A few spare monitors, but what I have, I'm hoarding... I need the CRT (only LCD I've seen that didn't have the "colour shifts as you move your head" thing that's a problem when editing images, costs $2200!) and the 17"-19" models with perfect-flat glass and perfect colour don't grow on trees anymore. When I see an unloved ViewSonic, I hit the owner over the head and take it away from him.:)
We get a lot of donated 15" CRTs at the club, but most of 'em have issues, and they really aren't worth the storage space anymore.
I do house-call PC repairs on the side... I used to cobble together systems from random salvage and sell them cheaply or give them away, but that's how I learned how SMALL that market is in SoCal... essentially nonexistent and not worth the bother, and the people who MOST need to have someone else repair their PC are, as noted, the LEAST likely to accept an older machine (even if it does everything they need). I live way the hell out of town AND dislike having visitors, so "come on over" doesn't work well on two counts.:) (Aside from the fact that I find linux frustratingly immature as a desktop and mystifyingly opaque as an OS, thus can't honestly recommend it to newbies, nor could I realistically support it. Conversely, I can nearly always beat Windows into submission. Reinstalling is against my religion.:)
Yeah, the average OEM P4 is woefully undercooled -- that's exactly what I was referring to when I said "DESIGNED to fail". Someone gifted me a Dell P4-3GHz (one of their most expensive models when it was new) because he was tired of fighting its overheating issues... he'd had some fancy active cooler in it to keep it running, but that died. Anyway, it came to me with just its stock cooling -- a shroud and case fan, but no CPU fan and a poor excuse for a heatsink. It wouldn't run for more than a few minutes without locking up. I did away with the stupid shroud, added a perfectly ordinary HSF (Tekgems used to carry one that fit the nonstandard Dell mount), and the poor thing's running temperature dropped 40 DEGREES. It earned its keep as my media server for a while, but then died of bad caps on the mobo, and that crappy board ain't worth fixing. All its other parts will eventually go into upgrading something else.
The other thing the OEMs do that makes me crazy is cram the HDs together, or worse yet smack up against the PSU. Right, let's COOK your data!! Oh, and they always use a dead-minimal PSU, so it has to work extra hard and stresses all the other electronics. Funny how OEM mobos and PSUs die early and often, and their HDs seldom last longer than 3 years, while clone mobos and PSUs seldom die at all, and... IIRC my oldest HD that still runs 24/7 is now 11 years old!!
I like a plain copper heatsink myself (the cheapest copper Thermaltake seems to work just fine), that will take an ordinary case fan so repairs are presto-chango. I also like a plain metal case, since a great deal of the system's heat exchange is through the case walls. (There's another thing the OEMs do that I hate -- sheathe the case in plastic, to ensure that it's well-insulated!!) And I like to have one more fan blowing in than out, to keep air pressure and circulation high inside the case... cools better AND keeps dirt out.
Evercool fans are a lot quieter than Sunon, tho I put Sunon in hard-to-reach places (like inside PSUs), cuz the damn loud things never die!
Anyway, I try to keep system temperature down in the 35-40C range, if possible, since like yourself, I've noticed Heat Is The Enemy.
Oh, funny story about my P3's twin brother... someone sent me a dead P3-500 that their "repair" guy "couldn't fix"... when I cracked the case, the cause was obvious (and equally obvious, their repair guy was a con artist): the HSF was choked solid with cig smoke; the CPU had been so hot that its fan *crumbled* when I touched it, and the motherboard was heat-warped to the point that I had to pull out the CPU with VISE-
Oh, you don't have to convince me... that faithful old P233 ("Argo" by name) isn't going anywhere. It's served me well for 11 years (well, I think the RAM stick needs replacing, but that's no big deal) and I'm rather attached to it.:) It'll probably remain a backup DOS/Win machine, essentially the role my old 286 used to have... tho your idea of turning it (or one of its near relatives) into a router has crossed my mind, possibly with the Dubbele setup -- http://firewall.dubbele.com/ which being NetBSD-based is probably pretty secure, and it'll run on much lesser hardware than Argo.
And I still have my original 286 (it still works) which didn't get retired for good until 2001. It stayed in use for so long because I lived in an area with power-outage problems, and my big UPS (itself salvage, and now 29 years old! needs a new battery, tho) would run the 286 and its little monochrome monitor for 5 hours... and it could still do everything I absolutely couldn't live without (including primitive internet access). At one point I knew every one of its 700 files by name and hex... couldn't bear to throw it out, that would be like killing my firstborn!
[Should I admit that there is also a working XT -- with VGA!! -- in my Closet??]
Like yourself, it pains me to trashbin working hardware, and as a result I often take in homeless computers. Used to be even 386/486 machines had value, and I've got a bunch sitting in my barn that I wish someone could make use of... Over the past few years P3s (and a few P4s, tho those tend to die young) have rained from the sky, so I've got a bunch of that era in my salvage pile too -- I consider those good enough to keep, along with some of the nicer MMX systems, since they'll do everything I really need, and very seldom die. I've pretty much stopped buying hardware, other than HDs (junk fills the space allotted:) and that iBase mobo which I got used, and intend [Real Soon Now!!] for my next longterm everyday system (and hopefully it'll last longer than the namebrand P4s that have come my way, none of which has lived longer than 4 years from manufacture date. I detest factory-built systems; they're DESIGNED to fail at such a young age. I've got a huge pile of gutted OEM carcasses in my side yard, from junk donated to our PC user group. Eventually our local electronics recycler will haul it off.)
I do tend to upgrade a system over time until it's completely maxed out, then the system remains in some sort of use til it dies of sheer old age. My everyday P3 actually started life as a 486, in 1994!! still has a few of the original parts, too.
Once in a while I encounter someone who is happy to have ANY working computer, and (as the hardware guru for the local PC user group) I can always find 'em something usable, from the club's stockpile (mostly P2s) or my own. But most people and organizations around here turn up their noses at anything that won't run XP, or don't know how to cope with any other OS and aren't really in a position to learn. Frankly a P200/Win9x does everything most people really use a computer for, but the less someone knows about computers and the less real work they expect from the machine, the more they fear being "left behind". So the folks who'd actually get the most use from these nice old systems are the least likely to accept 'em, even as gifts when they have no PC at all.:(
If it weren't for that, there'd be no one in all of America who needed a PC and couldn't get one for free -- there are that many older but perfectly useful machines going to waste.
Last summer I spent 3 weeks watching the CA state Senate sessions. Not ONCE did I see ANY Democrat vote against ANY program that cost money, no matter how trivial or ridiculous. This while fighting about the budget and the $8B that the feds are about to force CA to spend on building more prison hospital facilities.
Conversely, most (not all) Republicans voted against needless spending, most (not all) of the time.
Only Tom McClintock (R) voted against *anything* that needlessly spent money, 100% of the time. Blessings upon you, Mr.McClintock!
Just as I suspected... convince people that red tiles are "mission period" and therefore kewl, and increase profits since they're also cheaper to make, yet can be priced higher (tile roofs are PRICEY).
Which differs not at all from Life As Usual in the California legislature...
And as to stupid people, Prop 2 proved that at least 60% of California voters are stupider than average. Similarly, I've met two people here, both nominally normal adults and munching a hamburger DURING the conversation, who did not know that beef comes from cows!!
"This is supposed to be America, where laws are not justified on the basis of whether people are significantly harmed by being deprived of freedom. Instead, the standard by which laws are supposed to be judged is whether significant harm is done unless stopped by legislation."
This pegs it most accurately, and I hope you don't mind if I quote this far and wide.
I'd hazard that my 31 year old Ford pickup lacks structural fatigue as well.. of course, it was built to take abuse in the first place.
And even tho it's not the best for gas mileage, how much of that is offset by all the raw materials NOT used and the manufacturing stuff NOT required, for the 2 or 3 new cars I have NOT bought over this truck's lifespan?? (and the multiple trips I've NOT had to make because it will haul the whole load in one trip?) I'd guess most or perhaps even all of it.
I live in the SoCal desert. After a bunch of malls were built fairly close together, all with large asphalt parking lots coated with BLACK sealer, the summer air temp in that part of town went up by about 10 degrees.
And what's with all the dark coloured roofs -- in the desert?!
Asphalt, and worse, black sealer on parking lots, can significantly raise the ambient temperature. There can be (at a desert-educated guess) around a 50 degree increase in reflected surface temperature, compared to ordinary cement.
Red roofs and black roofs in the desert are another one that baffles me. When your biggest difficulty and expense is keeping the building COOL, why on earth do they use the roof colours that absorb the MOST heat from sunlight??!
I put a white roof on my house (it used to be a light reddish-tan), and the indoor summer temperature dropped about 10 degrees just from that.
I like that about Win9x too -- the fact that I can readily thump on the underpinnings and make it behave how I wish (and that I can also see everything that's going on). And that it still flys on what is now ancient hardware, especially if stripped down somewhat. Win2K also runs pretty slick on old PCs, but as you say, its tweakability isn't as good. I certainly wouldn't call any of these "clunky", even on what is now well-aged hardware.
I keep thinking I should retire the P233/W95 box, which nowadays mostly sits in DOS, and gets used when the everyday-work P3/550 is busy... let the P3 become the DOS (which is to say, DOOM:) machine, and finally get around to finishing up the "new" P4 (whose mobo is about 5 years old -- it's an iBase MB800, which someone here on slashdot turned me on to -- it has ISA slots, and really excellent thruput). This venerable Win98 install would surely fly on that box!!
But not being a modern-gamer, I tend to be kinda unmotivated to upgrade, so long as the old machine remains stable and does everything I ask of it. And so long as I gotta have my DOOM, I've also gotta have my DOS.:)
It does happen:) I've got a couple mouldy old graphics apps that are the only thing I've seen with certain functions. One dates to the 286 era and does concentric outlining on fonts, which modern apps seem not to do; the other is from the Win95 era and has a fingerpainting tool that behaves a little different from anything else I've seen.
I don't know CyberPaint, but I never did Amiga. Does it have a PC counterpart?
The guy I mentioned was using AOL's DOS interface, but he also used Nettamer for email and newsgroups. Dunno what he used for invoices. He'd have 'em all going at once and it seemed to work fine for him.:)
Funny how sometimes the ONLY place you can get some esoteric function, at least implemented exactly how you need it, is in some antique app that no one but you remembers. Yet that'll be the very function you can't live without.
It's another reason why I don't begrudge old software the trivial disk space to keep it handy... just in case!
Re:There is a slight Mac head skew here...
on
10 OSes We Left Behind
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· Score: 2, Informative
I used to know a guy who ran GeoWorks on his XT, with all of 512k of RAM. It multitasked, I'm not sure by what method, but it could be busy printing invoices in the background while he was surfing the 'net (in textmode) and reading/sending emails, all with no slowdowns or "system busy" lagging. He was still using it for everyday stuff in the mid-1990s.
From what I've gleaned from this discussion and various linked stuff, enough of that script WASN'T Harlan's doing that his case is at best dubious, even if his contract said what he claims, and even if the books are based directly on that script.
And as others have said, Harlan is always looking for a way to be offended, which makes it hard to take him seriously even when/if he's in the right.
Even funnier if you know about a house Harlan used to live in -- instead of a normal door, you went down thru a hole in the floor and came up thru another hole into the main room, sortof like a giant gopher hole.
No shit -- there was video of the entryway during a TV interview with Harlan, some years back, part of which served to celebrate his, uh, eccentricities.
Heh, yeah... and it's not just Harlan. Moorcock published a volume or two of such stuff as well, and it had me scratching my head as I painfully slogged through it, wondering when it would get good (it was supposed to be good, everyone said so!) And that was back when I'd read cereal boxes if nothing else was available!
I take it you haven't met Harlan, or seen him in action (I have). The parent post is pretty much what most people who have would say, I regret to report. He's more likely to piss on your respect than appreciate it.
Harlan would screw over anyone he saw as slighting or denigrating himself in any way, no matter how meager. He's not in anything for the "little people" (or the LPA people for that matter, tho he'd qualify for membership)... he's strictly out to aggrandize himself.
If he owned a media company, he'd be the sort that ran around suing authors of fanfic for "copyright infringement". (Technically true, but normally an accepted part of fanac, so long as no one profits from it.)
[I've met him a few times, and have been at a number of the LOSCON panels he and JMS did when B5 was running. Thus warned, I have no urge for closer acquaintance.]
The problem is that as it stands, Gershwin can write ONCE, then has no need to do so again for the next 100 years. If copyright were, say, 14 years, then to make a living he'd have to be about 5 or 6 times as creative. And I don't think anyone has the right to coast for life off a single piece of creativity.
I got it... but it's also what I see as a consistent problem with HE's stuff (which I gave up reading decades ago): dull and overlong, with a great punchline. Is it worth sitting thru the dull and overlong part for the great punchline? Not more than once.
That's Harlan in a nutshell... he behaves like that to most people. He CAN be polite and gracious, but only if he's the center of your attention, and only so long as you NEVER contradict him. (Unless you're someone HE respects, which might be JMS and... uh, can't think of anyone else.)
I remember this from one of JMS's B5 presentations at LOSCON: Harlan, rather than sitting in the front row like other people who are too short to see over the crowd (he's a little guy, maybe 4'10"), sat in the middle of the audience -- UP on the back of his chair, so he'd be noticed by everyone. Who cares if he thereby blocked the view of the people behind him?? Not Harlan! and of course no one dared ask him to move, especially once he and JMS started bantering back and forth.
As to his writing... I read some before I had any idea who he was, and long before I ever met the man... it's "speculative" fiction, all right, but I found it somewhere between uninteresting and annoying, even back when I would read almost anything. Style and theme over content, I guess. Turned me off to the point that I haven't touched anything of his since. Maybe it's an acquired taste, but it's not a taste I'd care to acquire.
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A few spare monitors, but what I have, I'm hoarding... I need the CRT (only LCD I've seen that didn't have the "colour shifts as you move your head" thing that's a problem when editing images, costs $2200!) and the 17"-19" models with perfect-flat glass and perfect colour don't grow on trees anymore. When I see an unloved ViewSonic, I hit the owner over the head and take it away from him. :)
We get a lot of donated 15" CRTs at the club, but most of 'em have issues, and they really aren't worth the storage space anymore.
I do house-call PC repairs on the side... I used to cobble together systems from random salvage and sell them cheaply or give them away, but that's how I learned how SMALL that market is in SoCal... essentially nonexistent and not worth the bother, and the people who MOST need to have someone else repair their PC are, as noted, the LEAST likely to accept an older machine (even if it does everything they need). I live way the hell out of town AND dislike having visitors, so "come on over" doesn't work well on two counts. :) (Aside from the fact that I find linux frustratingly immature as a desktop and mystifyingly opaque as an OS, thus can't honestly recommend it to newbies, nor could I realistically support it. Conversely, I can nearly always beat Windows into submission. Reinstalling is against my religion. :)
Yeah, the average OEM P4 is woefully undercooled -- that's exactly what I was referring to when I said "DESIGNED to fail". Someone gifted me a Dell P4-3GHz (one of their most expensive models when it was new) because he was tired of fighting its overheating issues... he'd had some fancy active cooler in it to keep it running, but that died. Anyway, it came to me with just its stock cooling -- a shroud and case fan, but no CPU fan and a poor excuse for a heatsink. It wouldn't run for more than a few minutes without locking up. I did away with the stupid shroud, added a perfectly ordinary HSF (Tekgems used to carry one that fit the nonstandard Dell mount), and the poor thing's running temperature dropped 40 DEGREES. It earned its keep as my media server for a while, but then died of bad caps on the mobo, and that crappy board ain't worth fixing. All its other parts will eventually go into upgrading something else.
The other thing the OEMs do that makes me crazy is cram the HDs together, or worse yet smack up against the PSU. Right, let's COOK your data!! Oh, and they always use a dead-minimal PSU, so it has to work extra hard and stresses all the other electronics. Funny how OEM mobos and PSUs die early and often, and their HDs seldom last longer than 3 years, while clone mobos and PSUs seldom die at all, and ... IIRC my oldest HD that still runs 24/7 is now 11 years old!!
I like a plain copper heatsink myself (the cheapest copper Thermaltake seems to work just fine), that will take an ordinary case fan so repairs are presto-chango. I also like a plain metal case, since a great deal of the system's heat exchange is through the case walls. (There's another thing the OEMs do that I hate -- sheathe the case in plastic, to ensure that it's well-insulated!!) And I like to have one more fan blowing in than out, to keep air pressure and circulation high inside the case... cools better AND keeps dirt out.
Evercool fans are a lot quieter than Sunon, tho I put Sunon in hard-to-reach places (like inside PSUs), cuz the damn loud things never die!
Anyway, I try to keep system temperature down in the 35-40C range, if possible, since like yourself, I've noticed Heat Is The Enemy.
Oh, funny story about my P3's twin brother... someone sent me a dead P3-500 that their "repair" guy "couldn't fix"... when I cracked the case, the cause was obvious (and equally obvious, their repair guy was a con artist): the HSF was choked solid with cig smoke; the CPU had been so hot that its fan *crumbled* when I touched it, and the motherboard was heat-warped to the point that I had to pull out the CPU with VISE-
Oh, you don't have to convince me... that faithful old P233 ("Argo" by name) isn't going anywhere. It's served me well for 11 years (well, I think the RAM stick needs replacing, but that's no big deal) and I'm rather attached to it. :) It'll probably remain a backup DOS/Win machine, essentially the role my old 286 used to have... tho your idea of turning it (or one of its near relatives) into a router has crossed my mind, possibly with the Dubbele setup -- http://firewall.dubbele.com/ which being NetBSD-based is probably pretty secure, and it'll run on much lesser hardware than Argo.
And I still have my original 286 (it still works) which didn't get retired for good until 2001. It stayed in use for so long because I lived in an area with power-outage problems, and my big UPS (itself salvage, and now 29 years old! needs a new battery, tho) would run the 286 and its little monochrome monitor for 5 hours... and it could still do everything I absolutely couldn't live without (including primitive internet access). At one point I knew every one of its 700 files by name and hex... couldn't bear to throw it out, that would be like killing my firstborn!
[Should I admit that there is also a working XT -- with VGA!! -- in my Closet??]
Like yourself, it pains me to trashbin working hardware, and as a result I often take in homeless computers. Used to be even 386/486 machines had value, and I've got a bunch sitting in my barn that I wish someone could make use of... Over the past few years P3s (and a few P4s, tho those tend to die young) have rained from the sky, so I've got a bunch of that era in my salvage pile too -- I consider those good enough to keep, along with some of the nicer MMX systems, since they'll do everything I really need, and very seldom die. I've pretty much stopped buying hardware, other than HDs (junk fills the space allotted :) and that iBase mobo which I got used, and intend [Real Soon Now!!] for my next longterm everyday system (and hopefully it'll last longer than the namebrand P4s that have come my way, none of which has lived longer than 4 years from manufacture date. I detest factory-built systems; they're DESIGNED to fail at such a young age. I've got a huge pile of gutted OEM carcasses in my side yard, from junk donated to our PC user group. Eventually our local electronics recycler will haul it off.)
I do tend to upgrade a system over time until it's completely maxed out, then the system remains in some sort of use til it dies of sheer old age. My everyday P3 actually started life as a 486, in 1994!! still has a few of the original parts, too.
Once in a while I encounter someone who is happy to have ANY working computer, and (as the hardware guru for the local PC user group) I can always find 'em something usable, from the club's stockpile (mostly P2s) or my own. But most people and organizations around here turn up their noses at anything that won't run XP, or don't know how to cope with any other OS and aren't really in a position to learn. Frankly a P200/Win9x does everything most people really use a computer for, but the less someone knows about computers and the less real work they expect from the machine, the more they fear being "left behind". So the folks who'd actually get the most use from these nice old systems are the least likely to accept 'em, even as gifts when they have no PC at all. :(
If it weren't for that, there'd be no one in all of America who needed a PC and couldn't get one for free -- there are that many older but perfectly useful machines going to waste.
Last summer I spent 3 weeks watching the CA state Senate sessions. Not ONCE did I see ANY Democrat vote against ANY program that cost money, no matter how trivial or ridiculous. This while fighting about the budget and the $8B that the feds are about to force CA to spend on building more prison hospital facilities.
Conversely, most (not all) Republicans voted against needless spending, most (not all) of the time.
Only Tom McClintock (R) voted against *anything* that needlessly spent money, 100% of the time. Blessings upon you, Mr.McClintock!
http://blog.tommcclintock.com/2009/03/25/when-is-enough-enough/
Just as I suspected... convince people that red tiles are "mission period" and therefore kewl, and increase profits since they're also cheaper to make, yet can be priced higher (tile roofs are PRICEY).
Which differs not at all from Life As Usual in the California legislature...
And as to stupid people, Prop 2 proved that at least 60% of California voters are stupider than average. Similarly, I've met two people here, both nominally normal adults and munching a hamburger DURING the conversation, who did not know that beef comes from cows!!
"This is supposed to be America, where laws are not justified on the basis of whether people are significantly harmed by being deprived of freedom. Instead, the standard by which laws are supposed to be judged is whether significant harm is done unless stopped by legislation."
This pegs it most accurately, and I hope you don't mind if I quote this far and wide.
I'd hazard that my 31 year old Ford pickup lacks structural fatigue as well.. of course, it was built to take abuse in the first place.
And even tho it's not the best for gas mileage, how much of that is offset by all the raw materials NOT used and the manufacturing stuff NOT required, for the 2 or 3 new cars I have NOT bought over this truck's lifespan?? (and the multiple trips I've NOT had to make because it will haul the whole load in one trip?) I'd guess most or perhaps even all of it.
Nope... now they're required to teach "self-esteem", by which very act they negate any potential for common sense in their students.
-- from another well-aged slashdotter, and get off my lawn! ;)
I live in the SoCal desert. After a bunch of malls were built fairly close together, all with large asphalt parking lots coated with BLACK sealer, the summer air temp in that part of town went up by about 10 degrees.
And what's with all the dark coloured roofs -- in the desert?!
Asphalt, and worse, black sealer on parking lots, can significantly raise the ambient temperature. There can be (at a desert-educated guess) around a 50 degree increase in reflected surface temperature, compared to ordinary cement.
Red roofs and black roofs in the desert are another one that baffles me. When your biggest difficulty and expense is keeping the building COOL, why on earth do they use the roof colours that absorb the MOST heat from sunlight??!
I put a white roof on my house (it used to be a light reddish-tan), and the indoor summer temperature dropped about 10 degrees just from that.
Interesting bit of history ... someone kindly mod up the informative AC so all may enjoy.
I like that about Win9x too -- the fact that I can readily thump on the underpinnings and make it behave how I wish (and that I can also see everything that's going on). And that it still flys on what is now ancient hardware, especially if stripped down somewhat. Win2K also runs pretty slick on old PCs, but as you say, its tweakability isn't as good. I certainly wouldn't call any of these "clunky", even on what is now well-aged hardware.
I keep thinking I should retire the P233/W95 box, which nowadays mostly sits in DOS, and gets used when the everyday-work P3/550 is busy... let the P3 become the DOS (which is to say, DOOM :) machine, and finally get around to finishing up the "new" P4 (whose mobo is about 5 years old -- it's an iBase MB800, which someone here on slashdot turned me on to -- it has ISA slots, and really excellent thruput). This venerable Win98 install would surely fly on that box!!
But not being a modern-gamer, I tend to be kinda unmotivated to upgrade, so long as the old machine remains stable and does everything I ask of it. And so long as I gotta have my DOOM, I've also gotta have my DOS. :)
It does happen :) I've got a couple mouldy old graphics apps that are the only thing I've seen with certain functions. One dates to the 286 era and does concentric outlining on fonts, which modern apps seem not to do; the other is from the Win95 era and has a fingerpainting tool that behaves a little different from anything else I've seen.
I don't know CyberPaint, but I never did Amiga. Does it have a PC counterpart?
The guy I mentioned was using AOL's DOS interface, but he also used Nettamer for email and newsgroups. Dunno what he used for invoices. He'd have 'em all going at once and it seemed to work fine for him. :)
Funny how sometimes the ONLY place you can get some esoteric function, at least implemented exactly how you need it, is in some antique app that no one but you remembers. Yet that'll be the very function you can't live without.
It's another reason why I don't begrudge old software the trivial disk space to keep it handy... just in case!
I used to know a guy who ran GeoWorks on his XT, with all of 512k of RAM. It multitasked, I'm not sure by what method, but it could be busy printing invoices in the background while he was surfing the 'net (in textmode) and reading/sending emails, all with no slowdowns or "system busy" lagging. He was still using it for everyday stuff in the mid-1990s.
I came up with a new word for the type that can't live without malls... Yammies, for "Yet Another Mall" It is primarily a subspecies of the Yuppie.
From what I've gleaned from this discussion and various linked stuff, enough of that script WASN'T Harlan's doing that his case is at best dubious, even if his contract said what he claims, and even if the books are based directly on that script.
And as others have said, Harlan is always looking for a way to be offended, which makes it hard to take him seriously even when/if he's in the right.
Even funnier if you know about a house Harlan used to live in -- instead of a normal door, you went down thru a hole in the floor and came up thru another hole into the main room, sortof like a giant gopher hole.
No shit -- there was video of the entryway during a TV interview with Harlan, some years back, part of which served to celebrate his, uh, eccentricities.
Heh, yeah... and it's not just Harlan. Moorcock published a volume or two of such stuff as well, and it had me scratching my head as I painfully slogged through it, wondering when it would get good (it was supposed to be good, everyone said so!) And that was back when I'd read cereal boxes if nothing else was available!
The Emperor's New Authors, indeed.
I take it you haven't met Harlan, or seen him in action (I have). The parent post is pretty much what most people who have would say, I regret to report. He's more likely to piss on your respect than appreciate it.
Harlan would screw over anyone he saw as slighting or denigrating himself in any way, no matter how meager. He's not in anything for the "little people" (or the LPA people for that matter, tho he'd qualify for membership) ... he's strictly out to aggrandize himself.
If he owned a media company, he'd be the sort that ran around suing authors of fanfic for "copyright infringement". (Technically true, but normally an accepted part of fanac, so long as no one profits from it.)
[I've met him a few times, and have been at a number of the LOSCON panels he and JMS did when B5 was running. Thus warned, I have no urge for closer acquaintance.]
The problem is that as it stands, Gershwin can write ONCE, then has no need to do so again for the next 100 years. If copyright were, say, 14 years, then to make a living he'd have to be about 5 or 6 times as creative. And I don't think anyone has the right to coast for life off a single piece of creativity.
I got it... but it's also what I see as a consistent problem with HE's stuff (which I gave up reading decades ago): dull and overlong, with a great punchline. Is it worth sitting thru the dull and overlong part for the great punchline? Not more than once.
Pretty much my own opinion... I'd add that somehow he made himself the Emperor whose clothes we dare not comment upon.
From what I've seen he does have moments of brilliance, but so does everyone, one way or another. Next??
That's Harlan in a nutshell... he behaves like that to most people. He CAN be polite and gracious, but only if he's the center of your attention, and only so long as you NEVER contradict him. (Unless you're someone HE respects, which might be JMS and ... uh, can't think of anyone else.)
I remember this from one of JMS's B5 presentations at LOSCON: Harlan, rather than sitting in the front row like other people who are too short to see over the crowd (he's a little guy, maybe 4'10"), sat in the middle of the audience -- UP on the back of his chair, so he'd be noticed by everyone. Who cares if he thereby blocked the view of the people behind him?? Not Harlan! and of course no one dared ask him to move, especially once he and JMS started bantering back and forth.
As to his writing... I read some before I had any idea who he was, and long before I ever met the man ... it's "speculative" fiction, all right, but I found it somewhere between uninteresting and annoying, even back when I would read almost anything. Style and theme over content, I guess. Turned me off to the point that I haven't touched anything of his since. Maybe it's an acquired taste, but it's not a taste I'd care to acquire.