Big surprise, eh? Put another shrimp on the barbie of started-but-never-finished projects.
I thought I had it figured out this year, too. Stream-of-consciousness, typed as fast as I can think it, caught on wax at the same speed it comes to me, edit later. Gonzofiction.
Only trouble with that method is you actually have to sit at the computer and type it. November just turned out to be too busy, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I could sit and write. Last year I came closer than I’ve ever come, and that was just longhand. I thought for sure I’d break the 50k mark this time. Ah well, best-laid schemes.
Still, got some interesting gems in this year’s attempt:
Algorigamithm: the mathematical description of the method by which hardcopy data is compressed to fit inside mailing envelopes. The United States Postal Service is seen as a sort of analog packet-switching network in the novel, a backup to the lightning-fast central nervous system that is the Internet.
Meganism: describes the planet-wide macrofauna creature that the human race is rapidly becoming. Nice resonance with “mechanism”, too.
The Hive-Human and the Event Horizon: It’s the book’s McGuffin, a sprawling, hundreds-of-pages long treatise on how the human race is shaping itself into a single collective being, each human being analogous to a cell in the human body, with the highway system as a circulatory system and the Internet as the nervous system. According to the theory expounded by one of the characters, it’s the next step in biological organization, as momentous as the transition from single-celled life to complex multicellular plants and animals.
The Hive-Human is the massive colony-creature made up of individual humans. The Event Horizon describes the physical boundary leading to new environments where those who reject the Hive go: across the ocean to the New World, “Gone to Texas”, etc. It’s a safety valve. Without an Event Horizon, the Hive self-destructs as those elements that want to leave are forced to stay and because they don’t fit, the Hive has to contain them with prisons, executions, and other uncivilized behavior. The irony is that eventually the Hive also crosses the Event Horizon, following its pre-swarm scouts to new environments, a glider gun that packs up and follows the gliders.
And there's a whole subplot with the villain wanting to use the Large Hadron Collider to run a timing attack on the Planck Limit as an attempt to destabilize local space-time and take his revenge on a universe that caused him to exist when he really didn’t want to in the first place.
Just like Pilots and Pilgrims last year, I’d love to finish this one. I’ll probably return to it off and on over the next few months. I never completely abandon anything, just keep passing smaller and smaller halfway points, never beating that damn tortoise of Zeno’s.
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
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4:53 pm - In Which an Old Friend Resurfaces
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| Thursday, November 8th, 2007
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7:36 pm
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| Thursday, October 11th, 2007
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9:54 pm - In Which Halloween will be More Depressing than Christmas
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 Halloween is coming. Dunno what I’m doing. I requested the day off some months ago thinking I’d be spending it putting the finishing touches on some wham-bang costume or getting ready for a party. Neither have materialized.
There’s a neat looking Halloween carnival, Nightmare on 19th Street, that is running all month long. Tickets are $20 a pop though, so forget that. Call me cheap, but I’m used to paying only a little more than that and getting a whole weekend pass to a con. What segment of population in this town is earning so much money that fun is so damned expensive?
Rocky Horror is playing every weekend at the Showplace Six, just like the old days. But that’s out. Don’t do the Rocky anymore now.
I guess I’ll fall back on my original plan: set up a grill and a cooler in the front yard, do up some burgers and dogs, try to get to know the neighbors when they come by with their kids. I doubt I’ll have more than two trick-or-treaters show up, though, so why bother?
Ah well, more candy for us.
current mood:  pessimistic
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(5 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, September 13th, 2007
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8:38 pm - In Which We Buy a Box of Vinyl Delights
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Don’t have money for luxuries all that much anymore, so I have to be very discriminating in what I buy, make the spare change go as far as it can. But when confronted with a box of vinyl in very good condition at a local garage sale, and it was pointed out that those “antiques” were only a quarter a pop – get thee behind me, seventy-eights!
See, while my digital music collection numbers in the thousands of pieces, indulging my Tangible Media Fetish is rare. I tend to download almost everything now, especially if it’s out-of-print or otherwise impossible to buy ($90 for a copy of Running Jumping Standing Still? Don’t think so. But I’ll buy it if I ever see it reasonably priced). Therein lies the problem. Dialup is cheap, but slower than Congress giving back civil liberties. Anything faster is out of our budget. It’s okay for grabbing shorter pieces, or multitrack albums piecemeal. I can get a song or two downloaded over an evening. But longer pieces, like the wild stuff on Kyle Gann’s site, or works I see on Soulseek, is impossible. And streaming? Forget it.
Download the small stuff, buy the big stuff. Used.
At a quarter each, I was picking through, getting only the really good ones in the best condition. I’d get eight albums, no more, I told myself. It was as I was weighing the merits of Rod McKuen versus Van Cliburn that the hostess came over and said I could have the whole box for five dollars. Jen handed me a fiver from her mad money and made my day. She’s so sweet like that; she knows how important music is to me. Sure, there’s a bit of God-botherer stuff, unavoidable in Lubbock but thankfully still shrinkwrapped to keep it from spreading – I’ll probably donate those albums. But a first pressing of 1964’s Hello Dolly! from Louis Armstrong? Jorge Bolet playing Chopin? Poor heatseekers didn’t know what a treasure was sitting in their driveway.
It’s great looking at all these old albums. Most appear unplayed, the jackets and all are also in remarkable condition. A faded – once screamingly bright – yellow label on the Jorge Bolet album reassures that “though the label and jacket of this record may be marked monaural and with our monaural numbers, this recording is TRUE STEREO”. It goes on to let me know that the company, Everest Records, is going to be using the same numbering system for its stereo albums as it did for monaural, and for me not to be worried about it.
Some of the marketing phrases are pretty funny too. I mean, how can you resist something labeled “Specially-Priced 2 Record Set of Mangione Magic”? It’s now second only to the Douglas Records ad copy for Electric Havens on my list of overblown recording industry gimmicks.
By far the best was this copyright notice on the labels of some old Mac Gregor 78 RPM records of folk music and square dances:
Licensed by manufacturer only for non-commercial use for phonographs in homes. Manufacturer and original purchaser agrees this record shall not be resold for any other purpose.
I’m not the original purchaser though, so screw ‘em. These babies are getting digitized.
current mood:  giddy
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| Sunday, September 2nd, 2007
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2:09 pm - In Which a Lot of French Books are Scattered on the Floor
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After working continuously for a full year and only missing once, I'm burning my well-earned vacation days before the end of the year and enjoying the fact that I now have enough seniority to get Labor Day and other holidays off automatically. I wanted to go to Bubonicon during my week vacation, but there wasn't enough cash in the kitty for that. Maybe next year.
The office is now clean enough to set up the big desk and get the computer and all the doodads moved over to it. A little more cleaning and I'll be able to set up the keyboard (the Yamaha, not the typey one). There's even enough room for the mixer board and other stuff, provided it too hasn't walked off over the years. I may be able to start doing music, real music, again.
I'm doing some light sorting here in the office today. It's not that there's a lot of stuff in here, but rather that it's spread out over several dozen half-empty boxes, and consolidating those will save a lot of room. For now, though, I'm looking through books. Dad left me with a bunch of his old books when he went to Florida. Most were for me, but three boxes are full of his old French books, both from when he was studying it, and when he was teaching it at Texas Tech. He asked me to donate them to the Foreign Language Library there, so I'm going through and seeing if any need to be repaired, cleaning them up a bit, that sort of thing.
It's a wide variety. Several textbooks on grammar (including Einhorn's Old French), sure, but also a nice collection of French theatre, complete with full scripts and a songbook or three. Dad has always felt that if all you do is read French to study it, you'll sound like a book. The real French, he said, was in the plays and the music, so that's what he put his students on. There's a heavily-notated (and luxuriously bound) Balzac that I think I might keep for myself rather than send it on. Yes, there's Proust – you cannot escape Proust. But there's also a mint 1966 paperback copy of Saint-Exupéry’s Courrier Sud that will be photographed for the Wikipedia – lots of these books will be, he kept everything in such perfect condition all these years. Some Garnier Flammarion editions of Stendahl, and of all things, a French rhyming dictionary.
Looking through all of these reminds me of just how little I know about my father. From the Seventies on, I know who he is. But before that, there's not a lot of information and I've never questioned him about a lot of it. The books provide a rough chronicle of his life to help fill in the gaps. He signed almost all of them, many are in the flowing signature he had from the Sixties on, a lot were bought during his trip to France then. The oldest ones though, date from the Fifties, as they're signed in block print, followed by "H.M." (Hospital Man), and "U.S.S. Shangri-La", the ship on which he served when he was in the Navy.
I'm very glad though, that he was able to see France one more time. He's just got back from visiting friends in the south near Marseilles. At seventy-one he packed everything up and drove, drove, from northern California to Florida, stopping in Lubbock and Big Spring on the way to visit me and my brother. Now at seventy-three he's gone to France and Italy. A few more years and he will have lived longer than any of his forebears did. France was good for him, he sounded quite happy when he called me on the phone from Manosque – I don't think the climate in Florida is healthy for him, too hot, too humid. His handwriting on the postcards he sent from Digne-les-Bains and Torino shows a much steadier hand than I see on his letters from home, too. I've wanting to convince him to move up here. Still hot, but at least it's drier. It's also less expensive and there's better work for semi-retired RNs here than caring for rich retirees younger than he is or working in the prison system, which is about all there is to do in Florida.
And so it goes.
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, August 30th, 2007
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8:32 pm - In Which Humbugs Rear Their Ugly Yet Peppermint Heads
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| Sunday, July 29th, 2007
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4:05 pm - In Which We Have a Vacation
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Woo-hoo! A whole week of no work!
I haven't had a real vacation in years. And since there's no place to go and no money to get there, I'll be staying right here in Lubbock. There's a big list of movies I want to see (theatre and disc), a small to-do list of household chores, and maybe the office to clean out and a computer desk to put together. Anybody want to do some gaming? Give a holler, my contact info's on the profile page!
I've got until next Monday to rest and relax.
current mood: recumbent
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| Thursday, June 21st, 2007
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3:27 pm - In Which We Celebrate Some Anniversaries
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With all the attention on the 30th Anniversary of Star Wars, I realized that two other anniversaries of childhood favorites all but slipped under the radar. The Apple II, the computer that launched the personal computer revolution, also turned 30 just a little while ago, and the equally-geek-appeal movie Tron turned 25. Both are dear to my heart, I’ve used Apples all my life and Tron is still one of my favorite movies, mostly because it introduced me to Wendy Carlos’ music and Moebius’ art, but also because it’s the first movie to highlight the ongoing conflict between the hackers in the labs and the managers at the top of the building.
While Tron stands out as a milestone in cinema CGI (though it was declared ineligible for a Visual Effects Academy Award for having used computers – technology now de rigeur in moviemaking), its overall message seems to have been lost. The most important scene in the whole film takes place in the real world between Walter, the bearded, fun-loving founder of the company, and Dillinger, the upstart from accounting who took over the whole shebang. Walter protests the locking-out of the company’s programmers from their systems and the use of a Master Control Program – the movie’s true villain – to maintain security by watching all the employees. Dillinger accuses Walter of “religious discussions” when Walter points out that the programmer’s spirit remains in everything he makes even if he’s no longer allowed access to it. This point is made all the more when we discover that Walter’s software alter ego is an I/O controller, something that in the digital world is akin to a high priest, allowing programs to commune with and receive guidance from their creators and users – a function the Master Control Program has blocked.
“Helping users is what computers are for,” says Walter at one point. “Doing our business is what computers are for,” retorts Dillinger. This one exchange sums up everything the film is about: the creators versus the moneymakers. The creators want to leave things open, modifiable, and with plenty of freedom to let the user do as he sees fit. The moneymakers like to keep things restricted, locked, but with the option to “upgrade” and get more freedom (or the illusion of it) by spending more money on more product.
In many ways, Tron is the story of Apple, and really, every other computer company that got so big so fast that the profit envelope had to be pushed ever further just to keep the doors open. The Dillingers of the world desire control because ever-increasing cancer-like growth is the only thing Wall Street rewards, and total control facilitates that. The Walters just want to make things that are not only useful to the human race, but are enjoyable and comfortable for people to work with. Walter wishes he were back in his old garage where he founded the company, a clear reference to Steve Wozniak, the creator of the Apple. Wozniak too shared the idea that computers were for people and that people should be able to conform and customize the computer to fit their needs, not the other way around.
Steve Jobs, the business end of the Apple II, wanted the computer to be an appliance, like a toaster or a TV set. You bought it, you took it out of the box, and you used it within a certain set of company-pre-defined parameters. Wozniak wanted entirely the opposite. From what some have said, there was actually a serious fight about the direction they’d take with the Apple II. The expansion slots that were in the II, and its successors the IIe and the IIgs are the legacy of that (Woz won). You could even build your own devices to plug into those slots, the specs were public. The inclusion of BASIC, not only as a separate package but also built into the firmware, was another Woz idea. You could even use the onboard mini-assembler, the Monitor, to program in the machine language, directly accessing the ROM and firmware tools. How many professionals in the software industry today cut their teeth on Applesoft BASIC? Raise your hands, there’s a lot of you.
Would the Apple II have been as successful if it hadn’t been user-modifiable? But the bigger question, would the Internet be as interesting, as fast-growing, as fun, as surprising if the majority of its users hadn’t been those who’d grown up assuming that technology was something to be tinkered with on an individual basis? There are times I think the Woz should be revered as the patron saint of the Internet – if not an honorary founder – along with the gang from Beagle Bros and the Chief Surgeon of Black Bag. There’s a clear spirit of anarchic creativity online and there always has been, and honestly, I don’t think that companies can lock that out. If Tron teaches us anything, it’s that lightcycles move faster than tanks and recognizers, and all it takes is determined and well-placed individuals to hit the weak spots and the villains come crashing down.
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(comment on this)
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| Thursday, June 14th, 2007
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3:23 pm - In Which Our Narrator Argues for Net Neutrality Again
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For me, the discussion about Net Neutrality is moot. Most of the communication lines in this country were paid for by tax money. Phone and cable line construction both have been subsidized in the United States from the beginning because companies had no incentive to put them to low-income neighborhoods, rural small towns, and other marginalized areas. Would tiny West Texas outposts of civilization like Cone, Tokio, or even my hometown of Coahoma have phones, Internet connections, or cable television today if the government hadn’t paid for it?
Take a look at your phone bill, your Internet bill, or your cable TV bill. Look for “infrastructure surcharges” or “911 maintenance fees”. Some are from the federal government, but every state has them too, some cities even do. You pay that money to the government, it turns around and pays it to the telecorporations so that they’ll run the lines out – and keep them running – to unprofitable areas.
The argument that the telecorps “own” the phone lines is about as silly as construction companies claiming they own the highways. A Granite Construction employee would laugh his head off at the idea his company owns the Marsha Sharp Freeway, a construction project funded entirely by taxes. If the telecom giants want to buy the lines by refunding every single cent back to the American taxpayer – not to the governments – directly, in cash, then maybe they have a case for it. Until then, they should keep their greasy mitts off my Internet. They’re providers only, like automobile manufacturers or gasoline companies. You pay them when you buy a car (computer), you pay them for the gas (ISP service), but the roads already belong to you and always have.
current mood: gloomy
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(comment on this)
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| Thursday, June 7th, 2007
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6:05 pm - In Which It is Wished There Were More Days Off
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If I could type anywhere, I think I'd get more writing finished. But these little comics I can throw out in half an hour, picture-taking included.
Just wish I was funnier.
current mood:  annoyed
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(comment on this)
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| Thursday, May 17th, 2007
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6:02 pm - In Which Our Narrator Hasn't Done Anything Useful Since Last Week
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No, sorry, I haven't written anything new in a while. Well, I have, but I haven't gotten around to typing it all in. But here's a comic.
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(comment on this)
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| Thursday, May 10th, 2007
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7:15 pm - In Which Game Pieces Have More Adventures
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2:33 pm - In Which Apotheosis is Just a Mouseclick Away
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