Remember when the Internet was going to be so damned good because it was going to be an interactive medium, where people talked back, and wrote, and would gain a voice as a massive, unruly, democratic whole?
Oh, wait, for the vast majority of users, it's television with higher resolution and more porn. Even the games require the smallest possible level of thought or strategy. (I tried an MMORPG once---the WoW beta. Possibly the most stultifying gameply ever. Walk over to a bad guy whose level is less than or equal to yours. Hit 'auto-attack'. Wait about sixty to ninety seconds. Pick up Six Rusty Copper Bits. Repeat.) (Not to bust on Warcraft. I had a damned good time playing WCIII and the expansion.)
Damn, you know, I spend five or six hours a day in front of a computer, but I write (for myself), I edit Wikipedia, I blather on Slashdot, I read, I write mail to people that uses complete sentences and capital letters... hell, I instant message using complete sentences and capital letters. Hell, I even go outside sometimes, exercise, read a book.
How did this kid end up so different from me? I was a dork; I didn't really have friends, but I wasn't so... passive.
I am so not having kids of my own for a long, long time.
Indeed, we should campaign for equal rights for pod people who piss away their lives playing Everquest! Clearly that's just as valid as making friends, or creating something, or writing...
Ass.
--grendel drago
Ain't all sweetness and light.
on
Feed
·
· Score: 1
There's a good reason for reading dystopias. Heck, there are lots of 'em. See, any good story has to have conflict in it. I'm in the middle of reading "A Deepness in the Sky" right now---not a dystopia, but it features what I consider pretty damned scary bad guys. If they weren't as sinister as they are, the book wouldn't be exciting. Who wants to see Fluffy Bear out-cuddle Slightly Less Fluffy Bear?
Now, I'm not defensing dystopias which are unimaginative or poorly written. As another reply to you put it, People so often read these kinds of books and then talk about how "1984ish" our world is today or how we are heading towards a "Brave New World." I wonder how many people who make those comments have even read the books. How many of them could name the main SF elements in each book (two-way television and a genetically engineered caste system, respectively)?
A good dystopian novel will make you consider elements of the society you live in, see it in a different way. PKD didn't have alien marauders secretly replacing humans left and right in his town, but that doesn't mean that "The Hanging Man" isn't a good read.
--grendel drago
It's a bait 'n' switch.
on
Feed
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It's a bait-and-switch, see, originating in the 1950s. The 1950s were supposedly the halcyon days of apple pie, clean (too cheap to meter!) nuclear power and robots that would clean your house---any day now! The 1950s were also a time of paranoia, McCarthyism and of course the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation.
To reflect this duality, take Asimov and PKD. Asimov's stories reflect the attitude that technology will save us, that robots will do our bidding and be our Fuzzy Friends. PKD's view is that aliens, or maybe robots, or maybe mutants, but in any case something utterly inhuman, will supplant and replace us. (See the short stories "The Golden Man", "The Hanging Man" or "The Father-Thing" for some really top-drawer examples of that.)
If you've been reading solely PKD, no wonder you think it's all doom and gloom!
Let's look at the last few SF books I read. "A Fire Upon the Deep" (Vernor Vinge), "The Left Hand of Darkness" (Ursula K LeGuin), "The Turing Option" (Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky). Hmm---not a dystopia to be found. (Though that last books was a damned waste of time.)
Hell, Vinge writes about ubiquitous computing in a way that doesn't lead to suckness and defeat. (See "Fast Times at Fairmont High" or the upcoming "Rainbows End".)
Also---you say that "the cure is always free love or fascism". Aside from Norman Spinrad trying to make a point ("The Iron Dream"), when is fascism recommended? When is "free love" recommended as a cure for a dystopia? The only free-love-proposing book I remember is "Stranger in a Strange Land", and that was hardly set in a dystopia.
As a consequence of cellular phones, nobody knows anyone else's number any more. (Yes, I'm generalizing, but not by much.) Lots of cell phones don't display the number when it's being dialed, just the shortcut-name. And since info can be loaded from one phone to another (iRDA, etc), one can conceivably 'know' and use a phone number that one's never even seen.
You can make a perfect home/office/small business machine for under $400, that will last for years.
Yes, you can... but not with a Shuttle box. It's a motherboard and a case for $400. With that same $400 I can get an Ugly Beige Box with better hardware on the inside.
I get some good stuff from used bookstores. Paperbacks range from $1 to $4 (for stuff that had a cover price of $9--10). Generally good yarns; if you keep your eyes open, you can find some classics. I found the original novel "A Simple Plan" (much, much darker than the movie), the occasional Heinlein book, etc.
If you don't care if your books are shiny and uncreased or not, it's a good idea to check out a used paperback store. They usually give trade-in credit on old paperbacks you might bring in, too.
Remember how the first two season openers said "It was the dawn of the Third Age of Mankind...", and nothing was really done with it? Folks kept asking jms (the fact that he posted to the fan newsgroup is an entire new level of cool by itself) what it meant, and he said to wait. Then, nothing for the third year. Then, in 4x08, "Into the Fire", the conclusion of the entire Vorlon/Shadow thing... oh, that's what it meant.
A strange confluence of factors led to the creation of Babylon 5... a creator devoted enough to write four seasons (12/22, 15/22, 22/22, 22/22, 21/22---it adds up) of the show, a network that left him the hell alone enough for him to do it... well, it doesn't take much, but those things are exceedingly, exceedingly rare---see how often we get both of them together.
Let's see... the entire EarthForce arc, from 1x22 "Chrysalis" to 4x22 "Endgame"---who else could have pulled that off? Earth the bad guys! No way! They looked like the frickin' UN in the first season! ("Intersections in Real Time" remains one of my favorites, especially because it's a late-in-the-show episode that's self-contained enough to show to people who know nothing about the series. Could you imagine Starfleet doing that?)
Oh, and, of course, Londo's dream about his death at G'Kar's hands. You see it in the very first episode, 1x01, "Midnight on the Firing Line", but its full meaning isn't revealed until "War Without End, Part II" near the end of S3.
Not to mention that the Shadows' motives aren't even revealed until 3x22, "Z'Ha'Dum"---after we've all assumed that they're the demons and the Vorlons are the angels; what else could we have seen in 2x22, "The Fall of Night"? But it's not nearly that simple, of course. The Vorlon/Shadow arc remains my favorite component of the storyline.
Well, they'd never do it. Just because jms managed to pull a five-year "novel for television" out of his hat on half the budget of TNG (has anyone else managed to make a drama series---not a soap opera---with that level of continuity in any genre?)... just because he consistently wrote critically acclaimed work... you think someone would actually employ him?
Come on! He enforced a "no cute animals, no robots" rule for B5! How would the small-minded Paramount execs manage to get him to put in big-boobed women in spandex?
"And I don't go to bed until I've made some very bad decisions."
Kidding aside, since it'll never, ever get made, I'd like to see his treatment of it. It's easy to backseat-drive ("they should have wrapped up Buffy Season 6 without the dead and evil lesbian cliche!") but more difficult to actually come up with something better. ("Here's a plot outline in which not only do I avoid cliche, but I tell a better story. Ha!")
Uh, sure. Are you trying to point out that great thinkers came from Europe? All of yours are (based on a quick scan) post-Enlightenment, definitely post-Rennaisance. I was talking about the Dark Ages. Medieval times. Burning times.
Amen, sir, amen. There should be a standard for DC power distribution and usage within the house. 24V (48V? 12V?) power should be right next to the 110VAC outlets. Another one of those great ideas which is so, so unlikely to ever happen. Bah.
Sure. Go to your local university. Look at the names of the engineering faculty. Surprise! Arabs tend to be rather well represented there. They come to this nation to do their work because it's at the forefront of light and learning, while Afghanistan, Iran, etc. are crawling out of the dark ages again.
Bear in mind that the most prominent philosopher on the middle ages, Moses Maimonides, fled Spain to work in the middle east, serving at the court of Saladin. The Christian world produced great thinkers (though he was a Jew, he did come out of the Christian-controlled part of Europe); it just couldn't do anything with them. Likewise, the best and brightest of the Arab world don't fit in in their home countries. Which is terribly sad. But doesn't reflect on the Arab people at all, just on their stupid theocracies.
A millenium ago, the Christian world was benighted, mired in superstition. Literature and art were at a standstill. The greatest minds of the era (e.g., Moses Maimonedes) fled to the Arab world, where they wouldn't be hunted down and set on fire. It wasn't safe to be a Jew in Christendom; many of them fled to Muslim-controlled territories.
Today, the Arab world is benighted, mired in superstition. Literature and art are at a standstill. The greatest minds of the era (e.g., about half of the engineering faculty at most American universities) flee the Arab world, so they won't be hunted down and set on fire. It isn't safe to be a Jew in the Arab world; many of them choose to live instead in Christian nations.
There's a lot of culture on Wikipedia. Most of it is self-documenting, but it's impressive how much stuff I'm still learning about how things are done after a year of contributions.
Exec 1: Here we have a script in which malevolent robots run amok, and stylish humans with big guns save the world by shooting them. Exec 2: Hmm. How can we make it more marketable? What's a good name in robots? Exec 1: Well, Isaac Asimov looked at the current robot-story market of his day, and found it flooded with tales in which malevolent robots run amok, and stylish humans with big guns save the world by shooting them. He created the Three Laws to prevent himself from repeating this cliche, and created some of the most beloved SF stories of the era, collected in the omnibus "I, Robot". Exec 2: Catchy! We should use the name, draw in his fans. Exec 1: Should we change the plot to reflect his creative influence in any way whatsoever? Exec 2: Nah, too much work. just rename the eye-candy babe to "Susan Calvin". Exec 1: I can taste the box-office receipts already.
Can you think of a better reason why they did it?!
And I agree that cams and TSs are different, especially in the sense of requiring the cooperation of an inside man. There's a good reason not to confuse them.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember when the Internet was going to be so damned good because it was going to be an interactive medium, where people talked back, and wrote, and would gain a voice as a massive, unruly, democratic whole?
Oh, wait, for the vast majority of users, it's television with higher resolution and more porn. Even the games require the smallest possible level of thought or strategy. (I tried an MMORPG once---the WoW beta. Possibly the most stultifying gameply ever. Walk over to a bad guy whose level is less than or equal to yours. Hit 'auto-attack'. Wait about sixty to ninety seconds. Pick up Six Rusty Copper Bits. Repeat.) (Not to bust on Warcraft. I had a damned good time playing WCIII and the expansion.)
Damn, you know, I spend five or six hours a day in front of a computer, but I write (for myself), I edit Wikipedia, I blather on Slashdot, I read, I write mail to people that uses complete sentences and capital letters... hell, I instant message using complete sentences and capital letters. Hell, I even go outside sometimes, exercise, read a book.
How did this kid end up so different from me? I was a dork; I didn't really have friends, but I wasn't so... passive.
I am so not having kids of my own for a long, long time.
--grendel drago
Indeed, we should campaign for equal rights for pod people who piss away their lives playing Everquest! Clearly that's just as valid as making friends, or creating something, or writing...
Ass.
--grendel drago
There's a good reason for reading dystopias. Heck, there are lots of 'em. See, any good story has to have conflict in it. I'm in the middle of reading "A Deepness in the Sky" right now---not a dystopia, but it features what I consider pretty damned scary bad guys. If they weren't as sinister as they are, the book wouldn't be exciting. Who wants to see Fluffy Bear out-cuddle Slightly Less Fluffy Bear?
Now, I'm not defensing dystopias which are unimaginative or poorly written. As another reply to you put it, People so often read these kinds of books and then talk about how "1984ish" our world is today or how we are heading towards a "Brave New World." I wonder how many people who make those comments have even read the books. How many of them could name the main SF elements in each book (two-way television and a genetically engineered caste system, respectively)?
A good dystopian novel will make you consider elements of the society you live in, see it in a different way. PKD didn't have alien marauders secretly replacing humans left and right in his town, but that doesn't mean that "The Hanging Man" isn't a good read.
--grendel drago
It's a bait-and-switch, see, originating in the 1950s. The 1950s were supposedly the halcyon days of apple pie, clean (too cheap to meter!) nuclear power and robots that would clean your house---any day now! The 1950s were also a time of paranoia, McCarthyism and of course the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation.
To reflect this duality, take Asimov and PKD. Asimov's stories reflect the attitude that technology will save us, that robots will do our bidding and be our Fuzzy Friends. PKD's view is that aliens, or maybe robots, or maybe mutants, but in any case something utterly inhuman, will supplant and replace us. (See the short stories "The Golden Man", "The Hanging Man" or "The Father-Thing" for some really top-drawer examples of that.)
If you've been reading solely PKD, no wonder you think it's all doom and gloom!
Let's look at the last few SF books I read. "A Fire Upon the Deep" (Vernor Vinge), "The Left Hand of Darkness" (Ursula K LeGuin), "The Turing Option" (Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky). Hmm---not a dystopia to be found. (Though that last books was a damned waste of time.)
Hell, Vinge writes about ubiquitous computing in a way that doesn't lead to suckness and defeat. (See "Fast Times at Fairmont High" or the upcoming "Rainbows End".)
Also---you say that "the cure is always free love or fascism". Aside from Norman Spinrad trying to make a point ("The Iron Dream"), when is fascism recommended? When is "free love" recommended as a cure for a dystopia? The only free-love-proposing book I remember is "Stranger in a Strange Land", and that was hardly set in a dystopia.
--grendel drago
As a consequence of cellular phones, nobody knows anyone else's number any more. (Yes, I'm generalizing, but not by much.) Lots of cell phones don't display the number when it's being dialed, just the shortcut-name. And since info can be loaded from one phone to another (iRDA, etc), one can conceivably 'know' and use a phone number that one's never even seen.
--grendel drago
You can make a perfect home/office/small business machine for under $400, that will last for years.
Yes, you can... but not with a Shuttle box. It's a motherboard and a case for $400. With that same $400 I can get an Ugly Beige Box with better hardware on the inside.
Price ain't the reason to get this baby.
--grendel drago
They were caricatures of the "American Cowboy" dream (which is a complete fabrication itself).
Oh! Why didn't you say you hated America? That makes everything so much clearer, now.
--grendel drago
demographics(inner city)
You can say 'black'. It won't hurt you. Sheesh.
--grendel drago
Where Do Dummy Email Addresses Go?
Tumbolia, of course!
--grendel drago
Plain GSView/gv from the GhostScript distribution does this. I was wondering where I'd seen the shadow-frame behavior before. Thanks!
--grendel drago
I get some good stuff from used bookstores. Paperbacks range from $1 to $4 (for stuff that had a cover price of $9--10). Generally good yarns; if you keep your eyes open, you can find some classics. I found the original novel "A Simple Plan" (much, much darker than the movie), the occasional Heinlein book, etc.
If you don't care if your books are shiny and uncreased or not, it's a good idea to check out a used paperback store. They usually give trade-in credit on old paperbacks you might bring in, too.
--grendel drago
Remember how the first two season openers said "It was the dawn of the Third Age of Mankind...", and nothing was really done with it? Folks kept asking jms (the fact that he posted to the fan newsgroup is an entire new level of cool by itself) what it meant, and he said to wait. Then, nothing for the third year. Then, in 4x08, "Into the Fire", the conclusion of the entire Vorlon/Shadow thing... oh, that's what it meant.
A strange confluence of factors led to the creation of Babylon 5... a creator devoted enough to write four seasons (12/22, 15/22, 22/22, 22/22, 21/22---it adds up) of the show, a network that left him the hell alone enough for him to do it... well, it doesn't take much, but those things are exceedingly, exceedingly rare---see how often we get both of them together.
Let's see... the entire EarthForce arc, from 1x22 "Chrysalis" to 4x22 "Endgame"---who else could have pulled that off? Earth the bad guys! No way! They looked like the frickin' UN in the first season! ("Intersections in Real Time" remains one of my favorites, especially because it's a late-in-the-show episode that's self-contained enough to show to people who know nothing about the series. Could you imagine Starfleet doing that?)
Oh, and, of course, Londo's dream about his death at G'Kar's hands. You see it in the very first episode, 1x01, "Midnight on the Firing Line", but its full meaning isn't revealed until "War Without End, Part II" near the end of S3.
Not to mention that the Shadows' motives aren't even revealed until 3x22, "Z'Ha'Dum"---after we've all assumed that they're the demons and the Vorlons are the angels; what else could we have seen in 2x22, "The Fall of Night"? But it's not nearly that simple, of course. The Vorlon/Shadow arc remains my favorite component of the storyline.
--grendel drago
Err... reference? If he hates it so much, why does he do so much work on it?
It's more likely that he's simply inept.
--grendel drago
PS Am I the only one who thinks Kerry looks like a Narn?
OH DEAR GOD GET IT OUT OUT OF MY HEAD AAAAAHHHH
"G'Kerry once wrote... "
--grendel drago
Weren't the glowing bleed-from-your-ears rods blue, not green?
--grendel drago
Nah; I think they flipped a coin... heads, particle of the week; tails, reverse the polarity.
--grendel drago
Well, they'd never do it. Just because jms managed to pull a five-year "novel for television" out of his hat on half the budget of TNG (has anyone else managed to make a drama series---not a soap opera---with that level of continuity in any genre?)... just because he consistently wrote critically acclaimed work... you think someone would actually employ him?
Come on! He enforced a "no cute animals, no robots" rule for B5! How would the small-minded Paramount execs manage to get him to put in big-boobed women in spandex?
"And I don't go to bed until I've made some very bad decisions."
Kidding aside, since it'll never, ever get made, I'd like to see his treatment of it. It's easy to backseat-drive ("they should have wrapped up Buffy Season 6 without the dead and evil lesbian cliche!") but more difficult to actually come up with something better. ("Here's a plot outline in which not only do I avoid cliche, but I tell a better story. Ha!")
--grendel drago
Uh, sure. Are you trying to point out that great thinkers came from Europe? All of yours are (based on a quick scan) post-Enlightenment, definitely post-Rennaisance. I was talking about the Dark Ages. Medieval times. Burning times.
--grendel drago
Amen, sir, amen. There should be a standard for DC power distribution and usage within the house. 24V (48V? 12V?) power should be right next to the 110VAC outlets. Another one of those great ideas which is so, so unlikely to ever happen. Bah.
--grendel drago
I... I have a happy that he has an article about himself. I've spruced it up a tiny bit as well. Great idea!
--grendel drago
Sure. Go to your local university. Look at the names of the engineering faculty. Surprise! Arabs tend to be rather well represented there. They come to this nation to do their work because it's at the forefront of light and learning, while Afghanistan, Iran, etc. are crawling out of the dark ages again.
Bear in mind that the most prominent philosopher on the middle ages, Moses Maimonides, fled Spain to work in the middle east, serving at the court of Saladin. The Christian world produced great thinkers (though he was a Jew, he did come out of the Christian-controlled part of Europe); it just couldn't do anything with them. Likewise, the best and brightest of the Arab world don't fit in in their home countries. Which is terribly sad. But doesn't reflect on the Arab people at all, just on their stupid theocracies.
--grendel drago
A millenium ago, the Christian world was benighted, mired in superstition. Literature and art were at a standstill. The greatest minds of the era (e.g., Moses Maimonedes) fled to the Arab world, where they wouldn't be hunted down and set on fire. It wasn't safe to be a Jew in Christendom; many of them fled to Muslim-controlled territories.
Today, the Arab world is benighted, mired in superstition. Literature and art are at a standstill. The greatest minds of the era (e.g., about half of the engineering faculty at most American universities) flee the Arab world, so they won't be hunted down and set on fire. It isn't safe to be a Jew in the Arab world; many of them choose to live instead in Christian nations.
The wheel turns.
--grendel drago
Wikipedia folks are, quite frequently, the same as Slashdot folks. I am, for one.
Check out my recent contributions or my images that I've made for Wikipedia as well.
There's a lot of culture on Wikipedia. Most of it is self-documenting, but it's impressive how much stuff I'm still learning about how things are done after a year of contributions.
--grendel drago
I bet they have discussions like this...
Exec 1: Here we have a script in which malevolent robots run amok, and stylish humans with big guns save the world by shooting them.
Exec 2: Hmm. How can we make it more marketable? What's a good name in robots?
Exec 1: Well, Isaac Asimov looked at the current robot-story market of his day, and found it flooded with tales in which malevolent robots run amok, and stylish humans with big guns save the world by shooting them. He created the Three Laws to prevent himself from repeating this cliche, and created some of the most beloved SF stories of the era, collected in the omnibus "I, Robot".
Exec 2: Catchy! We should use the name, draw in his fans.
Exec 1: Should we change the plot to reflect his creative influence in any way whatsoever?
Exec 2: Nah, too much work. just rename the eye-candy babe to "Susan Calvin".
Exec 1: I can taste the box-office receipts already.
Can you think of a better reason why they did it?!
--grendel drago
Low UID? Fuck, I'm old...
And I agree that cams and TSs are different, especially in the sense of requiring the cooperation of an inside man. There's a good reason not to confuse them.
--grendel drago