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What I Learned While Learning Trackstands

2023-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

For the past few months I’ve been practicing trackstands, and have gone from being able to balance on my bike for about 5 seconds to being able to reliably balance for 30 seconds or more (my current personal best is about 1:15). Here’s what I’ve learned in the process.

Before I get into lessons learned, let me take a moment to define what the heck a trackstand is. Simply put, a trackstand is balancing on your bike with a minimum of forward and backward movement. When your bike is rolling you have two large gyroscopes helping you to stay upright, so as you might expect balancing without their help is more difficult.

I guess the natural question that follows is: why did I want to learn trackstands anyway? Well, lots of reasons. It’s something that I’ve wanted to be able to do for about as long as I can remember. It’s cool. Most importantly, getting into mountain biking has rekindled a long-dormant interest in technical riding and trackstands form the base of the trunk of just about any skill progression tree that you might draw.

In any case, I’m not writing a post here about why you should learn to trackstand (though you should), but rather some of my observations on the process so far. Please note that while I’ve made a lot of progress, I feel like I’m still in the shallow end of even this basic skill. I sincerely hope that in a few years I have a totally different outlook and disagree with at least some of what I’m about to write.

Trackstands are not static

For anyone with a pulse, balance involves movement. We are constantly making minor adjustments even when standing still, and so balance is less about being perfectly positioned to not fall over and more about being able to constantly make small adjustments. As we get increasingly proficient balancing in a particular position those adjustments get smaller and more automatic, until they become so small and automatic that we don’t even notice them. To get a sense of this, try “bamboo in the wind”, where you stand upright and relaxed with your eyes closed. After a few seconds you will feel your body swaying, as if in a gentle breeze. That swaying is your body making adjustments to keep you from falling over.

In this sense, trackstands aren’t very different from standing (heck, it’s right there in the name). Since you aren’t rolling you can’t use big movements (or the gyroscopic forces of spinning bicycle wheels) to balance yourself and so have to use more subtle movements to keep from falling over. This is important not just from a mechanical perspective, but also so that you do’t get discouraged. When I first started I found myself gradually creeping forward as used my pedals to correct my balance, which was demoralizing when I was trying to stay perfectly still. Once I started expecting forward and backward movement and started to think of it as a spectrum and my goal became to control and reduce it rather than to eliminate it, practice became much more rewarding.

Balance is a side effect

There is no single movement that allows you to stay upright. Instead, trackstands are a combination of many tiny movements that allow you to correct your balance in different ways. Just as important, learning trackstands is just as much about learning to feel your balance point as it is about how to affect that balance point. Finally, it’s not just about learning those things but about internalizing them so that they happen automatically. To paraphrase what I learned when I studied Kendo, “hitting your opponent is a side effect of learning how your body works” and “if you’re thinking about what to do next, it’s already too late”.

Essentially, learning trackstands had three separate components for me. First I had to learn to feel when the bike (and me on top of it) was starting to move as early as possible. Then, I had to learn to apply force to adjust the the bike’s position (pedal pressure, handlebar pressure, wheel angle, shifting hips, shifting shoulders, etc.) and how to apply that force precisely so that I didn’t overcorrect myself straight into the ground. Finally, I had to learn how to relax so that my body could do the things that I had been practicing.

Microdosing practice is effective

Our culture is replete with examples of intense practice: the teenager playing violin alone in their room for hours every night, the gym rat who spends hours at the gym several days a week, the writer downing endless cups of coffee at the cafe as they tap away at their keyboard. In some cases, these marathon sessions are totally justified (such as when you’re training for a literal marathon), and long sessions can make sense it logistics are challenging (if you’re driving across town to go rock climbing, you might as well spend a few hours there). But since trials riding isn’t an endurance sport and there are plenty of skills that you can practice in a garage or driveway I think that short sessions are the way to go.

My trackstand practice has consisted of 5 minute sessions 3-4 times a week. I’m fortunate that I work from home and my home office happens to be in my garage, so when a spreadsheet is making my eyes bleed or I need to get my head right before the next meeting, 5 minutes on the bike is amazing. Is it the fastest way to learn? Probably not. I could likely make faster progress with more frequent and longer sessions. But 5 minutes here and there is what I can fit into my life right now, and my progress has been infinitely faster than if I waited until I had a big chunk of time to get some practice in (which in my experience probably means that I would likely put it off for months or years). At this rate, I’m never going to go pro, but if I had started this sort of gradual practice 20 years ago and stuck with it I’d probably be doing some pretty neat tricks by now.

I think of this practice pattern as ”microdosing”, and I think that it has some other benefits as well. For example, I can fit it in to more places. Waiting for 2 minutes at the trail while the person ahead of me works their way through something? Practice trackstands. Arrived early to pick my kid up from school? Practice trackstands. Also, it means that a bad session has less of an opportunity to spiral into an injury (I imagine that I’m not the only person who has just kept on trying something while in a bad head space until they got hurt) or to lead to burnout.

I’m not sure where I originally picked this idea up from, but I know that I’ve run across it many times. I think that the thing that most directly influenced me was an article I read about strength training frequency that makes a solid case for infrequent training, which has ended up changing the whole way that I think about exercise.

I expect the benefits to extend beyond balancing

I’ve been enjoying learning trackstands on their own merit, but I think that they will indirectly allow me to have more fun on my bike. Here’s what I’ve noticed so far:

It has added an element of challenge to riding with my kid. If he stops in a random place on the trail, instead of putting my foot down I can sit there and try to balance.
Other balance skills have gotten easier. For example, it has made riding skinnies easier and if I want to come to a stop to practice front wheel placement, I can do that.
Running errands is more interesting, since I can try to do a regular ride without ever putting my foot down.

Conclusion, resources, etc.

The short version is that practicing this skill has been very rewarding and I look forward to seeing where it goes. Below you will find some resources and other random stuff.

Astute reader that you are, you have probably noticed that I haven’t spent much time talking about the nuts and bolts of doing a trackstand. Part of it is because text isn’t the best way to teach this skill, part of it is because I’m too lazy to write it out, but by far the biggest reason is that I’m still new to it and there are already plenty of amazing trackstand tutorials out there already. My favorites are:

Super Rider: An Unexpected Way to Learn Bike Balance (he has a few, but this is the most recent as of this writing)
Ali Clarkson: How to Trackstand Any Bike for as Long as You Want

For me, there are a bunch of places to go from here. I plan on deepening this skill, practicing it in less controlled environments, trying it with my non-dominant foot forward, etc. Also, since trackstands are foundational to many trials skills, they naturally lead into things like riding fakie and front and rear pivots, so maybe I’ll write more stuff like this in the future.

The Wealth of Communities

2023-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

I ran across an interesting article talking about how local governments (cities and counties) should look at the revenue potential of their properties. The idea here is that governments own a lot of land but often undervalue it. Instead of letting it sit idle, they could lease it out to create a stable funding stream that doesn’t involve levying additional taxes.

The obvious way to do this is to physically lease out the land, which I’m all for, but there are other approaches. For example, the article mentioned a city that put solar panels on the roofs of all of the buildings that it owns, and was eventually able to generate enough power to sell to adjacent cities. I’d be surprised if there weren’t other ways to make this work.

I think that there’s a potential hazard here that the article didn’t mention, in that some perverse incentives could arise if the government ended up owning too much land, but it also seems like that situation could be avoided with some relatively simple guardrails. On the other hand, I’d likely be in favor of the government acquiring land to be used for things like affordable housing, which could be profitable but not as profitable as luxury housing.

This is similar to the idea of Value Capture, where a government is able to sell or lease land that it owns adjacent to an improvement project (think transit station) in order to help pay for that improvement. To me, the main difference appears to be that the city or county would look at all of its assets together and have them managed by an organization whose sole focus is generating revenue, rather than the narrower focus on funding a single project.

Beyond the financial impact, I get annoyed when I see a vacant lot with a gate and a sign that says something like “County Property - No Trespassing”. I mean, I pay county taxes, why am I paying for vacant property? I don’t much care what they do with the property, honestly. They can store equipment on it, lease it out to food trucks, or just plant a bunch of native shrubs, but really anything is better than a gravel lot overrun with weeds as so much of it seems to be. I think that we’d see a lot less of this sort of thing if the government started looking at these vacant lots as assets that could provide services for the community, which would benefit us all.

2022 Summer Links - Cities, Counties, and Transportation

2022-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

You might have noticed that I haven’t posted anything here in a while. You might also be wondering why that is. The short version is that I had a busy summer. We did a lot of camping, had a lot of family time, and got a lot of things done.

To spare you a massive update with way too many links (and to break the task into something manageable), I’m sorting the links into a few categories that I’ll post separately. This one is going to have all of the stuff that gets sorted into something like “Urban Planning” in my head. Of course, I’m more interested in Rural Planning and transportation than cities, since I don’t live in a city and really, cities aren’t what we need to figure out right now (low density sprawl and how to traverse it is). Without further ado, have some tasty links:

Another article about Land Value Tax. It would be hard for it to live up to the hype, with sompe people presenting it as a one-step solution to all of our problems, but the housing crisis we’re in the middle of certainly makes a compelling case that there’s probalby something messed up with our incentive structures and LVT would likely be a step in the right direction.
A good article on why the Manual of Uniform Traffice Control Devices needs to be rewritten.
Apparently Hoboken, New Jersey, of all places, is doing surprisingly well on the Vision Zero front. This is really important. If you are talking to your local elected officials (in the US) pointing to a place in New Jersy that they have heard of before is going to be way more effective than, say, Copenhagen. Heck, New Jersey often gets made fun of, so it even has a bit of a challenge to it, “You’re telling me that we can’t do better than New Jersey?”.
Although it’s easy to make fun of Vehicle Into Building crashes (that house wouldn’t have been hit if were wearing a hi-viz vest; that convenience store was probably using its cell phone when it stepped out into traffic), the idea that 2,500 people in the USA die each year from them is horrifying. And apparently we don’t even really know just how bad the situation is, since they aren’t consistently reported. It would be easy to blame this all on driver error, but I would argue that if that many people are driving into buildings on a regular basis, we need to be looking at our roads so we can figure out if there’s a way to design them so that people, you know, stay on them and don’t drive into buildings. Finally, you may be thinking of this as someone accidentally having their vehicle in the wrong gear when pulling out of a parking spot, but I’m not sure how you get 2,500+ fatalities from people hitting convenience stores at 5mph.
We have a tendency in our culture to blame homelessness on personal choices. That argument falls apart when you look at housing prices, though. Here in Olympia, the median house price has risen from about $300,000 to about $500,000 (66%) in 5 years. That translates to a whole lot of people who can no longer afford a house, and the rental market is just as bad, with the median 2 bedroom apartment being more than $1,600. The result is that our broken housing market is pushing people into homelessness.
Outside has an article asking “What should happen to drivers who hit cyclists?” that is worth a read. I plan on writing more about this once I get a chance to read There Are No Accidents by Jessie Singer. In podcasts I have heard Singer talk about how when something bad happens we have a choice between punishing the driver and preventing it from happening again, but that we can’t do both. Right now I feel like we, as a society, should be more willing to take away a person’s drivers license when they demonstrate that they can’t operate a vehicle safely, and that we should have mandatory written tests as a condition of renewing your license every 5-10 years.

Inside Tom's Head - May 2022

2022-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

How’d it go?

It was a really wet May here in Western Washington, but somehow I didn’t really feel like I got rained on that much even though I rode my bike every day of the month for the Thurston County Bicycle Community Challenge. Of course, it could be that I just didn’t notice since I spent more of the month riding with my family than in past years. Riding with them was great, so maybe I didn’t notice a little extra weather. Now that our kid is old enough to go on longer rides with us, I can’t wait to do more family rides.

I should probably say something about the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, but I doubt that I’d change anyone’s mind. I would ask, however, that if you believe that gun rights are so important as to preclude even the discussion of any sort of gun control, that you spend some time examining that belief (generally I believe that the more strongly held any belief is, the more closely and critically we should examine it).

The other big topic right now is gas prices, but what I want to say on the subject would be more appropriate in its own post. For now, though, I’ll leave a couple of thoughts here. First, gas prices probably don’t work how you think they do (the linked video is hilarious and informative; “Tank Toppin’ Spank Juice” is the best nickname for gasoline that I’ve ever heard). Second, we don’t have a “high gas price” problem so much as we have a “lack of viable alternatives” or “lack of transportation freedom” problem.

At this point, I think that I have exceeded my italics budget for the month, so here are some links:

The Links

You may have heard of Mastodon, which is a social media platform that sounds less bad than facebook. Its central feature is that it is decentralized, which can lead to a bit of a learning curve as you figure out the metaphor. Personally, I’m not on it, and don’t have any plans of doing so at present (though it could be a good platform for a practical cycling club).
It looks like Roe v. Wade is about to be overturned (and for the record, this looks to be a bad idea). While I don’t doubt their willingness to go through with this, it could well be that we look back at this moment as an early step in the dissollution of the court, as some are already saying that it isn’t worth keeping around. Personally, I would love to see the court have term limits or consist of an ad hoc group that calls together a panel of justices from the federal courts to look at a given case.
I hope this isn’t a controversial position, but we need to take care of our dams (or remove them responsibly if we can’t or if they no longer serve a purpose).
Can’t disagree with this essay from Erik Twice about miniatures in board games. It’s easy to get miniatures wrong in a medium built entirely around abstraction. Even the most realistic and detailed games are still simplifications of reality, and the quality of a game is more about creating a stylized metaphor than a 1:1 representation of reality.
If you need to have large commercial trucks in a city, this is what they should look like.
I really like the idea of doctors prescribing walking to their patients.
Apparently Netflix will be having ads on lower tier streaming services in the near future. I’m honestly okay with this, so long as there is a tier at which you can opt out of the ads. Mostly. My kid has seen only a tiny fraction of the ads that I had seen at his age, and I can’t help but think that’s a good thing. It makes me sad to think that we might be going back to kids being absolutely saturated with advertising, especially if that is based on their parents’ income.
No substantive commentary on my part, just a touching story abotu using cycling to cope with challenging life events.
John Scalzi looks back at his Straight White Male essay ten years later. I have referenced that essay so many times, and I’m gald it’s still having an impact.
The deadly impact of urban streets that look like highways. This is by no means surprising, but I’m always a fan of confirming things that seem obvious with some good ‘ol data.
Some good thoughts from an MIT professor about which qualities dictate success and how to develop them. In particular, I appreciate that “quality of ideas” is only #3.

Media

We finally got around to watching The Matrix Resurrections. I seriously enjoyed it. I want Reloaded and Revolutions to be edited down to a single movie now, since this feels like the ending that the trilogy deserved.
I finally finished reading This Is How You Lose The Time War. I enjoyed it, but didn’t love it as much as many did.
I’ve been reading the Upside Down Magic series with my kid and am really liking it. It’s light and sweet and thoughtful, just what I want from kids books right now.
Reading a book about a pandemic in the middle of a pandemic is probably not for everyone, but How High We Go In The Dark was good. I’m curious to see how frequently my thoughts return to it, how deeply it touched me.
I read George Packer’s dissection of American culture Last Best Hope after hearing about it on a Strong Towns podcast. Looking at the United States through the lenses of narratives is really compelling, since on some level each of us is the stories we tell ourselves. In my opinion, the book fell apart at the end, when Packer started to get into where we go from here, since it felt insubstantial. However, I would still recommend the book, since thinking about the narratives that our neighbors are living in (and that we are living in ourselves) is a good way to build some understanding of where they are coming from and hopefully finding areas on which we can agree.
My 2022 playlist on Apple Music.
My board game plays for 2022.

Inside Tom's Head - April 2022

2022-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

How’d it go?

It seems like just a couple of weeks since I last posted here. Which makes sense given that my last post was so late that it was just a couple of weeks ago. Not a whole lot has changed since then. Most notably, I rode in the Cascadia Super Gravel race. It was incredibly difficult, easily the hardest physical activity I’ve ever done. I’m glad I did it and am not sure if I would want to do it again, but would not be surprised if next year I find myself saying “It wasn’t that bad, sure I’ll do it again.” If so, hopefully I won’t be riding 30 miles on a waffle wrapper after slicing open my sidewall. We’ll see.

The Links

I’m struggling to summarize this article or come up with much in the way of commentary, so I’ll leave it here. In response to its opening question (how did we come to normalize this much death?) I will point out that the USA reacting to different sorts of deaths in ways that lack any sense of consistency is nothing new. After all, one person unsuccessfully tried to bomb a plane with explosives hidden in his shoes and now we all have to take off our shoes before boarding but our society seems to be more or less okay with mass shootings.
I’ve recently discovered the City Nerd channel on youtube. Something about his dry snarkiness and affinity for data just clicks with me. In any case, here’s a video about trucks and another about traffic violence.
I feel like I do a decent job of keeping on top of the science regarding health, injury, and sports performance, but this surprised the heck out of me. Apparently the research around strength training frequency doesn’t really back up the whole exercise every other day thing, and when strength training the average person can get the results they are looking for by going to the gym once every week or two. Of course, the science does show increased benefit from more frequent exercise, but I didn’t expect that you could get 50-70% of the benefit of going three days a week from going just once. To me, the interesting idea is that, if doing strength training less frequently makes it easier to keep up long-term, that should compound quite a bit over a year or more (as progressing half as fast over a year is a lot better than not progressing at all since you stopped going).
Using abandoned/played out gas wells for geothermal heat is a really cool idea. Even if it only gets us 1% of the way towards a sustainable energy situation, I’ll take it.
Even as someone who doesn’t use or care much about Twitter, this article about the platform was fascinating. From the article, “the problem that Twitter really solved was the discoverability problem”. Since discoverability is one of the central problems of the sea of content that we find ourselves in (there are too many books/movies/songs out there for any one person to engage with even a significant fraction), this is almost enough to make me want to use the bird app. Almost.

Media

The Bubble might have been a fun 90 minute movie, but it was 126 minutes and somehow managed to feel even longer.
Sing 2, on the other hand, was a lot of fun. I’d recommend it.
We watched Ride the Eagle which was weird and fun. It didn’t outstay its welcome (89 minutes), but I don’t feel like it had the impact that it wanted to, either.
Having read Phoenix, we are now all caught up with SF Said’s books. I really liked it, and am really looking forward to Tyger.
We got together with friends to watch season 2 of Upload. It was really nice to hang out with people again, even if we are back in another wave and are hunkering down again. As for the show, it wasn’t quite as much fun as season 1, but I still enjoyed the heck out of it.
I wasn’t expecting much from Slow Horses, but the show knocked it out of the park. It had the intrigue that I like in the genre, but also incorporated some of my favorite elements from Spy Game. I’m looking forward to season 2 and might even read the books.
It took us several months to watch the DuckTales reboot from 2017, and it was totally worth it. My partner and I both grew up with the original, and this was even better.
If you are at all interested in why our cities are the way they are, I’d recommend giving Chuck Marohn’s new book, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, a read. It was full of interesting stuff, but the thing that surprised me the most is that it changed my mind on automated traffic enforcement (red light and speed cameras). I had generally felt like we should have more of it, and still do, but agree with Marohn that there’s not much point to it unless we fix our roads so that
I read The Republic of Birds, by Jessica Miller, to my family. They enjoyed it and I loved it. It leans heavily on Slavic folklore and reading it out loud took me back to the brief period in high school where I took Russian. The story takes place in a world still recovering from a huge conflict, and I appreciated that it didn’t try to fix everything in one book, though I hope to see some of that happen in sequels.
I listened to The Machine That Changed the World and was really impressed. I had read The Toyota Way a while back and it made a big impression on me, but I think that this book was even better. From what I’ve seen, people often approach Lean as a way of making processes and systems more efficient. To me it seems like the focus should be more on empowering and supporting people, with efficiency being a byproduct of that process.
My 2022 playlist on Apple Music.
My board game plays for 2022.

Inside Tom's Head - March 2022

2022-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

How’d it go?

If you’re wondering why this is so late, I have two words for you: Triangle Strategy. It takes a lot of cues from my favorite game of all time, Final Fantasy Tactics. I’m not sure yet how I feel about it in comparison, but it has definitely been eating up a lot of my free time, which has led me to put off getting this post written up.

March was a good month, overall. I took a day off to ride my bike around the logging roads north of Montesano, and while I can’t recommend that route (it was advertised as 100% gravel but had a couple miles on a high volume rural road without a shoulder which isn’t fun in the best of circumstances) I did have a good time. I’m going to be riding the Cascadia Super Gravel 30 mile course in a little over a week here, which I’m both excited about and dreading a little since it looks to be a more challenging ride than the one linked above which was already really challenging for me. However, after my ride last month I discovered that my rear hub was having some serious issues and it appears that servicing it resulted in a 5-20% efficiency gain. Anyway, I’m not approaching it competitively, so I’ll plan on starting as early as possible and taking my time. Anyway, since I’m now talking about the future, now is probably a good time to get to the links. So without further ado:

The Links

I’m feeling a bit torn on gas prices. On the one hand, lots of working class people are stuck living in places that are completely car dependent, with no viable alternative (to far to walk, too dangerous to bike, non-existent or insufficient public transit). On the other hand, transportation is the single biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions here in Washington state. I guess the sad thing is that I doubt many people are looking at the current situation and thinking, “Gee, dependence on fossil fuels sure does make us vulnerable, what can we do to make things better the next time gas prices spike?” Even something as simple as relaxing the zoning codes so that corner groceries are legal and people can meet some of their needs without a car would be a boon.
Your Local Epidemiologist had a good write-up on the subject of risk, which humans are notoriously bad at. As with everything on that newsletter, it’s worth a read. On the subject, it reminded me of the post about “microcovids” on Interconnected as a way of accounting for risk.
Not quite sure how I managed to make it so deep into the urban planning rabbit hole without hearing about land tax, but it’s a fascinating idea that would probably be a net positive.
Apparently, if we were willing to sacrifice some profit, we could increase lumber yields from working forests by extending the rotation time from ~40 to ~80 years. This seems to me to be one of those policies that could be a win for both industry and the planet, and would probably be a good target for subsidies.
I really like Erik Twice’s take on strategy in games, namely that games are more fun when people are playing well but less fun when people are playing only to win. His most recent article on the topic is worth a read.
Paradoxically, telecommuting can actually increase mileage. I’m not going to argue too much about the underlying logic (though it makes some assumptions about people’s behavior that I’m not convinced of), but it is an example of how in need of fixing the suburban development pattern is. If someone needs to drive to get to work, I get it, but once you remove that, if you find that you have built a place where you need to drive to fulfill all of your other needs, that’s a problem. Of course, geometry hates this idea, since suburbs are so low density that they often struggle to meet the minimum requirements for even a small grocery (I have seen 1,000 households within 1/2 mile listed as a rule of thumb). Then again, with an uptake in e-bikes, maybe you could get away with a bigger radius. Realistically, the way to do this will probably be to relax zoning regulations in such a way that you can have microbusinesses that don’t require the same level of density, for example someone growing microgreens in a shed in their yard and selling them from a cooler in their driveway (we have something similar to this on our street and it’s really cool).
Looking at universal voting as a way to improve democracy in the United States. I agree with some things in this article, but as we have seen with masks, mandates and laws have their limits, if you want to change behavior you need to convince people. I think that things like Ranked Choice Voting (leading to campaigns that are less toxic), universal vote by mail (making it easier), and outreach would have a more positive impact on our political system.
I had heard about murder rates going up in the last couple of years. What I hadn’t heard is that there is a stronger correlation between murder and red states than between murder and blue cities. I’m not arguing for a causal relationship here, but it would be nice if media would accurately describe the situation.
Another Your Local Epidemiologist post (they’re really good, okay?), this time about how we should really be investing in better ventilation and filtration for buildings. Heck, this was true even before the pandemic given that it looks like better filtration improves for schools improves test scores and, you know, wildfire smoke.
An interesting idea about using inexpensive laser pointers to blind Russian pilots in the Ukraine. No idea of how feasible or practical this is (probably less effective than Cringely suggests), but low-tech resistance to an occupying force is worth thinking about.
The issue with meat is mostly due to its scale (if the average American ate meat once a week, our agricultural system would look very different), so I’m always glad to see stuff like regenerative grazing.

Media

Inside Man, by KJ Parker, was okay, but I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as Prosper’s Demon.
I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from Ghostbusters: Afterlife, but it was a blast. I’m kind of sad that they didn’t continue with the all-woman crew from the last movie, and it sounds like future installments might center around the original crew, which makes me a bit sad because this one was so fun.
Isolate, by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. was my favorite book of his yet, which is saying something. It definitely has the same dry, economics and politics heavy style that isn’t going to work for everyone, but I’m loving the setting and seeing realistic-feeling labor relations in a gaslamp fantasy setting.
We watched No Time To Die and . . . meh. I don’t know if it’s just that I’m not the target audience for the bloodless violence of the James Bond franchise, or if doomsday plots just don’t seem very relevant while in the middle of a pandemic and staring down the barrel of climate change. If you want a villain for Bond to fight, what about the oligarchs that are dead set on maintaining the status quo, even if the cost is that it renders our planet uninhabitable? Of course, those are the people that Bond effectively works for, so I could see that as being a tough sell.
The Harder They Fall, by contrast was visceral and fun. It was a film about consequences, and it never pretended that committing violence was something that you could just walk away from and forget. It also had a sense of humor (“It was a white town.”), and I’m glad to see a wild west not wholly overrun by white guys. I was a little disappointed that it didn’t hew a little closer to the history it was based on, but I don’t begrudge the filmmakers the choices they made.
I’m a sucker for Ryan Reynolds films and time travel stories, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that I loved The Adam Project.
I didn’t love Turning Red and think that it had some flaws, but I really appreciate what they were trying to do and enjoyed it. The people getting worked up over the idea that, checks notes, awkward teenage girls exist, are being ridiculous if you ask me.
I finally finished Triumph of Injustice, and it was well worth the read. It isn’t a stretch to say that it changed the way I look at taxation, and I think that the authors’ goal of discussing such a fraught subject in a rational way was excellent. I’m looking forward to digging in to the tax policy modeling tool that they built.
My 2022 playlist on Apple Music.
My board game plays for 2022.

Inside Tom's Head - February 2022

2022-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

How’d it go?

February was . . . nice. I have a flex schedule which lets me get off work early one day a week and I’ve started playing board games with my kid when he gets home from school on that day, which has been fantastic. On the holiday we ended up playing my favorite game of all time, Panamax (his choice, I swear), which was a blast. I also did my first group ride, the Chilly Hilly, which wasn’t particularly chilly but delivered on the hilly part and was pretty fun. I’m honestly not sure if group road rides are my thing, but I’m going to try doing a big gravel ride of some sort this year. We also celebrated Lunar New Year (remotely) with some friends, and it was really good, I will eat bao and red curry dumplings until my body gives out.

Anyway, enough recap, here’s what I’ve been reading and thinking about recently. The format is a bit different this month, since a few of the links I saved ended up coalescing into a bigger topic, so I broke that out rather than try to fit it in bullet points. Without further ado:

Parking, Planning, and Neighborhood Grocery Stores

The city of Lacey (which directly abuts Olympia) just decided to increase parking minimums. The rationale, apparently, is that owners of apartment complexes are complaining that they didn’t build enough parking spots for their units and so they need the government to force them to build adequate parking? I must be missing something. I mean, if it were residents complaining that apartment complexes needed more regulation I could see the argument, but apartment operators, not so much.

The counter-argument (which the article didn’t go into) is that parking minimums reduce density and act as a barrier to walkable development (that would reduce car dependency). In light of the report released by the IPCC in February, the car-dependent development pattern will need to change, and soon (even if all cars were switched over to electric, it wouldn’t be enough for us to hit our climate targets, we need to reduce the amount of driving we do). I get it, we’re in the middle of a housing crisis. I’m not arguing against large apartment complexes. In my view, the problem isn’t that there aren’t enough parking spots at Britton Place Apartments (one of the complexes cited in the article), but rather that it’s surrounded by industrial parks so its need to go 3 miles and cross a freeway to get to the nearest grocery store. Maybe a better approach would be to encourage the development of amenities closer to where people live so that they don’t need to drive so much (and own so many cars).

Of course, getting developers and business owners to locate amenities near where people live is a pretty heavy lift. But there are things that the government can do to take some of the load. For example, California is doing some really interesting stuff to get fresh produce into corner stores. Every time I see a convenience store in my area, I wish that it were a Spuds (small neighborhood grocery stores). I had always assumed that the margins just weren’t there to carry produce for most convenience stores, but the article makes some interesting points about how things like minimum orders from distributors probably create an even bigger hurdle. Creating this sort of system can help reduce car dependency, and would help to make it so that not every family needs two cars.

On the subject of parking minimums, this month Sightline had an article about how Fayetteville, Arkansas eliminated parking minimums in 2015. Notably, the city did not turn into a dystopian nightmare. Also, historic buildings that had long sat vacant were able to be redeveloped or reused as a result. The article talks mostly about commercial space, not apartment complexes, but it’s all tied together. If your parking minimums make it hard to build housing near businesses, then that means that your community needs more cars, and so you need more parking for your housing. With this decision, it seems that the Lacey city council is going in the wrong direction, locking themselves into a self-fulfilling prophecy of needing more parking for more cars because nothing is accessible any other way because the parking precludes density.

Links

I was sad to see that the Local Options bill didn’t quite make it to a vote this legislative session. To me it seems like it should be an easy lift, since all it does is allow local elections to choose what sort of system they use rather than forcing anyone to try things like Ranked Choice Voting. I imagine that one of the hurdles is that Washington (Pierce County) tried Ranked Choice Voting not too long ago and ran into some issues. However, I don’t find the arguments that we shouldn’t try it again to be terribly compelling (technology and best practices have improved, for example). State Senators Trudeau and Nobles have written up a good overview of why now is a good time to try again, even if we will now have to wait until 2023.
One of the ideas that’s been bouncing around my head for checks calendar 13 years now but that I haven’t gotten around to fleshing is that once a system gets big and complex enough, it becomes a faith based system by virtue of being impossible for any individual to verify that it works the way it says it works. I mean, if you live in a town of 1,000 people you can probably talk to enough people to get a pretty accurate picture of why the last mayoral race went the way it did. In a country of 331,449,281 people, though? Not so much. Back when I first started thinking about politics in this way, in 2008, the issue was mostly abstract. In 2020 it was decidedly less so. Part of what has kept me from writing about it is that I’m not sure where to go with the idea. Well, one of the ways that you can go is trying to make sure that communication does a better job of giving the audience an intuitive understanding of what is going on. In any case, this is all a really long way of saying that you should go read about some ideas for better ways to do voting maps. I’m under no illusion that it would have prevented the attempted coup on January 6th, but I can’t help but think that presenting vote totals in a map similar to the second map in this article would have resulted in a healthier conversation about the election results.
China is developing “seawater rice” that can thrive in the salty soils near the coast. This sort of thing will become increasingly important as rising seawater infiltrates coastal water tables.
Dear Winnipeg did a series of articles examining how people are upset about some wasteful spending when the whole North American development pattern needs to be rethought. part 1, part 2, part 3

Media

I read Katherine Addison’s indirect followup to the Goblin Emperor (same world, tangenitally related plot), Witness for the Dead. I loved it. It was maybe even better than the Goblin Emperor, which is saying something. I’ll have to reread both of them.
The Outlaw Varjak Paw was a solid conclusion to the first book. My family liked it, too.
I wasn’t expecting much from The Afterparty (Apple TV+), but it’s a solid show combining layered storytelling and genres. Every episode focuses on a different character’s recollection of the story and is filmed in that characters genre, covering everything from musical comedy to pschological thiller.
We watched The King’s Man on Hulu. It wasn’t quite as fun as the first one, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit.
I finally got around to watching Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. It was the best Marvel movie I’ve seen in quite a while, and I hope to see more in this vein.
My 2022 playlist on Apple Music.
My board game plays for 2022.

Bloc by Bloc and some heuristics for crowdfunding

2022-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) is a big thing in board games. Because they are a niche hobby, they have small print runs, and the lack of standardization (every title has different cards, boards, pieces, etc.) makes it difficult to do reprints unless there is massive demand. As a result, if you see a game for sale that you want (that isn’t a mainstream title like Ticket to Ride), you may not have another chance to buy it new. Crowdfunding (Kickstarter et al.) has only exacerbated this issue.

That being said, FOMO on its own is not a good reason to buy (or back) a game. If you miss a game, you can probably trade for it or buy it used, or it will be reimplemented (Glory to Rome is hard to come by but I own both Mottainai and Import/Export–I don’t feel like I’m missing out). Over the years, I’ve backed my share of games that I could have happily skipped, but there’s only one game that I wish I had backed: Bloc by Bloc.

Well, Bloc by Bloc is currently funding for its third (and final, the creators say) version. It’s a game about urban uprising, with revisions heavily inspired by the events of 2020. It’s playable as co-op or semi-co-op, and although I’ve heard nothing but good things about the second edition, this one looks just amazing. I’m not going to spend a ton of time describing the game, but you can find more information on their campaign page (Space-Biff also has a good write-up).

This is an independent game put out by a small company (their only other games are the previous two versions of this one), so it is uncertain if it will get another print run. The campaign only has about a week left, so the time is now if you’re interested.

Heuristics for Crowdfunding

Related, here are my criteria for whether I back a crowdfunding game. Generally, I will only back something if at least one of the following is true:

Does it look like the campaign might not succeed without my help? If I want to play a game and without me it won’t get made, then I’m more willing to back it. Campaigns that are close to the wire are also less likely to generate reprints, so this might be the best chance to grab it.
Is the game doing something that I haven’t seen in other games? For example, there are a thousand games about trading in the Mediterranean, but not so many about urban uprisings.
Is the game from a small, independent publisher? Bigger companies often use crowdfunding as a flashy pre-order system. Sure, it probably allows them to make more games, but let’s be honest, Queen Games wouldn’t stop making games if Kickstarter went away tomorrow. If it’s from a big publisher, I’m okay waiting and cutting my Friendly Local Game Store in on the action.
Is the game less than $20? I’m willing to back things that I normally wouldn’t if the price is low. Part of this is just a monetary risk calculation, but a part of it is that cheaper games usually a) come in small packages and are easy to fit on the shelf, b) are light or filler style games (so they can be really fun even if they aren’t played frequently), and c) are often about boiling a mechanic down to its essentials (which is how you get cool little games like Mint Works and Province).

This means that I usually pass on games from big publishers or which massively exceed their funding goal, and honestly that has worked out just fine for me.

Inside Tom's Head - January 2022

2022-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

How’d it go?

January was a bit of a mixed bag and I’m struggling to sum it all up. I turned 40, but it doesn’t feel like a big deal since I’ve been rounding up to 40 when I talked about my age for a few years now. I built a small addition to our climbing wall (I’ve been referring to it as Phase 2.5) which doesn’t add a whole lot of surface area but adds lots of potential for interesting boulder problems. The new job continues to go well. My partner continues to find new amazing vegan food to make, most recently vegan gyro/schwarma meat. I truly lead a charmed existence.

I’m still working on a couple of topical posts, but have been focusing more on getting enough sleep and exercise and less on being productive in my free time. I’m honestly not sure if I’ll finish any of them up in time to post in February, but we’ll see.

Links

I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise, but the costs associated with extreme weather (that is exacerbated or caused by climate change) are likely to be much higher than the costs of reducing carbon emissions would be.
Apparently the word ‘batman’ had a different meaning prior to the comic, and even before the current depressing version of the character. The article also has some interesting stuff on the link between superheros and fascism, well worth a read.
This article about microgrids is 4 years old, but it is still pretty exciting. Imagine if your neighborhood was set up as a microgrid and could go into island mode in the case of a power outage? Of course, right now that would mean lots of generators (it seems like most houses on my street have one, since we lose power with relative frequency), which have their own problems, but what if 50+% of houses had solar panels and/or batteries and the neighborhood could run at something like 50% capacity during an outage (enough to keep fridges, lights, and wells running)?
On the Hidden Brain podcast, William B Irvine talks about approaching difficult situations as tests and talking about how COVID-19 is in some sense a huge test, where we are suddenly deprived of the things which we took for granted (spending time with friends and family, movie theaters, haircuts, etc.). Personally, that framework doesn’t do much for me (I prefer the idea of challenges that provide the opportunity for growth), but it did get me thinking. In this lens are the people who are engaging in behavior that prolongs the pandemic failing a test? I don’t like that line of thought, it leads towards being judgemental (and I do entirely too much of that on my own, thank you very much). Rather, I think that it shows the value of having a Stoic practice before a crisis. Granted, there are definitely people who just don’t care, but how many people are engaging in risky behavior because they just have very little experience with being deprived of things? Would spending time thinking about how one day we will lose the things that we value (we will each of us die, after all) help us to make better decisions? I don’t know, but I doubt it would hurt.
Some insightful observations about how suburbs feel unsafe. Reading this made me think of an experience I had taking a cruise to South America. When you arrive in port, you are always warned to avoid the neighborhoods between the port and wherever it is you want to go, since they are dangerous. We always just walked through them. On our way back to the ship after a day in Montevideo, I stepped in a hole in the sidewalk and rolled over my ankle badly enough that it started bruising almost immediately. Imagine my surprise when we were immediately surrounded by 4-5 people from all walks of life, asking if I was okay, if I wanted them to call a taxi, or if I needed to go to the hospital. Again, this was in the bad neighborhood. I can’t imagine the same thing happening in many parts of the United States, and I think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that often no one is around, since they are all in their cars. We have abandoned any place that is not a “destination”, creating islands of activity surrounded by seas of non-places.
While I generally think that there are some serious downsides to short term rentals, this story about putting half of a duplex on Airbnb to finance fixing up the whole building demonstrates a good use of the system. Of course, if they had just been able to get a traditional loan in the first place, that would be ideal (they said that banks weren’t interested in that sort of loan, but I don’t feel confident that I have the full picture of the situation).
I don’t have anything to add here, but L.E. Modesitt, Jr’s thoughts on how manners and culture interact with laws are worth a read.
Generally, I don’t see us adressing climate change by individually switching to vegetarian or vegan diets is going to make much of a dent in climate change (though it definitely can in aggregate), but schools in the US are one of the biggest food distribution systems in the country, and small changes there could have large impacts. A little digging revealed this article about how the Oakland Unified School District was able to serve healthier meals with a lower climate impact for less money by reducing the amount of meat it served. This is really cool because it provides a good counter example to the argument that it is too expensive to serve healthy food (which is a weird distortion anyway, since it takes more vegetable matter to make meat or dairy than if you just ate vegetables). The other thing the article mentions is that they were able to source better meat when they did serve, rather than needing to puchase the cheapest stuff available. Related, (this is from February, I know, but I’m putting it here anyway) a new report concludes that eliminating meat and dairy entirely over the next 15 years would “pause the growth of greenhouse gasses for 30 years”. I’m not advocating complete elimination of meat and dairy for everyone (and doing so in 15 years seems highly unlikely), but I do believe that moving in that direction would have a large environmental benefit.
The Densely Speaking podcast interviews Marcus Casey, who has some interesting things to say about the effectiveness of racial integration as a social policy.
Sightline had an article about the relationship between parking lots and urban heat islands. Urban parking lots often don’t make any sense. Sure, some get used frequently, but once you get even a little bit outside of downtown (as in a couple of blocks here in Olympia), you see parking lots that are never used beyond about 25% capacity. In this scenario, everyone loses: the business pays to maintain infrastructure that they don’t need, it prevents density that would bring more foot traffic, we are in the middle of a housing crisis so it could definitely be better used, and it makes the surrounding area more livable. Of course, I understand that a lot of these are due to mandatory minimums in the code, but it seems like there would be more pressure to remove them than we are seeing. Heck, even if you just tear them up, recycle the asphalt, and plant grass, we would be better off.
In talking about the game John Company with a friend, it occurred to me that perhaps I was imagining it’s anti-colonialism message, so I did some digging. It turns out that I wasn’t imagining it, John Company is intended as a critique of colonialism. I really appreciate this, since games so often use colonialism as a “neutral” setting without much introspection.
An interview with Lee Drutman on how to depolarize politics in the US. Drutman’s book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, was one of the best political books I’ve read in a long time and this interview is worth a read. I have some minor disagreements with his conception of how change could happen, namely that I don’t think that it will necessarily take action on a national scale to break the two party system. In our current system, the people with the most power are the moderates, just see how easily Manchin and Sinema have overruled the other 48 Democratic senators. The problem with moderates is that their position is tenuous in an era of increasing polarization. However, with something like Ranked Choice Voting that encourages politicians to build the broadest base rather than appealing to the extremes, being a moderate is much easier and allows a politician to break from the party line more easily. Now that Alaska’s Ranked Choice initiative has weathered its legal challenge, it will be interesting to see how it affects the balance of power in Washington (DC).
Some board game humor, though honestly this applies to any situation where there is a big differential in engagement among participants.
Over the past few months, I’ve been trying to get to where I’m spending less time reading (and reacting) to news about Covid. To that end, I pay attention to the numbers that my county puts out, general local news, and this (free) newsletter by an epidemiologist. I wish that I had found it sooner in the pandemic.

Media

I enjoyed Encanto, but it felt like it was missing something, like the story was on rails with the characters just going along for the ride.
The second Skyward novella, Redawn, was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed seeing the situation from a non-human perspective, and the series continues to have interesting things to say about violence, force, and diplomacy.
I read the second Dragon Prince novelization, Book 2: Sky. It continues to be fun, and I really appreciate how it expands the world since it is written by the creators.
Somewhere along the line after reading The Martian, I had heard that Weir’s second book, Artemis, was just ‘meh’. Reading Project Hail Mary has turned me from a Martian fan into an Andy Weir fan, and now I plan on going back to read Artemis. This book is much more of a traditional science fiction story, but with the hard science that characterized The Martian. I hope that Weir influences the genre away from the special protagonist and towards the ‘competent man’ archetype (though I’d prefer it to evolve to a competent person archetype) that was mentioned in the article I linked above about Batman. I just wish that Weir’s audiobooks weren’t Audible exlcusives.
My 2022 playlist on Apple Music.
My board game plays for 2022.

Inside Tom's Head - December 2021

2022-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

This is my last post for 2021. I’m going to skip the long retrospective, since a calendar year is an arbitrary dividing line (as any temporal dividing line is). Some good things happened. Some bad things happened. Overall, I’m happier than I was a year ago. Some of this is due to choices I made (switching jobs) and a lot of it is luck (the same decisions that my family has made could have led to very different outcomes).

In site news, it looks like the site migration broke the sorting for my stories pages. I’m still figuring out what went wrong, so I’ve added a bit of front matter to the stories page and manually sorted the Horizon Station page.

Without further ado, here’s what I’ve been reading this month:

Links

I don’t have much to add to this, but 99% Invisible had an excellent episode about why the English language is so messed up.
It’s probably just coincidence, but my feed this month seemed to coalesce around a theme of problems with non-commercial systems. First was Tom MacWright talking about the ways that capitalism corrupts open culture (creative commons, open source, etc.) and how that caused him to sour a bit on the whole open culture thing. Then Yawar Amin had some interesting things to say about how messed up the reaction to the log4j security issue was. Finally, Scott Alexander talked about the pressure that doctors are under without clear guidance on from the FDA on COVID treatments. To me, these posts felt like they were mining separate lines on the same vein: MacWright was talking about feeling taken advantage of when his CC licensed work was used for profit by someone else; Amir was talking about how the log4j maintainers should have walked away when a multi-billion dollar company started pressuring them to work faster (without pay, since it is an open source project); and Alexander was talking about how difficult it is to overcome social pressure and potential damage to one’s reputation when making a decision about something in the grey area. I have minor disagreements with all of these articles, but I think that the important takeaway here is that we as a society tend to have a really hard time fitting reputational status systems into a capitalist framework, whether it be the reputational benefits of sharing creative work being outweighed by the sting of seeing your work exploited, watching as culture (subculture?) norms drive people to exploit themselves, or how difficult it is to try something new when you know it might cause your peers to look at you funny. Reputational currency is a pretty common idea in Science Fiction, but I don’t think that I’ve come across much about the transition from here to there. I wonder what that looks like?
Esquire has an article pointing out how inconsistent media coverage of different types of government spending is. We should just create a new unit of spending, the Pentagon, with 1 Pentagon being equal to the annual US military spending. So, if 1 Pentagon is currently something like $700 Billion, then a bill that wants to spend $3.5 Trillion over 10 years could be written as 0.5 Pentagons (since at the current rate we would be spending something like 7 Trillion per decade on the military). this isn’t an argument that we need to spend less on the military, but rather that it’s really hard to have an honest conversation about priorities if you’re not comparing apples to apples. Saying “$3.5 Trillion for infrastructure is a lot” is very different from “maybe we should spend half as much on infrastructure as we do on the military”.
Erik Twice interviewed Cole Wehrle (designer of John Company, which you may recognize from my 2021 boardgame top 10 list). There’s some really interesting stuff in there, and it (along with a recommendation from a colleague) inspired me to look at Wehrle’s newest game, Oath, which is now at the top of my list of games to play.
This is why TV news is bad: the story here is that buildings burned down but no one was injured. That’s it for the moment. Neither the fire or police department has released any information other than that they are investigating it for arson, but really there isn’t much else to report here other than the stories of people affected by the blaze. We get some of that, but what broadcast news needs is a narrative, so this clip keeps on mentioning the homeless, absent any evidence. Generally, my theory is that for any given news medium, the more news has to compete with entertainment, the worse it will be since the best way to compete with entertainment is by provoking an emotional response, which runs directly counter to the mission of providing information and unbiased analysis.
As with most of our infrastructure, our electrical grid is in need of an upgrade. Of course, how to actually do that is an open question: “But these upgrade projects require major investments of time and money, and utility companies are either unable or unwilling to make those kinds of investments — at least not at the scale and pace needed to keep up with climate change.”
An overview of the Cobra Effect (though I prefer the term perverse incentives). If you ever wonder why solutions to seemingly straightforward problems so often increase complexity, this is a good read.
Apparently buses were really interesting before the industry consolidated.
Some interesting thoughts on the usefulness of rankings. There’s some insight into why automated recommendations aren’t very good. I’ve long said that computers made it so that just about anyone can create anything. Connecting creators with consumers, on the other hand, hasn’t progressed nearly so far, and whoever figures it out could easily be bigger than Google. One could argue that Google is already connecting creators with consumers, but I would argue that they aren’t doing it in way that comes anywhere close to the serendipitousness of dense physical spaces such as walkable neighborhoods or libraries. Google is good at search, the next Google will be good at browse.
A fascinating account of how someone purchased property in San Francisco while working as a house cleaner. In particular, this quote caught my eye: “In a perfect world I’d much prefer to use my financial resources to build genuinely affordable new housing which society desperately needs. But this isn’t a perfect world. It’s decidedly imperfect. I learned that the hard way. So I’m essentially reaching back into the past and shining up the leftovers from a previous era.” If you want to understand why the author views building “genuinely affordable new housing” as a losing proposition in the current environment, this story from Strong Towns about the difficulty of building some really cool housing even though everyone seems to support it is worth your time.
A really cool list of workplace accommodations for people with ADHD. This really feels like an example of the curb cut effect (see also this short video from City Beautiful on the subject) to me, since I already do a lot of these things to keep me happy and productive and I don’t have ADHD. I’m hoping that at some point, organizations that allow for stuff like this will out compete ones that don’t, since it’s basically a very low cost productivity boost. Maybe one day it will even lead to a world without email.
Ars Technica has an article about how researchers were able to analyze the genetics of a bacterium that had been thought to only thrive in the lungs of those with Cystic Fibrosis, and found that tobacco smokers’ lungs had provided a reservoir for the disease. “This study marks the first time researchers have used mutational analysis to identify environments a pathogen has lived in.” I imagine that this analysis technique will find some interesting uses in the future.
I ran across an article about century-old stone markers warning where not to build in Japan is fascinating it its own right, but my mind bent immediately towards world-building. If you are creating a fictional place, there are lots bits in here about how knowledge is encoded in our physical space, ranging from markers to place names.

Media

I finally finished reading Sara Hendren’s book, What Can A Body Do?. I don’t think that I got as much out of it as I wanted, but it could be that parts of it challenged my assumptions in an uncomfortable way. I’m glad I read it.
I wish that I could have seen Dune in the theater (but I’m not quite ready to take that risk just yet), but even at home it was amazing. I loved the visuals, the sound, the adaptation, everything. I’m looking forward to rereading the sequels (and finishing the series, which I wasn’t quite ready for on my first pass through in high school). For more thoughts on the movie, I’d recommend Ethan’s review of it over at Examined Worlds (and generally, that blog is amazing).
Most of December was taken up with our usual Christmas movies: Klaus, The Grinch (Benedict Cumberbatch version), The Ref, The Christmas Chronicles (how is it that Kurt Russel makes a great Santa?), and White Christmas.
I read Varjak Paw to my kid. I had seen it on the shelf at the library many times and finally got around to picking it up. It was a ton of fun! I loved the semi-mystical cat martial arts! I loved that open mindedness, awareness, and self knowledge were a huge part of the martial arts/magic system even more. I’m looking forward to the second one.
I rewatched The Matrix in preparation for watching Resurrections when it becomes available outside of HBO Max and theaters. It holds up pretty well, even 20 years later. I’ll probably write more about the trilogy when I finish rewatching them.
I watched the first episode of Book of Boba Fett. It wasn’t as catchy as the opening episode of The Mandalorian, but I’m curious to see where it goes nonetheless.
I read Measure What Matters, hoping to find some insight about how to connect quantitative metrics to qualitative goals. The book does a really good job of making OKRs sound cool, but I came out of it with pretty much the same questions I went in with (I had a negative experience with OKRs in the past) and I didn’t get anything about metrics out of it. I’m sure that I’ll incorporate some of the book’s concepts into my thinking, but I doubt that it will be anything profound.
I read Sunreach, which is the first novella taking place between Starsight and Cytonic in Brandon Sanderson’s Cytoverse series. I really love the series’ exploration of the theme of empathy in violent circumstances, and this novella adds to that conversation (from a different POV, too).
We watched through the existing seasons of Sex Education, which was fantastic. I wonder how much of the show is intended as actual sex education for kids who live in areas where it just isn’t taught in school. I really like the empowering body-positive take on it, and wish that it had been available when I was a teenager.
My 2021 playlist on Apple Music.
My board game plays for 2021.

Inside Tom's Head - November 2021

2021-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

Not a whole lot to report for November. I made a list of some of my favorite board games that’s slightly different from most top 10 lists. I’m still enjoying my new job and have started work on figuring out what I want the next 15-20 years of my working life to look like. I started using an Upright Go and have been using it. I’m not sure if it is quite what I had hoped, but my experience has been generally positive and I’ll have more to say about it in the future. In other news, the hot tub that we ordered back during the summer is now fully operational and is amazing. Anyway, here’s what I’ve been reading, watching, listening, and thinking about for the past month.

Links

I don’t know how to feel about Exploding Kittens purchasing Happy Salmon from North Star Games. The article mentions them reimagining the game, which has me a bit worried since it’s kind of perfect, but watching the video for Throw Throw Burrito gives me hope.
Harry Connolly has some interesting stuff to say about the teen romance subplot in Stranger Things. I honestly hadn’t given it much thought when I watched it, but now I want to go back and rewatch it.
I’m pretty far to the left, so the first time I ran across Strong Towns saying that cities need to “turn a profit”, my reaction was not great. However, if by “turn a profit” you really just mean that cities need to collect more in property taxes than they spend in order to have nice things, that’s an idea I can get behind. Dear Winnipeg has a pretty solid introduction on the idea in Holy Leaping Dollars, Batman! which builds on their 2020 post, Accounting 101 for Councillors, Mayors and Free Press Columnists. Of course, a central pillar of the American identity is wanting services but not wanting to pay for them, so it isn’t clear where we go from here. Either way, it doesn’t make sense to have the argument about what government should spend money on until you can come to agreement about where that money comes from in the first place. Maybe our property tax receipts should be more detailed so that people can see where the money goes?
I honestly don’t do much in the way of image sharing, but this site kind of makes me want to.
Although there is often vocal opposition to bike lanes, Janette Sadik-Khan reminds us that the politicians who build them keep getting reelected.
Rene Herse Bicycles makes a compelling argument that we should focus on the quality of the things that we produce and consume, rather than the quantity. “Buying less may not sound like much fun, until we really think about it. If we buy fewer things, we have a larger budget for each item. That’s a fundamental shift, from ‘more’ to ‘better.’”
NPR had an interesting write-up of how effective plastic bag bans really are. I agree with it, for the most part, and agree that cotton shopping bags are probably not great. However, it is a pretty narrow analysis, since getting rid of single-use plastic bags is as much about stopping pollution and not incentivizing more fossil fuel use (as covered in season 6 of the Drilled podcast) as it is about reducing direct emissions. I do agree with the article, however that simply taking single-use bags would be a better way to go, as it would have roughly the same effect while provoking less backlash.
Vox had some thoughtful coverage of the environmental objections to meat alternatives such as Impossible meat. The short version is that, even if you have concerns about how Impossible is producing its meat, it’s really hard to be worse for the planet than beef. Sure, in a perfect world we would replace all meat with legumes, seitan, and jackfruit, but even as a vegan I still love an Impossible burger every once in a while.
Cory Doctorow points out that the corollary to “if you aren’t paying for the product you are the product” doesn’t necessarily hold up. Exhibit A: Vizio makes more money spying on its customers than it does from, you know, selling TVs. The original argument is still true, for companies like Google and Facebook you are the product, not whatever service you are using, but just because you’re paying someone doesn’t mean they respect you. I’ll keep preferring paid services over free ones, but just need to be a bit more careful about it.
This article about the origins of the Oregon Trail computer game makes me a little sad. Not because the creators didn’t get rich off of it, but because the education industry still hasn’t capitalized on it. Why can’t we teach history through games (digital or cardboard)? Why can’t I roleplay my way through the American revolution in class? Why can’t I play a game that forces me to learn something about history to advance? I’m not saying that we should abandon books and lectures entirely, but rather that it seems like there is so much more we could be doing but aren’t. In 50 or 100 years, people are going to look back and wonder why it took us so damned long to do education better.
Matt Webb has some thoughts on the second order effects of the quiet streets initiative in London. His speculation about pricing for roads is particularly interesting. Where my mind ended up going was, what if all roads were toll roads? What if we could basically determine traffic through pricing? Of course, there are some major issues with the idea, but given that we currently aren’t adequately funding roads it’s an interesting way of thinking about it.
Semi Co-Op has a wonderful comic about enjoying yourself while learning a new game. I’ve long said that if you aren’t having fun when you’re losing, you’re either playing the wrong game or playing with the wrong people. Competition and the drive to win is great, after you learn how to play.

Media

We watched Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency on hulu. It was a lot of fun, but I feel like they tried to go too big in season 2 and it lost a lot of its charm.
I read the follow-up to A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate, which I also enjoyed the heck out of. Not a huge fan of the cliffhanger ending, though.
Apparently Django Wexler wrote a short novel (or maybe a novella) about giant robots, called Hard Reboot. I got a copy of the audiobook from the library and had a good time. Not my favorite of his books, but still well worth a read. I really want to write a giant robot story, but won’t unless I can figure out something that’s not dystopian future war, arena battles, or mecha just being part of the setting.
I found myself thinking about Gridlock’d, recently, which I watched back in the ’90s. I somehow remember it being funny, but while it has a couple of moments and was very well done, 2021 me has trouble finding any humor in a gritty kafkaesque movie about drug culture.
Okay, I know that critics panned it, but Red Notice was a pretty good time in my book. Then again, I’d watch Ryan Reynolds, Dwayne Johnson, and Gal Gadot together in just about anything.
Gunpowder Milkshake was what I wanted John Wick to be, though maybe that comparison is a bit unfair. In any case, it was a lot of fun and had some heart.
I mostly watched Army of the Dead because I heard good things about Army of Thieves, and it was surprisingly good. It has a long runtime but I never really felt like it wore out its welcome.
We watched Sex, Drugs & Bicycles on Kanopy. It was interesting, but spent a lot more time on the approach to sex and drugs in the Netherlands, and not a whole lot on the bicycles, and I didn’t enjoy it as much as Not Just Bikes (which doesn’t really cover sex and drugs, to be fair).
I finished reading A World Without Email. It was really good, and I’m still processing it, but it seems likely that I’ll incorporate a lot of it into my approach and probably end up rereading it at some point. If you’re interested why the modern workplace sucks, this is a good place to start and has a lot of good suggestions. What the book doesn’t cover is that even for professions that aren’t strictly knowledge work (such as library operations) email has still ruined things. We can do better.
My 2021 playlist on Apple Music.
My board game plays for 2021.

Board Game Top Ten - 2021

2021-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

I was asked the other day what my top 10 board games were. While I’m usually fine ranking things, I have trouble with coming up with a single list for something like board games, since what I want to play is largely dependent upon things like who I’m playing with and how much time we have. So you’re getting a list of my favorite games for a given situation.

Overall

Panamax - If you ask me at any point what I feel like playing, chances are Panamax would come to mind. The game has a lot going for it: solid mechanics, nice design, heavy enough to be really engaging but short enough to fit into a regular session, but what puts it at the top of my list is the player interaction. There’s a mechanic where if you are shipping moving something through one of the canal locks it costs the same regardless if you are sending through just a litlle or packing it full. That means that you can help out another player at no cost to yourself, creating an interesting dynamic. It gets even more interesting when you start using money from your player board (victory points, essentially) to add incentive for others to help you out. I’ve never played anything else quite like it.
Tzolk’in - When Tzolk’in first came out, it wasn’t clear if the clock mechanism/mechanic at the heart of the game would be a novelty that quickly wore out its welcome or if it would have staying power. Thankfully, it turned out to be the latter, leading to gameplay full of really interesting decisions and interaction that rarely feels negative. It comes in at about 90 minutes of play time, but is engaging enough that my partner really likes it, which is saying something (45 minutes is usually about as long of a game as she wants). Combine with some really awesome aesthetics (the gears are just amazing when painted), and you have yourself a winner.
Quantum - When I first played this game, I immediately played it again. It has really unique mechanics, a fun theme, and really tight gameplay. That last point may seem minor, but it matters a lot to me. A lot of games feel like you spend 90% of the game building an engine, then never really get to see it run, or get going and keep going past the point where the game feels decided. Quantum has a really quick ramp up and feels close the entire time.

Family / Kids

Rhino Hero Super Battle - This is my favorite game to play with kids (though Mole Rats in Space definitely deserves a mention). In my experience, kids are really casual about it, placing new floors on the wobbly tower with a cavalier swagger, while adults are stessing out and covering their eyes. It’s a blast. The only drawback is that the game is focused on simplicity, so the rules around battling feel too light when playing with just adults. As my kid gets older, I’m sure we’ll house rule it.

Casual

Happy Salmon - It’s pretty hard to get more casual than Happy Salmon, which you can play in 60-90 seconds. That being said, it’s some of the most fun I’ve had with cards. Also, it functions as a team building exercise and any game you can play at work is a good game in my book. Just watch out for Stacy, she always wins. Also, it looks ilke the righs to the game were purchased by Exploding Kittens, so there will be a new version out soon.

Solo

Palm Island - More than a good pun, Palm Island is a great solo game. I like solo games, but I often want something different from them than from a regular board game, so I often get turned off by setup and the need for table space. This game gets all that stuff just right for my taste: you don’t need a table or surface or anything since you are holding the entire game while you play; there is virtually no setup, just shuffle the cards and go; 15 minutes is the perfect amount of play time for me, this game perfectly replaces phone games.

Theme

John Company - This may seem like an odd choice for best theme at first glance, but I think of theme in a board game as the quality of feeling like you’re doing the thing that the game is about, and John Company definitely feels like you’re part of the East India Company. I’ve only played it once (though I would play again given half a chance), but it left a very strong impression on me. I didn’t win (not even close, the mechanics didn’t click for me until about 1/3 of the way through), but I remember the excitement of being voted in as Governor for one glorious round, and better yet, not running the company into the ground during my brief tenure. My second choice for this category is actually another odd choice, Die Macher, a 4+ hour simulation of German elections which feels exactly how I imagine clawing your way to the top of the political heap would be. I love both of these games, but John Company’s shorter play time puts it on top in my book.

Two Player

Innovation - Although it isn’t strictly a two player affair (unlike Mr. Jack Pocket, Agamemnon, or 2 de Mayo–all of which I love for various reasons), Innovation really doesn’t want 4 people at the table. It was one of the first games that I played where I immediately wanted to play again. Like most Chudyk games, it has a bit of a learning curve, and feels really unbalanced (it isn’t, though, just because you drew an awesome technology doesn’t mean you’re going to win). Really my only complaint about it is setup, but eventually I’ll get a custom playmat for it which should fix some of the problems. On the subject, if you want ot play a Chudyk game with more people, find an old copy of Glory to Rome or Import/Export (which feels like a spiritual successor, even though it is by a different designer).

5+ people

Ca$h ‘n Gun$ - Any game that can get create this sort of situation is something special. I love that this game is quick to explain, plays fast, and creates direct conflict without vitriol. Mostly I’ve played the 1st edition, which I love. I’ve also played the 2nd edition, but I feel like the added complexity doesn’t really pay off for what I want out of it (though it is is still a far cry from being complicated). That being said, if I didn’t already have a copy of the 1st edition, I would not hesitate to buy a copy of either edition, depending on availability.

Gateway

Mint Works - This is probably a bit of a controversial choice, compared to the standards of Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, or Power Grid, all of which I have played and appreciate. But for me the ideal gateway game should be portable, quick to set up, and quick to play. Mint Works, which fits in a literal mint tin and plays in 10-20 minutes checks all of these boxes. It’s a game that you can keep in your bag and whip out on the spur of the moment at the lunch table. It is also a good introduction to the worker placement genre. Given how cheap it is and that it has a solid solo mode (both of which are excellent qualities for a game that I would lend out to someone who shows interest), this is my go-to for people who express interest in board games but haven’t played anything beyond Monopoly.

Well, that’s it. There are a bunch of games in my collection that I want to highlight here, but I’ll save them for another post. One of my projects for the next few months is to clean out my game shelves, and I’m hoping that doing so makes it easier to get a sense of what games I really love, so maybe next time I do this list I’ll have updated it. Then again, maybe I’ll do a totally different format next time, perhaps best game by mechanic?

Possible Disruption in Service

2021-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been planning on changing my current host setup for a while now, since it has been getting less reliable (it takes way more work than it should to upload a few files via ftp, for example) and has always been slow. But I just got a notice that my hosting plan is up for renewal at the beginning of December, so the timeline has been moved up from “eventually” to by the end of November to avoid that renewal.

The plan is to move pawnstorm.net over to GitHub Pages, and I am pretty much done cloning the site over to its new home. Unfortunately, while GitHub totally supports Jekyll, hosting there definitely has some quirks. I’m hoping to begin the process on Saturday night and if all goes well it should be seamless. However, I’ve done enough of this sort of thing to know that it could go totally sideways. Here are some things that could happen during the process:

The site could go down for a while. 24 hours certainly isn’t out of the realm of possibility.
Internal links could totally break. Most of the work of cloning the site has been figuring out how to get my Jekyll setup to play well with GitHub’s structure. I think that I have it figured out, but we’ll see.
RSS (web feed), could get seriously messed up, up to and including thinking that everything here is brand new and sending subscribers all the posts.

In any case, I’ll do my best to avoid all of that stuff, but consider yourself warned.

Inside Tom's Head - October 2021

2021-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

October was a good month, if a bit hectic. I started a new job and have felt like I have been gradually emerging from my shell of burnout. I’ve been able to relax and like smiles are coming easily again. In addition, I have had the energy to actually work on things: I’m making progress on the next phase of my climbing wall (I hope to have the next section up by the time spring rolls around, though that might be a bit ambitious), and I’ve had the oomph to work on stuff here, as evinced by me getting this out in the first week of November.

Working from home has taken some adjustment, though. My office is in the garage, which also functions as our auxiliary pantry, so I’ve had to bring back my snack tracker spreadsheet to keep from constantly munching. The good news for that is that I’m really liking the new version I’ve been using, enough so that I might post it to the projects page in the next month or two here. I’ve also been missing my commute, and have been trying to find time in the morning for bike rides. I’m guessing that I’ll be more or less settled into that routine by the end of November.

One of my reactions when I was reading Worm was that if Taylor ever just got a minute to get her feet under her, I (as the reader) could relax, but that moment never really came (which makes sense, you need all sorts of tension to draw the reader through that long of a story). Anyway, that’s sort of how I’ve felt since at least 2019, like I just needed a little time to get my feet under me. In my case, that time did come, but it was never enough, and I never felt like I actually recovered. Heck, I’m not sure if I ever properly recovered from the work hell that was 2015. Whether real recovery from that was ever a real possibility will forever remain an open question for me. But a fresh start sure does feel good, and I think that it may be enough.

tl;dr things are going well and I’m optimistic, to the links!

Although the cool thing to do these days is to mandate electric cars (despite not being that great of a solution), it’s a hard sell for a lot of people. Phasing out sales of new gas-powered lawn care equipment, on the other hand, could start today and would have big benefits for just about everyone. I could even see traditionally conservative Home Owners Associations getting behind it, since your neighbor running an 80+ db mower/leaf blower/whatever definitely impacts the quality of life of everyone around them and electric versions are much less disruptive (even at the same noise level, according to one of the linked articles).
Apparently, Native American tribes are starting to win court cases not just on the basis of treaty rights (also known as getting the government to do what they had promised to do at the beginning), but because they are simply doing a better job of governing.
An article in the Atlantic argues that by not attending to the inequities in our society or investing in public health in a meaningful way, we are setting ourselves up for the next pandemic. To me, one of the most compelling parts of this argument is that all of the things that the author says we should be working on will have huge benefits aside from pandemic preparedness. Imagine a world in which an average of more than 30,000 people in the US don’t die of the Flu each year. Imagine a world in which medical bankruptcy becomes uncommon enough that it is news, not just another gofundme campaign. Imagine a world in which the poorest Americans didn’t take a 10-15 year hit to their expected lifespan due to their income. We could have that world, if we choose to.
Why is FEMA planning on rebuilding the fossil fuel infrastructure in Puerto Rico instead of building renewable energy? I’m not even arguing that they should build exclusively renewable power generation, but Puerto Rico doesn’t even currently have the port capacity to import enough natural gas to run the power plants that are being proposed. The bit I disagree with in the article is that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. So long as we keep on building fossil fuel infrastructure, we will continue to exacerbate climate change, which will in turn increase the frequency of these “once in a lifetime” storms. If we do go down this path and build a bunch of fragile fossil fuel infrastructure, maybe the next time it gets wiped out we can invest in underground power lines and distributed renewable power generation.
On the subject of islands in the Caribbean, 99% Invisible has an article about why Bermuda Roofs are so cool. As the effects of climate change become more noticeable, I think that islands are going to have a lot to teach us. After all, they already deal with water scarcity, extreme weather, and expensive power generation.
I’m not sure if I totally buy the way people talk about cars and drivers as evidence of a sort of proto-vehicular-transhumanism, but it is definitely a fun idea. At the very least, our use of language is problematic, since saying a car hit someone implies that the car did acted on its own, rather than the driver hitting someone (sure, no one thinks that cars are acting on their own–yet–but why introduce that subconscious bias). I’m definitely going to refer to driving as “putting on a car-suit” in the future, though.
A video about how the character of the built environment in Japan derives from the country’s zoning laws. This is a fairly obvious point, in retrospect, but well illustrated. In addition, something about this video made me realize how weird our idea of “residential” is. Granted, it makes sense that residential means where people live, but it strikes me as odd that in the US it also means that you can’t have anything else. To me, having a corner store or a cafe makes an area more residential, not less, as those things are very different from big box stores and office towers. It’s like building a house that has bedrooms and bathrooms but no kitchen. Perhaps we need a new term for places like suburbs that have no amenities? This feels like it could be a whole post, so I’ll leave it there for now.

Media

I finally got a chance to watch Palm Springs. I love time loop stories (Groundhog Day, Russian Doll, Happy Death Day, etc.) and this didn’t disappoint. I read somewhere that we don’t really know how long Bill Murray is stuck in the time loop in Groundhog Day, it could be basically what is implied by the movie or it could be 10,000+ days. What would that do to a person? Palm Springs explores this, and is funny and charming. I loved it. I just wish that it weren’t exclusive to Hulu so that more people could watch it.
Season One of Only Murders in the Building (Hulu exclusive, sorry) was a ton of fun. Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez play three neighbors who try to solve a murder that happens in their building, documenting their case with a podcast. I loved pretty much everything about the show.
Foundation has finally gotten an adaptation. It has been a long time since I read the first book (I never finished the series, unfortunately), but it works without having fresh knowledge of the plot. Matt Webb has some interesting thoughts on it, as well, about how the choices the show makes take a little away from the magic of the books. He’s probably right, but I’m still excited for new episodes every week.
Yeah, we watched more Hulu. We’ve been making our way through What We Do in the Shadows. I enjoyed the movie, but am liking the show even more. It has become our go-to chaser when we watch something that ends on a weird note.
I’ve been waiting to watch Free Guy since nearly the start of the pandemic. It was fantastic. Aside from being a silly action comedy, I really loved how much philosophy they crammed in there. Definitely worth renting.
This year I started a 2021 playlist in Apple Music. Every time I get a song stuck in my head or listen to something that feels particularly relevant to now, I add it to the list. I think that I’m going to try to do it every year, since it would be interesting to go back and listen to in the future.
It may not sound like it, but I have been reading, too. I’m working my way through What Can a Body Do? by Sara Hendren and A World Without Email by Cal Newport, but I’m still adjusting to my new schedule and haven’t had a whole lot of time for reading paper or ebooks. I also made a big dent in my podcast backlog before reading the audiobook of A Deadly Education which I absolutely loved. It reminded me of a bunch of things, from Dark Lord Clementine to the Murderbot Diaries. I’m currently in the middle of the second book, and enjoying it, too.
We received our copy of The Dragon Prince: Battlecharged, which I’ve only had the opportunity to play once so far, but liked quite a bit. There seems to be a good balance of simplicity and interesting decisions, and I’m looking forward to playing more. Also, the box is designed with space for sleeved cards, which is a huge bonus in my book (if I need to regularly shuffle a deck smaller than about 40 cards, sleeves make things way better). Finally, it looks like Fantasy Flight stopped making sleeves, but Sleeve Kings looks to be taking their place. Their standard sleeves are thicker than normal but not as robust as the sleeves I would use for a game like Netrunner, I think that they will be perfect for board games.

Inside Tom's Head - September 2021

2021-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

September seemed to last forever. I spent the first half of the month interviewing, which was about as much fun as it sounds like. Then I gave notice at my old job, and a few days after that I had a job offer. September also marked my 10 year anniversary at that job, which is a good chunk of time. There’s a lot I’m going to miss about it (especially the people), but I can already tell that I made the right choice for my mental health.

I’ve been on the fence about leaving my job for a long time–years–now, but the deciding factor was my partner telling me that our kid had asked why I was always angry. It was quite a shock, and made me think of my own childhood. My father’s job wasn’t entirely to blame for my family falling apart as a kid, but it certainly didn’t help, and I strive to put family ahead of work whenever possible (though I’m the first to admit that I’m often not successful).

In any case, the upshot here is that the next couple of months are going to be a bit rough around here as I figure out my new schedule. I think that it will be better in the long run, though. But enough of that, to the links!

Sightline takes a look at Cascadia’s carbon budget. There isn’t anything surprising about this, basically we needed to start cutting emissions back when the oil companies first became aware of the problem, in the 70’s, but as the saying goes, the second best time to plant a tree is now. What is worth noting here is the graphs, which do a good job of illustrating the scale of change that we’re about to experience (one way or the other).
If you had asked me before reading this article, I would have said of course landlords are not developers, but I had never given any real thought to how different their business models are and how odd it is that they get lumped in together.
A fascinating blog post about what happened to the spines on cucumbers, since apparently kids these days have been coddled by smooth defenseless cucumbers their whole lives.
Scalzi takes a look back at the whole Sad/Rabid Puppy thing. It all seems a bit quaint in retrospect.
A Vice article about how “walking places is part of the culture wars now” came out at the end of August. I had some criticisms of it that I wanted to write up, but Strong Towns did a better job of it, so I don’t have much to add.
A suburb of Indianapolis makes a good case that human-scale infrastructure doesn’t have to be a partisan issue. For me, the key insight was to look at a bike trail as the backbone of an infrastructure network. It didn’t matter how nice the trail was if you had to drive to it to use it, so they focused on making sure that it connected to things. I’ve had people in cars yell at me, telling me that I should be riding on a trail, never mind that the nearest trail is over a mile away from my house.
The greenest building is the one that has already been built.
I don’t think that I have enough of an understanding of the subject to properly evaluate this, but at the very least I think that this discussion of our education system is worth reading and thinking about, especially as we grapple with the still-growing ripples of the pandemic. As with everything that got broken (or which had its brokenness revealed) by the pandemic, we should be asking ourselves if we can’t fix some of the old problems when we rebuild. Related (sort of), we should be asking ourselves some hard questions about school transportation given the current problems.
A post about moire showed up on my RSS feed and ended up being a delightful rabbit hole of math, technology, and why striped shirts may not be the best choice for video conferencing. I had always seen Fast Fourier Transform as a tool in graphics software, but never had any idea of what it did. Now I know . . . that I still need to look into it, but being aware of how cool it is will hopefully act as motivation.
Federal flood insurance is likely going to get more expensive as a result of climate change. I do feel bad for people who live in flood-prone coastal areas, but I’m also not a fan of negative externalities that encourage bad decisions, in this case flood insurance that is priced in such a way that people can ignore the effects of climate change because the costs get borne by general tax payers.
Sightline did a good writeup of how Portland’s voting system makes its government less representative. For the record, Portland has a similar voting system to much of the United States, and it’s broken pretty much everywhere else, too.

Media

I don’t feel like I did much reading, listening, or watching in September. With how things were at work, I spent a lot more of my audiobook/podcast time on music than usual (when I would try to listen to a book or show, I would find that I hadn’t been paying attention since my mind had strayed to work). That being said, I did watch a couple of things:

We really love Horror/Comedies (HoComs as we call them in these parts), and after hearing good things about Spontaneous we subscribed to Hulu with the intention of watching a couple of things then canceling. We’re still subscribed (Why must you have good content, Hulu, why!?). That being said, Spontaneous was good, but not great. It was bloody, but never really rose to a level of horror, and it was dark enough that the humor didn’t really have much of an impact on me. It was still a good time, though, and it definitely felt like it was about now despite being based on a book from 2016.
The other film that made an impression was Love and Monsters which I loved. I’m definitely looking forward to more from everyone involved. You should go watch it.

Inside Tom's Head - August 2021

2021-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

I spent a good bit of August on vacation, which was nice. I also got a new phone, switching from my trusty Sony XZ1 Compact to an iPhone 12 Mini. The transition has eaten up a lot of time (because instead of just using the migration tool I wanted to see what I actually needed and use the transition as a way of cutting some digital clutter), but I’m pretty happy with my new auxiliary brain.

In more important news, my kid had his second pandemic birthday, and I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t a little frustrated by people being unwilling to vaccinate, contributing to much higher case rates than we had at this time last year (by a factor of 10). So even though my partner and I are fully vaccinated, no party or friends over for him. We made the most of it though, with vegan sushi and a birthday present scavenger hunt, and he had a good birthday.

Work continued to be tough in August, and I’ve been feeling rung out, which means that I haven’t had a lot of oomph to put in much work on this blog. The good news is that I’ll be starting a new job in a week and a half here and think that I’ll be much happier there. Without further ado, here’s what I’ve been reading online:

The Key to Slowing Traffic is Street Design, Not Speed Limits. I have to wonder how much of the danger posed by teens driving is due to them trying to follow the speed limits even when that is at odds with the speed that feels right on a given road. Put another way, if the posted speed differs from the design speed, that seems like it would create conflict as drivers are essentially following two different sets of rules. When we teach people how to drive, we teach them to follow the speed limits, so it might follow that newer drivers (teens) are behaving very differently from experienced drivers (who are probably more likely to be driving at the road’s design speed) as a result. That being said, I’m guessing that it would be a relatively small contributor to teen driving safety, probably dwarfed by reduced impulse control, the desire to impress peers, and general inexperience.
The Olympia Police Department has said that the new laws around use of force mean that they can’t respond to calls where an actual crime isn’t being committed. Fortunately, the Attorney General’s Office disagrees, saying: “Nothing in the statute’s plain language indicates that specifying permissible uses of force prohibits an officer from responding to community caretaking calls.”
This feels like old news now, but seeing the calculations of the R0 values of the delta variant definitely got my attention.
A story about a city that had parking problems downtown and chose to spend $75,000 for a year of valet parking instead of building a $12,000,000 parking garage. This is really cool in the short run, but probably works out in the long run too, once you factor in operations and maintenance cost for the garage, lost tax revenue from having a garage instead of something like housing or retail on the same lot, and possibly increased tax revenue from downtown businesses if valet parking makes going downtown more desirable (and increases property values as a result).
Farmers have started using hybrid rye to deal with some ‘superweeds’. This is really cool. The weird thing to me is that one of the things holding it back is that the market for rye is pretty small. Given that it can be used as animal feed, I interpret that as meaning that it has trouble competing with subsidized corn, which seems like an eminently solvable problem.
A community on Vancouver Island (BC) is considering phasing out gas stations. In essence, they are talking about changing their zoning codes to prevent the installation of more gas pumps, even at existing stations. This may sound a bit extreme, but if Comox Valley is much like every other community that I’ve lived in or visited, there are plenty of gas stations (and it sure looks that way on Google Maps). Strong Towns makes a good argument that we have already built enough roads (and in fact that we can’t afford to maintain the roads that we already have) and many of the same arguments apply to gas stations. Given the tendency of gas stations to turn into petroleum brownfields and the fact that we really need to be moving away from petroleum as fast as possible, is building new gas stations really a responsible thing to be doing?
A pretty compelling argument that the IRS should make it’s own free tax filing system/service. Of course, I’m probably not the target audience for this article, I’m already on board with the IRS automatically filling out your tax forms since, you know, they already have all of the information that you are sending them.
If you think that machine learning is going to fix everything, Cory Doctorow has some bad news for you.
Portland City Hall is definitely making it look like they are okay with violence in their community. I can’t help but to contrast this with the state response to the George Floyd protests last year.
Mushroom ketchup?!. From that recipe, follow the link for cucumber ketchup for a brief history of the condiment. Fascinating.

Books, Movies, Video Games, etc.

I read Mine! by Michael Heller and James Salzman, which is a book by a couple of really enthusiastic law professors about ownership and ownership design. It had a definite Freakonomics vibe to it, exploring the normally unnoticed underpinnings of everyday life. I listened to it, and the audiobook was excellent, but I also kind of want to get the physical book so that I can read through all of the footnotes/endnotes. In particular, the argument that if the Irish had been allowed to use primogeniture the Irish potato famine might not have happened seems fascinating. I’d recommend this book for just about everyone.
Some might criticize Jungle Cruise (Disney+) as just being a big dumb adventure movie, and while I agree that it isn’t highbrow by any stretch, it’s more than just a treasure hunt and has some heart besides. In any case, it was a ton of fun, and you should watch it if given the chance.
I was distinctly ambivalent about Cruella when it first came out. I didn’t like 101 Dalmatians as a kid and the trailer didn’t give me any sense of what it was about. But, between my partner wanting to watch it and it being free on Disney+ (as opposed to the $30 premium access tier), we watched it. And I loved it. It was fun, incisive, had good music, and was a movie about women’s fashion without being exploitative (the fashion was about style, not sexiness). I think of it as kind of a cross between The Devil Wears Prada and The Count of Monte Cristo.
My new phone came with a free 3-month subscription to Apple Arcade. I had initially disliked the idea of a subscription-based gaming platform, but I was clearly in the wrong. I don’t play a whole lot of video games, so paying $60/year to play any game (on the service) I want is actually kind of a good deal since one top tier game will run you about $60. I’ve played a few things that I’ve enjoyed, such as Cat Quest II (I’ll write more about this later) and Super Impossible Road, but by far my favorite has been Fantasian. It’s by one of the creators of the Final Fantasy series, and it feels like Final Fantasy with the governors removed. I haven’t finished it yet, but the first half of the game feels super accessible with some wonderful quality of life improvements for seasoned gamers, the second half leans in to the puzzle aspects of RPGs and is hard. I probably have another ~20-30 hours before I beat it, so I’ll probably follow up about it then. Also, even if you aren’t going to play, follow that link and look at process of making the game, all of the physical areas in it are actually dioramas, the game is gorgeous.

Inside Tom's Head - July 2021

2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

July was eventful. We had planned a short vacation of sticking around the house and maybe going on a short camping trip. Instead, we got word that a relative was sick, and ended up taking a road trip to Colorado to visit them. It ended up being a lot more vacation-y than anticipated and we got to do fun and make some good memories with them.

The downside was that the farther east we drove, the fewer masks we saw. By the time you get to Colorado you wouldn’t be mistaken for thinking that the pandemic had already ended and you just hadn’t been told. As bad as the recent news has been, I wouldn’t be surprised if things get worse.

In other news, I found out that AT&T has decided that it will no longer support my phone. I would understand if my phone were 3g only and wouldn’t work when they stopped providing 3g service, but instead it’s compatible technologically but just not on the small list of phones that AT&T has decided can use their network. In the grand scheme of things, not really a big deal, my phone is getting old and I was getting ready to replace it anyway, but I don’t see why I need to do it on AT&T’s arbitrary schedule. So I’ll replace my phone, but I’ll also never give AT&T money again if I can avoid it.

What’s new around here

I still have some blog posts that are almost done, but work has gotten even more stressful over the past months and I just haven’t had the oomph to work on stuff.
As I mentioned last month, I’m going to have to switch out my email subscription service, since Google appears to be dismantling Feedburner. Towards that end, I have rewritten my Subscribe page and will be manually transferring everyone over to Follow.it in August.

What I’ve been reading online

Apparently, people in the US 600,000 e-bikes last year. It’s a far cry from the ~14 million new cars that were purchased in the same year. Imagine if they had the same infrastructure and subsidy support that cars (and electric cars in particular) receive?
It’s strange to me that white bicycle advocates don’t get that enforcement isn’t what’s going to make bicycling safer. As a cisgendered straight white guy, the only negative interactions I’ve had with police are when I was on my bike (being told that getting hit by a car was my fault since I was “going too fast” on a 30mph street; being told that the driver who passed me and immediately took a sharp right turn, stopping in the bike lane, hadn’t done anything wrong since they claimed to have used their turn signal). I imagine that being part of the BIPOC community is a lot like that except 100x worse and, you know, all the time.
It’s no replacement for adding trees and green space (especially to historically redlined communities) and decreasing the amount of paved surface in our cities, but spraying roads with titanium dioxide as a method of reducing the urban heat island effect seems like a pretty cool technology. My concern is that since it probably isn’t cheap, it might only be deployed in affluent neighborhoods. From the first link, trees are “the only infrastructure that add value over time.”
More on that topic: “The surface temperature of an ivy-covered wall in an industrial area was about 119°F. Right next to it was a non-ivy-covered wall, which was about 157°F — about a 40-degree difference in temperature”
I just love this headline: State sees decrease in pedestrian fatalities as more safety measures are taken. On the other hand, it makes me wonder if maybe the relationship between reduced fatalities and safety measures was in doubt. I do love the phrase “pedestrian crashes”, too, as it conjures images of a two people bumping into each other, saying “sorry” and continuing on their way or possibly of a distracted walker ambling into a parked car. I’m assuming that the point of the phrase isn’t to minimize the role of cars in the fatalities of pedestrians hit by . . . cars, but rather to save time. I’m still going to poke fun at it, though.
The trick with any solution is to get people to adopt it, so connecting ranchers with land stewards seems pretty exciting to me.
A solid argument that public transit is a public good (like a library), so we should fund it accordingly.
I had heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre, but I wasn’t aware that “Black Wall Street” recovered from that atrocity and thrived. What finally did it in was was actually a highway.
A while back I linked an long-form exchange on the Olympia subreddit about what happened to Tumwater’s downtown. Here’s more on the subject from one of the debate’s participants.
Developing mountain bike trails to bring in tourism seems like a good way to replace money lost when extractive industry (logging, mining) goes away. Of course, it wouldn’t work everywhere and logging and mining will continue somewhere, but looking at the environment as something to be enjoyed rather than simply harvested is a good start.
An interview with Jesse Frost, author of a new book on no-till farming. The bit about how agricultural science writing is often aimed at other scientists rather than farmers was really interesting.
As always, context is a good thing. In this case, the news about shoplifting in San Francisco leaves some things out.
Private health insurance makes no sense.
Researchers say that bike share saves the US $36,000,000 in public health dollars every year. Granted, that amount doesn’t take into account how much money governments spend on bike share, but I’d be surprised if it was anywhere near $36 million. In addition, since there are other benefits to bike share (reduced traffic, better mobility, etc.) it seems safe to say that we should be spending more on it.
It appears that recent forestry management efforts (thinning, prescribed burning) has been helpful in containing and fighting wildfires.
I honestly did not expect to see a discussion of Miyazaki’s films on Strong Towns, but it totally makes sense. Miyazaki creates a wonderful sense of community in his films and it isn’t really surprising that there are some lessons for urban planning in them.
This post comparing hacking with marketing fits really well with my experience at work. We get a new tool and people tend to take two approaches to it: either they ask what to use it for or they experiment with it and figure out how to they can use it (sometimes in ways unanticipated by the designer). Although I am firmly on the side of the hacker here, I think that the danger of it is the raccoon-like attraction to shiny new tools, since I really like experimenting with stuff. The hacking mindset should be tempered with the Amish-inspired question: does this tool actually get me closer to my goals or am I excited about it because it is shiny and new?
Yeah, I’m one of those people, I miss Google Reader. The good news is that I’m pretty happy with Newsblur, and I’m glad that I’m now paying for a service rather than simply being a source of advertising revenue.
The Suicide of Our Troubles, a short story by Karl Schroeder in the same setting as Stealing Worlds. Schroeder is hands-down my favorite contemporary science fiction writer, and if you haven’t read his stuff, this short story is a great place to start.
I had never considered why some barriers on roadways are designed to protect drivers and others are not.
I hadn’t ever given much thought to the problematic acceptance of colonialism in board games, but looking at my board game shelf I don’t seem to own any that involve colonialism. I wonder how much of that is due to my preferences (I have a lot of games about vikings, Polynesian cultures, and Japan) and how much is due to some sort of unconscious aversion to the topic. On the other hand, I wonder what sort of problematic things I’m simply overlooking in that collection.

Media Consumption

We started watching The Mysterious Benedict Society on Disney+. I had never read the books and was pleasantly surprised to find something that felt like an upbeat Lemony Snicket.
On our road trip we listened to The Wild Robot. It was okay, but didn’t leave much in terms of lasting impressions on me. I think that our kid liked it more.
We also listened to The Secret Keepers by Trenton Lee Stewart, the same person who wrote the Benedict Society books. It was a lot of fun and felt like it had something interesting to say about honesty (beyond “honesty is good”).

Inside Tom's Head - June 2021

2021-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

I continue my trend of not knowing quite how to characterize the past month. When work was good, it was really good, when it was hard, it was really hard. The weather was great until the atmosphere tried to cook us. I actually wrote something that wasn’t a monthly update, a rant about how people don’t quite seem to get how much damage even a little extra vehicle weight does to roads, but have been too tired to get any other writing done.

What I read on the internet in June

I have long found the idolization of Sparta to be problematic, but it turns out that it was even worse than I had imagined.
You probably won’t find this surprising, but most drivers speed. However, when Transportation Alternatives sent teams out with radar guns, 70% of the drivers that they measured were speeding. I guess that’s what you get when you design roads for high speeds (wide, straight, trees removed from the roadside) and set speed limits based on how fast people drive (the 85th percentile rule from the MUTCD).
Living in the US, I can’t imagine people letting regulators put any sorts of policies in place about maximum car size, but if you accept the premise that they should be allowed to keep obviously dangerous products from being on the market, then yeah, they are failing us on that one. I don’t think that we’ll see regulation on huge personal vehicles any time soon, but I could see some sort of legal framework that would acknowledge that driving a bigger vehicle makes you more likely to kill a pedestrian (or other vulnerable road user), and force insurance agencies to raise their rates accordingly.
While I agree that we shouldn’t focus so much on European city desgin, people calling for us to look closer to home are often short on good examples, usually talking about ciclovia in Columbia and leaving it there. I guess that we need to make some examples of our own. I’m planning on watching [this presentation] (https://chi.streetsblog.org/2021/06/17/lessons-on-building-bike-culture-from-latin-america/) next month in the hopes that it fills in some of these gaps.
This is really cool. Indigenous forest gardens are still productive despite being untended for the past 150 years. It’s amazing that they are even still there, given how aggressive forests can be in claiming new land.
Tom MacWright, whose blog inspired the current design of this site, has started selling his theme as a package.
I ran across a TED talk from 2007 that felt halfway between urban planning and stand-up comedy: James Kunstler: How bad architecture wrecked cities. I’ve read some of Kunstler’s stuff in the past, and I don’t subscribe to his central idea of the Long Emergency, the idea that we are at the beginning of a long decline, but I do think that his take on the current state of our built environment (that we have built many places that are not worth caring about) is relevant.
Governor Inslee finally got a climate bill passed. As much as I wish it had been sooner, at the very least it looks like they learned some lessons from those who have gone before, such as California.
Believe it or not, the rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes. Shocking, I know.
How parking destroys cities. I recently realized that in Olympia at least you can tell where downtown ends by looking for surface parking in a satellite photo. There’s a surprisingly sharp line (north of Legion, for example) where parking lots suddenly take up the majority of space, and beyond that there’s really not many places you would want to go except for lunch places catering to office buildings.
I just learned about the Downs-Thompson Paradox in this video. Unfortunately, close reading of the wikipedia article leads me to think that its application is more narrow than I would hope, and that it probably doesn’t apply at all in places without well-developed mass transit.
I had never really considered why the Idaho stop/bicycle safety stop is, well, safer, but this video does a good job or demonstrating it. Bonus points for making the case that if you need to put up a sign, there’s a good chance that you actually need better design.
Apparently, Amazon is famous for its document culture. When I TA’ed Symbolic Logic, it always struck me as odd how many people skipped the required reading. From where I stand now, it seems that while some people very clearly don’t bother with the reading, a lot of people simply struggle with absorbing complicated written material and it is important to present over multiple channels. That being said, scheduling the required reading into the meeting time could definitely be worth it.
It’s tempting to say that Americans don’t care about rail, so it’s good to see that rail is actually getting better in some places
I like the idea of a sprawl tax, though I have no idea of how it would be calculated.
There is some (justified) concern out there about bicycle infrastructure being just another tendril of gentrification, so it’s good to see a study showing that bike lanes aren’t associated with the displacement of BIPOC and low income people. I’d like to see more studies like this, but it’s a good start.
“What spam is to communication, scams are to marketplaces.” Even if I were okay with Amazon’s labor practices, the sheer number of knock-offs on the site are starting to render it useless.
Apparently marijuana legalization is having a negative effect on traffic safety. Not terribly surprising given our culture’s permissive stance on drinking and driving or texting. If you really want to prevent these sorts of accidents, walkable neighborhoods (if you can easily walk to the pub, you probably aren’t going to get in a car accident on the way) and transit (you’d have to really miss your stop to do much damage) are definitely the way to go.
One of the consequences of suburbs generating so little tax revenue that they can’t fund their own infrastructure is that they effectively end up being subsidized by apartments and other higher-density land uses.
I can’t imagine these happening any time soon, and they’re kind of hard to wrap my head around, but I have to agree that banning certain kinds of turns for automobiles would probably make things a lot safer for everyone. I remember back in the early 2000’s my friend Ken and I spent a day driving around Anchorage without making any left hand turns. At first it seemed like it would be difficult and perhaps dangerous, given that the roads really weren’t set up for it, but it didn’t take too long for it to become trivially easy. Maybe we should form a “leage of rightists” who voluntarily forego left turns whenever possible?
How bad was the Pacific Northwest Heatwave of 2021? Well, it has made me reconsider my stance on air conditioning. We are getting a quote for a heat pump in a few weeks. Granted, heat pumps aren’t the same thing as AC and we probably wouldn’t be considering it if it didn’t have the strong possibility of reducing our winter heating costs/energy usage, but this is still a big change.

Media

Again, the outdoor kitchen/living room/theater was an excellent investment. During the heat wave we would wait until the temperature outside dropped below 100° turn on a fan, and watch stuff until the house was cool enough to sleep in. Here’s (some of) what I read, watched, and listened to:

Infinitum by Tim Fielder was an excellent afro-futurist graphic novel.
The Miracle Pill by Peter Walker was an excellent tour of how we should be more active. I especially appreciated how his solution isn’t “Everyone should go to the gym!” but rather that we should make sure that our built environment encourages activity, whether it be making the stairs accessible and inviting or planting trees between buildings to make it more pleasant to walk.
We watched Biggest Little Farm on Kanopy, which was really good. In particular, it made me appreciate how as our edible landscaping has grown in, we are seeing more and more wildlife that we weren’t seeing before, from some large garter snakes to a beautiful Western Tanager.
We watched The Mitchell’s vs the Machines again as my movie pick for Father’s Day. It holds up and was just as fun the second time around. Probably my favorite movie of the year, so far.
Toradora! is an adorable anime series with short episodes (~24 minutes) currently available on Netflix.
I’ve been reading a lot of stuff from Strong Towns, and so decided to give Chuck Mahron’s first book, Bottom-Up Revolution, a listen. I definitely didn’t agree with everything in there, but it does present a good way of looking at our cities.
I kind of expected Netflix’s Wish Dragon to be a rip-off of Aladdin, but it ended up feeling pretty original and far exceeding expectations.

The F-150 Lightning: A Little Heavier, A Lot More Damage

2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

It’s well established that humans are bad at exponential math (the wheat and chessboard problem dates back to at least the year 1256). So when I read this passage in Slate about the issues with the new electric Ford F-150, I took note (emphasis mine):

Finally, there is the question of infrastructure. The impact of even a superheavy passenger vehicle like a Hummer pales in comparison with an 18-wheeler; it’s not like our bridges are going to collapse when all the F-150s turn electric. The problem is less that heavier vehicles will wear down the roads at a slightly faster pace, but more—since their owners are freed from gas taxes—they won’t be paying for it.

To be clear, I agree with the main point of the article, that having super-heavy passenger vehicles on the road causes a lot of problems (and the F-150 is a passenger vehicle for most people most of the time–how many pristine trucks do you see driving around without anything in the bed or attached to the hitch?). However, “wear down the roads at a slightly faster pace” is misleading at best. Highway agencies in the US generally use the “fourth power rule” as a rule-of-thumb for predicting how vehicle weight affects maintenance costs. What this means is that road wear increases with the vehicle’s axle weight raised to the fourth power. So, if a vehicle is twice as heavy (and has the same number of axles), it will do 16 times as much damage to the roads.

The Slate article says that the truck weighs 35% more than its gas-powered counterparts, which doesn’t really sound like a lot, but when you raise it to the fourth power (1.35^4), you get 3.32, which means that we should expect the electric F-150 to do more than 3 times the damage to the roads than its gas-powered counterpart. I don’t think that most people would consider tripling to be a “slight increase”.

This gets us to the second part of the paragraph, where the author mentions that the trucks won’t be paying their fair share. This is true, of course, but it forgets the current reality that their gas-powered siblings don’t pay their fair share, either. The gas tax currently pays for less than half of highway and road costs, with the rest coming from general funds and bond revenue (which probably aren’t going to be paid by future gas taxes anyway, regardless of their intent), and gas tax revenue is disproportionately spent on highways (the more local the road, the more of its funding comes from the general fund). The adoption of electric vehicles will have a huge impact on highway and road funding, but it’s not like the system was doing fine until they came along, the Highway Trust Fund has been reliant on regular infusions of cash from the general fund for a while now. Switching to electric vehicles is just adding stress to an already broken system.

So What?

I imagine that you may be reading this and agreeing with me, but thinking that it’s pretty abstract. By my logic, a heavier pickup truck that probably won’t be a significant chunk of the market for a while pales in comparison to the impact of people purchasing heavier vehicles in general (there are a ton of SUVs out there and pickup trucks outsold cars for the first time ever in 2020). Our roads haven’t eroded out of existence. But we haven’t been spending money on improving them, either. For example, I just stumbled upon the Thurston County Transportation Benefit District, which is appropriately shortened to TC-TBD since it appears that in 6 years they have yet to raise any money or start any projects (in essence, what they will actually do is To Be Determined). Here’s their answer to the question “What happens if no funding is approved?” (from the FAQ).

Roads will continue to deteriorate as insufficient funding is available for pavement preservation; the County’s neighborhood traffic calming program will continue to be unfunded; and fewer roads will have fog lines, a proven, low cost means of reducing traffic accidents.

The Olympia Transportation Master Plan paints a similar picture, though they do set aside some money for active transportation projects (which will be finished in about 137 years, if none of that money needs to be diverted to road maintenance).

Is vehicle weight solely to blame for this persistent funding shortfall? Certainly not. After all, we could choose to increase funding. Unfortunately, increasing usage fees like the gas tax is generally considered to be political suicide, and here in Washington, with our regressive tax structure, finding other money is difficult. It seems reasonable, then, that the trend of increasing vehicle weight is going to continue to break our infrastructure funding system.

Won’t things get bad enough that we are compelled to fix the system?

In a word, no.

Since vehicles are getting heavier and people in the US seem to be allergic to higher usage fees (I-976 passed here in Washington, the federal gas tax hasn’t been raised since the early ’90s, the TC-TBD has been unwilling to implement a county car tab fee, etc.), usage fees are going to cover a decreasing share of road maintenance. Roads are essential, so we will find a way to pay for them, which means that money is going to come out of the general fund.

Spending money from the general fund isn’t the worst thing in the world (after all, there is a societal benefit to a road network), but if it causes the funding to be delayed, that will end up costing us a lot more money in the end. A lot of road maintenance consists of patching small cracks and holes in the pavement, if we defer this due to lack of funding those cracks and holes won’t get patched, allowing them to worsen. Not doing this small maintenance shortens the lifespan of the road, since the road surface is what is protecting the roadbed, and once the roadbed gets damaged, you can’t just resurface the road (which is already expensive) but are instead looking at road reconstruction (which is as expensive as it sounds).

In short, electric vehicles pose a two-pronged threat, in that they will cause a lot more wear on our roads and that we appear to be unwilling to update our road funding. I’m picking on the F-150 here, but the same logic can be applied to any electric vehicle from Tesla to Hummer (which will weigh something like 9,000 pounds), and will hold true until we figure out how to make an electric vehicle that doesn’t need 1,000+ pounds of batteries.

Notes

To be clear, I’m all for electric vehicles. I think that spending more (even a lot more) on roads is a small price to pay for, you know, having a liveable planet. I do take issue with the idea of them being thought of as a complete solution, but if you’re going to have cars and trucks, they should be electric.
For more discussion about how roads are paid for, Who Pays for Roads by U.S. PIRG is a good start.
To be fair, the “fourth power rule” is a rule of thumb. According to a research paper on Repricing Highway Pavement Deterioration, “Depending on the definition of pavement damage (loss of serviceability, roughness, rutting or cracking) the appropriate power ranges from 3 to 6 or more.” This means that the increased wear from the vehicle could well be lower than what I listed above (1.35^3 is only 2.46), but it could also be a lot higher (1.35^6 is 6.05). Given this context, I think that the fourth power rule sounds reasonable. That being said, I would like to see newer research on the topic (the rule was based on studies done in the 1960’s).
This is the same reason why the argument that people on bicycles don’t pay their own way. If my bike weighs 250 lbs when I’m riding it, and I pay, say $0.01 per mile (or about $25 per year), for it to be fair, the driver of a car that weighs 2500 lbs should be paying about $100 per mile (since a vehicle that is 10x heavier is causing about 10,000x the wear on the road), or about $1,400,000 per year (the average American drives about 14,000 miles per year), which is absurd. To get down to a reasonable level, say $1,400 per year (1,000 times less), a person on a bicycle who is charged at the same rate would be paying $0.00001 per mile, or about $0.025 per year for someone who rides 2,500 miles. I’m happy to pitch in a nickel towards road maintenance every other year to pay for the wear and tear I put on the local roads, but it might just be easier to deduct it out of the taxes which I already pay for roads (since less than half of highway and road spending comes from user fees–including gas tax).

Inside Tom's Head - May 2021

2021-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

May was a heck of a month. I continued my trend of running behind on these posts, but I did manage to write some stuff for this site that I haven’t posted yet (I’m hoping to send at least some of it out in June).

Two things happen every May, yardwork and the Bicycle Commuter Challenge. This was an ambitious year on both counts. We built a final raised bed in our garden (the open space is now all claimed), which took some doing. It was also the year that I decided to make another attempt at 300 miles in 31 days, one of my long-term goals (it kind of felt like cheating, since all rides counted, but whatever). Combined with work being just brutal for the past few weeks, and I haven’t done much writing.

In any case, enough whining about all that, I’m going to try to get this posted so that I can get some of the other stuff I’ve written recently posted, too.

New Stuff Elsewhere

One of the things that prevents governments from making roads human-scale is that fire departments need them to be large enough to accomodate huge fire engines. This is in spite of the fact that most calls that fire departments go out on are not for fires, but ironically for things like car crashes that are exacerbated by speeding that those same wide roads encourage. It’s starting to look like fire departments are starting to consider smaller vehicles, though.
We don’t need a moonhshot for faux burgers, we need to hold big meat accountable.
As bad as the police violence in Portland was in 2020, I can only imagine how much worse it would have been if they hadn’t been under federal supervision since 2012. As it was, they did nothing to convince me of their good intentions
Agroforestry (food forests) is really neat.
Why would we expect police to make our steets safer when they repeatedly demonstrate that they consider themselves to be above the law? I mean, I understand that off-duty police speed, roll through stop signs, and generally act like everyone else (except for domestic violence, which police officers report committing at a rate 2-4x the general population), but the willingness to engage in street racing in squad cars is something else entirely.
A short video of Representative Katie Porter demonstrating how ridiculous the claim that drug prices need to be high to fund R&D is.
All of the cycling deaths in the US during 2020.
Some good news for the climate. Since one of these is coming from oil company investors, I’m more hopeful than usual.
A look at how Germany does housing and why it works better than the current system in the US.
Researchers have found a coronavirus that can infect humans from dogs, although they haven’t yet been able to find human-to-human spread. I’m taking this as a good sign rather than another reason to worry, since it means that we are looking for these rather than just waiting. I think that thanks to all of the virus research that we have done in the past ~year, COVID-19 will be the last viral pandemic that we are wholly unprepared for.

Media consumption

I’ve been reading more of The Shadow Campaigns series by Django Wexler, Shadows of Elysium (a short story that takes place between books 2 & 3) and The Price of Valor. It wasn’t so long ago that I turned my nose up at flintlock/musket/whatever fantasy, saying it wasn’t really fantasy, but I’m glad to have dropped that particular bit of snobbery, since it means I get to enjoy stuff like this.
We watched The Mitchells vs the Machines on Netflix, and it was fantastic. We’re going to have to watch it again, since I definitely missed stuff on account of laughing too hard.
We watched Shadow & Bone, also on Netflix. It was pretty solid, seeming to lean hard into teen fiction tropes but then doing something interesting. I’m looking forward to the next season.
I purchased another pass for the Bicycle Film Festival (New York this time) in order to watch Together We Cycle, a documentary about how Dutch cities became so bicycle friendly. It was interesting, but I was really hoping for a more structured narrative. It could be that I’ve been watching a lot of Not Just Bikes on YouTube and I was looking for a more technical look at things.
I reread Daemon, which holds up surprisingly well. I’m looking forward to a reread of the other book in the series, which I’ll probably get to in June.
Disney+ has really been hitting it out of the park with their original content. We enjoyed the heck out of The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers (which had a bit of a family-friendly Ted Lasso vibe) and are really liking what they are doing with The Bad Batch. I’m won’t be surprised if Loki doesn’t turn out to be lots of fun, too.

Inside Tom's Head - April 2021

2021-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

April was a good month.

We’ve been getting lots of overdue house stuff done, and are in the process of finishing the work we did on our back yard last year. Most notably, we purchased a projector, and being able to watch movies on a big screen in our back yard has been fantastic.

I also have my bike pretty much set up (for now, I’m taking it down to Portland to get it fit in May). I read The All-Road Bike Revolution, which I wish had been available years ago, since it helped dispel some of my misconceptions about what actually matters on a bicycle. I also got some cool new pedals, which I absolutely love. Finally, I’ve started carrying my tools in a frame bag, which has reduced the weight in my backpack, quite a bit. I’ll probably be investing in some swanky new bags in the near future.

New Stuff Around Here

I’ve been trying to get away from Google stuff for a while now, but since I use an Android phone, I haven’t been pursuing it as much as I would like. One of the things that has been on my radar for a while now is Google’s FeedBurner service. I don’t really need it for RSS, but it was really handy to allow people to subscribe for email updates.

However, Google just announced that they will be “modernizing” the service, which means getting rid of email subscriptions. I have until July, but sometime in the next month or two. I will be moving over to another service for email updates. I’ll post about it when I do, but heads up that you may be receiving some weird updates in your email (if you’re subscribed).

New Stuff Elsewhere

Focusing exclusively on electric vehicles isn’t going to fix the climate. That isn’t to say that it’s not an important piece, but ultimately we need to drive less, and that means that we need to make sure that our infrastructure supports other methods of transportation.
If we want to fix our childcare system, a good start would be to make it so that it pays enough to provide a living
Light rail is really cool, I agree, but if you’re serious about moving people around without cars, you should be looking at busses.
I love Signal, and have been meaning to start donating to them, but now that they are trying to integrate a cryptocurrency scheme into their service I’m not so sure what the future of the service is. Another take on why this change is problematic.
It’s time to stop worrying about cleaning so much. Of course, I say that as someone who still washes their groceries, but our cleaning regimen now consists mostly of letting stuff sit out in our garage pantry for a day before bringing it in and washing produce (which we were doing before the pandemic).
If you want people on bicycles to use bike lanes, you should stop putting those lanes in the door zone.
So first Harley made the electric motorcycles used in Long Way Up, now they are making e-bikes? I’m both really excited to see how mainstream this is getting but also find the culture that Harley has built to be problematic. However, I think that the take of motorcycles being about the freedom of the open road and e-bikes being about the freedom of city streets is a good one.
A pretty compelling argument that we should focus on building a passenger rail culture with the infrastructure that we have now rather than betting it all on high speed rail. I have to, reluctantly, agree (I love the idea of HSR after all). At first I was disappointed that the article didn’t go into what that might look like (for example, youth passes), but then I realized that the situation is bad enough that almost any improvement would be a huge step forward.
File under “more backward than you realized”. Apparently, on top of holding out on moving to a modern measurement system, the US can’t even be bothered to standardize the foot. Relevant meme.
Some interesting thoughts on how transitions affect attention and perception. The video linked in the post is fascinating and well worth a watch, too (Star Wars did some cool stuff).
Why is the US so bad at building public transit? Lots of reasons. Fortunately, many of them can be improved.
The Olympia Time blog makes a good case why we should take down the statue of Gov. John R. Rogers. In a discussion with a friend a while back about taking down confederate statues, he asked me where it would end, if I would be okay with removing statues of the founding fathers. I was a little less certain back then, but now my feeling is that maybe we shouldn’t have statues of individuals in public places at all. After all, I can’t think of a better way to portray someone as “good” or “heroic” while still avoiding any nuance or discussion about them. Nothing worthwhile in history was accomplished by one person working alone (contrary to what statues would have you think). Statues can go in museums, for public spaces I’d rather have statues of unidentified people or some other way of symbolizing the events and accomplishments that we want to celebrate.
Sometimes it really seems as though the people I would most want the police to protect me from are . . . the police. I’m a big fan of body worn cameras for law enforcement, but their very necessity is an indictment of the institution. Imagine if, say, teachers were so bad at their jobs that we needed them to be under constant surveillance. Before it got to that point, the teachers whose actions were prompting the complaints would be fired, and if that didn’t work, the school administration would also go. With the police, however, this is not what happens. My preference would be for us to stop thinking of the police as a general-purpose solution to things like mental health, drug addiction, and traffic violence, and instead have people like health professionals, social workers, and transportation employees deal with those issues. There is almost certainly some role for the police in our society (investigating violent crime, for example), but I believe that it is much smaller than their current incarnation. So long as they remain our sole means of dealing with stuff, though, we should have them wear cameras at the very least, since doing so apparently makes them less likely to rely on violence.
On the subject of police, here’s a department that seems to think that their job is to encourage people who are driving to take videos of people on bicycles who are creating traffic issues. Interestingly, there is no corresponding call for people to take videos of bad drivers, even though last time I checked, the rising rates of pedestrian fatalities weren’t a result of people on bicycles riding pedestrians down.
I’m a big fan of bringing back traditional crops, since they are often well-adapted to their locations (and thus require fewer chemical inputs), help to diversify our food system, and support healthy cultures (see: the Maya Nut), so this article about bringing back breadfruit is pretty interesting.
I’m generally a fan of automated traffic enforcement (after all, traffic cameras rarely kill people during traffic stops), but here’s some well reasoned opposition that differs from the usual concerns about privacy. I do think that good road design (that doesn’t rely on enforcement) is almost always superior to enforcement (traditional or automated), but the big question is about how we get there.

Media

As mentioned above, I picked up The All-Road Bike Revolution after looking for a bicycle magazine to subscribe to and seeing it listed on the Bicycle Quarterly shop. It does a really good job of explaining the things that my mechanic has been trying to tell me for years now. I wish that I had read it years ago (never mind that it just came out last year). If you ride a bike (or want to) you should read it, too.
I read Dark Lord Clementine to my family and it was fantastic. I really hope that we get to spend more time in that world.
I watched The Hummingbird Project on Netflix. By all rights it should have been right up my alley, since I find high-frequency trading to be fascinating (in a negative sense), but in the end it was meh.
It’s been a while since I watched a Spike Lee film, and BlackkKlansman didn’t disappoint. It was insightful and funny, well worth watching, especially in a time where the discussion around police abolition has become mainstream.
Mr. Peabody and Sherman ended up being a solid family film, if you have some time to kill and a Netflix subscription.
I finally got around to watching Columbus. I really enjoyed it, but you’ll have to wait until I write a dedicated post about it for details.
We found Bloodsucking Bastards by looking at what else Pedro Pascal had been in prior to The Mandalorian, and found this delightful HoCom (Horror-Comedy).
Tenet is what you would get if you decided to remake Primer as an action movie. I don’t regret watching it, but I kind of wish that I’d rewatched Primer instead.
The Old Guard, on the other hand, was a solid action film. I’m looking forward to the sequel.
I’ve started listening to The War on Cars podcast and am really loving it. I’m honestly not sure about the title, since it really leans into the whole preaching-to-the-choir thing, but I look forward to each new episode, so whatever.
The Bicycle Film Festival is an example of a fringe benefit of the pandemic. I really enjoyed it, but there’s about 0% chance that I would have actually traveled somewhere to attend. I want more digital-only short film festivals.
I watched Freaky with my partner, and I think that it was the movie that inspired her to coin the phrase HoCom. It was an awesome take on Freaky Friday, and we’ve started watching the director’s other work, including Happy Death Day, which was a fantastic take on Groundhog Day. Now I want to go through and watch all the major time loop movies.
Valley Girl was a lot of fun.
I read the follow-up to Gideon the Ninth, Harrow the Ninth. It was really weird (which is saying something, considering the first book), and took me about half the book to really get into, at which point I really enjoyed it. I wasn’t as taken with it as with the first book, but I’ll read the third entry in the series when it’s available.
I finished Django Wexler’s Wells of Sorcery trilogy Siege of Rage and Ruin. It was a satisfying conclusion to the series, but I didn’t love it in the same way as his Forbidden Library series. I’m really impressed by his range, in that each series feels very different. Now I need to finish up The Shadow Campaigns series, and read Ashes of the Sun looks fun.

Fix the MUTCD

2021-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

I was planning on posting my monthly update for April today, but then I realized that tomorrow (May 14th) is the final day for public comment on the proposed revision to the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD). The MUTCD is the document that determines not only how signs look, but where crosswalks can go, and where the rule that maximum speed should be set at 85th percentile of actual speed driven is found). It has been more than a decade since it was last updated, and may be another decade or more before it is updated again. If you are a person who walks, cycles, or drives in the US (so, everyone), you have an interest in making sure that this document reflects what you want from our roads. There are a lot of articles about the MUTCD out there right now, but to save you a web search, you might want to start with Streetsblog or America Walks. If you have a few minutes today or tomorrow and don’t know where to start, America Walks has you covered. If you’re curious, here’s what I wrote in addition to the template:

As a driver, pedestrian, and cyclist, I feel that our roads are designed with speed, not safety, in mind. When driving, I feel the constant tension between the maximum designated speed on a road and the speed that the road design encourages. Since most roads around me have differing speed limits but nearly identical design, a lot of traffic goes in excess of the posted speed limits. When I or other drivers attempt to drive the posted speed limit, other drivers react with aggressive driving (tailgating, honking, overtaking in areas of limited visibility). I have come to realize that the MUTCD plays a role in how roads are designed and how speed limits are set, and would ask that you adopt standards that are designed to create roads that encourage drivers to travel at the appropriate speed rather than relying on signs to do so.

As a cyclist, I have been hit by drivers who are turning against a red light, who have run stop signs, and who have made an unsignaled turn through a bike lane. In addition, I am frequently told by drivers that I do not belong on the road, been spit upon, and have had items thrown at me. I have had to explain to my 8 year old why drivers are yelling at us when riding on residential roads. Most recently, I have noticed that where a residential road goes from 25 to 35 mph (without any change in the road design), I am subject to much more abuse in the 35 mph segment. I would ask that you remove the 85% rule for speed limits, set standards that encourage non-arterial roads to signal slower speeds to drivers through their structure, and create signage that clearly states that bicycles are legal road users in those locations where the laws provide for that.

As a pedestrian, I deal with the issues created for drivers and cyclists. With high speeds and lack of infrastructure making it difficult and unpleasant to walk near my house, with cyclists riding on the sidewalk in areas where they feel unsafe riding in the road due to lack of or inadequate bicycle infrastructure (riding in unprotected bicycle lane on a 40 mph road does not feel safe). The effect of this is that when walking I feel like an afterthought at best and a nuisance at worst. In areas where there is good infrastructure for walking, it often sounds like that has been achieved in spite of the MUTCD rather than because of it.

Given that a decreasing proportion of road spending comes from gas tax and other user fees, and much of local road spending comes from the general fund, even when I am not driving I am still responsible for paying for roads, I shouldn’t be made to feel like a second-class citizen when I am using them other than driving. As a driver, I want roads to reinforce good behavior and discourage bad behavior. However, from what I have read, it sounds like the MUTCD is focused primarily on vehicle throughput, meaning that driving is unpleasant, walking is inconvenient, and bicycling is dangerous. This is supported by the data showing that an increasing proportion of traffic fatalities are pedestrians and cyclists who have been hit by cars, even as overall fatalities decrease.

I believe that the people who have worked on this version of the MUTCD are doing their best and I appreciate the time that they have put into it. However, I have to wonder if the goals and objectives that they have been given reflect the realities of our present situation. I am asking you to take a step back and assess what the desired outcome of this document is, what sort of infrastructure we want and need. I know that this is a big ask, since so much work has been put in already, but if the choice is to not do that work now, I worry that the next time the MUTCD comes due for a revision it will be with another decade of data on deaths and injuries that could have been prevented.

Sincerely,
Tom Dillon

I’ll plan on posting my monthly update in the next day or two, it can wait. Better streets can’t.

Inside Tom's Head - March 2021

2021-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

I don’t really have a whole lot to say about March, as it’s all getting a bit blurry. I spent a lot of it focused on my new bike (more about that in a future post), and the rest has faded on account of me writing this halfway through April. This is the second update in a row that has been a bit late. I’m optimistic that things will improve, though, since I just set up linux (Gallium) on the old chromebook that I keep at work, which should make it easier for me to stay up to date on stuff.

Without further ado, here’s the rest of my monthly update:

New stuff elsewhere

I don’t follow the WNBA, but when I see it in the news, it’s usually because they are doing something progressive, in this case because a player is now a part owner of a team after its racist owner was ousted.
Charlie stross on how we are currently building our own demon haunted world.
UBI is definitely worth a shot. I’m excited to see how it does with a large-scale implementation, but for now stuff like what they are doing in Stockton is very promising.
Why crime isn’t the question and Police aren’t the answer. A bit at the end, “if police were not willing to enforce wealth hoarding, people who own things could not maintain their claims to land”, doesn’t sit quite right with me. Although a justice system is definitely necessary for wealth inequality like we see in the US, I’m not sure how to disentangle that from basic property rights. Ultimately, although I believe that regulation can curb the worst excesses, inequality is a fundamental feature of capitalism, so we’re probably stuck with it until we move on to the next system (which I hope is better).
An argument to end the gas tax based on it being racist and regressive. I’m conflicted about this one. I am opposed to regressive taxation in general, but on the other hand I want a planet to live on, so . . . However, if we could remove it and replace it with a carbon tax that wasn’t used to fund highway construction, I think that I could get behind it. On the other hand, removing the revenue from gas tax might be a good way to reduce highway spending. I guess where I’m going to land on this one is that the gas tax should either be increased or removed, but that the current setup is bad.
I had no idea that bumblebees had been commercialized, or that they were causing problems for agriculture
I’m glad to see that the younger generation are just as excited about high-speed rail as I am.
We should cover California’s aqueducts with solar panels. I have to wonder if we couldn’t do something similar in the PNW, where warming streams are causing problems for salmon. It would be awesome if we could cool them down while also providing green electricity.
If you talk to any urban planning wonk for long enough, they will eventually get to the topic of parking requirements for new developments. I haven’t really heard a good argument against getting rid of minimum parking requirements, but it’s exciting to see what happens when a city actually implements it. The effects are more nuanced than some would guess, but promising nonetheless.
Yes, Other Countries Do Housing Better, Case 1: Japan. There’s some interesting stuff in here.pparently housing prices have remained stable since 2000, which sounds amazing in comparison to the constantly rising prices in many places of the US. The article doesn’t really address how a centralized zoning regime could be problematic, but then again I have a hard time picturing it being worse than the overt racism that has permeated US zoning policy. Another issue is that, as the article points out, houses are demolished much sooner in Japan than in the US. I have to wonder about the ecological cost of rebuilding, but on the other hand if you are rebuilding to efficient modern standards, the energy savings might well be more than enough to offset the rebuilding costs.
I like a lot of things about Japan, but it is important to remember that they (like any culture) have issues too, in this case, their response to a nuclear reactor meltdown.
Now I feel old. We love our dining room table, but apparently that isn’t cool any more.
Vice has a really interesting writeup of how food delivery has enabled virtual brands. One thing that I’m surprised they didn’t cover is health inspections. If a restaurant gets a bad score on their health inspection and I choose not to eat there, I don’t want to order from a “different restaurant” only to have the food coming out of that same gross kitchen.
Apparently, there are at least $600,000,000,000 in unpaid environmental damages from fossil fuels annually. This is one of my main issues with allowing externalities of this sort. If we want individuals to make better decisions, we should give them better information. In the case of fossil fuels, including cleanup and mitigation in the price would be a good start.
Although it is tempting to think that some big project will solve our problems, this is often not the case, since large projects have a tendency to get delayed, scaled down, or aborted mid-process. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t push for them (we’ll never get high-speed rail incrementally, for example), but there is so much that we can do with tiny changes, small improvements, and lots of little bets.

Media

March was a slow month for reading, but I did finally get to Gideon the Ninth, which was a breath of fresh air. I had some issues with it (I’m generally against empire), but had so much fun that I barely noticed the things I didn’t like. As of this writing, I’m reading the sequel, and will probably write more about it next month.
We finally got around to watching A Cat in Paris, which had a couple of blemishes but which was really fun overall. We watched it on Kanopy, which is the video streaming service that our local library uses (and yours might, too).

Inside Tom's Head - Februrary 2021

2021-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

I enjoyed February. It feels like we are inching towards getting enough vaccination to start resuming parts of normal life, but the vaccine rollout will need to accelerate quite a bit if there’s to be any hope of social gatherings, but I’m optimistic.

I ordered a new bike in January that was supposed to ship mid-February. I just found out this week that it isn’t coming, which was unfortunate. I really liked that bike (and am not a fan of how the new paint looks. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, as far as I can tell, just a bad combination of the pandemic bike boom (and corresponding shortage), a new version coming out, and an extremely picky consumer (that would be me). I think that my mechanic and I have something figured out, and it’s been a lot of fun digging into some of the more technical bicycle stuff that I hadn’t really paid attention to before. I’m hoping that sometime in the next month I’ll have cause to write up a narrative of my Surly Pacer and maybe something about a new bike.

New Stuff Around Here

I wrote up some thoughts about Bicycle/Race, by Adonia E. Lugo, PhD, where I talked about how I had never really considered the unhoused community to be bicyclists even though they clearly are. Shortly after posting it, I ran across an article about how many unhoused folks rely on bicycles as a lifeline. My impression is that a lot of them already have a access to bicycles, but probably lack access to infrastructure that would make riding more viable: maintenance facilities and tools, spare tubes and patch kits, helmets, locks, etc. This feels like a solvable problem to me.

New Stuff Elsewhere

I watched the Social Dilemma on Netflix, and although I liked it at the time, a month or two later, it didn’t really make much of an impact on me. Certainly not on the level of Cal Newport’s book, Digital Minimalism. I might have guessed that it has something to do with my appreciation for the Amish approach to technology (does this piece of technology move us closer to our goal?), but LibrarianShipwreck makes a pretty compelling case that it might just be because the film is inherently demobilizing: You, the consumer, don’t have any responsibility to fix this, just trust the Silicon Valley folks (never mind that they made the mess in the first place).
An interesting look at the things that actually improve the quality of software. It may be tempting to think that since bugs are technical problems that they have technical solutions such as coding in a different language or using different tools, but it is likely that companies would get a lot more benefit out of supporting coders and making the workplace less awful.
Apparently some people are up in arms that Washington state is delaying some highway projects to free up funds to fulfill court-ordered habitat remediation. I have a hard time getting too worked up about it, but I would hope that all of the politicians getting upset about it put that same level of passion into ensuring that their constituants have internet access.
Emmett O’Connell has a brief history of anti-corporatism in Washington state and some thoughts about what that might mean for the future of the Republican party.
Kelp farming has a future as part of the climate solution.
Apparently the organization that sets the standards for governmental accounting classifies roads as assets. Of course, in a very real sense roads are assets for communities, but financially, not so much. You can’t trade or sell them, most of them don’t generate revenue, and they require upkeep and periodic replacement. This seems like a recipe for a budgeting nightmare (as we keep on building new roads without addressing how to pay for their maintenance–or maintenance on our existing roads)
Some ideas on how to fixi the legacy of racist housing policy in the US.
A long-form back and forth about how Tumwater was affected by the I-5. It starts with a comment that I didn’t catch somewhere, then Emmett O’Connell wrote up a post about how Tumwater was already in trouble prior to the I-5. User steve-the-kid responds that it’s only fair to say it has prevented it from ever coming back. There was probably more to it that I missed, but I loved what I saw of it.
A list of Netrunner cards whose flavor text is ruined by doing too much. It’s pretty telling that most of the flavor text listed could be fixed by just deleting the last sentence or two.
An interesting interview with Sacha Baron Cohen about the ethics of his incognito filmmaking.
Holland shows how to put pedestrians first in winter. When I saw the title, I failed to see how another country doing a better job at maintaining infrastructure than the US was news, but Holland, Michigan, is another story.
When we built our house we were bummed out that it didn’t have gas hookups. It turns out that our wanting a gas stove was probably the result of a long-running gas industry marketing campaign.
Seattle’s Democracy Voucher program is pretty exciting.
Apparently, internet advertising is even creepier than previously imagined. Get an ad blocker, folks.
The new USPS truck design is seriously adorable. But it’s safety features are what I find really exciting. I really hope that this starts a trend for delivery vehicles. I almost got taken out by a logging truck rolling through a stop sign the other day, and one of the scariest parts was that the driver never saw me, and probably didn’t hear me yelling at them. If they had hit me there is a good chance that they wouldn’t have even noticed and just kept driving. Granted, a delivery van is very different from a logging truck, but not if you’re a kid.
A 99% Invisible episode about the bridge in Austen that accidentally became the home of the largest urban bat colony in the world. Arbitrary decisions can have big impacts, and are where we can have basically free ways of making the world a better place. After all, if we can encourage or discourage bats from living somewhere simply by varying the spacing on a boring piece of infrastructure, imagine what sort of things we could do if we approached everything the same way.
The problem with housing policy is that housing is either affordable or a good investment. By definition, it cannot be both. The US has clearly chosen the latter, and many of our housing issues can be traced back to this fundamental decision (and racism, of course, dig into anything in the US enough, and you’ll eventually run into racism). This reminds me to a couple of my favorite articles about the subject over on Urban Kchoze: Euclidian Zoning and Japanese Zoning.
An article about the solar envelope, or how we should be {designing buildings to deliberately create or prevent shade on adjacent properties](https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/03/solar-oriented-cities-1-the-solar-envelope.html).

Media Consumption

I read Prosper’s Demon by KJ Parker. I loved the story, but am not sure how I feel about the ending.
I finally got around to watching the cargo bike documentary, Motherload. I definitely enjoyed it, but it didn’t really convince me that a cargo bike is for me. It could just be that when my kid was smaller I hauled a bunch of stuff in my Burley trailer, so this wasn’t much of a surprise. If you don’t think that it’s possible to haul stuff with a bike, though, you should give this movie a shot.
I finally read City of Bone and Silence, the sequel to Ship of Smoke and Steel. I really enjoyed it, and will probably get to the final book in the trilogy in April or May.

Thoughts on Bicycle/Race by Adonia E. Lugo, PhD

2021-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

I picked up Bicycle/Race after reading an interview with the author where she talked about the unintended consequences of bicycle infrastructure, namely gentrification. I expected something akin to Bikenomics (they are from the same publisher and the editor for Bicycle/Race, Elly Blue, was the author of Bikenomics), with facts and recommendations about how bicycles fit into social justice movements. What I got was a narrative, with Lugo leading the reader through her youth (and a history of Southern California), to helping to create CicLAvia, to joining then leaving the League of American Bicyclists. There was definitely stuff in the book that I found valuable, but I found the experience jarring, too. Maybe, as a straight white guy, that could be viewed as a win for the book. In any case, here’s some of the stuff I got out of it:

If you’re serious about making bicycling better, you need to also talk about race and class

It’s not immediately obvious that bicycles have anything to do with race. You can buy one for pretty cheap and ride it wherever the heck you want. In fact, they seem like a great tool for empowerment. Then why is it that most cyclists you see are middle aged white men? One possible answer is our society tends to only build cycling infrastructure where they live. While this is definitely part of the reason, I think that it probably has more to do with bicycle culture just not being very friendly to people who aren’t white men. If you want more people to ride bikes, then you need to deal with some of the racist and classist ideas built into the bicycling community.

There are more people who ride bikes than you realize, you’ve just learned to not see them

In the book, Dr. Lugo talks about how there are two mostly non-overlapping groups of people who ride bicycles: affluent (usually white) people who ride for recreation and poor people (often of color) who ride out of necessity. (I’m paraphrasing here, she talks about it with much more nuance.) The first group maps pretty clearly onto who you think of when you think of ‘cyclists’. The second group doesn’t really map onto any defined group for me (which is a problem) but Dr. Lugo refers to them as ‘core cyclists’.

This realization made me feel shame and disappointment in myself, since I work with core cyclists at work. Even though I’ve been thinking and saying for years that people would be better off economically if they rode bikes, I had somehow managed to miss a whole group of people who were right in front of me just because I didn’t think of them as ‘cyclists’.

Vehicular Cycling vs Infrastructure Advocacy is a false dichotomy

Bicycle advocates fall broadly into one of two camps: vehicular cyclists who believe that bicycles should share the road with cars as equals and Infrastructure Advocates who believe that creating bicycle infrastructure is the way to improve and expand bicycling. For a while now I have found myself believing that infrastructure is the future of cycling. Reading Bicycle/Race, I realized that my day-to-day life is that of a vehicular cyclist, which is to say that I do most of my riding on streets without any sort of cycling infrastructure. So how do I square that with my belief that building better infrastructure is the best way to get people on bikes?

The book points out that bicycle infrastructure can have a gentrifying effect that activists need to reckon with (but haven’t). I certainly hadn’t considered it, but find the argument compelling given how many people I know who are struggling with rising rents and would find any sort of gentrification-induced rent increase to be a serious threat. So where does that leave me? I don’t think that vehicular cycling is going to get more people riding (and sharing the road with cars is generally not safe), but it doesn’t look like just building more infrastructure is going to fix everything, either (lack of infrastructure is a barrier to cycling, it is not the barrier).

Maybe bicycle infrastructure is like light rail. I love trains, I think they are cool and I would choose a train over a bus any day of the week. But the fact is that you can buy a lot of buses for the cost of a single light rail line, so if you’re serious about public transit, you’re going to do more good for your community with buses. However, light rail does make sense once you hit a certain threshold of passenger volume or distance (although I’m hoping that very light rail improves the situation). If I look at cycling the same way, I realize that I don’t actually want more cycling infrastructure most places. Even if they put more bike lanes in on my commute to work, I would continue to cut through quiet neighborhoods and side streets where a bike lane makes no sense. Part of this feels similar to how pedestrian infrastructure is actually car infrastructure, it’s needed because pedestrians aren’t the priority in most places. However there are places where infrastructure is needed, primarily in commercial areas and places where few alternate routes exist.

I still have more processing to do after reading this book. Are there areas in my community that have high diversity but low bicycle connectivity? Are there ways that I could use my privilege as a white bicycle rider to support communities of color? Does non-bicycle specific design such as traffic calming have the same gentrifying effect? How can I be more welcoming to people of color who might want to ride? On the other hand, it has given me some ideas of things to work on:

I think that the practical cycling guide makes a lot of sense in the context of this book. I need to get all of the basic routes done so that I can look at other things to add to it.
Is there something that I could do to help core cyclists? Is there a way that I could get lights, tubes, or locks to people who need them (or is there a better way of helping)?
I really liked what Dr. Lugo said about social infrastructure, it makes me want to work on my idea for a practical cycling club.

Inside Tom's Head - January 2021

2021-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

At the beginning of the month, it was an open question whether or not the United States would remain a democracy much longer (though I agree that there is a very strong case to be made that we are actually an oligarchy). Then, a week into 2021, Trump made a coup attempt. It appears that the coup failed in the short term but so long as our politics are dominated by just two parties (who don’t represent us particularly well, anyway) we will continue to see this sort of thing.

On a more optimistic note, I think that we have turned a corner. Even if having Trump gone only means that things are 1% less crazy (and that’s being pretty pessimistic), that’s 1% of our energy that we will spend evening waking hour stressing about it that we can direct towards other things. Even a marginal gain can have big benefits over time.

New Stuff Elsewhere

An interesting look at how we currently do public assistance. There’s possibly enough money in there for a guaranteed income, but at the very least, a good first step would be to switch current benefits over to a simple cash payment.
Is Fonio the Ancient Grain of the Future? I’m all for crop diversity, and this looks pretty cool.
I had never stopped to think about how credit card rebates actually work. Now I feel guilty about it, but I don’t know the solution.
Twitter is dying, apparently. Although I don’t really care about the future of the platform (it will be replaced), I found the discussion of the signs of decline for social media platforms to be really interesting.
Despite the ways in which the 1/6 coup attempt seem novel, it’s worth noting that it has happened before, and there are definite lessons from countries where coup attempts were allowed to repeatedly happen until they eventually succeeded. For the record, I’m not saying that we should crack down on civil liberties, but rather that going easy on the perpetrators because they were acting out of a sense of patriotism (though that is debatable) is not a good idea.
The legacy of vehicular cycling lives on, unfortunately. Although I understand frustration at having to slow down (I like to ride as fast as possible, too), it seems that rather than objecting to cycling infrastructure on the grounds that it encourages people who can’t ride as fast, we should be advocating for better infrastructure (wider protected lanes, bicycle highways, etc.).
Surprising no one (who has been paying attention, at least), police are far more likely to use violence against left-wing protestors than against their right-wing counterparts. In Olympia, photos of police at right wing events usually have an “I’ll be here with you right after I get off work” vibe rather than the “ready to throw down” vibe of police at left wing protests, even though the right-wing groups have a tendency to shoot people.
The average price of a new car topped $40,000 in 2020. For the average monthly payment ($581), I could buy a brand new, really nice, bicycle every 6 months, or just a nice bike every time it needed a tune-up.
As schools in Washington State start to reopen, the science is starting to say that kids play a role in the spread after all.
An interesting article in Logic magazine about how engineers don’t solve problems, just transform them. If you find the plight of Mexico City interesting, 99% Invisible had a good episode about it from a different angle.
As I mentioned last month, the research we did in 2020 will echo for generations. Although I’m skeptical of the idea that this may be the last pandemic we face, I do believe that it will be the last viral pandemic that we face unprepared.
It’s good that Amtrak is getting the Defiance Point Bypass up and running again. I’m still upset that Positive Train Control hasn’t been implemented everywhere, though. Then again, capitalism has a tendency to fight anything that would prioritize safety over profit, so no big surprise. Of course, the elephant in the room is why we don’t mandate a top speed for public and private vehicles, given that speed is one of the main determiners of injury in a crash and the average citizen shouldn’t ever need to go 110mph on the highway in their Toyota.
We get most of our groceries through Thrive and Safeway these days. In general, we have had much better luck with Safeway than with stores that use Instacart (in our area, Safeway uses employees for grocery delivery), but it looks like Instacart is also anti-union, if you needed another reason to avoid them.
It looks like rural broadband is one of the issues that could fracture the political parties, since republicans tend to be anti-infrastructure (except highways?) but rural voters desperately need better internet connection that the monopolies will likely never provide, regardless of how much money we give them to do it.
We love our election induction stove, and yet I keep on talking to people lusting after gas ranges. Well, it turns out that gas appliances are a bad idea.
A really interesting interview with Devin Michelle Bunten on the Densely Speaking podcast about her paper where she looked at the societal costs of parking. Although this might sound like a boring topic, they went about the research in an interesting way, showing (some of) the societal costs of free parking by looking at how livable a city might be without cars. Densely Speaking is becoming one of my favorite podcasts. It tends towards the wonky side of things (although to be fair, the title gives you a good idea of what you’re in for), and I appreciate the amount of research that the hosts put into their topics.
Boise is going to start testing self-driving scooters. The basic idea is that they work like current scooters, but are able to park themselves or to be summoned. This is exactly the sort of autonomous vehicle we should be thinking about, since it seems unlikely that a 50 pound scooter traveling without a passenger at 5mph will be responsible for many fatalities.
The ongoing legacy of Initiative 456 and why we should pass HB 1172. I don’t really have a lot to add to this, but I’m all for finding and removing racist laws that are still on the books.

Media

I watched Wolfwalkers with my family. It was amazing, and I’m really glad to see that the studio behind it, Cartoon Saloon, looks like it will continue on its current path.
I started reading Bicycle/Race by Adonis E. Lugo, PhD - “Stuff wasn’t what made me a person, although without inheriting money from the family property I might not have had the breathing room to figure that out.”
I read Angel of Crows by Katherine Addison (author of The Goblin Emperor, one of my favorite books). This book was very different from Goblin Emperor, but excellent in its own way. I loved what Addison does with the Sherlock story, and I really appreciate how this book was just flat-out fun but also didn’t shy away from saying important stuff. Highly recommended.
I continue to play a RingFit Adventure most days. I’m really enjoying it, even when it’s hard.

Inside Tom's Head - December 2020

2021-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

That’s it, December is over and January is here, bringing with it an end to 2020 (although some may disagree). This is the part where I say “good riddance” and talk about how much 2020 sucked. Welp, I’m going to take a page from Donald Robertson’s How to Think Like a Roman Emperor and not do that. After all, very little of what happened this past year bore even a passing resemblance to something that I could control, and one of my goals is to not let things that I can’t control dictate my happiness. Instead, how about:

So, that happened. Where do we go from here?

The answer to that question is, thankfully, pretty short: we adapt to the situation (which for me includes putting on a mask and staying physically distant from others) and continue to figure out how we can use our finite time on this planet to improve things.

Now that we have that out of the way, there are a couple of things that are on my mind as I look back on the past year:

I believe that we will look back on 2020 as the year in which our species had the equivalent of a moonshot for virus research. There’s a lot we don’t know about viruses, but I’m guessing that we know a heck of a lot more than we did a year ago. If a decade from now vaccines aren’t our only good tool to deal with them, it will likely be at least in part due to the research we did this year.
2020 is the year that Work From Home will become a Thing. Many of the reasons for not doing it have proved to be less than convincing in the face of it actually working pretty well. I don’t find the idea of permanently working from home to be that appealing, but I could see someone like my partner doing it 3-4 days a week long-term and 1 day a week is good for me. If the average worker is able to work from home 1 day per week, then that is something like 26 hours per year of unpaid time that they get back (assuming a 15 minute commute) to spend with their family, on their hobbies, or whatever, really. This has the potential to be huge, and that doesn’t even factor in the direct costs or transportation related emissions that would be avoided.
I imagine that 2020 will be a defining year for a lot of people. If you have been in the workforce for a while, this may be the first time since high school that you had actual time off. Sure, that time off was likely stressful and lonely, but you might be asking if this whole capitalist house of cards is really worth propping up. If you’re on the younger side, this is the second once-in-a-lifetime financial disaster in your life without much experience of the preceding normalcy (which wasn’t all that great, really, the working class has been taking it on the chin since the 70’s), and you might be some of the same questions that people were asking during the 1920’s and 1930’s, namely “If this is the best we can do, what’s the point?” UBI and universal healthcare are looking a lot more appealing and consumer culture is looking more like the suckers’ game that it is.

New stuff around here

Not much, really. I had hoped to write down the second part of my post-election thoughts, but I ran out of both oomph and time.

New stuff elsewhere

Automated traffic enforcement is no replacement for transitioning away from single-occupancy vehicles, and there are legitimate privacy concerns that need to be addressed, but they are also the best path forward that I’ve seen for reducing bias in law enforcement (especially given that traffic stops are the main way that many people interact with the police). To be clear, privacy concerns are solveable, and even if they weren’t, traffic cameras are nowhere near as good at spying on us as the smartphone in your pocket.
I ran across this in a reddit comment and don’t have much to say about it but found it interesting nonetheless. Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development
Sharrows, the bicycle infrastructure that doesn’t work and nobody wants. I would contend that sharrows are useful, but only in the sense that they are a very clear signal from the government that my safety (as a person on a bicycle) isn’t important, and that I’m on my own. Snark aside, I think that they create a very real danger for newer riders who may come to the (incorrect) conclusion that a sharrow means that drivers are going to share the road. If a road needs a sharrow, you probably shouldn’t be riding on it.
Charlie Stross has a pretty good overview of Brexit and what comes after that’s worth a read. I’d be surprised if things went exactly as he predicts, but as an ignorant American, I found it to be a helpful framework.
File under “ways in which cars make everything worse”: Apparently one of the chemicals used in tires is killing salmon. It is unknown at this point what other ecological effects it may have or if it affects animals up the foodchain that eat salmon (worth looking into, since you may be one of those animals). I took issue with the author’s assertion that we “can’t control what’s in our tires”. Since car tires don’t drop from the sky fully formed, I would argue that, actually, we can change how we manufacture them, even if it is difficult. Heck, at the very least we could calculate the ecological costs and slap a tax to cover mitigation/deterioration of our food supply and the market sort it out (not a great solution, but it is a solution).
Robot Exclusion Protocol by Paul Ford. I loved it and think you should give it a read, it will take about 2 minutes (it is shorter than this post). Also, when you’re done, take a look at the publication date.
Fishless fish is coming. Even though I miss seafood, I haven’t tried any of this yet (though I must admit that I’m really excited about Kuleana). The most interesting bit of the article to me is the discussion of lab-grown meat, namely that it’s years away and that for terrestrial animal protien the current options are already amazing so it’s hard to see lab-grown meat competing with them given that it will have the same amount of time to advance.
I’m going to go ahead and say that I called it back in 2013, though I surely wasn’t alone and definitely wasn’t specific enough to take any sort of credit. Amazon is shutting off access to it’s API, which means that other sites can’t access the data. There are some alternatives out there that look promising, but honestly I stopped using goodreads a while back in favor of a really simple paper-based reading log (includes year read, title, maybe author, and a proprietary smiley-face rating system). I have considered doing some sort of self-hosted reading log like Tom MacWright does but honestly I don’t think that I’d use it. I also have concerns about how a digital reading log influences me as a reader, since it creates pressure to read as much as possible and I would prefer to focus on my enjoyment and what I get out of my reading (goodreads-era me would hate that I’ve spent almost a year reading Worm at this point, but I’m loving it). Of course, I work in a library, so my reading list never needs refilling.
- As a side note, be aware that Amazon also owns IMDB. At some point, it will come into conflict with Amazon’s bottom line, and it will lose out. If you want an alternative, The Movie Database looks okay (though I’m not a heavy user of IMDB, so I could be way off).
Can Organic Farming Solve the Climate Crisis?
VMT tax? Actually expecting states to reduce fatalities? This is exciting. What Secretary Pete Could Mean for the US DOT
With terrible federal broadband data, states are taking matters into their own hands. This is probably what is behind the work that Washington State’s Broadband Office is doing with it’s surveys. If you haven’t done their speed test yet (and live in WA), please do so, it will help us all out. If you don’t live in WA, see if your state is doing something similar.
I’ve never thought of snow-narrowed streets as prototypes before, but it is kind of perfect.
It looks like some local governments are starting to do a public version of Uber.
The Biden Administration needs a VP of Engineering, not a CTO. I had never considered things quite this way before, but I like the idea.
Erik Twice has a good primer on what exactly a eurogame is. Even though I consider myself pretty familiar with modern board games, I learned some stuff.
I don’t have much to say about this one, but I find precolombian Caribbean societies to be fascinating. Ancient DNA Shows Humans Settled Caribbean in 2 Distinct Waves
Car ownership is absolutely brutal for lower income families (this article is talking about money, but it is worth pointing out that traffic violence also disproportionately impacts lower income families). If you want to help people economically, getting rid of the $5,000+ inflexible annual expense of owning a car is a good way to go.
A handy takedown of some of the arguments that get trotted out in defense of widening roads.
You have probably seen the headlines about the SolarWinds attack, but Scheier makes a solid argument that it’s really a symptom of a deeper problem, namely that our government is focused on being able to infiltrate networks (both foreign and domestic) but not terribly concerned with actually helping to secure our networks, which would serve both us and the rest of the world much better.

What I’ve been up to

I received RingFit Adventure for Christmas. I had been interested in it for a long time, but had assumed that it was a bit of gimmick (which is why it was on my wishlist rather than in my cart). Turns out that I was wrong. There is an actual (light) RPG underneath the exercise component, which is itself excellent (I am usually done after one level). What is more, I really appreciate the game’s focus on having a healthy relationship with your body (the main antagonist is the embodiment of toxic fitness culture). If you were thinking of giving it a try, you should definitely pick it up. I’m probably not the best person to do a decent write-up, but I found this one to closely mirror my experience and opinion so far.
I read Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots and it was amazing. It will definitely be my go-to recommendation for the next few months (or longer). In particular, it is the best depiction I have run across of what it’s like to find something interesting in a dataset then pull that thread until it feels like the whole world is unraveling. Do yourself a favor and read it so that I don’t have to nag you about it. Also, if you want to see more about how to think about data in a practical setting, I would recommend Streetfight by Janette Sadik-Khan, nonfiction, about how to change things (in this case streets, but the approach is broadly applicable).
I really love Serious Eats’ recipe for the Best Crispy Roast Potatoes Ever, but I’ve been experimenting with dicing the potatoes a little smaller (and parboiling them less), and adding onions, peppers, and vegan chorizo analog partway through the roasting (also using a different set of spices) for Potatoes O’Brien. It’s pretty freaking amazing. If people ask I’ll write up the recipe here.

Inside Tom's Head - November 2020

2020-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

November . . . not much has happened, right? Just the . . . oh yeah . . . the election. That already feels like so long ago. I even wrote something about it (still working on the followup). I imagine that I’ll be a bit on edge until January 20th. I’m looking forward to politics being boring again, but what I’m really interested to see is how much brainspace this frees up for people who have been glued to political newsfeeds for the past 4 years, and what they do with that capacity.

I had a Covid scare this month. I got home from work, ate dinner and put the kid to bed. However, when I lay down, I found that I had shortness of breath, which was scary, since my lungs are generally in good condition. When it didn’t clear up in the morning I did a livechat with my health care provider and was told to go to urgent care. I got tested and spent a day isolating in the garage, but the test came back negative. The doctor said that it sounded like I might be experiencing side effects of stress, which checks out since things kind of came to a head at work around that time (I think that I’m getting them sorted out, though).

Also, this was my first vegan Thanksgiving. We’ve been doing Indian food for Thanksgiving far a few years now (I’ve never particularly liked turkey), and India has a deep vegetarian tradition so it was actually pretty easy to switch it over. Somehow vegan butter chicken is actually tastier than regular butter chicken, which seems like it should be in violation of some sort of Newtonian law given that the primary ingredients for the regular kind are butter, cream, and chicken. Jackfruit vindaloo was also a pretty solid replacement for lamb vindaloo.

New stuff around here

I wrote down my initial reaction to the election and spent some time working on edits to Passport Denied (working title for the followup to There Are No Words), but other than that I didn’t do much writing. I still have some blog posts that have been kicking around my head that I want to get out there, and I want to say that I’ll get a couple done in December, but realistically I’d have to say January or February.

One of the things that has been kicking around my head which will eventually make it into a post or an essay or something is my thoughts on the nature of anger. I carry a lot of it around with me, and have been chipping away at a rough outline on the subject, but this month I finally came up with a satisfying personal definition: “Anger is the emotional response to a mismatch between one’s expectations and reality.” I’m sure taht I could have just looked it up somewhere, but arriving there on my own has been rewarding. It’s amazing that even by just having a working definition I can feel my outlook shifting to accommodate it.

New stuff elsewhere

Although I felt like I spent a lot of the month refreshing news feeds, it was an unproductive, unenlightening sort of reading, so there won’t be as many links here as usual.

I’m really hoping that we can see some progress on repairing our infrastructure in the near future. I don’t really think of this as a partisan issue, but rather as result of it being more politically beneficial to build new stuff than it is to maintain the old stuff. I’m guessing that we’ll see a catastrophic failure of some piece of infrastructure in the near future, but I’m not sure if even something like that would spur us to adopt a more reasonable approach to it. On the other hand, we could make repairing our infrastructure part of how we recover from the pandemic, similar to the proposal that Washington state’s economy could recover without federal assistance by issuing bonds to pay for necessary environmental work.
Remember back in March/April when governments were blaming their inability to process unemployment claims on antiquated code written in COBOL? Well, it turns out that COBOL wasn’t the problem, after all. There are a lot of parallels between our physical and digital infrastructure that I wish the article had gone into more detail about, but you should definitely give it a read.
A neat guide on how to search for anything on the internet.
I’ve always found memorisation to be an annoying mechanic in board games, but this post by Erik Twice does a good job of laying out a bunch of ways that it makes games less fun.
One of the big challenges of the next decade will be how our culture responds to social media, which tends towards toxicity. It looks like there is another way though, with social networks being built to reinforce agreement to help communities react to difficult problems. I didn’t see it anywhere in the article, but it looks like the system it is talking about is based on pol.is, which is free and open source. Unfortunately, here in the US one of the big gaps that needs to be bridged for anything to get done is the urban-rural divide, and one of the defining traits of rural living is lousy internet connectivity, and a system like the one Taiwan has developed won’t work if only half the population can participate. That being said, this has a lot of potential and I could see it being a part of the solution in the not-too-distant future.
An interesting take on what the future of journalism in the US could look like.
An interesting write-up of using an e-cargo bike for 30 days. I’m not quite ready to jump on the e-bike bandwagon yet, I really like the simplicity of my bicycle, but I can see how e-cargo bikes could make a huge difference for families who want to go from 2 cars down to 1 or for people who live in an area with good transit who just need a little nudge to get rid of their cars.

What I’m reading/listening to/watching/playing/whatever

I read Nimona, which is the first graphic novel by Noelle Stevenson (creator of the new She-Ra on Netflix, which was excellent, and co-writer(?) of Lumberjanes, which I haven’t read). It was really good, and you should read it. I cried at the end, but that’s not uncommon for stuff like this.
Apple Music put together a playlist of what I’ve been listening to this year. I’ll need to find a way to put the track listing in a spreadsheet so that I can compare year to year.
I’ve been playing a lot of Into the Breach on the Switch (it’s also on Steam), which has been a ton of fun. If you are a fan of tactics games, you should definitely give it a try.
I convinced my family to play My City with me. So far I’m really enjoying it, but them not as much (I’ve won 6 out of 7 games so far). I really like the idea of a lightweight family-friendly legacy game, but I’m reserving judgment until I see how things turn out. Either there will be a catch-up mechanism that will start to penalize me pretty hard for my victories, in which case I will say the game is pretty great, or there won’t be, in which case I would say that it is fun but deeply flawed.
I’ve been listening to Lee Drutman’s Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop. It’s really good so far, and I think that it has a message that appeals to both sides of the aisle (do you think that your party represents you well? wouldn’t you like it to?), but I’m waiting to see if it’s a “this is something that needs/ought to happen” book or a “here’s a problem and here are some things you can do about it” book.

Political Parties are not Monoliths

2020-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

In the wake of the election, I’m seeing a bunch of headlines from people on the left about how disappointed they are with the country, how they had hoped that a landslide victory for Biden would show that the United States had somehow become less racist. I had hoped the same thing, and I’m disappointed, too. However, I think that it’s dangerous to simply label everyone who voted for Trump as being racist and end the analysis there. It’s clear that the United States has a lot of racist people living here, but I believe that it’s possible to improve the situation. That being said, the current thinking from many on the left seems unlikely to work. If calling someone a racist and cutting ties with them would make things better, our country would look a lot different than it does today.

A lot of people talk about how we should cut ties to people with whom we disagree. I agree that we shouldn’t tolerate intolerance. I also agree that if someone hurts you, you should distance yourself from them. However, I also believe that people are capable of change and that it’s a lot easier for people to leave an organization like the modern Republican party if they have somewhere to go.

One of my core values is that everyone deserves dignity and that by treating everyone with dignity I can make the world a better place. A big piece of this is treating people as individuals rather than making assumptions about who they are. What I’m going to argue below is that even if you don’t sign on to this worldview, treating people this way is still a lot more productive than painting with a broad brush.

I’m going start by looking at the Democrats, because I’m much more familiar with that party than with the Republicans. I vote Democrat more often than not, but I don’t feel that the party does a particularly good job of representing me and don’t consider myself a member of the party. I vote Democrat because once the primaries are done, the options narrow down to someone who I disagree with on a bunch of stuff or someone with whom I disagree on just about everything. The major exception to this is the presidential election, where there is usually a third party candidate in the general. This is the first year that I have not voted for a third party candidate for president (I live in a ‘safe’ state, but I wanted that landslide). I don’t vote for Democrats because they align particularly well with my politics (although Bernie comes close), I vote for them because my options are constrained.

If you went out and talked to a whole bunch of Democratic voters, you would find a bunch of different factions: Progressive democrats, corporate democrats, democratic-socialists, etc. The point is that even though you can find more than 70,000,000 people who voted for him, most of them aren’t going to perfectly align with Biden. You would hear a lot of “I like him, but…” from people who are critical of his stance on the climate, or the economy, or just about any issue. What’s more, you’ll find a lot of people who don’t align with him very much at all but felt that the alternative wasn’t really an option (Republicans who voted for him, for example).

The upshot of this is that, yeah, I voted for Biden, but no, I wouldn’t consider myself a ‘supporter’. If you think that you can judge my positions on the issues by looking at which presidential candidate I voted for in 2020, you’re not going to come up with a terribly accurate idea of where I stand. What’s more, if you think that based on that single data point, you know enough about me to sway me on those issues, you’re probably not going to have a whole lot of success.

Looking at conservatives, the same dynamic is likely at play. If you went out and talked to a bunch of conservatives you would meet people from a bunch of factions. Granted, some of those factions are truly odious, built on foundations of racism and authoritarianism, but you would probably run into people who agree with you about the environment or any number of issues, people who share your goals for the US but who have different ideas about how we get there. I have no idea what the proportions are, if die-hard Trump supporters are 30% or 70% of the Republican party, but it is certain that the proportion isn’t 100%.

Now what happens if I talk to one of those Republican voters, assume they are part of Trump’s base (and don’t bother to check my assumptions), and base my arguments on that? Well, for one I’m not likely to get through to them. For another, I might well push them away from my point of view rather than towards it, which is, to say the least, a less than optimal use of my time.

But what if I’m wrong about the proportion of people who voted for Trump? What if 95% of them are actively racist and authoritarian? Well, if you could convince the other 5% of his voters to switch sides, it would have changed the results of the election quite a bit, with Biden winning an additional 109 electoral votes, for a likely total of 415 electoral votes (a true landslide). What’s more, it would have outright flipped 3 senate seats and brought 4 more from sold Republican wins into toss-ups.

However, I’m not here to tell the Democrats how to win. Again, they don’t represent me particularly well. I have other things in mind, which I will have to get to in a future post since this one is getting a bit long.

What I’m trying to get at is that we should avoid making generalizations about tens of millions of people, both because we would be wrong and because it would be counterproductive. In the wake of the election the temptation for a lot of us on the left will be to vilify people who supported Trump. I’m not arguing that we need to go out of our way to mend relations with people who voted for someone whose main accomplishment (and perhaps goal) was to cause so much death and suffering. However, I am saying that we should be careful to avoid the folly of thinking we know what their experiences, priorities, and reasons were. We don’t need to reach out to them (not right away, at least), but we don’t need to burn those bridges, either.

Inside Tom's Head - October 2020

2020-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Well, I was hoping that I could spend some time talking about the election, but I also want to get this written and posted today, so it looks like that will have to wait for another post.

Coronavirus led to what felt like a subdued October for me. We didn’t go out to the pumpkin patch and we didn’t go trick-or-treating. However, I continue to be impressed by my kid’s resilience in the face of the pandemic. He misses his friends, but accepts things as they are. If we could get all of the adults to just handle this on the level of an eight-year-old, wearing masks and limiting contact, we probably wouldn’t be seeing record case numbers every week.

There continue to be bright spots in all of this, however. We watched the first episode of the new season of The Mandalorian with some friends using the GroupWatch feature on Disney+. The service works pretty well, synchronizing playback is smooth, but backchannel communication is severely lacking. I can understand not wanting to do chat, since it is a family-friendly service, but somehow I feel that expressing myself with six emojis (there isn’t even a “surprised” emoji) is kind of weak. What I really liked, though, was watching it together and then doing a video chat to talk about it afterwards, which mimics one of the better parts of 90’s TV, where everyone was watching the same thing at the same time.

New Stuff Around Here

I wrote my thoughts on I-976 not making it through the courts.
I finished my most recent editing pass of “Passport Denied”, the followup to There Are No Words. I’ve been mulling this stuff over for about 6 years now and have figured out some of the issues that I had with the story when I first wrote it. The story has good bones (I think), but there’s a lot to cut. There’s also a lot that needs to be added. First, I need to integrate all of the blue ink that I put on the draft with the digital version, which will be slow going unless I figure out a better process (gDocs doesn’t run well on huge documents on my old chromebook).
I’ve started writing a post about digital animism, which is an idea that probably makes no sense without context but which I’m excited about.
I’ve also started a post about why bike maintenance sucks (even if you have an awesome mechanic) and how to make it better.

New Stuff Elsewhere

I recently started listening to the Ezra Klein podcast from Vox, and it is quickly becoming one of my favorites. The first episode that I listened to was about decarbonizing America and was really interesting. I imagine I’ll be linking more in the future.
A brief history of how grassy lawns exist to prove you’re not a peasant and how we should probably let that status symbol go the way of the fur coat (it looks like mink farms might be problematic in a new way, too).
I watched Kiss the Ground on Netflix, which was one of the more hopeful and feasible-sounding plans around climate change that I’ve seen so far. It reminded me of The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka. It also led me to seach for stuff about the future of agriculture, which led me to this article about how our agriculture system is heading towards catastrophic, yet preventable, decline.
I was generally aware of the issues around bicycles and race, but this interview with Adonia Lugo definitely had a lot of interesting stuff in it. I’ll make sure to post about it when I get around to reading the book.
Three charts that illustrate just how badly the US is doing on road safety compared to Europe. The short version is that we made some progress but that between giant vehicles and terrible street design (among other things) pedestrian and cyclist fatalities have been trending back up.
It seems like maybe we should tax the hell out of non-recycled plastic… Apparently big oil lied to us about how much plastic would be recycled (shocking, I know).
The documentary Gather sounds fascinating. I found the discussion with the filmmaker (in the linked article) about the process of making a documentary about a group that has long been poorly served by documentarians to be particularly interesting.
We should always try to design in such a way that the environment encourages and reinforces good decisions. Any time we have an environment that encourages one type of behavior but where we expect a different sort of behavior, we are seeing ourselves up to fail. The 94% Error: We Need to Understand the True Cause of Crashes
I remember hearing about the Land Institute trying to create a perennial cereal grain (a serial grain… I’ll see myself out now) a while back but hadn’t been keeping up with it. Well, it turns out they’ve been making progress! This could be a huge boon to the environment.
More ways in which cars make everything worse. Air Pollution Particles in Young Brains Linked to Alzheimers Damage. Also, apparently between emissions and lack of in-person interaction, cars are making us more depressed, even if we don’t drive.
Some good stuff about how car-free transportation could be advertised. In particular, I liked the bit about changing the negative stereotypes about adults who ride bikes. It makes me want to do something about that casual bicycle club I was talking about a while ago.
Everywhere basic income has been tried, in one map. UBI, or something like it, will probably continue to look outlandish, right up to the point that it looks inevitable.
An interesting TED talk about how we can design maps (really, navigation algorithms) to help us find the best (calmest, quietest, prettiest, etc.) way to get from here to there rather than just the fastest.
I don’t agree with everything that Cringely says about the 2020-2021 academic year, but what he’s saying is worth thinking about.
An episode of the How To Save A Planet podcast about traditional forestry practices that can prevent or ameliorate wildfires (among other things).
Although electrifying our fleet of vehicles is a good step towards addressing climate change, it would be more effective to rethink transportation entirely. Given that a lot of the emissions from a vehicle happen during the manufacturing process, I’d feel a lot better about EVs if we were focusing on things like the ElectraMeccanica Solo rather than the electric Hummer (seriously, WTF?). When I showed the Solo to my partner, her response was “I don’t think that I’d feel safe driving that to work surrounded by huge trucks” and I can’t help but to agree. Until the US stops subsidizing huge vehicles (by exempting them from fuel efficiency standards, for example), reasonably-sized vehicles don’t really stand much of a chance.
With more smart appliances, daylight saving time changes now feel like my house is gaslighting me. That being said, we should get rid of it.

What I’m reading/listening to/watching/playing/whatever

I’m still gradually working my way through Worm, which is still good.
I’m currently listening to A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine, which is quite good so far.
I read Dragon Pearl to my family last month, and it was excellent. I really enjoyed the combination of Korean folklore with science fiction (in a way that I didn’t for Lee’s other works that I’ve read), especially the idea of spaceships having meridians. Notably, the book also handled non-binary gender issues quite well (though I could be totally off on that count, being a straight cis guy). I hope it gets a sequel.
Nothing has really separated itself out for me musically, lots of Metric, lots of Nine Inch Nails, lots of Garbage, nothing terribly surprising about that.
I started playng through My City with my family. I’m enjoying it a lot so far, but I worry that they aren’t enjoying it as much, since I have won both games by wide margins. It is a legacy game (you play with the same people each time and the game changes a little each time depending on the results), though, so I’m thinking that the catch-up mechanisims should start hitting me pretty hard. If the game continues to be fun, it may be the perfect thing for the pandemic. If that’s the case, I’ll write a post about it.
I have been listening to a lot of podcasts. In particular I’ve been enjoying the Ezra Klein Show, How to Save a Planet, and season 2 of Against the Rules by Michael Lewis.
I watched Ted Lasso, which was somehow amazing. Do yourself a favor and watch the trailer, then watch the show. It’s a 30-minute comedy series with a ton of heart that is exactly what we need for 2020. Even mentioning it makes me want to watch it again.
We have started playing MarioKart on the weekends, which has been a ton of fun, though my partner has started winning more and more, which is concerning.

I-976 and the Problem with Car Tabs

2020-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

Last week the Washington State Supreme Court struck down I-976. This is excellent news, since the measure would have removed a lot of funding for transit agencies, possibly crippling them.

It appears that the law was struck down for good reasons, namely that it was poorly written and didn’t adhere to the state constitution. However, the fact remains that a lot of people voted for it. Even though it could be argued that a lot of voters weren’t sure exactly what they were voting for (part of the court’s reasoning was that it was worded in such a way as to confuse voters what the effects would be), this isn’t the first time that Washington voters have passed this sort of law (though these laws have yet to make it through the courts).

Although I think that this is a good outcome, I can’t really consider this a win in the long term. If people are unhappy with car tabs as a funding mechanism for transit, this sort of legislation is going to keep coming up, and as the linked article points out, a lot of places around the state have implemented something similar on their own. We need to find a better way of funding transit (for example, my area passed a sales tax in 2018 to fund our transit system).

So what’s wrong with paying for transit with car tabs?

As with any tax or usage fee, people dislike paying for car tabs. However, attaching transit funding to car ownership seems like a particularly hard sell. After all, if you own a car, you probably don’t take the bus much. Sure, if those fees are used to expand light rail to your community you might drive to the station then take light rail to work/shopping/whatever, but until our transit system gets built up enough to allow the majority of people to maintain fewer personal vehicles, a lot of people are going to be paying into a system that doesn’t really work for them.

On the other hand, there is a certain logic to funding transit through car tabs. On its face it creates funding for transit while disincentivizing driving. The problem is that it doesn’t really disincentivize driving in any meaningful way. Once you pay for your tab, it doesn’t matter if you drive 100 or 100,000 miles in a year. Also $100/year is a small enough number that people won’t base purchasing decisions on it (“Hmm, I like that $50k car, but I would have to pay $100/year.” No, I don’t see that happening either.). In essence, you are getting money for transit by spending community goodwill, which is a scarce resource.

Just to be clear, I’m not arguing that driving and car ownership shouldn’t be more expensive. It should. If you look at the societal costs of driving (road construction/maintenace, space lost to parking, lives lost to collisions, mental health), there are a lot costs of driving that are borne by the general public. If you want to reduce the harm that cars do to our society, a rational place to start would be to set things up so that the societal costs of driving aren’t completely dissociated from driving and car ownership. What might this look like?

Keep car tabs, but put the money towards things like road maintenance

People will still grumble since our society doesn’t seem to get that taxes pay for services, but most reasonable people will see the connection between paying a fee for your car and having, you know, roads to drive it on. The more that road usage is paid for by usage fees, the more we can transfer money currently used for road construction and maintenance (a lot of which comes from the general fund) to transit (this same point holds true for the following ideas, too).

Replace or augment the gas tax with a Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) tax.

This has some pretty broad support and the benefit that it can be argued as people paying their share (you drive more, you pay more). The gas tax has been problematic for decades (the federal gas tax hasn’t been raised since the 90’s) and will get worse as electric vehicles become more mainstream, so it will need to be fixed anyway, we might as well replace it with something better.

Charge for parking.

Parking is expensive to build and maintain. On my way into work every, I pass by a row of houses along the waterfront, each of which is valued at about $500k - $1.5m. However, there is also parking on both sides of the street, and I see the same cars parked in front of the houses every day (the spots across the street are much less frequently used). I have to wonder, why am I subsidizing extra parking for someone living in a million dollar house?

Granted, I’m not as annoyed by this in working-class neighborhoods, since they are presumably less able to reconfigure their property to house more vehicles and more likely to only own vehicles that they need. However, if we are going to provide free on-street parking for everyone, then we should remove the permitting requirement for off-street parking, which would make it easier to build denser housing. In denser areas, such as city centers, there shouldn’t be free parking. I won’t go into that here, but will just leave a link to The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup, which makes the case that free parking has all sorts of negative side-effects and that there is a better way to do it.

Conclusion

Of course, a lot of that is about how we should pay for infrastructure for cars. What about transit? If car tabs isn’t a good source of funding, what is? I’m not sure. After all, if there were an easy, palatable way of funding stuff like Sound Transit 3, we would already be doing it. However, I do think that making it so that drivers pay something closer to their fair share of the societal costs of driving would free up a significant amount of money for things like transit. In addition, if drivers had to pay those costs directly, rather than having them hidden in other taxes, they would likely also be more willing to support funding for transit projects.

Another way of looking at is that while transit is great, it is only part of the transportation solution. In many parts of the country, you don’t just need a car to go to work, you need a car to do just about everything. When we build new communities, we should make sure that there are minimal services nearby. We should be upzoning neighborhoods to allow for denser housing that can support things like shops, restaurants, and medical offices. In short, we should follow the lead of Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo and strive to have “15-minute cities”.

Finally, I’d like to point out that I think that having roads and infrastructure for private vehicles is a good thing. I like being able to have mail and packages delivered. Riding on paved roads isn’t as nice as a dedicated trail, but it does beat gravel or dirt (for transportation, at least). I like being able to drive somewhere when riding my bike isn’t a great option. Even if I didn’t own a car, having good roads benefits me. However, I don’t think that is an unqualified good. Every time we make space exclusively for cars, we reduce space for something else, and cars aren’t very good at sharing space with pedestrians. Right now, we tend to think of space for cars as a necessity, but this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, since it leads us to invest in infrastructure for private vehicles rather than for transit and other sustainable modes of transportation. As a result, we have a system of incentives that encourages people to drive. Fixing those incentives won’t fix all of our problems, but it could go a long way towards a better future for all of us.

Inside Tom's Head - September 2020

2020-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

September 2020 was a strange month here in the PNW. The large fires were all safely distant from Olympia, but still there was enough smoke to drive the AQI above 300, which is really, really bad (though it was even worse elsewhere). It ended up being about a week of driving to work and spending as little time outside as possible. With the pandemic, that made an already small world shrink further, which was . . . sub-optimal. What was perhaps worse was not being able to open the windows of my house at night and trying to sleep in an 80 degree room.

I was surprised that there are so few air quality sensors in my area. I found two publicly accessible sensors within 5-15 miles of my house, which gives me a general idea of how the air is, but I felt like more granular data would make it easier to make decisions about how safe it would be to do things like go outside or crack open the windows. Towards that end, we purchased a PurpleAir sensor (which is back ordered, as you would expect) and plan on connecting it to the various public networks.

We also bought a Dyson fan/purifier. It was pretty expensive, but the included air quality sensor makes it seem pretty reasonable. We already had two air purifiers in the house and the air never felt bad in here. However, with an indoor sensor, we might have been able to more actively manage things like whether to open the windows (even a crack) at night since we would be able to tell if our purifiers were keeping up. Getting it has made me realize just how much I’m willing to pay for things that do their job well without being noisy (spoiler: a lot).

Going forward, wildfires like we have seen these past few years will keep happening. With climate change making these huge fires more likely, we need to be proactive. Native Americans have been using controlled burns for millennia as a tool of forest stewardship and wildfire prevention, we need to continue that tradition. Power companies that are unable/unwilling to maintain their transmission lines need to be broken up (if you have too many lines to maintain, sounds like maybe you shouldn’t be in charge of all of them), regulated, or replaced entirely (if capitalism isn’t able to handle electricity generation/transmission without killing us all, the government should do it).

New stuff around here

I wrote about how we need a practical cycling club and what it might look like. Because, you know, I really need another project.
I decided that while I like the idea of reviewing and recommending stuff, realistically I don’t actually enjoy the process of doing it. I’m removing the “Recommended” section of this site and replacing it with with the Subscribe page. I’ll be moving the recommendations that I’ve made in with my regular posts, so they will show up in your email/rss feed if you have subscribed. I do still plan on recommending things here, it just won’t be a focus of the site.
I’ve been continuing to edit “Passport Denied” (the followup to There Are No Words). It is going well, but will be a while before I have something that I’m ready to share with y’all.

Stuff I’ve been reading elsewhere

A new law allowing “safety stops” in Washington State goes into effect today! This means that people on bicycles can treat stop signs as yield signs. Practially, it won’t make much of a difference, since that was already most people on bikes acted (and in cars, for that matter), but it’s progress nonetheless.
HYPER-REALITY a short film about about an Augmented Reality dystopia. Although it was a bit stressful to watch, I still appreciated it and was impressed by its technical merits. Although I can’t really watch a feature-length movie based on good cinematography if it doesn’t have a compelling story, I feel differently about it if I’m only living in that world for 5-10 minutes.
L.E. Modesitt, Jr. on poetry in fiction. It’s interesting that he brings up rap as the only popular continuation of rhymed and metered poetry, which ties in with what Ibram X. Kendi has to say about the genre in How to be an Antiracist.
A look at why exercise is good for you, and why most people avoid it: https://harvardmagazine.com/2020/09/features-active-grandparenting
Most Pedestrian Infrastructure Is Really for Drivers. Basically, it is arguing that all the stuff we call “pedestrian infrastructure” wouldn’t be necessary if there weren’t cars on the road, so really it exists to allow cars to drive faster. I had never thought about it this way, but it’s definitely a valid viewpoint.
Robin Sloan on how to think about content. He uses the economics terms stock and flow to talk about whether that thing you’re posting is interesting but ephemeral (think Twitter) or more of a deep dive. Although I didn’t have the terminology, that’s kind of what I’ve been doing with these monthly posts, creating a steady drip of information, with my stories and projects forming the more substantive content. Of course, these posts are incredibly useful for me to track the ideas I come across, as well.
Another post by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. about how a low minimum wage equates to a subsidy for businesses paid for by individuals. Given that he is definitely more conservative than me, I find this notable.
It looks like Los Angeles is getting new streetlights and they look pretty neat. In particular I’m excited that they will have the capability to have sun sails attached, give the dearth of shade in that city. Combined with Garcetti’s plan to plant 90,000 trees I’m interested to see where that city is going (though I’m pretty sure I’ll never want to live there).
I don’t really have much to add to this, but it resonated with me and I want to share it. Baseball is not black enough.
I feel like I don’t have enough context (other than that the government’s actions around treaty rights are indefensible) to really make sense of this, but what I do understand of it is fascinating. We have to face Slade Gorton’s legacy, not bury it.
Although we often talk about greenhouse gasses and other types of air pollution that cars contribute to (apparently we even get a ton of air pollution from tires and brake pads), we rarely talk about just how bad noise is for us
Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, which sucks. She leaves behind a legacy of empowerment and equality for women and many others. However, I hope that we can add to that by showing how broken the institution of the Supreme Court is. I don’t know if the solution is to have a larger court or to have a rotating bench of federal judges, but so long as the Supreme Court can be “won” or “lost”, it is not functioning as intended.
A short film about how Utrecht became the bicycle city it is today. I wish the video had been able to delve a bit more into the challenges they faced, but it was inspiring, nonetheless.
Public bathrooms suck, but this episode from 99% Invisible explains why they don’t have to and how designing public bathrooms for people with different needs makes them better for all of us. What’s really exciting about this is that it isn’t a “wouldn’t it be great if bathrooms were better, here are some ideas that can’t be done in the current regulatory environment” thing, but rather “here’s a better idea, and we already got it added to the International Building Code”. Now people just need to urge their localities to adopt that new code and start building these things.
Bust ‘Em All: Let’s De-Monopolize Tech, Telecoms AND Entertainment. Ar essay by Cory Doctorow about how we shouldn’t be choosing between different sets of monopolies, we should be choosing to not have monopolies.
Apparently this October is ‘National Pedestrian Safety Month’, where we tell pedestrians that it is their responsibility to not get hit by cars. Of course, this whole campaign could probably be replaced with a sign that reads “Remember pedestrians, we aren’t going to invest in infrastructure for you, so you’re on your own. Try not to die.”.

What I’m reading/listening to/watching/playing/whatever

I’m still reading How to be an Antiracist and Worm. I’ll finish the former this month and the latter . . . eventually. They are both excellent.
I’ve been enjoying the Aquabats new album Kooky Spooky quite a bit, it’s fun, light-hearted, and catchy.
I’m not sure why, but Bush’s album Sea of Memories has also been in heavy rotation. I definitely enjoy it, but I can’t quite put my finger on why that is so. Reading the reviews when I dig up a link, it appears that I’m in the minority on this one.
My video game time has been spent on Stardew Valley, an indie successor to the Harvest Moon series that manages to surpass the original in my book.
I haven’t been playing many board games (you know, pandemic and all), but I have been having a great time with Palm Island and Hisashi Hayashi’s MetroX (the Japanese version, because I like the aesthetic better). Both are excellent, but Palm Island feels a bit more like a game and MetroX feels more like a puzzle.
I overcame my dislike of Amazon to watch Upload. It was fun and had lots of heart. If you’re looking for a good half hour comedy and have Prime, this series is definitely worth a shot. I’m looking forward to the eventual season 2.

We Need a Practical Cycling Club

2020-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

I’d like to see more cyclists out on the road. Specifically, I’d like to see more practical cyclists. The more of us there are out there, the safer we will be and the more likely we will be to receive funding for infrastructure. That led me to thinking about the barriers to cycling. Here’s what came to mind (I’m sure there are more):

safety (and perceived safety)
rain & snow
I don’t want to show up to work all sweaty
security
bikes can be expensive
bike culture (but what if I’m not a middle-aged white guy in spandex?)
gotta get the kids to school/practice/etc
I can’t carry my groceries
it takes longer / I don’t have time in my schedule

Although a lot of these things might seem to be out of control of the individual at first glance, most of them can be dealt with if you want to use your bike for practical transportation. The one that stuck out to me, however, was ‘bike culture’. I mean, sure, you can just ignore what people think of you, but we are social animals and at the very least you want to not feel alone.

This is where a practical cycling club comes in. What if instead of worrying about the culture, you tried to make your own culture? What if you had a supportive community to help you figure things out? What if you relied on your bike to get to work/school/wherever and you were able to borrow a part from someone you knew?

So what would it look like? I’m not quite sure, but here is what comes to mind:

It should be local. Sure, a state or national organization sounds neat, but what I really want is people with intimate knowledge of my area, who can make suggestions about where to ride or even come pick me up if something goes horribly wrong on a ride.
It should be inclusive. By this I don’t mean “everyone is welcome to join” (though they would be), but rather that the club should focus on actively removing barriers and onboarding new practical cyclists. It is sad that a vehicle so enmeshed with women’s rights is now dominated by men. Likewise, in a country in which wealth is so unequally distributed by ethnicity, reducing or removing the $2,500 annual cost of owning a car (which doesn’t include car payments, by the way) could make a huge difference for a lot of families. A practical cycling club would actively reach out to underrepresented communities and help them start cycling.
It should be easy. You shouldn’t need special equipment to join (not even a bicycle, actually, the club should help people get started, even if they aren’t members, see above point). No group rides with minimum speeds.

Okay, but what would the club do? Again, not sure, but here’s what comes to mind:

Probably something really simple for online presence, maybe a webpage with information and a discord server. Things like suggested bike shops, a map, and other resources. Again, it should be easy, so not a website that requires a lot of work.
Periodic meetups. Online if there happens to be a pandemic or something, but otherwise ride to a place and grab a bite to eat with some friendly folks.
Mutual aid. Maybe have a channel on the discord where folks can post if they are taking a longer ride (similar to logging a flight plan when hiking). A place to ask for help if you get a flat and don’t have a spare.
Other activities, such as attending city council meetings (and maybe advocating for bicycle stuff), volunteering at a build-a-bike.

Of course, I also wonder if a practical transportation club would be better. Would the benefits of a bigger tent including walkers and transit outweigh the loss in specificity? These are questions for another day (or another post), so I’ll leave them for now.

Anyway, I’m not sure if this is even a good idea (I like it, but I’m a demographic of one). For now I’m going to continue to work on the practical cycling maps that I’ve started. However, if you also think that this is something that should exist, let me know (I’m assuming that most people who are reading this know me personally, otherwise my email is my first name @ this domain).

Inside Tom's Head - August 2020

2020-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

I don’t have a whole lot to talk about for this month’s post. I didn’t manage to get an actual blog post together (although it doesn’t help that it took me half the month to finish my July roundup), but I was working on stuff:

In particular, I started creating a practical cycling guide for the Olympia-Lacey-Tumwater area. It needs a lot of work, but I’m happy with how it’s progressing. I hope to get the first drafts of a couple more routes done this month. I also have some ideas on how to make the maps work, but I’m not sure if I’m going to make much progress on them this month with school starting back up and all.
I started working on a writing project that has been kicking around my head for almost a decade, 42 Apocalypses, I’m hoping to have more to say on that subject next month.
Finally, I think that I figured out one of the major issues I had been running into with the follow-up to There Are No Words. I’ll plan on printing it out and reading through it with a critical eye this week to see if my ideas might pan out.

Stuff I’ve been reading elsewhere

Adrian Hon wrote about what Alternate Reality Games can teach us about QAnon. For me, one of the big (and scary) takeaways is that part of what makes Alternate Reality Games and conspiracy theories work is that they reach a sort of critical mass of complexity and engagement, at which point the participants will find ways of integrating anomalous or discordant data rather than viewing it as a challenge to the game/theory.
- In my mind I had viewed the ideas expressed by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as being pretty broadly applicable, but maybe I’m wrong on that count. If you haven’t read the book, the idea I’m referring to is that science operates as a series of paradigms, each of which gradually accumulates anomalies before collapsing and being replaced by a more sophisticated paradigm. In essence what we’re seeing is the opposite, closer to a scientist clinging to a flawed idea and twisting data and methodology in an attempt to make the idea true. In science, this usually fails, but I worry that the same isn’t true here.
I was unaware of this, but police departments apparently used to be responsible for ambulance services (except that the officers weren’t trained as EMTs, even if they were to try to provide medical care en route to the facility). As you can imagine, not a great situation for anyone involved. I find this hopeful because there are a lot of paralells between that situation and the current situation of police being repsonsible for dealing with mental health crises and homelessness (to the degree that such enforcement can really be said to be dealing with the issue), and we now have a better system. Different people mean different things when they talk about defunding the police, but finding better ways of addressing issues that shouldn’t be the police’s responsibility in the first place is a pretty common theme.
Speaking of, there is a compelling argument to be made that releiving police of their role in traffic enforcement would make everyone safer.
A post over at Surly about The Realities of a Black Man in the Bike World. I don’t really have much to add to this one, except that it was good to see my chosen mode of transportation from a different perspective.
It’s a sad statement about the state of modern philosophy that philosophers are surprised and excited that their instruction has an effect on their students. I think that part of reason why it doesn’t is that philosophy is often all lumped together, when in fact there are big differences between practical philosophy (such as stoicism) abstract philosophy (such as epistemology) and philosophy that falls in between the two (such as ethics or moral philosophy). In my experience, philosophy is often presented as being deep, abstract thoughts, which of course is going to sound boring to a teenager. I would much prefer it presented as tools to help you have a more fulfilling life, at least at first. People can discover Kant in college.
I’m a big fan of RSS feeds, and am sad that they aren’t a bigger part of the web for most people, since they are the opposite of walled gardens like facebook. Matt Webb has some suggestions about what could be better about RSS. Bonus points for him also creating one of the things that he said needed to exist, aboutfeeds.com, here’s his announcement about it.
Some commentary on how the “cult of the free” contributed to the staff cuts at Mozilla last month. Remember, if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product… Or it’s an unsustainable business model. I feel like things like Mozilla should exist, and I’m glad that they are not a traditional business, but they should definitely be more upfront about it. For example, say I want to support Mozilla, here’s the process:
1. Go to mozilla.com.
2. Scroll down 5 screens (!) to find the first mention of the Mozialla Foundation, which only says “Support a healthy internet”. Click that link because it seems like there may be some sort of financial component to that support.
3. Arrive at foundation.mozilla.org, either notice the donation link at the top or scroll down to the bottom.
4. Once you are at the donation page, wonder about what the relationship is between the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation. The Wikipedia page for the Mozilla Foundation clarifies things a little, but even at the end of this I’m not sure if donating to the foundation would be doing what I wanted it to do. Does a donation to the foundation help pay for people to work on MDN? Does it help pay for people to work directly on Firefox? I have no idea, so I’m probably not going to donate. I could continue ranting, but I’ll just queue that up for a future post sometime.
Some good news, last month Portland passed the best low-density zoning reform in US history. Zoning exclusively for single-family homes is a problem in just about every US city and it is good to see places where sanity appears to be winning out.
A study on how COVID-19 might finally get city planners out of their cars. It saddens me that this wasn’t the case before. Frankly, if you’re in charge of anything, you should be making a point of spending some time seeing it from the ground. If you’re a city planner or elected official, you should make a point of experiencing what the people you’re planning for/representing experience.
Scientists are changing the way that we write genetic sequences due to Excel’s tendency to turn them into dates. It pains me that we are changing science to make spreadsheets work. Seriously, Microsoft should just sell a genetics plugin to fix this. Echoes of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget.
This is horrifying: An inland hurricane tore through Iowa. You probably didn’t hear about it.
Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation, an essay John Lewis wrote shortly before his death.
A pretty good overview of Universal Basic Income. If you’re wondering why I’m linking Teen Vogue, you might be surprised to hear that they do some good journalism these days.
Joe Biden Lost His Wife and Daughter to Traffic Violence. Could He Be the First President to Do Anything to End it?. What struck me most about this piece was actually a throw-away line about how when we talk about being in traffic collisions, we talk as though we were hit by a sentient (or at least autonomous) vehicle: “I was hit by a car.” Was the car driving itself or did the driver pilot into you? None of this is new, except that at some point in the next decade this will be an actual question, not a rhetorical one, since a car might well drive itself into you. What a weird way to possibly get to describing traffic collisions accurately.
- Speaking of which, here is a handy guide on how to talk about this stuff in a way that doesn’t misattribute responsibility for collisions, as well as other more accurate and neutral phrases for talking about transportation.
Unsurprisingly, the people who are responsible for figuring out how much traffic to plan for often get the math wrong, which explains a lot about our built environment.
Tamika Butler has a long thread on Twitter asking “Do you describe yourself as a cyclist?” I had never given it much thought, and don’t honestly know if I have in the past or not, but I think that I probably won’t, going forward.
This sounds like a way better take on batman: ACAB: All Cops Are Batman.
It looks like Olympia may get a new flag, which is great. Also, Roman Mars (of the 99% invisible podcast) has an excellent Ted Talk about flag design (somehow informative, upsetting, and hilarious).

What I’m reading/listening to/watching/playing/whatever

Almost done with Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. I have one more challenge to complete and some chests to find, then I’m thinking of taking a break from it to try out while True: learn(). I’m also almost done with an initial playthrough of Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker.
I think that I have mostly broken my reddit habit. I’ve gotten to the point where I only check reddit every few days, and have been spending more time reading my web feeds, books, and the like.
I’ve started reading Unwinnable magazine. It is so good. I’m not that into video games honestly, but I can definitely get behind a magazine that uses video game journalism as a springboard to talk about other things (to be fair, they cover all sorts of stuff, it’s just that video games is their main focus). They have some free stuff on their site, but the bulk of their content is paid. Fortunately, they have released their entire archive for free due to the pandemic, so now is the perfect time to check it out.
I’m hoping to play a game or two of Mobile Frame Zero with my kid next month, which is a tabletop game where you build your mechs out of legos.
I’ve been listening to the audiobook of How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. It’s not always easy to listen to, but it is well written and very good.
I’m still trying to get statistics out of Apple Music (I’m on Android) and I don’t keep notes on my listening habits, so I don’t have a good idea of what I listened to most this month. However, I do know that the albums “A Thousand Suns” by Linkin Park and “The Woods” by Sleater-Kinney were in heavy rotation.

Let’s see if this can be the month where I actually write a real blog post.

Inside Tom's Head - July 2020

2020-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

July seemed to pass much more quickly than June, which is probably a good thing, since my (our?) subjective experience of time probably has something to do with the density of relevant events, or in the case of 2020, crises. I kept on wanting to write stuff, but between work being miserable this month and spending a ton of time on yardwork, I haven’t had the oomph to do so. Also, this post is coming out much later than I had planned. Between work being rough and a vacation, I haven’t wanted to make time to write this up until now.

COVID-19

The pandemic continues, and our response continues to disappoint (in the US, at least). Locally, cases have been steadily rising, but not yet to the point where we are overwhelming our hospital resources. I’m going in to work 4-5 days a week, which definitely has some risk even though we are taking reasonable precautions, but really I’m just waiting for the notification that someone in my building has tested positive, at which point we will pretty much all be exposed and I will expose my family. I can picture our some future society looking at what is happening in the US right now (and in the rest of the world to a lesser degree) and shake their heads at how tightly we have chained ourselves to wheels of capitalism, where the first question, even in the teeth of a pandemic, is never “What is best for everyone?” but rather “What is best for the owners?”. Even working at a library, which is decoupled from the economy just about as much as is possible these days, the forces of capitalism are at work.

On a related note, I saw an interesting article on hygiene theater, which is exactly what it sounds like, the pandemic version of security theater. However, I think that it’s even worse than the article makes it out to be. For example, due to concerns about transmission through contaminated surfaces, my library system requires us to quarantine all returned materials for 4 days. This isn’t really problematic in and of itself, but with our volume that means our big bins fill up really quickly (last week we filled all three of them in less than a day), meaning that we need to use small boxes the rest of the time. However, the small boxes fill up even more quickly (many of our patrons will return 1-2 boxes worth of materials at a time), meaning we have to spend a lot more time interacting with the public handling returns. I applaud the intent behind the procedure, but in trying to limit our exposure to a low risk situation, our administration has increased our exposure to a higher risk situation. In addition, storing all that stuff takes up a lot of room, making it harder to socially distance while working, which again increases our risk.

To be clear, I do feel safe at work. They have been very good about things like requiring masks and we have a lot of leeway to ensure that we are avoiding unnecessary contact (if there are people near the returns, we wait until they leave to empty them, for example). Also, everyone has been very good about finding ways to work as safely as possible, and it seems that we impotence things a little every day.
Also, I am not advocating against cleaning surfaces, even if it makes only a tiny bit safer. My issue is that we might be taking actions to prevent a little bit of risk but that those actions incur more risk from other sources. At home we are still cleaning/quarantining our groceries, mail, and packages.

The pandemic is making us question the connection between work and money. That’s a good thing
The pandemic has been a boon for animals as roadkill decreases. We should try to find ways of keeping it this way.
Apparently the rich own so much of our society right now that when they stopped spending at the start of the pandemic, it tanked the economy. Granted, it wasn’t just them, but as the article states, “the wealthiest 25% of Americans account for fully two-thirds of the total decline in spending since January”. I would have guessed that this effect would have been a result of broader trends, but in hindsight it makes sense, most people don’t have much money for discretionary spending so it’s not like they are going to stop buying stuff if they can avoid it.
Schooling in the US this fall is going to be painful either way. Of course, this has a lot to do with housework being untracked and unpaid (and unfairly burdensome on women). This is one of the best arguments for Universal Basic Income that I’ve heard (and there are a lot of good arguments for it, in my opinion).

Stuff Happening Elsewhere

Bike-powered cargo haulers. This is pretty cool, and I imagine that in 10-20 years we will see more stuff like this as climate change ramps up.
Honestly, I think that the best approach to social media is to avoid it entirely, but if you are going to use it, stoicism has some useful tools for you.
It’s good to remember that even in this deeply problematic time, there’s still plenty of unexplained weird stuff out there. It makes me happy to think that in the midst of everything that’s happening, there are people out there who are spending their time trying to figure out what some weird object in space is. Anyone who says that this sort of work isn’t important and shouldn’t be funded probably should never be in charge of anything.
An opinion piece in the New York Times makes a compelling argument for banning cars from Manhattan. It argues that cars make every sort of transportation (cars included) more terrible. I would argue that cars make every aspect of city life more terrible.
It says something that police are much more worried about ‘antifa’ than they are about the far right, even though one group has a history of killing police officers (hint, it isn’t antifa, which is only a group in the same way that feminism is a group, which is to say it isn’t).
A surprisingly good read on how trucking deregulation created big box stores.
If you had asked me at the beginning of the month, I would have said that poor people are over-represented in the military. Apparently I was wrong
A propasal for a (partially) wooden bridge in Seattle that looks pretty cool.
This has been sitting as an open tab on my phone for over a year now, but I finally read it, and I’m glad I kept it open. The Story of Carolina Gold, the Best Rice You’ve Never Tasted. We just bought a big bag of super-tasty sushi rice, but once we’ve eaten through some of that, I’ll definitely be getting some Carolina Gold.
Even if it isn’t an immediate fix, a wealth tax is probably necessary, and the sooner we start working on it, the better. “It won’t solve our immediate problems” isn’t a good argument for delaying it. However, since it is likely a very unpopular idea to the powerful, it will probably be a while. In the meantime, we can start by properly funding the IRS.
The Legacy of Arctic Explorer Matthew Henson. I ran across a link to this in an article on Outside about creating an anti-racist outdoor industry. I think that there is a lot to be said about how important it is to see yourself represented in media (an idea I first ran across while reading Blue Rage, Black Redemption. I’ll try to share more of this sort of thing as I run across it.

What I’m reading/listening to/playing/whatever

I’m still reading Worm, which is still excellent. I find that sometimes I only read a little bit for a week or two, then other times I’m reading it every chance I get. I still love it, and feeling the freedom to take my time with it has been one of the (expected) benefits of abandoning reading goals (or rather, having a goal of reading fewer books).
I’m gradually working through Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson. I probably wouldn’t be reading it save for an article about the author in the New Yorker that sat in my open tabs for like a year (Yeah, I have a tab problem. No, I’m not going to just bookmark things). It’s a tough read, definitely more academic philosophy than pop science, but so far the payoff has been great. Unfortunately it feels as though it is getting more relevant as many of us are being compelled to ignore the advice of health professionals (tl;dr stay home) by our employers. I hope to have something worthwhile to say about it in the next few months.
I’ve been listening to the Hamilton soundtrack quite a bit after watching the filmed performance on Disney+. It’s really good, but I probably wouldn’t appreciate it nearly as much if I hadn’t watched first (I may be wrong on that count). The production feels a bit like a hagiography, but the music was amazing and I honestly don’t know enough about the subject to state whether or not I agree with it.
I’m almost 90% done with Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. Somehow this goofy crossover seems to be on a level with the original Final Fantasy Tactics (which I still consider the best game ever made). I’m really impressed. I’ll write more about it once I finish it (and the DLC).

Inside Tom's Head - June 2020

2020-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

It feels like way more than a month ago that I wrote my May post. Between the US deciding that politics is a valid reason to abandon our most effective responses to COVID-19 (masks and social distancing) and the protests that sprung up in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police, it has felt more like a year.

This is the first month where I made an effort to keep track of what I read online, but I was surprised at how long this post ended up being. There are a couple of things that could probably have been their own posts, and I think that the protests ended up creating a lot of stuff to read and think about. If these end up being consistently this long, I’ll have to either split them up or do a better job of pruning them down. In any case, here’s a brief overview of what I’ve been thinking about for the past month.

COVID-19

Washington state has been gradually reopening. Back when they first announced their plan and talked about having at least 3 weeks between phases, it sounded pretty reasonable. However, the reality on the ground (for me, at least) is that 3 weeks feels way too fast, since it takes a while for businesses to get up to speed with a new phase and longer still for people to adapt (shopping, eating out, etc.). My understanding is that the 3 week period is to see if the new phase causes an uptick in cases, but since the virus can take up to 2 weeks to show symptoms that means that they are making decisions based on incomplete data (since not everyone is going to go out and start doing more stuff immediately after we enter a new phase). I’ll take slow and safe over fast and dangerous any day.

Apparenttly face masks don’t even have to be very good to be effective.
Andrew Percy makes a strong argument for Universal Basic Services. I’m not sure how I feel about this vs UBI, but it’s worth giving some thought.
COVID-19 Broke the Economy - What If We Don’t Fix It?. I would like to see an organized effort to switch to a 32 hour workweek come out of this.

Police Brutality

The institution of policing is broken. A big part of that is that policing in the US was heavily influenced by 19th century slave patrols. Another part of this is that white supremacist groups have made efforts to infiltrate law enforcement organizations. Finally, police spend a lot of their time on non-violent crime, with things like traffic stops taking up the vast majority of police time (some estimates put it at about 4%).

Although I would prefer to live in a society where there is no need for police, I don’t see that happening in the next few years. However, if we don’t try to move in that direction now, it will never happen. There are lots of ways people are talking about this, but without getting into the weeds on terminology, here is what I hope to do in the immediate future:

Get a sense of how much money my community is spending on police. The police budgets of the three small intersecting cities where I live plus the county sheriff (and jail) budgets add up to about $80,000,000 for a population of less than 300,000 people. I have a hard time believing that we can’t find a better way to spend that money.
Contact my representatives and ask for oversight. As far as I can tell, none of the law enforcement agencies release any sort of annual report explaining what they do. For an $80,000,000 enterprise, it seems odd that they apparently feel no need to explain what they are doing and why they should be funded at the level that they are.
Ask my representatives to increase the use of speed cameras. In Washington state, they are legal in school speed zones. It turns out that traffic cameras do a pretty good job at reducing dangerous behavior and the fewer police that we have doing traffic enforcement, the fewer of them will be killing people for minor infractions.

The book The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale is an excellent overview of how policing works in our country, and offers many suggestions about ways that it could be improved. However, after going through just about every aspect of what is wrong with US law enforcement, one has to ask, what’s left? I listened to the audiobook, which was quite good.
About Face is an excellent short webcomic (you can read it in a single sitting) by Nate Powell about military, law enforcement, and far-right aesthetics.
Examined Worlds has some questions that white people should ask themselves. I would add that if you find yourself comfortable with all of your answers, you should examine them more closely. These questions are meant to be difficult and uncomfortable.
The Case for Ending All Traffic Stops
We Don’t Need Cops to Enforce Traffic Laws
It’s not clear that police actually deter dangerous driving anyway.
Report: City Must Get NYPD Out of Street Enforcement — For Everyone’s Safety
Just Because They’ve Turned Against Humanity Doesn’t Mean We Should Defund the Terminator Program
If traffic safety is the goal, police don’t appear to working towards it
I saw a quote or a comment somewhere that pointed out that if a broken tail light is a real concern, wouldn’t it be cheaper and better to just pay to replace people’s tail lights than pull them over? Anyway, the DSA did something along these lines a while back, seems like a positive piece of activism.
And it looks like cops are not great drivers themselves. Acting as though you are above the law (even if that is pretty much accurate) isn’t a good way to engender trust in your community.

Stuff I’ve Been Working On, Here and Elsewhere

Not a whole lot going on for me. Going back to work and the protests kind of sidetracked me, mentally.
I’m going to start linking books via WorldCat and movies via The Movie Database (since IMDB is owned by Amazon now and I’m not comfortable with corporations profiting off of volunteer work that was intended to create a free resource).
No new fiction, but I have a piece of flash fiction that I’m hoping to post sometime in July (I wrote it quite a while ago).
I shared my Netrunner Mobile Random Card project with Reddit and got a pretty good response. On their suggestion, I posted it on GitHub as well. I haven’t had time to do much work on it last month, but I hope to make some progress in July.
I didn’t get around to recommending anything. I still have hope to be able to do it on a regular basis. The rest of the world just needs to calm down a bit first.

New Stuff Elsewhere

Olympia’s parking plan looks pretty good.
An oral history of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”
A look at the connection between zoning and racism where I live. I would be surprised if this wasn’t the story in most places. Another post from the same blog, looking more closely at a specific section of Olympia and showing how current zoning affects race. If you’re interested in the history of zoning, I would recommend a series of articles on the Urban Kchoze blog: Euclidean Zoning (no, not that Euclid) and Japanese Zoning (presented as an alternative to our system).
Passive Voice is for Cowards
Since it appears to be pretty bad for your mental health, I’ve been reducing my presence on social media for a while now. I hadn’t gotten around to deleting my Facebook profile, though, since I still used Messenger. However it seems that the company lacks the will or desire to curb misinformation from our president and climate-change deniers. Time to delete the ol’ Facebooky.
Somehow it doesn’t seem that surprising that Bon Appetit has some problems with race.
Thinking about what school will look like in the fall reminded me of an article I saw a while back about how we could see huge improvements in academic achievement simply by putting good air filters in schools. Heck, even if it didn’t boos academics, it would probably be worthwhile.
Hasan Minhaj had a good episode on ranked choice voting. It won’t fix all of our problems, but it’s a start. I recall hearing or reading somewhere a few years ago that no one can agree on what the best voting system is, but most of them agree that ours is just about the worst.
One of my favorite books is getting a sequel!
I listened to the first episode of the Asian Enough podcast with John Cho, and it was quite good. I’m looking forward to future episodes (there are already a bunch out, I just haven’t gotten to them).
My partner and I have been doing Khan Academy with our son over the summer. I had spent some time doing math on the site and been impressed but wasn’t sure what to expect in terms of language arts, but I’m honestly blown away. As with the math, the presenter clearly has a passion for the subject, which makes for engaging and fun videos. In addition, I really appreciate how they don’t speak down to the kids, the material feels age-appropriate while still being honest and challenging. Even as an adult who is relatively familiar with our language, I’ve learned stuff. Their bonus video on the origin of mutant plurals is an excellent example of what I’m talking about. Also, while I’m on the subject, Salman Khan’s book, The One World Schoolhouse was excellent and is worth reading in this time of rapid change in our education system.

Black Lives Matter

2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been wanting to write something about the protests for a couple of weeks now, and made plenty of false starts. I wanted to write a big thing about my thoughts on the situation, but I’m not sure that the movement really needs another priveledged white voice talking about how things ought to be. However, I do feel the need to say something, so here goes.

Black Lives Matter

It makes me sad that this even needs to be said in 2020. The fact that such an obvious statement can sound radical is evidence of the deep inequality at the foundation of our society. Something needs to be done.

I am thankful that people are willing to stand up for this, and it makes me happy to see that the people doing so are a diverse bunch. I wish there was less violence involved, but since most of that violence appears to be perpetrated by the police, I can hardly fault the protesters (who, it should also be noted, tried doing this peacefully and were ignored). I also wish that there were less property damage (looting) but then again, stores carry insurance for a reason and things can be replaced, people killed by the police cannot (not to mention that there are good arguments to be made about looting being the result of structural inequality anyway).

What is to be done?

I’m not sure. However, here are some ideas:

Join the protests. Go out, show solidarity. Heck, even if you don’t agree with them, go out and talk to people (outside of your circle of friends) about it. Granted, we are in the middle of a pandemic, so some amount of caution makes sense. That being said, the fact that protests of this size are happening in the middle of a pandemic speaks to the seriousness of the issue.
Contact your representatives. Voting isn’t enough and never has been (though you should still vote). If you don’t like what you see, you should be writing or calling your representatives at the local, state, and national level. It’s hard for them to represent you if you don’t tell them what you want.
- If your rep is already doing the things you want them to do, go ahead and contact them anyway, knowing that their constituents approve of their actions makes it easier to keep pushing for change.
- If you are certain that your rep won’t listen, contact them anyway. Even if all they do is ignore you, that takes up time and effort on their part and might eventually chip away at their certainty. If you call, please be kind to whoever answers the phone, they aren’t the one making the decisions (heck, they might even agree with you) and the world already has plenty of assholes, don’t be one of them.
Do a little research:
- How much does your city spend on police? Here in Olympia, we spend about $20.5 Million per year for a population 52,000. That’s a lot of money and I have to wonder about what impact it might have if some of it were spent on things like mental health services or affordable housing.
- Another place to start is with Qualified Immunity. The idea that police shouldn’t be held accountable for violating people’s rights because they can’t be expected to know that things like stealing property or excessive use of force while on the job is repugnant. Police are acting as part of the state when they put on the uniform, and should be held to a higher standard, not a lower one. If an officer doesn’t know that something like theft is wrong, then they have no business being a police officer. Thankfully, a bill has been introduced that might help the situation.
- Why are police using tear gas on peaceful protesters, which is prohibited in warfare by the Geneva Convention? It seems like a bad idea, especially given that it appears to be especially dangerous in the midst of a respiratory infection pandemic.
Finally, here is something that resonated with me when I first read it, and has helped to shape my thinking on race. Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is by John Scalzi.

I firmly believe that we will come out of this thing as a better, more equal, and more just society, but for that to happen we all need to be helping in whatever way we can. However hard this may be, the alternative is worse, and until we address the structural inequality that is endemic in our society, things will not improve.

Inside Tom's Head - May 2020

2020-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

It has been a busy May. I redesigned this site, and of course the everything is still shut down due to the pandemic, which is deeply weird. This post is the first of what I hope to be a regular thing, a place to put stuff that doesn’t quite merit its own post, and also a way to keep me actively involved at this site when things get busy (and hopefully avoid some of the unintentional hiatuses that have occurred in the past).

New stuff around here:

I posted recommendations for the webserial Worm and Zante’s Pizza in San Francisco.
As part of the site redesign, I posted all of my stories. I also went ahead and posted There Are No Words, which is one of my favorites. You should go check it out.
As part of learning about how APIs work, and because it is a useful tool for me, I wrote some code that will show you a random Netrunner card (especially for mobile, since there is already a Chrome plugin that works pretty well). I’m still figuring this stuff out, so it doesn’t do everything I want it to, but it is at a point where it works.

New stuff elsewhere:

Akim Aliu’s piece on how far hockey needs to go if it wants to claim to be welcoming to people who aren’t straight white men. I really liked Aliu’s focus on how the sport is more than just the NHL and that what we are seeing is a cultural problem, not a problem confined to one organization such as the NHL. Unfortunately, some of the stuff the article talks about is a little too familiar from my time spent as a Zamboni driver. I had hoped that things had improved in the intervening years, but it sounds like that is not the case.
Citylab takes a deep look at elevators as social spaces and what that means in a world experiencing a respiratory pandemic. The article also made me think about Colson Whitehead’s book The Intuitionist which was excellent, in a deeply strange way.
If you wanted (needed?) more evidence that social media is probably a net negative for society, here’s an article about how facebook knows that its platform exacterbates division but chooses to do nothing. None of this is surprising, since, like reality tv, of course social media thrives on conflict. Of course, reality tv is spectator conflict and social media is participatory conflict, so it may be even worse in that regard. Jaron Lanier’s book 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now is a quick fun read on the topic if you want to know more.
Ars Technical has an interesting article about how the rise of the Hollywood studio system in the 20’s shut women out of the filmmaking process.
Planet Money did an episode on municipal internet. The whole idea of corporations being able to write legislation (especially legislation that affects them) is pretty disgusting. Even so, I could maybe see it if their entire argument didn’t rest on the idea that a fast internet connection isn’t a utility. I don’t think that people working from home right now think it is a luxury. As it is, municipalities wouldn’t want to be providing internet service if corporations were doing a good job. As it is, arguing that cities shouldn’t be able to run their own internet is like saying that the USPS shouldn’t exist because it undercuts FedEx (yeah, I know that this exact argument is probably being made somewhere). I’m interested to see what Washington State’s new Broadband Office does, maybe things will get better in this corner of the country.

This is my first attempt at this new roundup post thing. I think that for now I’m going to do it on a monthly basis, since I want it to be something that is relatively easy to keep up, but I might increase the frequency at some point.

Zante's Pizza

2020-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

If you ever find yourself in San Francisco, do yourself a favor and go to Zante’s Pizza & Indian Cuisine and get an Indian Pizza (they have several varieties vegan, vegetarian, and with meat). I’ve never found anything else like it.

What is an Indian Pizza? Well, if you took a tasty pizza dough and instead of putting the usual toppings on it instead covered it with indian food, you’d have a good idea of what I’m talking about. Every bite is a different flavor of Indian food, and every bite is delicious. Even if you don’t like Indian food, you should try it.

It is also worth noting that that I have seen Indian pizza elsewhere, too, but it is usually much closer to a traditional pizza (red sauce, mozzarella) with some Indian toppings. Zante’s, on the other hand, is more akin to Indian - Italian fusion. To get an idea of what I’m talking about, here’s the list of toppings for the original best Indian pizza:

Spinach
Egg Plant
Cauliflower
Ginger
Garlic
Green Onions
Cilantro
Lamb
Tandoori Chicken
Prawns

Finally, I should mention that Zante’s saved my marriage. “How?” you ask. Well, back when my partner and I lived in San Francisco, we realized that almost all of our arguments started the same way, with the innocuous question: “What do you want for dinner?” Usually, one of us would have something in mind and everything would be good. If neither of us had a strong preference, however, we would circle around and around, neither of us wanting to force the other eat something that we didn’t feel that strongly about ourselves. Eventually, this would continue until we got hangry and then one of us would say something that we regretted.

Enter the “Zante’s Rule”. Once we realized what was happening, it was relatively easy to figure out a way around it. Since I could always go for pizza, and my partner could always go for indian food, if our dinner discussion had gon past the 5-minute mark, before it could turn into something more akin to trench warfare we would just order from Zante’s. And so, for the remainder of time that we lived in San Francisco, most of our arguments were averted.

In retrospect, the Zante’s Rule seems really close to some of what Algorithms to Live By was talking about, so if you found this interesting, you might want to give the book a try. Or, just go get yourself a tasty, tasty Indian Pizza.

Note: I know that the website lists the name as Zante Pizza, not Zante’s Pizza. Since the magnet on my fridge says Zante’s, I’m going with that.

A Fresh Start

2020-05-29T00:00:00+00:00

It took a bit of work, but if you’re reading this I have successfully switched from Wordpress to Jekyll. As of now, there are some things that I still need to take care of (getting the navbar to highlight correctly, adding some of the images back in, etc.) but the bulk of the work is done. There’s a bit more detail about this site’s current incarnation over on the About page, but the short version is that I ran across Tom MacWright’s website a couple of weeks ago and realized that I could fix the things that had bothered me about this site for years now (how slow Wordpress was, the difficulty of finding a theme that I liked, etc.).

Everything important from the old site should be moved over at this point, including all of my fiction and any blog posts with actual content (it was difficult to not edit them).

I’m still figuring out how I want to proceed from here. There’s a lot to do and I don’t want to get burned out. Here are some of the ideas that I have:

Figure out a way of doing a regular blog post to keep things alive here and to track what’s going on in my head that doesn’t quite rise to the level of a post. I’m experimenting with keeping track of links to articles I read to do some sort of monthly post. I’m not sure if this will be closer to MacWright’s Recently posts, Keith Law’s Stick to Baseball posts, something else entirely.
Regularly update the Recommended page. I’m not sure if the interval should be weekly or less frequent. I also need to come up with some criteria for how I’ll do it.
I’ve been wanting to write again, and I’d like to do a bit more with my fiction. Publishing short stories as ebooks kind of worked, but I don’t think that the effort:benefit ratio was very good. Also, since I’m not looking at writing as a potential income stream these days, I’m even less concerned with profitability than I was before. Instead, I’m looking for discoverability. That being said, the POSSE model (Publish One’s Self, Syndicate Elsewhere) sounds pretty appealing. I might experiment with sites like Medium.
I want to document some of the Projects I work on. Currently that page has a couple of things I’ve done for Netrunner, but eventually I would like for it to include some of my offline projects, as well.

In any case, I think that’s enough for now. See you all around.

Worm

2020-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

If you’re looking for something to eat up some time, I have a webserial for you. Worm is a webserial by John C. “Wildbow” McCrae. If you aren’t familiar with webserials, it can help to think of them as the 21st century successor to 19th century serialized novels (think Charles Dickens). You can’t get it at the library, since the author hasn’t yet released an official book/ebook, but you can read it in its entirety online. There’s also a fan-made audiobook of it, too, although I haven’t listened to it so can’t comment on the quality.

Worm has a few things going for it. First, it’s really good. Like good enough to disrupt my sleep schedule good. It took me a section or two to get into it, but once I did, I was hooked. The characters are interesting and believable, the setting is well-built, and actions have consequences (death isn’t cheap, people hold grudges, and concussions will mess you up). Before I get any further, I should disclose that it is superhero fiction, not usually my favorite genre, but it is closer to the Warren Ellis flavor of the genre than the Avengers.

Second, Worm is long. 1.6 million words long. For comparison, it is as long as almost three Lord of the Rings series back-to-back. Normally, this length is a bit daunting, but if you’re reading this, you might just be looking for something to soak up some hours. At this point, I should disclose that I haven’t finished it yet, but since I’m about 2 Lord-of-the-Rings into the story and lots of other people seem to like it, I feel comfortable recommending it to you.

Finally, Worm somehow manages to remain hopeful despite being pretty dark (people die, communities are devastated by natural disasters and the story doesn’t look away, bad things happen). Although it can be tough to read at times, I find its depiction of the resilience of our species to be inspiring. That being said, it isn’t a kids book, as the author says, “It would be easier to note the trigger warnings that don’t apply than all the ones that do.”

Old Man Yells at TV - March 2020

2020-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

Thanks to the global pandemic and general collapse of society, I have been able to watch more movies than usual. Here’s what I watched last month:

Spies in Disguise – Rewatch, saw it in theaters and it is still awesome. It can feel a bit preachy at times, but not excessively so, in my opinion.

Forks Over Knives – My doctor suggested that I watch this, and damnit I don’t want to stop eating meat, but I may have to. This is problematic. The documentary could have been better put together, however. I think that it would have been better if they went through a piece of science completely then did a case study moving on to another piece of science, but instead it felt like things were unnecessarily drawn out, with a piece of information introduced then not actually dealt with until a bunch of other stuff had happened. Even so, it was compelling.

Jumanji 2: The Next Level – Watching The Rock do a Danny Devito impression was surprisingly fun, which is an apt metaphor for my feelings about the movie as a whole. I enjoyed it more than I felt I should.

The Game Changers – Okay, another movie about eating plants. This one was better put together, both in terms of production value (higher quality video) and presentation (it felt like they did a better job of presenting science, showing an example, then drawing conclusions than in Forks Over Knives). It was compelling and enjoyable, but I didn’t really care for the appeal to traditional masculinity (though I can totally see why that choice was made). This movie ended up moving me even farther into the plant based diet category.

Angry Birds 2 – This was second or third time watching this. Not as good as the original, but still fun.

The BFG – Fun, but it didn’t quite live up to my memories of enjoying the book 30-ish years ago.

Ford v. Ferrari – Fun, and deeper than expected, but I didn’t love it as much as I expected to. Full Review.

Ford v. Ferrari

2020-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

I wasn’t able to catch Ford v. Ferrari in theaters, but I did manage to see it while sheltering at home from COVID-19 this last weekend. Although the movie had some issues (notably a one-dimensional antagonist and lack of female characters - Keith Law has a good write-up if you want a review from a competent reviewer), I had a lot of fun watching it. I do have a couple of things to say about it, though.

Namely, the title Ford v. Ford would have been more apt (although not better). While the movie was nominally about Ford wanting to build a car to beat Ferrari, the latter automaker has a remarkably small role in the movie. All of the real conflict was about Ford getting it its own way.

This got me to thinking about when I was practicing Kendo. During that time, one of the pivotal moments for me was when I realized that winning a match had a lot more to do with me overcoming my own limitations than with what my opponent was doing. I won’t go into this idea too much here, but it is tied into the stoic idea of dichotomy of control (of which I was unaware at the time), which basically states that we shouldn’t place much weight on things which are outside of our control. In a competition, our opponent’s actions are not in our control, so really the only thing that we should care about is not whether we win or lose, but whether we did our best under the circumstances.

The movie deals with this in a couple of ways, mainly with the ways in which Ford got in the way of Shelby and Miles, but also with Miles’ attitude towards attempting to one day drive the perfect lap, where every element is perfectly executed and harmoniously connected. Unfortunately the movie spent a lot more time on the former when I wish it had spent more time on the latter (I would have liked to see more of him hashing it out with his wife, and the scene where he talked about it with his son could have used some more support). I also think that this would have led the movie to end on a better note.

This idea of competing with oneself makes a sort of intuitive sense, we can all probably think of times when we have gotten in our own way. Winning that internal competition is difficult and to me, it has a lot to do with being in harmony with oneself. Practicing Kendo was an exercise in getting my mind and body on the same page (see Ki Ken Tai Ichi). But how does internal harmony work when you scale it up to a team? A company? A government? A society?

The movie in no way answers these questions, which isn’t a flaw in my books, since those answers aren’t easy to come by and are riddled with complexity (At what point does unity turn toxic, as in Fascism? How does unity balance with diversity, which provides its own sort of strength?). For a movie that I expected to be fun but shallow, even raising these questions is a win. If you haven’t watched it yet, you should.

COVID-19 Reading List

2020-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

As the pandemic strengthens its grip on the country, like many of you I’ve been at home. Although homeschooling my child has taken up a lot of my time, I have still found some time to be glued to my smartphone, where I’ve been reading about what is happening. Here’s some stuff that I have found interesting:

Food Safety and the Coronavirus by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. This is an excellent guide that will answer your questions about how to eat safely during the pandemic. While you’re there, check out the rest of Serious Eats, which is definitely my favorite food site on the internet. After all, even if you don’t usually cook much, there’s a good chance you have some time on your hands right now, so I can’t think of a better time to try it.
Interview with Max Brooks on COVID-19. Part of the reason why World War Z was so good was that it was very well researched, and it shows in this interview. Brooks has spent a lot of time talking with experts about pandemics and provides a lot of insight in this interview, especially in regards to the Defense Production Act (which I admit I didn’t really understand until reading this). The highlights cover a lot of the important stuff that was discussed, but listening to the whole thing is definitely worth it. Also, if you haven’t yet you should read World War Z, which is my personal favorite zombie book, the audiobook version was also excellent, sounding like an NPR retrospective special on the zombie apocalypse.
Lowering Speed Limits Will Help Stop COVID-19. Okay, I know it sounds ridiculous, but since limited hospital capacity is the gun whose barrel we are currently staring down, we should do everything in our power to reduce the number of people going to the hospital for preventable causes, such as traffic collisions (which, honestly, we should be doing anyway). In any case, regardless of your reaction to the article’s title, you should give it a read.
An article about how Social Distancing is slowing the spread of other viruses, too. I wonder how much of this is due to us doing the stuff that we should have been doing during flu season all along.
How The Pandemic Will End. A pretty good rundown of how we got here and what things might look like going forward.
Despite what your government has told you, masks are a good idea. This is just a summary of a study done about influenza, but what it comes down to is that if you want to stop the spread of a disease like influenza or COVID-19, impeding the path of droplets from people is a good idea, even if you have to do it with homemade cloth masks. Also, since we don’t know who is sick and who isn’t (even if testing were in place), it only works if most people do it. I hope that this changes the culture around wearing masks in public. Even if COVID-19 doesn’t become a seasonal illness, the benefits for preventing deaths from the flu are totally worth it.

Of course, there’s a lot more going on, and a lot more that I’m thinking about, but haven’t spent much time reading up on (will a work-from-home culture emerge from this and if so, how will it affect things like family budgeting and transportation emissions; will this result in public education being properly funded; will workers be able to leverage their demonstrated utility in the face of executive waste). If I have time, I’ll try to do another of these in a few weeks and maybe answer some of those questions.

No matter what, we are in for an . . . interesting time in this country. Please stay home and stay safe.

Updates

2019-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

Despite the complete lack of activity on here for the past couple of years, I’m not dead! Here’s a brief overview of what I’ve been up to:

I’ve been following that goal I set for myself a few years back of going easier on myself. Unfortunately, a big part of that has been making a conscious effort not to overextend myself, hence my silence here. That being said, things have been going pretty well in life offline but I won’t bore you with the details.
I spent the last year-and-a-half playing Magic: The Gathering. I played in high school, then gave it up and got rid of all my cards. After randomly picking up a copy of Generation Decks at the library last year, I got back into it. However, I’m a bit burned out on Magic again (though this time I won’t be getting rid of my cards).
Currently I’ve been playing Android: Netrunner, which is also a card game, but this one no longer supported by its publisher. This may sound like a downside, but I’m actually thinking that it may be a positive for me since the fan community has taken it over and I think what was annoying me about Magic was the decisions that resulted from the profit motive. Last week I wrote an Android: Netrunner New Player Guide.
I haven’t been doing any writing recently, but I have a couple of ideas for projects to work on next year. In the next week or two, I plan on making There Are No Words into a proper story page on the site.
I updated the site’s theme to something a bit more modern with better mobile support. It looks like it may have broken some of my formatting though (particularly in lists), so sorry about that. I’ll continue to work on it.

Convention Report: GameStorm 19

2017-04-03T00:00:00+00:00

This past weekend I attended my second GameStorm convention, GameStorm 19. If you are unfamiliar with it, it is a Portland area gaming convention that runs for four days.

Last year I had a good time but didn’t get a chance to play some of the stuff that I had brought with me and really wanted to (this was partially due to the venue, which the convention had outgrown). This year, the convention was in a bigger venue (which was also closer to where we were staying in Portland) which helped a lot, and I signed up to run three games: Mines of Zavandor, Panamax, and Edo. This helped immensely, as it provided a bit of structure to my convention experience (signing up for games that others were running isn’t quite the same, in my experience). If you are planning on going, I would recommend bringing your favorite game and signing up to run it, you are guaranteed a spot at the table, finding players is easier (and they will have a chance to prepare), and you will get to share a possibly obscure game that might not otherwise see the table (I didn’t see or hear about another session of Panamax, and I only met one person who had even heard of Mines of Zavandor).

In any case, you probably aren’t here for gaming convention advice, so here’s what I played:

Mines of Zavandor
Harbour
Mint Works (x2)
Panamax
Eridu (prototype)
Take the Gold
Wreck-A-Mecha (x2)
Quantum (x2 with three then two players)
Nocturnal
Tongiaki: Journey into the Unknown
Isle of Skye: From Chieftain to King
Hanamikoji
Armageddon (recent Queen Games version)
Yedo
Keyflower
Edo

Highlights:

Wreck-A-Mecha - This is the second game from Black Table Games (makers of the excellent Inglorious Space), and was probably my favorite game of the convention. It is simple and fast (with a playtime of 10-20 minutes), has great theme, great art, and was just a ton of fun. They are planning on launching it on Kickstarter in June, and I will definitely be backing it (and probably mentioning it here, too). My only complaint is that it isn’t on BGG yet, so I can’t log it.
Nocturnal - This is currently on Kickstarter (ending tomorrow), and though it looks like the kickstarter may not succeed (currently at 45% with 38 hours to go), I would recommend backing it to get a notice when the designer relaunches (though I will try to make a point of mentioning it here when it does). To me, the game has a vampire hunting theme plus some Carl Chudyk elements (Innovation, Glory to Rome, Mottainai, etc), minus the steep learning curve of Chudyk games. It teaches and plays fast, has good theme integration (the game reminded me a lot of John Steakly’s Vampire$, which I haven’t read in too long and now want to see if it stands the test of time).
Quantum - I had been hearing about this game for quite a while and now I’m working on how I can trade for it. It is a fast-playing spaceship game with an innovative use of dice and the perfect amount of player interaction (for me, at least). Combined with fully customizable maps and you have what feels to me like a near-perfect game.
Edo - Somehow, I always manage to forget how much I like Edo between plays. I had heard it negatively compared to Yedo, but after playing that for the first time I can’t really agree. There are some similarities between the two (they are both about the historical city of Edo, for one), but they are very different games, with Yedo feeling like a heavy version of Lords of Waterdeep (mostly due to the missions) and Edo feeling like a heavy version of Robo Rally (due to the action programming aspect). Personally I prefer Edo, but had fun with Yedo and would happily play it again even if I don’t feel there’s a home for it in my collection.

The other thing I did differently this year was to attend panels, and they definitely enriched the convention for me:

Golden Guidelines of Game Design - Dave Howell presented his Golden Guidelines, which was a list of things that suck the fun out of games and why. Even as someone who isn’t into game design (though I would be surprised if I didn’t eventually try my hand at it), the panel was an excellent examination of why some games don’t work. It helped me to put some of the things that bother me into words, and will probably increase the quality of my feedback to game designers when I playtest.
A Gamer’s Guide to the Resistance - This was a panel presented by Mike Selinker, Rebecca Meiers, Sara Waffle, George Kennedy, and Adrian Hayes about how gamers with a progressive mindset can work towards positive change in our current political and social climate. This panel was only an hour, and I feel that it really could have used double that time. I was most interested in Sarah Waffle’s story about how she ran for, and won, a local political office using the skills that she had developed as a gamer. I hope to write more about this panel in the next week or so.

In summary, I had a great time and am looking forward to GameStorm 20.

A Stoic Response to the 2016 Election

2016-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

Earlier this week, Quartz published a piece about how philosophy has failed in its essential role of helping us to make sense of our world by focusing on academic navel-gazing. My initial reaction was that, yeah, they should be doing a better job. My second reaction was that as someone who values and studies philosophy, there is no “they”, it is my job as much as anyone else’s to rectify the situation. Without further ado, here is my first attempt at that rectification.

If you are anything like most of the people I know, you are reeling from last night’s election results. I won’t go into much detail about what I think happened except to say that I don’t see it as an endorsement of bigotry by the majority of the country (although there is definitely a strong bigot contingent). Instead, I see it as the reaction of people for whom our economy (our whole country, even) simply has not been working for quite a while now. In particular I am talking about people in rural areas who have been seeing their jobs, communities, and way of life steadily deteriorating for decades and for whom a vote of more of the same was simply not an option. I am not trying to condone their choice, only to point out that it would be both wrong and counterproductive to write them off as simply ignorant rednecks. The people who voted for Trump are just as American as I am and this election is a statement that they feel something is very broken with a large part of our country.

That being said, what about all of the progressive urbanites who are in a state of collective shock right now? I believe that stoicism can be of some help here.

First of all, let me start by saying that if you base your understanding of the word stoic on how it is commonly used, you may need to add a second line to that definition. Stoicism as a philosophy is not about ignoring or enduring unpleasantness. Instead, it is about recognizing that unpleasantness is inevitable and finding ways of having a joyful and fulfilling life in spite of it.

The first tenet of stoicism is that one can view the world as being comprised of things which are in your control and things which are not. When put this way, it quickly becomes clear that it isn’t a good idea to allow your happiness to be determined by those things which are outside of your control (since they will eventually turn against you). Furthermore, if you think about it, there is really very little that you actually have any control over, really just your actions and your judgments. That means that just about everything else in the world is outside of your control, including the weather, what other people think about your actions, and literally everything that has happened up until this moment. So what does that mean for last night’s election? That it is outside of your control. Whether or not you voted and who you may have voted for are irrelevant now. The vote happened and the results have been accepted by the candidates. Whatever you did or did not do, we now live in a world in which Trump is president elect.

So what now, progressive urbanite?

Grieving, obviously.

The election results are not good news and it is neither my job nor my desire to sugarcoat that fact. However, I would encourage you to grieve fully and quickly. Get it over with. If you’re still stuck in a pit of despair in two years when the midterms come around you’re not going to be of any use to the ideals which you hold so dear. (I could also suggest that you practice some negative visualization prior to last night, but that would violate tenet number 1, above.)

Okay, with that out of the way (hope you’re feeling better), what’s next? Let’s look at the things which are in our control. Fortunately, it is a short list:

Our actions. If you are unhappy with the election results, then you need to organize. For example, you could:

Build organizations and communities to mitigate the effects of what you fear Trump might do, whether by providing support for those who his policies might hurt (such as security for minorities or ensuring access to women’s health services, whatever the law may say in a year) or by denying him a political mandate (protest, talk to your representatives, do not be silent and therefore tacitly complicit).
Prepare for the midterm elections. Trump isn’t nearly as frightening as Trump+House+Senate. In two years you have the possibility of restoring some of those checks and balances, but to do so you need to start organizing now (hence why it is so important to get the grieving out of the way).
There are, of course, many other options, ranging from trying to get rid of the electoral college to secession. I’m not going to tell you what to do, but if you are upset, you should do something.

Our judgments. This may seem to be much less important than our actions, but I would disagree. Whether or not you agree with my bit above about the reason for the election I hope that you realize that Trump is a symptom, not a cause, and that unless that cause is addressed, we have little to no hope of making any real or lasting progress. If you believe that what happened is the result of bigotry, then you should attempt to alleviate that bigotry (a difficult task, no doubt, but bigotry often stems from fear of the unknown, so it can be addressed). If you agree with me that there is a significant contingent of people for whom our system is not working, you can work on that. Or you can work on the ~50% of registered voters who did not vote this election. In any case, you might be asking why this is listed under judgements. This is listed under judgements because in order for you to make any progress on the above issues, you aren’t going to have much success if what you think is the problem and what is actually the problem aren’t the same thing. Writing off everyone who voted for Trump as a bigot or everyone who didn’t vote as apathetic is not going to make it easier to change their minds, much less influence their actions. So the best course is probably to let go of your judgements, and to build new ones on better foundations.

I realize that this may not seem particularly comforting or helpful to you, but it’s what I have to give. I believe that this is going to be a difficult time for all of us, but that it is something that we can get through, collectively.

If you are looking for a good introduction to stoicism, I would suggest William Irving’s A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy.

Also, it is worth noting that this post didn’t follow my normal process, which usually involves letting it sit for a day before revising and posting. As such, it likely has more errors than usual, which I may or may not correct in the future.

Have a tranquil day.

Reporting back from GameStorm 18

2016-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

Last weekend I was at GameStorm 18, Portland’s regional board game convention. I had a great time, and got to play a bunch of stuff:

Steam
Splendor (x2)
Favor of the Pharaoh (x2)
Raiders of the North Sea
The King is Dead
Traders of Osaka
Dice City
One Zero One
Krosmaster: Arena (x2)
Skull King
Lifeboat (with the Cannibalism expansion)
Shipwrights of the North Sea (with Townsfolk Expansion)
Isle of Trains
Fleet (with all the expansions)
Ca$h ‘n Guns (second edition)
Swinging Jivecat Voodoo Lounge
Eurorails
Medina
Inglorious Space

Overall, I had a great time. I didn’t run into any annoying people, and nothing I played fell flat (although a couple weren’t as fun as I expected). Here are some of the highlights:

Eurorails - This is something that I have been wanting to play for literally years (rather, I’ve been wanting to play any Crayon Rails game), but the weight of the game and long play time has been problematic. I definitely want to play more Crayon Rails games, and will probably buy/trade for Nippon Rails at some point.

Raiders of the North Sea - This game was just awesome, probably the best Kickstarter I’ve backed. In some ways it reminds me of Tzolk’in, but is a bit lighter and the rules are much more intuitive. I’m not sure if I had as much fun playing it as I did with Eurorails, but it will be much easier to get to the table. (Shipwrights was also great, the expansion really brings a lot to the game without adding much complexity.)

Inglorious Space - This game came as a complete surprise to me, given that I had never heard of it before playing it (not surprising since it is only a few days into its Kickstarter campaign), but I loved it. Based on classic space shooters like Galaga, it is a multiplayer with a semi-co-op mechanic. I had been excited about The Battle at Kemble’s Cascade, but after looking into it more, it just sounded tedious. Inglorious Space, on the other hand, plays quick, light, and fun, but has enough depth to keep it interesting. I’m definitely looking forward to playing it more.

Isle of Trains - Another game that I had never heard of. This is a tiny (52 card?) game about building a train and fulfilling contracts. It had some depth, interesting decisions, and good interaction. For $10, I can’t think of a good reason not to buy it.

All in all, a great weekend. Looking forward to GameStorm 19.

On Goals

2016-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

The most recent post on what is rapidly becoming one of my favorite blogs, thestonemind (which I would recommend even to non-climbers), talks about goals and some of the pushback that the author has gotten in regards to his advice to let go of them. Towards the end, he adds a bit of nuance, saying:

But does that mean I have no attachments, or propose that you should have none? Definitely not. I’m a realist, not an absolutist. But I do feel there’s a fine line between valuing things and clinging to them. To work assiduously and in earnest, but not be overly concerned with results—here’s the thing that I couldn’t quite express to my dad over dinner. I guess you could say my personal philosophy is more about the means than the ends. It’s not unlike the school of climbing that places style above all else. If you cut corners or do something in bad style, if you focus on just getting to the top or getting there faster and ignore the how of it, you’ll end up missing the whole damn point. An attachment to outcome that’s too strong can pull us out of alignment with the most meaningful things in life.

To me, what he is talking about is the difference between internal and external goals. I define internal goals as goals where I have control over the outcome and external goals as goals in which I don’t. What does this even mean?

Well, to say that I want to ride my bike as fast as I can is an internal goal, since even if I have a flat tire which slows me down, what counts is the effort I put in, not the result. On the other hand, if I say that I want to be the fastest person on the trail, that is an external goal. If a professional cyclist happens to be riding that day, I’m just not in the sort of physical condition where I can do more than keep up for a short period of time. Likewise, if I have a flat tire, my goal is dead in the water. As you may have guessed, I view the first sort of goal as good and the second as counterproductive.

So does that mean that I should pay no attention to how fast everyone else is riding? No. When I get passed by someone, I do my best to catch up with them, even if I have no expectation of passing them. What’s more, I’m thankful for their presence, since without them it is unlikely that I would have pushed myself as hard.

Another example comes from Kendo. It doesn’t matter how good your opponent is, you are only in charge of how well you fight. All your opponent is doing is keeping you honest, really. Well . . . not really. Every opponent, whether they are more or less skilled than you, has something to teach you, and the only real way to lose is to fail to pay attention to the lesson (unless you are in an actual duel, in which case dying would count as loss, too). I would argue that the same can be said of any climbing route, bike ride, or board game. They all offer you the chance to get to know yourself better.

Unless you get hung up on external goals, that is, too invested in how the other person is doing to have a chance at success yourself.

My New Year's Resolution: Go Easier On Myself

2016-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

2015 was a rough year. I started in a new position at work in December of 2014, and although I knew that it was going to be rough since my boss had been out for much of the previous year on medical leave, I was unprepared for just how bad it would be. I had thought that the situation surely couldn’t last another six months. It went on for the entire year. In 2015, work took over my life.

Predictably, I feet terrible about what the situation has done to my family (I was not able to give them the attention and time they deserved) and, to a lesser extent, to my writing (it slowed to a crawl), but it was exacerbated by how I felt about work. I was not able to cover both my and my boss’s responsibilities anywhere near my expectations and as a result I felt like I was failing at every aspect of my life which I valued (family, writing, work). I felt like I was killing myself for my work (and to some extent, I was, I gained 25 pounds and started to experience physical symptoms of stress) and hurting my family in the process, all in the name of a job which I wasn’t doing to anywhere near my expectations.

As if that weren’t bad enough, somewhere along the line I picked up an expectation that I should be more appreciated at work. Sure, I received an Excellence in Service award in addition to the rest of my department, and people thanked me on a regular basis (without everyone’s support, I would have quit months ago), but part of me was hoping that I would receive something on the anniversary of my starting in my new position. Even at the time I realized this was unrealistic, and that I was setting myself up for failure, but it still hurt nonetheless when the day came and went (compounded by the fact that I dropped the ball on my wife’s birthday).

In short, 2015 sucked.

But while the suckage was largely due to external factors, the suffering that resulted was almost entirely my fault. I had impossible expectations for myself and when I didn’t meet those I thought praise would make up for it. It didn’t.

In truth, the only expectations that make any sense are for me to do the best that I can given the circumstances. Everything else is out of my control. Likewise, there is no such thing as enough praise (and beyond doing my best I have no real control over how much of it people choose to give to me anyway). I did get praise. A lot of it, actually, from just about everyone. And yet it wasn’t enough, I wanted people to remember a date (as if they weren’t busy enough themselves) that is pretty arbitrary anyway (I chose my starting date to make life easier for the Payroll department rather than any numerical significance, and what’s so important about 365 days?).

So, in 2016 I have a single resolution: I want to go easier on myself. That doesn’t mean letting myself off the hook completely, but it does mean being realistic about my expectations and not letting myself get worked up by praise or lack thereof. I imagine that this will be both very simple and very hard and that I’ll probably have to apply my resolution recursively (I’ll have to give myself a pass on failing to give myself a pass).

I should also point out that I have plenty of goals (finishing the story I’m working on, finishing another section on my climbing wall, blogging more, etc.), but they are things I want to do, this is something about myself that I want to change.

Anyway, enough whining, back to work.

Writing: Profession or Hobby?

2015-04-30T00:00:00+00:00

Over the last few months, I have had to reevaluate my approach to writing. Do I look at it as a profession or a hobby? I had always looked at it as a profession (albeit one to which I aspired rather than belonged), now I need to learn to look at it as a hobby. This is not to say that I am planning on taking it any less seriously (indeed, ask my wife about my board games and you will get an exasperated explanation of how seriously I take my hobbies), but rather that I am changing what I expect to get out of it.

There are several reasons for this. I have a two year old at home and have recently changed to a position that both requires more of my time (40 hours rather than 32) and can be significantly more draining (I tend to miss a lot of my breaks and I actually need them to relax now, which cuts into my writing productivity). This lack of time has led to me allowing my writing to cause me anxiety (when the opposite should be true), but that anxiety has more to do with my expectations than with the quality of my writing. Simply put, when I worked in retail, writing was a sort of long-term hedge against, well, working in retail. My thought back then was that if I were still working in retail in a decade, I would have enough quality fiction to base a business model off of. As it is, I like my job (and have for several years now), and even if I made enough money writing to get by, I don’t think I would want to give it up. So even though I feel that the quality of my writing has improved, my emotions have suffered. Finally, I have no desire to do the whole self-promotion thing, I don’t suggest my stories to people who don’t first indicate an interest and I don’t nag them about it. I feel that this is a great attribute for a writer (or an artist of any kind, really), since I really don’t want to be that guy who is always trying to get you to read his story. All of this adds up to writing as a hobby.

So what does this mean for you? Well, if you deal with me personally, it hopefully means less moody Tom. It should also result in more blog posts, as I enjoy blogging, too, and it will likely benefit from a less adversarial relationship with my other writing hobby. Finally, it will mean no more sitting on stories. Sure, I’ll still try to sell them first (I mean, why wouldn’t I?), but I’ll go for the most likely outlets and then just put them up here (and Amazon and Smashwords). As it stands, I have three stories and a couple of pieces of flash fiction that are ready to go. I’ll try to get them out in May (it being National Short Story month and all), and I hope to have the first of them up tomorrow. Either way, thanks for sticking with me.

Proportional Response

2015-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

This morning there was an attempted shooting at a high school about five miles from my house. Thankfully no one was injured. What struck me most about it, though, was the fact that I was only mildly surprised at the news. School shootings have become common enough that I am no longer shocked by them, even when they are close to home (granted, I am sure that my reaction would have been very different if my son went there or if I knew anyone who attended or worked there).

Now take another almost-tragic event, the shoe bomber. His attempt was also unsuccessful, but anyone who has flown since 2001 is aware of his legacy as they proceed, shoeless, through security checkpoints. What would gun policy look like if our country reacted on the same scale to what are becoming semi-regular school shootings?

I’m not going to talk about what we should do as a country about either of these issues, as it would distract from my point: It is highly unlikely that our systemic responses to these two issues are both correct, and they could both be wrong.

Best books of 2014

2015-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

Okay, that title may be misleading, it should say “Some books that I read during 2014 and think that you should, too” as some of these books were not published in 2014 (Lady of Mazes was published in 2005, for example). Of course, if I were to actually put that as the title, the Headline Writer’s Guild would blacklist me (don’t laugh, they are scary, secret, and very powerful. haven’t heard of them? my point exactly). In any case, you’ve made it this far, so I should probably give you some actual content. This is a list of books that I read and enjoyed last year, and is not in any particular order.

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison - Far and away my favorite book of last year, but also the one I am most hesitant to recommend. Watching the main character, Maia, trying to do the right thing without letting his new position destroy his values was amazing. I loved everything else about this book, too: the setting, the plot, and the language. The last one is kind of the issue, however. The book is full of jargon, and it was annoying to have to refer to the glossary in back constantly. But then I realized that perhaps the author was trying to have me experience the same thing that Maia was going through; just as Maia was overwhelmed by his new position I was being overwhelmed by the jargon. When I stopped worrying about knowing exactly what people were talking about and just allowed myself to experience the slight confusion as I read, the book really came together for me. Which is precisely the reason that I have such a hard time recommending it, as I can see it being too literary-minded for many fantasy readers and to fantasy-minded for many literary readers (which isn’t to say that fantasy readers can’t handle heavy literature or vice versa, but rather that they have different preferences). In any case, best book of the year, go read it (but make sure you read at least two chapters, the first chapter has a different tone than the rest of the book, and doesn’t give a good sense of what you’re getting into).

Red Rising by Pierce Brown - Imagine a Science Fiction dystopia that reads a bit like Lord of the Flies if all of the characters started off as sociopaths. Red Rising (so far, it is only the first installment in a trilogy) is everything that I wanted The Hunger Games to be. It is dark, but amazing. I loved it. The audiobook was fantastic, too, I could listen to that guy read the phone book. Also, some people seem to think that this is a Teen book, and yes, the main character is a teen, but the book is very adult in its sensibilities, expect to be horrified not just by the things that the characters do (though it really isn’t that graphic, the worst of it happens offscreen), but by the cold, rational way in which they go about it.

Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway - I had made an attempt to read Harkaway’s first book, The Gone-Away World, a few years back but it didn’t take. I tried it again this year after hearing that I really needed to read it from a trusted friend (thanks Linda!). It was brilliant. Then I read Angelmaker, Harkaway’s second book. It has a lot of the same elements that made Gone-Away World so good, but in a tighter, more finely-crafted package (hence why I chose it over the debut). Imagine a British, leftist Neal Stephenson (Angelmaker has some parallels with Cryptonomicon, actually) with pop culture sensibilities writing about things like identity and free will. These books take some work, but they are pure fun and totally worth it (usually I don’t care much about ‘style’ and ‘voice’ but I would read a technical manual on the manufacturing of manhole covers if Harkaway were to write it). The audiobook of this was great, as well, the narrator reminded me in turn of Jason Statham and Bill Nighy (favorite line: “I can sue anything.”). I would not be surprised in the least to see Tigerman on next year’s list.

The Martian by Andy Weir - While not my favorite book of the year, this was definitely my most recommended book of the year. At this point, something like half of my coworkers have read it due at least in part to my proselytizing. If you like Science Fiction, read it. If you like adventure (particularly man vs. nature), read it. If you like space, read it. If you like gallows humor, read it. If you like entertainment, read it. If you like science, read it. If you are not completely dead inside, you should read this book (and if you are dead inside, read it anyway, it might help, who knows). Instead of summarizing the plot, I’ll just go ahead and suggest that you click on the link and read the description on Goodreads.

Rome: An Empire’s Story by Greg Woolf - History books usually aren’t my thing. I’m not reading them to build the foundation a master’s thesis, I’m reading so that I can get some sense of the general patterns of the world. Rome: An Empire’s Story is exactly what I want in a history book. It takes a close look at a handful of periods of Roman history that exemplify what was happening in the empire. It was entertaining and informative, and it never outstayed its welcome, thanks in part to its brevity. If you are reading for more serious reasons, however, I would still recommend this book. It covers a lot of things, and has a truly massive reading list included, making it a great place to start for the more academic minded.

Lockstep by Karl Schroeder - Karl Schroeder has long been one of my favorite short story authors, but his novels hadn’t grabbed me the same way (the Virga series was good, but not great, in my opinion), until this year. Lockstep is his shot at reinventing space opera, a genre which I usually don’t go in for, and it was amazing. The central idea is that of a culture that gets around resource scarcity and lack of Faster Than Light travel by hibernating in lockstep. Everyone goes int cryostasis for thirty years, then wakes up for one month, then goes back into stasis. This allows them to live in marginal environments by having machines stockpile resources while they hibernate. As a side benefit, if someone travels to another planet several light years away, they would spend the entire transit asleep, meaning that it would just be like waking up the next day on a new planet. This book is everything that epic science fiction ought to be: mind-bending and hope-giving. Unfortunately, it also has a terrible cover. Look at it: two generic people in some sort of . . . environment (perhaps it is the future, perhaps it is a Japanese luxury hotel, who can say?). Yay? It would be a perfectly fine cover for a thriller or a novel without cool visuals . . . but Lockstep has Denners. What are denners, you ask? Picture a cross between a cat and an otter, with embedded net access. Adorable and really freaking cool. So why the hell aren’t they on the cover? In any case, read the book, it is excellent.

Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder - I tried to keep this list down to one book per author (see entry for Angelmaker, above), but Lockstep and Lady of Mazes are very different, and each is very cool in its own way. Whereas Lockstep reinvents space opera, Lady of Mazes takes a shot at the singularity. It is set in the far, far future (complete with implanted computing and ringworlds), but is really about (for me, at least) social media and the incursion of the virtual into the real (see Google, Facebook, etc), and the ways it will affect us. Whereas reading one of Schroeder’s short stories is like having a firecracker set off in your mind, this is like having a whole damn string of the things, but you are having such a good time with the pretty lights and loud noises that you hardly notice that your worldview is being tampered with. This is a big, sprawling adventure like Lockstep, but where Lockstep was largely about family, this is largely about society. Also, they didn’t botch the cover.

Darkbeast Rebellion by Morgan Keyes - A juvenile book, really? Well, yes. A sequel? Yeah, that too, so this also, perforce, an endorsement of the first book (Darkbeast). This book may be aimed at younger readers, but it is more emotionally mature than 90% of what I read (and to be clear, emotionally mature does not mean sex and violence). The book manages this by talking to its audience, not at them. The reader gets to watch as Keara makes mistakes, deals with them, then grows up a little. Aside from that, the world is fascinating: every child gets magically bonded with an animal (their Darkbeast) and is taught to give their animal all of their undesirable traits and impulses. The catch is that, when they turn twelve, they have to kill said Darkbeast. In the first book, Keara refused to do so, and this book is the continuation of her struggle to survive the continuation of that decision. As far as I can tell, the publisher only contacted Keyes for two books in this series, and although it comes to a satisfying conclusion, I really, really hope that more get written.

Top 11 board games - 2014

2015-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Anyone who spends enough time around me knows that I love board games (some of them no doubt wish that I would shut up about them, sorry Jennifer). Over the past couple of years, their importance has grown for me. Aside from being fun, when I play board games, it is something that I can focus the entirety of my attention on, allowing me to stop thinking about work or whatever might be stressing me out. That benefit, combined with providing a framework for social interaction (talking to strangers is a lot less awkward when you have something to talk about, board games are perfect for this), makes board gaming an ideal hobby, for me at least. So what am I talking about when I talk about board games? Monopoly? Risk? Not really. Both of those are board games, yes, but it in the same way that an Apple II is a computer: it is, and it was really cool when it came out, but it has long since been superseded by vastly improved computers. Modern board games are a huge and varied thing these days, and looking at the shelf of your Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS) for the first time can be an experience akin to looking at the craft beer section of a well stocked supermarket: You know sort of what is going on in front of you but you don’t have a good idea if you’ll actually like whatever you pick out. Towards that end, I am putting together a list of board games that I enjoyed playing in 2014.

This year, I logged 166 plays (not of 166 different games, mind you, Star Realms alone accounts for 24 plays). I have put together a list of my top 11. They aren’t games that came out in 2014, necessarily, but they are games that I played in 2014. In addition, I’m restricting myself to games that I’ve played at least twice, as a game can seem great the first time around then fall flat on the second play. These games aren’t in any particular order, I’m not going to attempt to figure out if one is better than the other given that I like them all for different reasons with different people in different conditions. Without further ado, here’s the list:

Star Realms - Star Realms is a light, competitive deckbuilding game. To my mind, deckbuilders come in two flavors, “Dominion” and “Ascension”. Dominion style have a common pool of cards for players to buy (which is how they build their decks) that doesn’t change much during the game, as there are multiple copies of each card. Ascension style games also have a common set of cards that both players can buy from, but the selection changes from turn to turn and there are only a few duplicates (of weaker cards). Both styles of game have their strengths and weaknesses, so I won’t go into which is better. Star Realms is part of the Ascension family of games. The thing that makes Star Realms stand out is how quick and inexpensive the game is (15 minutes and $15) and how much player interaction there is (the goal of the game is to destroy your opponent, not to collect victory points like in Dominion, which can feel like multiplayer Solitaire). If you’re on the fence, the app is free and very good. Recommended for: anyone who wants a light, inexpensive, deckbuilder; recovering Magic: The Gathering players who want something to scratch the itch without taking over their lives and ruining their credit scores.

Puzzle Strike Shadows - This one is another deckbuilder, but in the Dominion style. It doesn’t play as quickly as Star Realms, and is much more expensive, but I the gameplay is deeper (lots of combinations and permutations while still remaining very balanced). The really cool thing about Puzzle Strike is that instead of cards, you play with chips (think poker chips made out of cardboard) which you draw out of a bag rather than shuffling. As shuffling is the most annoying part about playing deckbuilders (you usually start the game with ten cards that you cycle through very quickly, meaning you spend a lot of time shuffling a tiny deck, which is just annoying). I picked up Shadows rather than the base game because it is a stand alone expansion and my wife liked the art better. I plan on getting the base game this year. Recommended for: people who want a rich and highly interactive deckbuilder.

Mr. Jack Pocket - Mr. Jack is a classic asymmetrical deduction game in which one player plays as Jack the Ripper and the other as Sherlock. Players take alternating turns trying to confound their opponent (Sherlock attempts to narrow down the pool of suspects and Jack does his best to avoid this). I liked the original, but I felt that the setup and rules were too cumbersome for what was actually going on. Mr. Jack Pocket (or Jack Junior as my wife affectionately calls it) fixes all this. It does not attempt to miniaturize the game, but rather reinterprets it in such a way that the game is distilled down to its purest essence. The setup, rules, and gameplay are elegant enough that I can teach the game to a new player and get two or three full games in over the space of an hour with enough time left over to eat lunch (I have done this a few times now). All of this without sacrificing the depth of the original. Recommended for: people who want a quick and intense two player game with high portability.

Province - Province is the first microgame that I backed on Kickstarter. A eurogame small enough to be shipped in a letter envelope and streamlined enough to play in 25 minutes. It is not a heavy game by any stretch, but there is a surprising amount of depth here. This sort of game is also one reason why I love shorter games: its brevity creates a sort of freedom, you can try all sorts of crazy strategies and if they don’t work out, you haven’t spent two hours in the learning. For $5 I can’t think of a reason not to buy this game. Recommended for: anyone with $5 to spare.

Burgoo - Another microgame that cost $5. This is my go-to lunchtime game for more than two players (although it plays quite well with two, as well), it is easy to teach, short, and being a game about soup, the theme fits perfectly. After I received it, it sat on my shelf for about a month, as I wasn’t sure I wanted to actually play it (it had been an impulse purchase) and the rules didn’t immediately ‘click’ for me (through no fault of their own, the mechanics are different from anything else I’ve played before, as soon as I actually started to play, it all made sense immediately). Once I gave it a shot, however, I absolutely loved it. It feels quick and light, but the endgame can turn into a bit of a brain burner (in a good way, as I usually play it at lunch and while one player is thinking of how to screw over their fellow chefs everyone else is actually eating, no one gets bored). Recommended for: anyone with $5 to spare.

Vikings - Vikings, you know them: longboats, horned helmets, axes, pillaging. This game has nothing to do with any of that, instead focusing on the other stuff they did, namely founding settlements, trading, and farming. This game consists of six rounds in which players take turns buying island tiles and viking meeples from a really clever rotating rondel that adjusts the prices for things as each turn progresses. The game plays quickly (about an hour), has plenty of indirect interaction, and is full of interesting decisions. I had been wanting to try it for a long time but it was out of print, so when I heard about the reprint I requested a copy from my FLGS. Money well spent. Recommended for: anyone looking for a quick mid-weight economic game.

Waggle Dance - One of my goals this year is to spend less money on Kickstarter, particularly for larger companies who are using it as a preorder system. I have nothing against that, personally, but it screws with my budgeting. So, going forward, I want to shift my focus to backing games that might not succeed without me. Waggle Dance falls squarely in this category. It met its funding goal, but just barely. And man is it a great game. It is all about building a hive and making honey, with each player having a ton of dice representing bees which are used to take actions. It feels really elegant, has beautiful design, and you get to chuck a ton of dice (each player can get as many as eighteen, though ties are broken by the player with the fewest bees, which makes for a really interesting dynamic). Recommended for: anyone looking for a “dicer placement” game that can range from light-weight lighthearted filler to a cutthroat medium-weight game.

Dungeon Lords - “Well, everyone got what they wanted this turn.” Wait, I must be thinking of a different game. Dungeon Lords is a game about building a dungeon and killing pesky heroes, in which you never have quite enough actions or resources to make things work out like you want them to. That might sound kind of harsh, but I absolutely love this game. It is hard (even when I win, I feel like I’m losing for the entire game), but very rewarding (even when I lose, I have a great time, partially due to the shared suffering of the rest of the players). The learning curve is steep (expect to spend some time learning how things work before royally botching your first game) and the game isn’t for everyone, but if you know someone who owns a copy, you need to at least give it a shot. Recommended for: people who are distraught that things are just too easy in their lives; people who want to feel like they have accomplished something, even when they lose.

Tzolk’in - Tzolk’in is one of those games that looked as if it might be a flash in the pan when it came out in 2012. It is a worker placement game (a game in which the primary mechanic is placing pawns–“workers”–onto a limited pool of actions that are available to the other players, too). It has a beautiful board with a giant rotating gear in the center. When it first came out, I thought that its popularity might be due to the novelty of the board, but it turns out that there is a solid game underneath those rotating wheels and that it does some interesting things with the mechanic. Usually in a worker placement game you take turns selecting actions and once everyone is out of workers, you get to do the things that you chose. In Tzolk’in, however, the workers stay on their spots until the player chooses to remove them, and because those spots are on gears that get rotated by the central wheel, the longer you wait to pull off your workers, the better the actions you can do. When combined with the variety of paths to victory, the result is a game that is packed with interesting decisions. Probably my favorite game of all time. Recommended for: anyone who isn’t afraid of some brain work.

2 de Mayo - When people ask me about games that I love but that no one seems to have heard about, 2 de Mayo is my go-to answer. It is often referred to as a wargame, but it lacks many of the stereotypical hallmarks of the genre: it is not a long, sprawling, complex game, but rather a short, tight, focused brain-burner. It plays really quickly (30 minutes) and I’m glad for that because I don’t think that I could handle it for any longer. The game is about Napolean’s invasion of Madrid on, you guessed it, May 2nd. The Spanish player’s goal is simply to survive ten turns and the French player is trying to destroy all of the Spanish forces while controlling all of the city entrances. The result is a cat-and-mouse game that is combined with secret orders and simultaneous actions. I may not always be in the mood for it, but I love it. Recommended for: People wanting a quick, tense filler. History buffs (the rulebook has an overview of situation and all of the event cards are based on things that actually happened).

Brass - I should be clear that I’ve only played this game twice and don’t know it nearly as well as the others on this list. That being said, I love it. It is the heaviest game on this list, I think, but doesn’t feel dry. I love just about everything about Brass, but there are a few things that stand out. First, I love the canal/railway dichotomy. Halfway through the game, all of the canals that you’ve spent so much blood and treasure building become obsolete, but most of the buildings in the cities that they connect stay around, leaving a very interesting puzzle as players have to rebuild the infrastructure. Second, it does interdependence very well, as you can sell cotton through your opponents ports benefitting them in the short term but possibly wrecking their timing (as they might have trouble selling their cotton after that. Finally, I love the theme. For me, well done theme means that the game feels like what it represents (Cash N Guns, for example, definitely feels like you are getting screwed over by your criminal associates), and Brass feels like a bunch of entrepreneurs scrambling to ride the tide of modernization. Recommended for: people who like economic games but want some flavor, too. Anyone watching Peaky Blinders.

Games I’m excited to play this year: Taluva, Panamax, Harbour, Impulse, Republic of Rome, and Tigris and Euphates. More on those in a future post.

Thanks to Zach Havok for pointing me to the post (worth checking out, by the way, as is the rest of the blog) that inspired this list, by eclectic blogger Keith Law. Zach is also the reason that the list is eleven items and not, say, ten (he really likes eleven, I guess).

I know nothing about Robin Williams

2014-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

Well, that may not be quite true. I know that he was in a bunch of films that I enjoyed, but I have no way of knowing how similar on-screen Williams was to off-screen Williams. So when I ascribe things to him, know that I am talking about neither of those people, but rather the version of him that lives in my head (who probably has little relation to either). That being said, he died yesterday. Well, off-screen Williams died, on-screen Williams can still be watched and there are millions of versions of himself running around inside the heads of just about everyone who has been influenced by him. Where am I going with this? Oh yeah, the Robin Williams who lives in my head says not to mourn him. As far as I can tell, Robin Williams made the world a better place, and that is a truly noble thing. I won’t catalog the things he did, as others will do a much better job of it, rather, I will repeat what I learned from him: Laugh. Laugh at things that are hard to laugh at. Laugh at yourself. Laugh at the things you take seriously, and if you can’t laugh at them, I would suggest that perhaps you aren’t taking them seriously enough. If you want to honor his memory, lighten up and make the world a better place, and maybe go ride a bike.

Good points, but hold the elitism please.

2014-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

The other day I ran across an article in Forbes, “Kids Don’t Read Books Because Parents Don’t Read Books,” by Jordan Shapiro. The central point was that the print vs. digital debate is much less important than it is made out to be, and that the real story is how parents’ reading behavior affects that of their children. On board so far. Then I came to this paragraph:

I’ve met highly educated elite individuals who have told me they just don’t have time to read books. They skim the NY Times book review so they can participate in cocktail party conversations. They buy executive summaries from the back of in-flight magazines. I’m shocked by the number of people who ask me if there are audio versions of my books available.

That last sentence bothered me. Although he isn’t explicit about it, it looks a lot like Mr. Shapiro is equating audio books with executive summaries and book review articles. Huh. Even if I’m misinterpreting that, it is pretty clear that he is disappointed by these people who want to listen to his books rather than read them. Now, I won’t argue with the fact that listening to an audio production of a book is a different experience than reading the text of it, but it seems that I missed the part where he provided justification for implying that it is an inferior method.

The written word is a way of transcribing the spoken word, not the other way around, and though some books do not make the transition to audio very well, suggesting that text is the superior way of experiencing prose sounds to me like saying that we shouldn’t watch productions of Shakespeare as reading the plays is clearly far superior. Given his words in “Phaedrus”, I suspect that Socrates would side with me on this point. Or perhaps Shapiro’s derision is because listening to books can be less work than reading them on a page or a screen. Fair enough, but I would argue that the work of reading a book isn’t in how the text makes it from the author’s brain to your own, but rather with what you do with it once it gets there. Let’s not mistake audiobooks for television here.

Finally, it seems he has a bit of a double standard. He writes: “My kids read on the iPad, the e-reader, and paper. I make sure of it. I read to my kids every night.” I’m not exactly sure why a parent reading a story to their kid is worthy of praise and an adult having a story read to them is worthy of scorn. Perhaps it is because this inferior form of prose is okay for children, who cannot read on their own, except that he points out that his kids can and do. If, as parents, we need to model good reading behavior for our kids, it seems somewhat arbitrary that we should avoid modeling the enjoyment of listening to a book ourselves while encouraging our children to enjoy books that we read to them.

On another topic, at the end of the essay, he talks about some interesting findings from a recent study about what kids are reading. The one which caught my eye was the third:

3. Books like Twilight and Hunger Games are more popular than literary classics. These days, teachers assign these more often than Shakespeare or Don Quixote. Most of them will tell you that it is because they figure any reading is good reading and books like these increase student engagement. On the one hand, this makes sense. On the other hand, we should remember that popular fiction prioritizes sales over content. They are revenue generators first and literary explorations of the human condition only afterward. This doesn’t necessarily mean popular fiction is bad, but there’s also a reason that certain books have transcended the economic, political, and epistemological trends of particular centuries.

I’m not sure that most teachers would say that the reason they might assign a popular book is that “they figure any reading is good reading and books like these increase student engagement.” I missed the supporting evidence for that bit. Perhaps the teachers are just trying to assign books that their students will find entertaining and relevant. Perhaps these teachers are trying to show their students that reading is fun and rewarding. Perhaps the historical importance of the first contemporary novel is not the thing to create lifelong reading habits.

Frankly, if I have to choose between a teen reading “Don Quixote” in high school and coming to the conclusion that reading is tedious or that same student reading “Hunger Games” and coming to the conclusion that reading is fun, perhaps even later in life listening to an audio production of “Don Quixote”, I’ll pick the latter any day of the week. As important as the classics may be, and as much as we should encourage people of all ages to read them (in whatever format works for them), how about we give them the tools and opportunity to decide to do it on their own first.

Judge Dixon, you're doing it wrong.

2014-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

Last year, a guy decided to drive his Ferrari through downtown Olympia at 100 MPH, while drunk and being pursued and with a captive passenger. It was his 7th DUI. He recently plead guilty to felony charges of the DUI as well as eluding a police officer. His sentence: no jail time and a one year work release program. WTF?

Reading about this, one has to wonder what Judge Dixon was thinking. It looks an awful lot like corruption, and even if it isn’t, when you’re talking about the judiciary, there is little difference between the appearance of impropriety and impropriety in fact. This sort of thing damages the perception of the courts, and therefore the fabric of society (insofar as we are a nation of laws). I doubt that much can be done at present, but until it can, lets just hope that the defendant decides against vehicular manslaughter, as the courts seem to have no interest in doing anything about it.

Story Idea: The Silent and The Dead

2014-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

Okay, let’s say that there’s a zombie outbreak and virtually everyone gets infected (99% or more). What would that look like? I’m going to use Olympia as an example, as that is where I live.

The average population density of Thurston County (where Olympia is located) is 347 people/square mile. This could be better (the average for the US is 88) but it could be a whole lot worse (Los Angeles County has a population density of 2,100 people/square mile). Assuming “Walking Dead” style zombies, with a small group, you should be able to clear a square mile without too much trouble over the course of a week. The problem comes in when people get guns. Something like an assault rifle might be audible as far away as five miles. With sustained shooting, it isn’t unreasonable to assume that you would draw every zombie within a three mile radius. Not so bad, right? Wrong. A three mile radius gives you an area of a little over 28 square miles, with 347 zombies per square mile, you’re talking about nearly 10,000 zombies.

Now, let’s say that you’re a survivalist shooting zombies from their roof. Even with a 100% accuracy rate, you would be talking about 10,000 rounds, and at 28 pounds/1000 rounds, you would be talking about 280 pounds of ammunition, just to give you an idea of the amount of supplies you would need. Furthermore, what would 10,000 zombies look like? Shoulder to shoulder, that many people would take up something like one and a half football fields. In any case, I think that you get the picture. Things would not be good for our lone survivalist with his buried gold, canned food, and mountain of ammunition. I wouldn’t write about him.

Instead, I would write about the sort of group that would survive the math of the situation. They would need to be competent, not necessarily at killing zombies, but in organizing themselves as a group. A disorganized or fractious group of people with weapons doesn’t have many more choices than the a single armed person (in fact they may even have fewer, as their resource footprint would increase with their size). Weapons are force multipliers for individuals. Organization, on the other hand, is a force multiplier for groups.

The group would find a defensible place with a source of fresh water (and as far from survivalist types as practicable), and they would secure that area as quietly as possible, then gradually move out, clearing the area around them. Once they had carved out a large enough area for themselves, they would create zombie traps, basically pits with sound emitting things (perhaps a shishi odishi for zombies?) scattered around the area’s perimeter. Every day or so, someone would head out the pits, dump in some gasoline, and burn the day’s zombies.

Wouldn’t they need that gasoline for their cars? No. First of all, gasoline goes bad and eventually will not work in your engines (but will probably still be viable for burning some zombies). Second, cars are loud (see the bit about drawing zombies to you above) and require cleared roads or paths. Finally, gasoline production would cease at the zombie outbreak (or shortly thereafter), and the group would soon find itself scavenging farther and farther away just to fuel their vehicles.

So what sort of stories would take place in this setting? First of all, there wouldn’t be much soap opera (which isn’t to say that it would be entirely absent, either), as it requires a fractious group and would likely get everyone killed before long. Instead, the story would probably focus on the various struggles from within the group, such as how decisions are made, and how to deal with divisive issues (51-49 votes are terrible for morale, see congress). The group would have to decide on its relationship to other survivors. I’m sure that there would be plenty of stories to tell in this setting. The main difference is that it wouldn’t be as annoying as much of what you see being made these days, which either assumes that people are basically bad (it seems to me that our world is an example of the opposite) or that people want to watch petty squabbling, or both.

In any case, I probably won’t write this, or at least not any time soon, but wanted to share the ideas anyway. If you want to write it, feel free.

What does your ringtone say about you?

2014-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

So I have this theory (okay, I have a lot of theories, most of them likely wrong, but bear with me), and if you started this article by reading the title, you might have guessed that my theory is about classifying people by their cell phone ringtones. Yes, I realize that I am painting with the broadest of brushes and that I have a definite preference for not being aware of other people trying to contact you while I’m talking to you, but this blog has been on my To-Blog list for over a year now, so I kind of have to write it down at this point, as it has reached the internet age of majority and will soon sue me for confinement. So what does your ringtone say about you? I’ll divide this into two portions: volume and type of tone. After going through this, you will be a better person.

Volume

The volume at which you have your ringtone set says a lot about how you view the people in close personal proximity to you. Here is the range:

LOUD: The people who are near you, physically, are nowhere near as important as whoever might call you. And how could they be? You already know all about them, they’re right there next to you, after all. Chances are, the people you hang out with share many of your values, and so their cellphones are set just as loud as yours. Alternatively, you might have hearing loss.
Moderate: Most of the people who call you are actually people you might need to talk to, and although you want to make sure that you don’t miss the call, you also don’t want to annoy the people around you. This would also be the setting for someone who would normally be the LOUD personality type but is forced to adopt a less irritating persona for the sake of appearances (think corporate executives).
quiet: The people around you are more important than those far removed, but occasionally you do need to hear what the person on the other end of the metaphorical line has to say, though if you miss it the world will not immediately go off the rails.
vibrate: You find buzzing things to be calming. Or more likely, you aren’t planning on answering your phone but you want plausible deniability (“Sorry, didn’t feel it go off, but I can’t turn it up at work. No, I don’t have a reason for why it took a week to get back to you. What, the problem has resolved itself without my intervention? Splendid. I think my work is done here. Bye.”). You are a good person.
silent: Answering your phone is simply not a priority. Not as in low on your priority list, but more akin to not on the list at all. Alternately, you might have AT&T and so have long since given up on actually being able to use your phone as a phone. Either way, you may want to talk to someone about that.

Tone

Whereas the volume of a cell’s ringer indicates how a person views the world, their tone is all about how they perceive themselves or want themselves to be perceived.

Music: Either you really like listening to music in short, randomly spaced snippets or feel that dressing just like your friends leaves a little to be desired in the individuality business.
Preloaded Quasi-Musical Ringtone: Just like the Music type above but attaching a much lower value to individuality. Alternately, you might just be trying to prove how hip you are.
Theme Song to Quantum Leap: You want the rest of the world to recognize your awesomeness, but instead finds that whenever your phone goes off you look for whoever that cool person is with the cool ringtone only to realize that the cool person is you and your phone is about to go to voicemail.
Combination of Beeps and Tones: You hold tight to the outdated idea that a ringtone’s job is to alert you to an incoming call. You probably don’t even have a colorful protective case. If you are not in this category, avoid these people, they might attempt to convince you that individuality is about the way you live your life, not how you decorate it. If you are in this category, it is probably too late for you.
Silent/Vibrate: You don’t believe in ringtones and are probably actually a luddite who only grudgingly goes along with societal norms. Get help now.

Conclusion

So there you go, you can tell everything you might ever need to know about a person simply by the volume and tone of their phone. All without ever having to actually get to know them. Think of how much time this is going to save you!

Recursive Geekiness

2014-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

I’m about 7,700 words in on the Broken Shores story that I’m currently working on and I’ve started to run into some problems, namely that I need to know where everyone on the island is at a given time. This isn’t an insurmountable problem, as there are only seven people on the island, but it can be a bit tricky. One way to do it would be to just write things so that people are wherever the story needs them to be. This approach would be fine if I were only writing a single story in the setting, but as it is part of a larger series, it would lead to inconsistency. So on my lunch break last Saturday, I went ahead and started to make a schedule, which is where the title comes from (sitting in a room full of people, some of whom I enjoy talking to, using my phone/keyboard combination to create a spreadsheet that tracks the schedule of fiction people on a fictional island in a fictional world, and I couldn’t use a regular calendar program because my world has eight-day-long weeks due to my decision to play around with calendar stuff, raise your hand if you feel normal now).

The work will likely pay off as it will make writing the story much easier, but it brought up something else that I found interesting, as well. Making the schedule I learned a lot about the island, such as who was likely to be close to whom and how important seniority was. In addition, it helped to define the group dynamic, after all not everyone can have the best schedule, creating tension. Finally, it will likely result in the stories being more interesting, as it places some limits on who is available at any given moment. For example, if Emera needs help, the best person to provide that help might be Ran, but what if he is on watch? What if he is dead tired from a long stretch of work? Emera now needs to either find someone else or find some way of convincing him to help her despite very good reasons not to. This is much more interesting than being able to simply write: Emera found Ran and asked for help or having to make up reasons for him not to help her. It will also likely feel more realistic, more relatable to those of us who have to work around scheduling conflicts.

In short, if I had to sum it up in a rule concise observation, the more you know about the world you’re creating in your fiction, the easier it will be to make that fiction interesting. I’m sure that I’m not the first person to say this (in fact, I recall hearing a piece of advice that when you run into a dead end, find out what your character’s hobbies are), but it bears repeating. Also, I think that this applies to all kinds of fiction, whether it be speculative or straight literature set in modern day Chicago, there are things that won’t be immediately obvious about a given character, and if you find yourself running into a lot of walls in your writing, you might want to take the time to dig a little and learn something new about them.

On a final note, I think that this has some bearing on the nature of creativity. Creativity is often viewed as creating something entirely new, or recombining existing elements in an interesting fashion (I personally believe the latter is vastly more common than the former, if you doubt me, go spend some time at TV Tropes), but that is only the starting point. Good narrative is two things: something new and the logical consequences of that something new. If you do only the first, you get a confused mess, if you do only the second (logical consequences sans something new) you get something even worse, boredom. I will end by disagreeing with Einstein, who said “Logic will take you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” Imagination can take you to fantastic new places, but without logic, you will find yourself earthbound, wherever you may land.

And now for some shameless self-promotion. I’ve written two stories that are part of the particular storyline I’m talking about, “Induction” and “Trust and Vulnerability”. They’re free and you should really check them out. “Induction” is also available (for free) on Smashwords for just about any format, I hope to get the rest of Broken Shores up there as well, this year.

2013 Recap

2013-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

If you have been listening, you will know that this blog has been silent for most of the year. Sorry about that. The primary reason is that 2013 was my first full year as a father, which has been an all-around wonderful experience but one that has taken a large chunk out of my free time. Fair warning, 2014 will likely follow a similar path, although I do hope to spend a bit more time on the blog. Enough about that, what have I been doing besides parenting?

I read less than I did in 2012, but not by too much, according to goodreads I read 103 books this year. I did do a couple of interesting things on the reading front, however. First of all, I made a goal of finishing as many series as possible, having started many and left them hanging. These included the Virga series, the Magister trilogy, the Family Trade series, the Wheel of Time, and probably others that don’t come to mind at the moment. The second thing I did that I plan on repeating was to read nothing but short stories in the month of May (which is Short Story Appreciation Month). I read and listened to a whole lot of stuff, some of which was good some of which wasn’t. If you are a writer, you should give this a shot, as I had more story ideas during that month than during any other (a couple of which I may even get around to writing in 2014, more on that later). It was refreshing. Below is a list of the books which I have given five stars on goodreads this year, I would recommend all of them, but keep in mind that a few might fall in the middle of a series.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson
Antiagon Fire by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
Who Owns the Future by Jaron Lanier
City of Thieves by David Benioff
The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson
The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
Mind of the Raven by Bernd Heinrich
Colors of Chaos by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson
Sleepless by Charlie Huston
Seraphina by Rachel Hartman
Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson
Imager’s Battalion by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green
Concrete Planet by Robert Courland
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Princeps by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
The One World Schoolhouse by Salman Khan
Gun Machine by Warren Ellis

If my reading didn’t suffer much from parenthood, my writing can’t say the same. I don’t keep meticulous track of what and how much I write, but I did finish several short stories, none of which have been published, yet. I also managed to get some of my older stuff up on Amazon and Smashwords. Also, I succeeded in completely neglecting this blog.

So what do I have planned for 2014? First of all, I hope to get a post (even a short one) up at least once a month, hopefully more frequently. Second, I want to clear off my physical to-read shelf at home, as I have promised myself that I will not buy any more physical books unless I can fit them on it. I plan on revisiting my short story reading in May. Finally, I wrote a short story, There Are No Words, which has yet to find a home despite positive feedback from several editors. I have been convinced to turn it into a novel by writing more stories in the world that form an overarching plot. We’ll see if I succeed or not. I will begin with that as soon as I finish the rough draft of the Broken Shores story I’m working on (I think that I’ve finally figured it out, so it should go quickly from here, I hope). I also hope to write at least one other story that I came up with the idea for last May.

In any case, it has been a fantastic year and I can only hope that yours has equaled or surpassed it. Happy 2014!

Conversational Overload

2013-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

Sorry about the radio silence, I spent a week in Colorado, which was nice but prevented me from getting any real writing done (although I did produce a bunch of notes for upcoming stories). I did get some reading done, however.

It is often said that Speculative Fiction (and I would argue all of fiction) is one big conversation stretching back to the first time someone said “What if . . .” This conversation isn’t always obvious, there is no comprehensive guide that will tell you what a particular story was responding to or if it was the basis for a new thread of conversation. In my experience, the only way to pick it out is to read a lot of it and tease out the connections on your own.

Anyone who writes a story is part of that conversation, which is one of the reasons that I love short fiction, because you don’t have to write a novel to participate (which isn’t to say that writing short fiction is any easier than writing a novel). This month I have been making a concerted effort to read a lot of short fiction, an effort in which I have been moderately successful (I’ve still been reading an ebook novel before I go to sleep every night, but that is largely because the anthology I wanted to read in that time slot is, somehow, not available as an ebook).

I have read some good stories, a lot of mediocre ones, and a few that have been just bad. The good ones are very entertaining, and the bad ones are unfortunate, but it is the middle category that creates a problem. I have read a number of stories to which I really want to respond, in story form. Of course, I’m already working on something. So I make notes and push them out of my mind. Then my frustrated subconscious starts pushing stories into my head fully-formed, stories which I do not have the time to write at present.

I feel full to bursting with stories, and it is frustrating. But I should stop whining, it’s better than writers block after all. In any case, I should get some work done on Assassination so that I can placate my subconscious before it kills me.

A First Draft

2013-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

I haven’t really gotten much writing done this past week. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t wanted to, but rather that I haven’t made enough time to do so (and to be fair, some of this is out of my control). In fact, as I have been consuming a bunch of short fiction, in the form of Diverse Energies, Podcastle, and Escape Pod (and then At The Mouth Of The River Of Bees and High-Tech Gothic), I have had a lot of ideas for stories, which is frustrating as I can only work on one at a time. One of the great thing about Speculative Fiction is that, once you read enough of it, the outlines of a great conversation begin to emerge (a similar phenomenon can be found in philosophy), and the more of that conversation that I see, the more I want to participate (and in the case of short fiction, the more attainable that participation is). At the moment, there really isn’t much to do about it, other than to make notes about the stories I want to write (which are great to have for when you sit down to write but aren’t able to come up with a story, by the way). But enough about that, this post is titled “A First Draft”.

Back when I first started to work on Broken Shores, while I was still figuring out how the world worked (I hadn’t figured out what to call it, if I recall correctly), I wrote a short story with the working title of “Assassination”. I liked this story, but Broken Shores went a different direction, and I shelved it. But I have always wanted to dust it off, and make it work, but every time I looked at it, I was daunted by how much would need to change (almost all of it). Well, fuck it. I’m going to make it work, and you get to see the process. Just remember that what follows is a ROUGH DRAFT, and will be full of errors (continuity, plot, grammar, and otherwise) and represents a direction that the Broken Shores setting could have gone, but didn’t. Really, I want you to go into this expecting less than nothing. If you continue to read beyond this point, you will never get those minutes of your life back, and I cannot be held responsible, so don’t bother asking. Also, although I dislike doing it, I’m going to put a page break after the first scene, which I hope doesn’t mess with the feed/email subscriptions, but if it does I’m sorry. Feedback is welcome, just keep in mind, there is much necrotic tissue that is already marked for removal. Without further ado:

Assasination (working title)

by Tom Dillon

FIRST DRAFT (“here there be errors”) / 6.27.2008 / approximately 6,200 words

“We must never forget our history, what our forefathers went through to ensure our safety. We have become complacent, and there is nothing to stop another disaster from occurring. My opponent insists that the time for caution is over, that the threat is past, but it is not. If anything, it is greater than ever.” Senator Burien’s words blended into the noise of the crowd as something else caught Devin’s attention.

The man was easy to spot, moving quickly through a crowd that seemed to sway sluggishly in Devin’s ramped-up state. She didn’t bother to signal as she braced herself, the guards on the perimeter had already done so. The guards on the stage with her noticed as well, and she heard a series of thunks from their crossbows just moments before a few quarrels embedded themselves in the man’s chest.

The bolts didn’t slow the man down, he kept on dodging through the crowd as one of his hands plucked the quarrels from his chest and the other drew a long knife. The guards that were closest to Senator Burien bunched up, making a human wall in front of him. Even if the assassin got through them, they would slow him down enough for Devin and the rest of the guards to do their jobs.

Then the assassin jumped. His momentum carried him in a smooth arc over the guards’ heads. He ducked his head and crossed his arms in front of him just in time for the metal plates on his forearms to deflect three or four more quarrels.

He landed to the left of the main bunching of guards, in between them and her. He ricocheted off of them, heading straight for her. For a moment, his face was nearly touching hers, and she could see the tinge of blue under a layer of powder. Then she felt her dagger slide along one of his ribs. It caught, then he shoved off of her causing the blade to snap off as she lost her balance.

Even ramped up as she was, it was over by the time she regained her feet. Senator Burien was on the ground, the assassin’s knife protruding from his temple. It wouldn’t matter how much Ve they pumped into him, there was no coming back from something like that.

“So after that, what happened?” the Arbiter asked.

“He was gone,” Devin said. “So I assessed the damage and helped where I could.” She felt naked, standing alone in front of the Arbiter’s raised desk. Representatives from her firm were seated behind her. They would offer no help, it was best to simply cut their losses.

“Gone? What you mean to say is that he blended into the crowd, yes?” the Arbiter asked, and Devin nodded. “Of the guards on the stage, you are the only one who got a good look at his face. Why didn’t you go after him?”

Devin started to open her mouth, but she found no words. She hadn’t expected praise, but she hadn’t expected this, either.

“He was gone,” she said. The Arbiter didn’t so much as blink. “There was no chance of me catching him, none. And if I had caught him, then what? He had already taken a dozen bolts, at least, my knife was lodged in his back. What should I have done?”

“The reason, the only reason, that you had no chance of catching him was that you failed to try. As for what you should have done, had you caught him, you should have put another knife in him. If it didn’t work, you should have used a bigger knife.”

Devin had no answer to that, the Arbiter’s words almost made sense. But he hadn’t been there, the assassin had simply disappeared. Any additional pursuit on her part would have been an exercise in futility. The Arbiter wasn’t done, though.

He frowned, first down at her and then at the papers in front of him as he searched for a particular page. “In your statement, you claim that the assassin was an avatar.”

“Yes.”

“Do you realize what that means? That you are accusing one of the companies of this island of having a senator killed?”

“Indirectly, yes,” she said.

“Yet you have no proof. It is more plausible that this was simply a detail that you invented to explain your failure,” the Arbiter said. “Understandable as that may be, it is not excusable, and so it is this court’s verdict that you be stripped of your position. Is that acceptable to the Leeman Firm?”

Devin heard the scrape of boots on the tile floor but didn’t look back at the Leeman Firm’s avatar as it spoke. “Yes, your honor,” it said in it’s perfect, empty voice.

The Arbiter returned his attention to Devin. “As there is no direct evidence of any wrongdoing on your part, no further charges will be pressed. You are free to go.”

When she passed it, the Leeman avatar handed her a packet that she presumed held her severance papers. She looked up at it, but it didn’t say anything. It returned its attention to the front of the court, where the Arbiter was commencing his report on the findings of the investigation into the Leeman firm’s responsibility in the incident.

“So what will you do now?” Jayson asked, holding the wine bottle out for her.

“No thanks,” she said, waving it away. “What do you think I should do?”

“If you want, I have a friend who might be looking for someone with your particular skill set,” he said.

“Who?”

“Have you ever heard of Nisfu?”

“What? You want me to work for them? After an avatar killed the man that I was supposed to protect? Why would I want to protect the avatars?”

“Never mind,” he said, taking a drink before offering it to her again. She took it this time.

“I’ll figure something out,” she said. “I have a couple of months worth of reserves, at least. I’ll think of something by then.”

That seemed to kill the conversation, and they sat there, passing the bottle between them, watching the distant mountains slowly drift by. A layer of fog clung to the water, turning to haze and then fog as it neared the land, turning the coastline into no more than a ghost. This was about as close as the Island ever got to the mainland.

“Have you ever wanted to leave?” Jayson asked.

“To another Island? What would be the point?”

“No, I meant to the mainland. How do we know that things aren’t different now? How do we even know how they actually were, for that matter?” he asked.

“No one has come back from the mainland since the Island was created. I imagine that things aren’t so great,” she said.

“Good point.”

“What I can’t figure out is how the avatar got here in the first place,” she said.

“You still think that he was an Inkerran?” Jayson asked, arching one of his eyebrows at her.

“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, what’s the alternative? A firm assassinating Burien? I’d have a hard time believing that.”

“You clearly haven’t spent enough time around the firms,” he said. “They’re not above anything.”

“Who else could it have been? The Guard ruled out all of the other Avatars powerful enough to have pulled it off.”

“If you’re right, then he’s either already off the island or deep in hiding,” Jayson said. “Both ways, there’s not much chance of finding him unless he attacks someone else.”

“I know,” she said. “But that’s what’s eating me.”

“Maybe you should be asking why Senator Burien was killed and no one else?” he said.

“What I should do,” she said, “is just forget about it. Its not my job any more.”

Senator Burien had been active in politics for the better part of two decades, which was both good and bad. One one hand, there was an extensive record of his political activities. On the other hand, that record was incomprehensible, consisting mostly of how he voted on this or that bill or which sessions and committees he attended or was a part of. After several hours of poring over the records, Devin gave up on the Hall of Records and decided to try the Hall of Recorders.

“So I was told that you wished to know about Senator Burien,” a man man said as she rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “I’m Recorder Nathaniel.” A glance at the sky confirmed that she had been there several hours.

“Yes, I was hoping to find out why someone would assassinate him,” she said.

The man laughed, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes drawing together. Although he looked old, with more white than grey in his hair, he was almost certainly ancient, probably past the century mark.

“I’m sorry that I kept you waiting,” he said, putting out a hand to cut off her insistence that it was alright. “I had been under the impression that you were here on the behalf of the Guard.”

Devin was taken aback by the sheer pettiness of his actions, that he would keep someone waiting just because of who they represented. He must have read it off her face though, because he started talking again.

“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t keep them waiting out of some sense of cruelty, but only because I am a busy man, and everyone must wait their turn. I try to bump up individuals, though. They ask more interesting questions, and aren’t getting paid to wait for me.”

“How do you know that I’m not representing a firm, though?” she asked, pulling her collar down a little to show the three interlocking circles that were tattooed on the hollow of her throat, representing the Leeman firm.

“Because of your question. Bureaucrats are only concerned with three things, how an event came to pass, who is responsible, and what are the consequences. There is rarely time for the question of why, and so the question rarely gets asked,” he said. “All of this is irrelevant, however, and the answer to your question is not a short one. Would you mind if I gave it to you over dinner? As a way to make up for my wasting your time, of course.”

“That would be nice,” she said, and was immediately embarrassed by her stomach growling audibly.

“Good, give me a few minutes and we can leave.”

Devin had never been to the restaurant that he took her to. Located on one of the terraces that was cut into the island, it was well beyond her budget, and even so was only a series of tables and a kitchen cut into the rock. Nathaniel ordered for both of them, spiced ground lamb baked into pastry dough.

“This is amazing,” she said after biting into hers.

“Yes, but don’t tell anyone,” he said. “I’ve seen too many good places get ruined by praise.”

By the time they had finished their food, the sun had gone down, and they were served coffee.

“As for your question,” he said, as he added sugar and cream to his coffee. “If you hold to the assumption that the Inkerrans must be responsible, there is no making sense of it, Burien was an outspoken advocate of peace.”

“What if the Inkerrans were opposed to the idea of peace, though?” Devin asked.

“If they didn’t want peace, why would they send an assassin? Surely there are cheaper and more efficacious ways of accomplishing the same end,” he said. “Meaning a continuation of the war, of course.”

“So it would seem that the assassination was not the work of the Inkerrans, then,” she said.

“That is where the path of reason seems to lead, yes.”

It wasn’t until nearly dawn that they left the Steps, him back to the Hall of Recorders and her back towards the flat that she shared with Jayson.

In the predawn light, the only people who were up were the bakers, evinced only by the slivers of light and muffled sounds coming out of their shops. The fishermen had already set out for the day, leaving the docks mere skeletons protruding out into the bay.

Ahead of her, a figure - she was pretty sure that it was a woman - stepped into the street. The woman started to shout and wave her arms, running towards Devin, her yells losing their meaning as they crossed the intervening space.

Perhaps it was because she was focusing on the distant figure, or maybe it all just happened too fast to comprehend, but she didn’t notice the man hurtling towards her from an alley until he hit her, slamming her sideways. The force of the impact snapped her head head towards her shoulder and for a moment her entire world was a cockeyed view of a row of storefronts. Her body reflexively curled up, and then she was rolling and skidding across the cobblestones, her senses no longer able to keep up with what her body was going through.

After what seemed like several hours of rolling, her body came to rest. She reached down, careful not to move anything unnecessarily. Her purse was still there, tied to her belt, and she worked at the knot with wooden fingers. Once she got it open, she found the small pocket sewn into the lining, and the 1000 mark coin that it held.

She didn’t like the thought of using up three month’s salary, but the alternative was worse, and so she pressed the coin onto the tattoo in the center of the tattoo on her left forearm. For a heartbeat, nothing happened, then the energy from the Vault hit her, feeling like being suddenly submerged in freezing water. To her surprise, she was only superficially injured, and she felt her cuts and scrapes closing up, even as the coin crumbled to dust in her fingers, worthless.

Devin hopped to her feet. In the street, where she had been standing, two people were fighting. She started towards them at a sprint, but by the time she had covered the short distance, it was over. The woman was lying on the ground and the man glanced over his shoulder towards Devin. Even with his highly ramped reflexes, there was no time for him to react, and she caught him on the ribcage with her shoulder. He was standing firm, and although he tried to move with the impact, it wasn’t enough. She felt his ribs snapping and giving way as her momentum carried her into the space that he was still trying to occupy.

The avatar stumbled, but didn’t lose his balance. Then the woman who had been on the ground a moment before was up, and she ran a dagger through the front of his throat, pushing until the blade protruded from his neck. When the woman twisted the knife, Devin could hear the blade separating the vertebrae and could see his eyes lose their focus. The woman’s skin had the blue tinge of an avatar and Devin brought her knife out, holding it between them.

“Please, let me speak,” the woman said, her words having the disjointed quality peculiar to those speaking in a foreign tongue. “If I had wanted you damaged, I would have just done nothing, yes?”

“Maybe,” Devin said. “But that does not make you a friend. How do I know that you were not using your countryman as a decoy?” As soon as she gave voice to the question, Devin knew that it was absurd, but it was too late.

“He is no . . . countryman of mine. Look and see,” the woman said, pulling the collar of her shirt down to expose the bare patch of skin where her mark should have been. When Devin looked back up at her, she smiled and turned to walk away.

Devin took a half-hearted step to follow the woman, but curiosity got the better of her, and instead she crouched down next to the body. Unbuttoning his collar, she opened the top of his shirt. On his neck was a symbol she had never seen before, a sinuous line that appeared to flow around a small dot of ink. As she watched, the symbol started to fade. When she looked up, the other woman was gone.

“So this is what it looked like?” Nathaniel said, holding up the scrap of paper that Devin had copied the assassin’s mark onto.

“As close as I could get,” she said. “I’m no artist, though, as I’m sure you can tell.”

“I’m not familiar with it,” he said, handing the paper back to her. “Which really doesn’t mean much. There isn’t a comprehensive listing kept of all of the minor sigils, there are probably thousands that I couldn’t identify.”

“Is there any way for me to learn who this mark belongs to?” she asked, trying and failing to hide her disappointment. “Another Recorder, perhaps?”

Nathaniel set the paper down on his desk and set to work copying it. “I suspect that this hasn’t really made it into general circulation, but I will see if any of my colleagues are familiar with it.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“In addition, they will almost certainly make another attempt on you, which might give you more information,” he said.

“I hope you will understand if I don’t find that particularly comforting,” she replied. With no income, she would become an increasingly easy target, and to compound things, the past week’s events would make finding work difficult.

“Yes, of course,” he said. “The bright side is that if the avatar who attacked you yesterday was anywhere near as powerful as he seemed to be, then whoever is behind this has lost quite a bit in the way of resources. It will probably take them at least a week to regroup, so you should spend that time wisely.” His estimate seemed generous to Devin, and she mentally adjusted it to three days. Not much time.

“Hopefully I’ll be able to do something about it before then,” she said.

Nathaniel finished copying the Mark, and checked it against the original before handing it back to her. “What I really want to hear about is the avatar who helped you. Are you sure that it was female?”

“Beyond a doubt,” she said. “What does it mean?” She had never seen a female avatar before, but then again, she had never paid attention.

“I’m not sure,” he said, and though clearly there was something more there, she didn’t want to press him on it. “I should be getting back to work, though. I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”

There was still enough energy left in Devin’s system to make the hours that she waited for Jayson to get off work seem like days. She met him at the docks when he got off work in the evening. As they made their way back to the flat that they shared, they stopped for noodles from a street vendor. She told him about the attack, and her conversation with Nathaniel.

“There has to be a better way than just waiting,” he said, and she was glad to hear it. “Do you have any way of contacting the woman who helped you?”

“Not that I can think of,” she said. “Besides, if it knew who was behind all of this, don’t you think that it would have told me?”

“Could you ask another avatar, maybe?” he asked without looking up from his noodles.

“What? No,” she said, perhaps a bit too loud. She couldn’t believe that he would suggest something like that to her, after everything she had been through in the past week.

“All I’m saying is that time isn’t on your side here. Once the tide starts leaving . . .”

She wasn’t sure if it was Jayson rubbing off on her or if it was having been saved by the female avatar, but she felt that she was seeing the world in a new light. She had been conditioned since birth to simply not see the avatars existing alongside the people, but now they seemed to be everywhere she looked. They looked more human, walking around in suits or simply carrying baggage for their wealthy owners.

The next morning found Devin at the office that belonged to the Leeman Firm, her former employer. It was a squat building, several blocks away from the waterfront. She had only been there a few times over the course of the five years that she had worked for the firm, but it seemed to not have changed from the day she interviewed there, five years ago. She gave herself a minute outside, breathing in the chill, brine smelling air and trying to convince herself that what she was doing was a good idea. After she had given up on that, she went inside.

“Can I help you, Ma’am?” the clerk sitting behind the counter said. Her first time there, the clerk that had been there then had seemed much more imposing, a gatekeeper. Now, he seemed to be just a kid sitting behind a desk.

“Yes, I would like to see Av. Leeman,” she said, a firm’s primary avatar always bore the name of the firm itself.

“Do you have an appointment?” the clerk asked, unlatching and opening one of the leather-bound books that rested in front of him.

“No, I’m a former employee, and I have been having difficulty with a reference . . .” She had expected to have to go through this, and the prepared lie came easily.

The clerk closed the book. “He’s busy at present, but if you have a moment, I think that Av. Klefman might be able to help you, miss . . .?”

“Tarlen,” she said. She hadn’t realized that the firm was large enough to have multiple avatars, but in a way she was glad to not have to face Av. Leeman.

“If you want to take a seat, then,” he said, gesturing to the the benches that lined the walls of the lobby. “It shouldn’t be too long. I’ll let him know that you’re waiting.”

It ended up taking just over an hour for Klefman to see her, by which time she was sore from the thin cushioning on the bench and bored of looking at the bland art on the walls. Then, after some unseen notification, the clerk stood up and ushered Devin into the hallway next to his desk.

“Third door on your right,” he said as she passed him.

“Thanks.”

She stopped in front of the door, pausing to collect herself. Before she could knock she heard someone, presumably Av. Klefman, yell that he could hear her and that she might as well come in.

The room was so bright inside that she had to blink several times before she could make anything out. It wasn’t what she expected. The room contained the chairs and bookshelves and desk that were required for the space, but one entire wall had been covered with windows, and there were plants everywhere. The feeling of being in a botanical garden was strange when juxtaposed with the need to get information that could save her.

Av. Klefman sat behind the desk. He had the slender, fragile looking features that defined his race. With such bright light, it was difficult to make out the blue tint to his skin.

“Miss Tarlen, I am told that you are having trouble with a reference?” he looked slightly puzzled as he spoke.

“No, actually,” she said. His eyes narrowed slightly in response, and she rushed to continue before he summoned someone to drag her out. “The truth is that yesterday I was attacked again by the assassin who killed Burien, and I had hoped that you could help me.”

“You know that we can’t protect you,” he said. “Besides, you seem to have come out all right.” One didn’t need to be an Arbiter to know what he was thinking. If she could so easily survive an attack by the assassin, why had she let Burien be murdered?

“The only reason that I’m here now is because I had help. Another avatar saved me. If not for her, I would be dead.” Devin stopped speaking. She had hoped that the mention of a female avatar would get his attention, but it did one better. His composure cracked, his face going from calm to surprised with seemingly no intermediate state.

She remained quiet as he regained his composure.

“So you’re telling me that you were helped by the Inkeri?” he asked. “I have no contact with them, and if I did, I would not reveal it to you.”

“I don’t expect you would,” she said, trying to convince him that he had known all along. If an avatar gave even a hint of sympathy with the Inkeri, their existence would be ended. No trial, no defense, no shred of leniency, they would simply be snuffed out. “What I need your help with is this.” Devin slid the scrap of paper across the desk to him.

He picked it up and looked at it, or rather, pretended to study it. The Mark that she had copied was about the size of her palm, but when he looked at it, his eyes simply focused on the center. She had first noticed people doing it when inspecting ID, no one cared who you are, so long as you looked like you belonged.

“What is it?” he asked after a few moments.

“You know exactly what it is,” she said. She had hoped that he would have some personal reason to help her, but that apparently was not the case.

“I assure you, I do not.”

“Listen. They will kill me. If not this time, then the next. Do you really think that I would hesitate to tell the powers that be that you have links to the Inkeri given whats at stake?” she asked, and he froze, appearing to not even draw breath. “All I want is a name, that’s it. Then I leave, and we never see each other again.”

He leaned back in his chair and regarded her. He could have been made of stone for all that he moved, but she was sure that he was trying to find a way out. Finally, he leaned forward, placing his forearms on the desk between them.

“The mark belongs to a group called the Rakah,” he said. “All that I ask is that you do not name me as anything more than an avatar who cleared up some reference problem, all right?”

“Sounds fair enough,” Devin said before getting out of her seat and leaving his office.

Devin had thought that once she had the name of the group that was trying to kill her, things would be better. She hadn’t known how they would improve, but she had been sure that being able to put a name to whoever was trying to kill her would make things easier. It hadn’t. If anything, things were worse. Now she had to deal with the problem.

She bought some fish from the market down the street from the office and headed to Jayson’s flat. When she got there, she found the door ajar. Setting the paper wrapped fish down outside, she drew her knife. She pushed the door all the way open, being careful to not be standing directly in front of it. Inside, everything looked to be in order. She found the hundred mark coin in her pocket and used it, bracing herself against the rush of energy. It wasn’t much but it was better than nothing, and all that she had.

There was no one in the front room, so Devin continued to the main room. Sitting at the table was the Inkerran avatar who had helped her the day before. Devin froze, then went back outside to grab the fish that she had left on the steps.

“What are you doing here?” Devin asked when she returned.

“I need to get in contact with Nisfu,” the Inkerran said.

“Why me? What makes you think that I would help you?”

“Because I can trust you,” the avatar said. “And because you need them as much as I do, if for differing reasons.”

Devin thought about it for a moment, trying to get around the Inkerran’s logic, but couldn’t. “Alright, but we will have to wait for Jayson. He’s the only person I know with any connection to the group.” The Inkerran looked relieved, and it was then that Devin realized how dangerous her being on the island was. “What should I call you?”

“My name is Petra.”

Devin and Petra waited together for the rest of the afternoon, but Jayson never showed. The next morning Devin headed out to the docks to see if anyone at his work had seen him. She found herself getting steadily more paranoid as she walked, staying in the middle and avoiding the less crowded ones. When she got back to the flat, she found Petra moving the stones on the Atrissi board around.

“What did you find?” she asked when Devin came through the door. Since they had first met, her speaking had improved dramatically.

“Nothing good. No one from his work has seen him since the end of his shift two days ago,” Devin said. “It could be something innocuous. He could be at a woman’s house, or–”

“Even if that were the case, we have to assume the worst,” Petra said. “Can you think of anyone else who might know something?”

“I know a Recorder who might be able to help us,” Devin said.

“Then you should talk to him.”

“Nisfu? I thought that they had been wiped out a century ago,” Nathaniel said.

“Thanks anyway,” Devin said. “I should get going.”

Nathaniel put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry. Is there anything that I can do?”

“Unless you have a few hundred marks weighing you down,” she said, trying to smile.

“Actually,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “Ever since you were attacked, I’ve been keeping some extra. Here.” There was a brief battle between Devin’s pride and her survival instincts. She took the coin.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll pay you back, I promise.”

“Its a gift, not a loan,” he chided her. “Besides, they pay me well.” He patted his stomach, which was pushing his robe out in his midsection. “Good luck.”

She was halfway back to her flat when she realized that he had given her a 500 mark coin.

Petra wasn’t at the flat. Instead, there was a note on the atrissi board, tucked under one of the stones. The writing on it was large and blocky, but at the same time precise and consistent, like a child’s writing penned by an adult’s hand.

The people who we were looking for came. They will have someone waiting where you first met me. See you soon.

Hope sprung to life in Devin’s chest, but it was short-lived. If Nisfu had come looking for Jayson, then it was almost certain that Rakah had gotten to him, one way or another. That thought led her to the possibility that it was a trap- Rakah posing as Nisfu. It didn’t matter though, after all, what choice did she have?

She pulled the coin out of her pocket and turned it over in her hands. She put it back and then checked to make sure that she had her boot knife. Finally, she went to her room and found her iron knuckles. She hadn’t used them since her bodyguard training, but she felt that they might come in handy. She locked the door behind her and started to walk towards the intersection where she had first met Petra.

Coins could do a lot, but it helped to have some energy to start with, so Devin bought a small bag of bite-sized pieces of fried bread from a vendor near her house. She didn’t want to be hungry, but it wouldn’t do to be over-full, either.

As she drew closer to the area, things seemed to slow down. Everywhere she looked, it seemed eyes were following her. The feeling was similar to that of escorting high profile clients when she had still been a bodyguard. Although her position had changed, the methods of dealing with the anxiety hadn’t. Much of the feeling came from over-alertness, scanning a crowd too rapidly. So she slowed down, forcing her gaze to linger here and there, to whatever her eye was drawn to, without ever stopping completely. Things returned to normal, people glanced at her, then looked away.

She had gone a block before she noticed that someone was following her. She kept on seeing him out of the corner of her eye. He was a little behind her and to her left, matching her progress exactly. She took it as both a good and a bad sign. if the people meeting her were Rakah, it was unlikely that they would have someone also set to following her, for fear that it might tip her off. On the other hand, she would have to deal with him.

It was another long block before she found a suitable spot, a narrow alley that snaked in between buildings so that she could only see partway into it. It was perfect. She made a show of looking around, letting her eyes slide around the man. Then she walked into the alley.

There was a man in dirty clothes standing in the the alley who grinned, showing his teeth, when he saw her. His expression went blank when she looked him in the eye, adjusting her grip on her knuckles. She continued deeper into the alley.

She barely had time to crouch behind a stack of crates before the man who had been following her caught up. Her hand whipped around, the knuckles connecting with his temple. He went down.

He must have had a lot of Ve in his system, because his eyes began to twitch open almost immediately. Her boot caught him in the head and he was out. When she rolled him over, she found that he was holding a length of thin cord and a blackjack.

Devin knew that it would be for the best to just kill the man, but couldn’t bring herself to do it, not while he was lying there helpless, at least. Instead, she broke his hands, if he had access to that much Ve, he would heal, although it would take a while. Then she used the cord to bind his hands and feet, pocketed the blackjack. After checking his clothing and finding nothing else, not even any coins, she headed back towards the meeting point.

Devin arrived at the intersection without any further difficulties. By then the sun had touched the horizon and the crowd had thinned out.

She was starting to think that no one was going to show when someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned around to find herself facing a short man who might have been mistaken for a teenager if his hair hadn’t been grey.

“Were you followed?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. The answer surprised him, and he quickly scanned the intersection. “The man who was following me is probably still tied up in an alley. He’ll probably be able to get free once his hands heal, though.”

The man smiled. “Excellent. We should get going, though.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

As the two of them left the area, another man and then a woman joined them, falling in with only nods to signify that they knew each other. None oft he three spoke and Devin followed their lead.

Finally, when they were approaching the docks, the short man spoke up. “I’m James, and they are Silvia and Elon.” He gestured to the other two.

“I suppose you already know who I am,” she said. “Do you know Jayson well?” James and Silvia both looked at Elon.

“He and I were close,” Elon said.

“Wait, are you Lo (REF)?” Devin asked and he nodded. She broke out in a smile, but couldn’t sustain it. “Have you heard from him? I checked at his work, but . . .”

“No,” Elon said, his voice sounding dangerously close to cracking.

“Its too early to tell,” Silvia said. “We just can’t know yet.” That seemed to kill the conversation, and after that they walked in silence.

Once they were in the docks proper they made their way to an old warehouse. It had once been on the waterfront, but as the island grew it was now several blocks from the current waterfront. There must have been lookouts, because the door opened as soon as James knocked.

Inside twenty or so people waited for them. Petra was among them and surprised Devin by hugging her.

“I’m glad you made it,” Petra said.

“Yeah, me too.”

Meme Culture

2013-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

Sometime last year, I stumbled across a blog post about how Star Trek had prefigured the direction our language and culture is heading in. In essence, there was an episode that dealt with a race that communicated purely by metaphor, the author then compared this to the rise of memes and reaction gifs. Of course, these things were around long before that post was written, but it wasn’t until I read it that I saw the connection between memes and language. And now I can’t unsee it.

More and more, I see emails and facebook posts that consist of nothing but a meme or reaction gif. These things can be fun, and I know that I’ve spent my share of time looking at lolcats, but when they become a substitute for communication, I begin to worry. These things are sort of like the graphic equivalent of cliches. Both are useful for expressing a common sentiment to someone who shares the same cultural frame of reference to yourself, both make it difficult to say anything interesting, novel, or memorable. The main difference is that I would guess that there are fewer memes/reaction gifs than there are cliches, due to the higher cost of production and the shrinking half-life of popular culture phenomena.

To be clear, I am not worried that using memes and reaction gifs will start us on the slippery slope to complete illiteracy. Rather, I feel that their use constitutes a vocabulary of expression, and a small one at that. The capacity of expression of ideas and sentiments seems as though it could limit the occurrence of them, or put another way, if you cannot express something, how fully can you be said to experience it?

On the other hand, if you’re reading this, you speak the English language, and if those upstarts over at Oxford Dictionaries are to be believed, “there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary”. This number likely also doesn’t include cool untranslatable words like fingerspitzengefühl, or neologisms (look at what Shakespeare did to the English language). Taken together and considering that most things will be expressed by a combination of words, and the possibilities appear to be virtually endless.

The Devil’s Advocate in me responds to all this by saying that creativity is often the result of artificial limitations, and so reducing our vocabulary to a handful of memes might actually act as a font of creative expression. I would have to disagree. As a culture, we use memes as a shorthand for complex ideas and sentiments, as a shortcut. Words, on the other hand, are hard to use well, much like representing three dimensional objects on a two dimensional medium. As such, it would seem that words are inherently more limiting, and thus more beneficial to creativity (which also helps to explain why we have a quarter million of them in the English language).

So the next time you feel the urge to reach for that comfortable meme, take a moment and do yourself and your culture a favor. Just put it into words. Don’t worry, we won’t run out any time soon.

Organization: what it is and why it matters

2013-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

When we talk about organizing and organization, we often think about it in terms of optimizing an existing organizational structure. This is all well and good, but the concept of organization has become so ingrained in our culture and language that it is often assumed as a given and little thought is given to what it means to organize and how the resulting order differs from disorder. So I’m going to do some thinking out loud on the subject.

First, what is organization? Following the word’s etymological trail leads one eventually to the greek organon which apparently translates literally to “that with which one works”. In short, organizing is the act of creating something that is useful, an infrastructural element of getting things done. One could think of it as the fundamental aspect of toolmaking. All of this is good if you’re making a musical instrument (something else that pops up when looking into the history of the word), but how does it function when applied to people? Sure, forming a task force to get something done fits the notion, but a couple of interesting ideas come from it:

Organization is a multiplier of force. For example, take a mob of people who want to effect some sort of change. As a mob they have certain amount of ability to influence the world. Now, arm the mob, give them all guns. The mob has exactly one more option, violence (and even that isn’t really anything new, any mob is capable of violence with or without weapons, arming them just makes that option more effective and more likely). Okay, so go back to the original, unarmed mob. Instead of giving them weapons, organize them. Get them talking to each other, have them work out what it is they want and delegate tasks to individuals or subgroups. All of a sudden, the mob (although it is no longer a mob, really) has as many options as it has ideas, and the amount of ideas in proportion to its size. Instead of adding to its options, the mob has multiplied them. This is specifically why governments are leery of any well-organized group, they are more dangerous than an armed crowd ever could be.
Mindset. Unorganized groups (and individuals within the group) approach problems from the perspective of the individual, organized groups (and individuals within the group) approach problems from the perspective of the group. This may not sound like a big deal, but it is in fact the difference between powerlessness and power. Many of the issues that we find troubling in our world are not problems at the individual level but problems at the neighborhood, town, state, national, or world level. Dealing with problems on those scales as an individual is difficult, if not impossible (which is why superheroes seem to be such a dangerous fantasy to me, almost no one can deal with those problems on an individual level).

All of this is not to say that there aren’t problems with organization. Take for example the Stanford Prison Experiment, which suggests that it is possible for our individuality to be overridden by group identity. Despite this, I don’t honestly believe that there is a better option, yet.

In short, organization is a process by which useful things are created, multiplying the options of a group and providing the potential for hope against long odds.

So why am I going to the trouble of working all of this out? Aside from the subject being interesting in its own right, I’ve wanted to write something about organizing in a post-privacy society, and so this post was a necessary prerequisite. I’ll try to get that (more interesting, I promise) post written in the next week or two.

As I was saying . . .

2013-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about some of the issues that arise when a for-profit company offers a free service. A week later, as if to prove my point, it was announced that Amazon has purchased Goodreads. There has been quite a bit of outcry about this, ranging from indifference to outrage. I’m somewhere in the middle. I think that there is a value in an independent social book review site that is incompatible with a retail-owned version of the same. But the change will be gradual, and there will be plenty of time for something else to come about (and perhaps something even better). In short, I won’t be deleting my account, but I will be keeping my eyes on the horizon.

But what do I mean about the values of Goodreads being incompatible with ownership by amazon? Well, the reviews on Amazon suck, and they suck for a simple reason: there is money to be made, and so reviews are posted that reflect not the opinions of actual consumers but rather the purchased opinions of whoever stands to make money when you choose this book over that book (not Amazon, who doesn’t care which book you buy so long as you buy a book, preferably both books). Although Goodreads no doubt has this same dynamic present, it is much less pervasive, as the site was focused on the readers, not selling the books.

On another topic, what I find really interesting about this is that the value of Goodreads was largely created by the users. Users wrote the reviews, rated the books, categorized the books, and Goodreads’ part in all this was largely that of facilitator. And yet, when they sell, the money goes to the facilitator, not the people responsible for most of the value (Amazon could have written similar software for far less than what they no doubt paid for GR, what they were paying for was the stuff you and I put in). Now, this isn’t to say that users weren’t compensated for any of this, when you receive a free service, that can be viewed as a form of compensation.

So what to do if you care more about the service than the compensation? Well, you’ll just have to pay for it.

The Problem(s) With Free

2013-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

A couple of weeks ago, you might have heard from your geekier friends that Google has decided to “power down” their Google Reader service, which, even after they hobbled it, was still a great service. This prompted me to write a lengthy post on the topic . . . just in time to find someone who said it better. I do still have some things that I wanted to add, however, so no concise blog post for you today.

When looking at web services offered by for-profit companies, here is a simple rule: If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. Companies like Facebook do not make money off their users, they make money off of advertisers, which means that those advertisers are the actual customers, not you. What Facebook is selling to those advertisers is your attention and your data (whether that be direct information like name and hobbies or indirect information like anonymized browsing and social networking trends).

Of course there is a moral component to all of this, nobody wants to be a product, after all, and it is easy to get worked up over having your information traded between third parties, but I’m going to ignore that. What this relationship means is that for companies like Google or Facebook, their loyalty is to their advertisers, not to you. And when it comes down to it, if you are not that good of a product (Google Reader was apparently difficult to monetize), if that product doesn’t sell, they will find a new one. And so Google Reader gets dropped in favor of Google+, whose users are apparently much shinier products. (Of course, there is doubtless more to the decision than this, Google appears to be attempting to build a large, integrated platform with G+ and Reader simply didn’t fit in, I do not begrudge them their business decisions).

On the other hand, when you are paying directly for a service, you are the customer (or at least a customer, there is nothing to keep that service from selling your information). The company has a vested interest in keeping you around, as you provide revenue. That doesn’t make all paid services better than their free equivalents, but a lot of them are.

Of course, this starts to get complicated when you are talking about minors or college students, who are often defined by their inability or unwillingness to pay for things that they could otherwise get for free, so regardless of icky ethical practices or instability, free services will continue to dominate the market, but I imagine that in the coming years we will see an increase sophisticated premium services, and equally sophisticated methods of paying for them.

Finally, much of this post was inspired by NewsBlur, a social RSS reader based on a subscription model (although they do offer a free, limited, account). When I got it working (it took a while due to them being slammed from the Reader announcement), it felt like home: a visually pleasing RSS reader with a solid social network built in. In some ways, I kind of wish that I had jumped the Reader ship earlier, but I was unaware of the alternatives. And although it may sound like they are paying me to say this, I am in fact paying them, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Stuff that I came across after I had finished writing this post (but that I don’t feel like editing into the post):

Tobias Buckell mentioned a post by Jeremiah Tolbert that talks about why having a website is important. The article goes over some of the stuff that you just read, and other things as well. Also, that rule that I stated above about being the product? Apparently I was remembering it, not creating it (thanks for bursting my bubble, internet). I guess that the idea has just become so deeply embedded in my worldview that I have a hard time remembering that at one point I didn’t know it (“The step after ubiquity is invisibility” and all that)
Forbes: Google Reader Shutdown a Sobering Reminder That ‘Our’ Technology Isn’t Ours - “We are all participants in a user driven Internet, but we are still just the users, nothing more. No matter how much work we put in to optimize our online presences, our tools and our experiences, we are still at the mercy of big companies controlling the platforms we operate on. When they don’t like what’s happening, even if we do, they can make whatever call they want. And Wednesday night, Google made theirs.”
NPR’s All Tech Considered: ‘Keep Google Reader Running’ Petition Hits 100K; Fans Audition Replacements - Of course, 100k isn’t that many people to Google, especially considering that Reader doesn’t really fit in with G+ (and probably competes with it).

Applied Logic

2013-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Earlier this month, a bit of a kerfuffle broke out between Representative Ed Orcutt and the Washington state bicycle community. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in the linked article, and I suggest you read it, but what I want to talk about is logic.

Logic is the study of the connections between things, and is often not taught explicitly until college (although Geometry class might cover it). In short, logic is the difference between being told “one one two” and “one plus one equals two”. The first example is just a bunch of numbers, the second is a logical statement. Simple, right? Not exactly. The thing about logic is that it is not about whether or not the individual elements are true, but whether the connections between them make sense. Take, for example: “All pigs are green. I am a pig. Therefore I am green.” On the face of it, this argument is wacky, but the logic works out, if all pigs are green and I am one of them, then I must be green, too, right? The connections between these false statements make sense even if the content being connected is factually incorrect.

At this point you might be thinking to yourself, “And this guy thinks this green pig nonsense is more likely to make me study logic? Maybe he is a green pig.” I’m glad you’re thinking critically about what I’m saying, but I have a point, so bear with me.

When someone makes an argument, it can be approached in many ways. I would argue that there are three basic approaches, and I will focus on those: emotional, fact based, and logic based. The emotional approach is basically evaluating an argument based on how it makes you feel, and many arguments count on this, which is why so many politicians try to induce fear or anger when they speak. Unfortunately, it is wide open to manipulation, as it makes you want to just react, rather than thinking about it. Fact based evaluation is what you most likely did when you first read the green pig argument. You most likely rejected it based on the fact that you had never seen a green pig, and that it would be very difficult for me to type this with cloven hooves instead of fingers. Logical evaluation is the analysis of connections, which entails ignoring whether or not the statements in an argument are true and instead assessing whether or not they necessarily lead to the conclusion.

To be clear, I’m not advocating the use of one of these over all others, but rather that you should expand your evaluative toolbox and use whichever method or combination of methods is most appropriate. If something feels wrong emotionally, then there is a good chance that something is wrong with it. If you don’t have the right facts, you can be convinced that I am a green pig. If you don’t have good logic, you can be led to bogus conclusions from accurate facts.

You might be thinking that in this networked age, where an unprecedented amount of information is available, we should just be able to fact check everything. Yes and no. We can fact check a lot of things, but the truth of the matter is that when someone is trying to convince us of something, there is a good chance that we simply will not have time to check all of their assertions, and even if we did have the time to do that, we probably would not want to. And so we might just have to rely on logic. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, true assertions can lead to false conclusions if they are not linked logically, and Rep. Orcutt’s argument is a perfect example of this.

Here is an excerpt from his email (the whole thing is available in the linked post):

Also, you claim that it is environmentally friendly to ride a bike. But if I am not mistaken, a cyclists (sic) has an increased heart rate and respiration. That means that the act of riding a bike results in greater emissions of carbon dioxide from the rider. Since CO2 is deemed to be a greenhouse gas and a pollutant, bicyclists are actually polluting when they ride.

And here is a breakdown of his argument:

Cyclists have increased heart rate and respiration.
Increased heart rate and respiration result in increased CO2 output.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas and a pollutant.
Therefore, cyclists are polluting when they ride.

This is a solid argument. The facts check out and the logic is sound. The problem comes in when you look at the claim that he is attempting to disprove: “it is environmentally friendly to ride a bike.” On the face of it, this looks fine, if we define environmentally friendly to mean “not harmful to the environment” in an absolute sense. Unfortunately there is context. The assertion that he was responding to was: “Additionally, bicyclists produce fewer emissions and reduce healthcare costs through increased physical fitness.” (full text of original email, if you’re curious). To rephrase, skipping the bit about healthcare, “Bicycles produce fewer emissions than cars.” Which brings us to the wonderful world of logical fallacies.

There are forms of arguments that are always invalid. One of the most common is the straw man. In a straw man, a person is confronted with an argument. Instead of attacking that argument, they create a weaker argument (a straw man, if you will) and attack that instead. For example, it is much easier to attack the argument that bicycles cause no pollution than the argument that bicycles cause less pollution than cars. Rep. Orcutt never said anything about the original argument, but tried to trick us into believing that he had. His argument makes no sense and can be safely ignored.

Whew. That may seem like a lot of work to go through simply to call bullshit on a politician for acting like a politician, but once you get used to thinking like this, you will read a paragraph like that and immediately realize that there is no connection between what he is saying and what he wants you to think he is saying, no fact checking required.

On a final note, Rep. Orcutt did issue an apology, saying that the issue of bicycles not being zero-carbon “was not a point worthy of even mentioning” and went on to sound like a much more reasonable person. Nonetheless, the fact remains that he used a straw man in dealing with a constituent. Either he did so knowingly, which is a form of dishonesty, or unknowingly, in which case I would question his competence as political representative.

Separating the Wheat From the Barley

2013-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Back when I lived in San Francisco, so more than five years ago, I realized something: marketing for fiction is terrible. Here’s the chain of relationships between an author and a reader, as far as I can tell (and this is for novels, other formats are much worse): Writer writes a book. Writer markets book to agent. Agent markets book to publisher. Publisher markets book to bookstore. Book store markets bookstore brand to potential reader. Reader hears about book from a friend or notices a catchy cover and buys book. Most of the books that get any marketing support are books that are already pretty much guaranteed to be popular (think Evanovich, Patterson, or Rowling; they could have announced the Deathly Hallows by way of a Post-it note on a random desk in Tunisia and it would have been around the world in three hours).

Granted, this is not necessarily a problem with a good solution. Books are personal things, and marketing to the wrong demographic is a waste of money. The traditional solution to this is the bookstore/library model of browsing. By arranging books by genre, a reader has the opportunity to discover something new. Of course this model falls apart when bookstores start to act like theaters, focusing almost exclusively on the first week of sales, which can easily prevent a new book from finding an audience (just ask the unfortunate authors who had books released on 9/11/2001 what happened to their books/careers). Unfortunately, this browsing model doesn’t seem to translate to digital bookstores, which means that finding new books can be very frustrating if you don’t already know what you are looking for (which, to me, is kind of the point of finding new books to read)

On to my point. Last week I realized that I read books in three different formats: paper books, audiobooks, and ebooks. Each format fills a different need. I read paper books on lunch breaks and in the bath (as I really don’t want to break my shiny new smartphone) and the books I read this way are mostly the ones that I can’t find in one of the other formats. Audiobooks I listen to while at work or doing household chores. Ebooks I read before I go to bed (a backlit screen is much more convenient for me than a book light) or when my son falls asleep in my arms (turning pages on a hardcover with only one hand free is a pain). In addition, I decided that I wanted to read more indie fiction, stuff that was good but didn’t fit into the publishing industry’s current fad. I read enough paper books and audiobooks that reading indie fiction on my phone wouldn’t really keep me from reading anything that I read now.

Somehow I had assumed that things would be better, 5+ years down the road. So that evening, instead of reading, I went on to Smashwords to look for something to read. Forty minutes later and I still hadn’t found anything. I tried again the next night, and the next. Still no luck.

I chose Smashwords for three reasons: 1) everything on there is indie, meaning that I wouldn’t have to filter out traditionally published works; 2) they are device neutral, when you buy a book from them you can download it in any format you want from plain text to kindle; 3) they have the best filtering tools. I’m going to focus on point #3.

On Smashwords, I can filter my browsing by genre and subgenre, as well as by various types of popularity and release date, and by length (which is my favorite feature, as I like short fiction). The subgenres are nice but don’t offer enough specificity. For example, lets say I want to read a short piece of fantasy set in a secondary world (meaning not Earth). The subgenres listed for fantasy are: General, Paranormal, Epic, Contemporary, Short Stories, Urban, and Historical. Out of these, I can write off Short Stories (which, on Smashwords, usually indicates anthologies), Paranormal, and Urban, and Contemporary (which implies contemporary Earth), and Historical (which implies historical Earth). Granted, there may be a few stories in those categories that fit what I’m looking for, but the vast majority won’t. That leaves General and Epic, neither of which are exactly what I’m looking for but are better than the alternatives. Filtering down to just short fiction, those categories have 136 and 49 pages of results, respectively. At ten results per page, that is a total of nearly 1900 results to sort through, a large number of which will not fit my criteria at all.

The thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way. With ebooks, we don’t have to shelve things in just one place, we can have a near infinite number of categories, and each book can fit into more than one. In fact, there is already a system in place that could handle this. Each book is tagged. When you look at the detail page for any particular book, it lists the tags that the author has assigned to it. Click on the tag, and it brings up a list of every other book that has that same tag. For example, lets say that I clicked on the tag for space station, it brings up 94 results. Cool, right? Well, no. I can’t filter that list at all, and as far as I can tell, the only way to get to the tag list is to find a book with that tag and click or to know the format that the site uses and type it in manually. If I, say, search for space station, it brings up a page with “title search” results and “full search” results (whatever that means). Of course, I can’t further filter this list in any way, but the weird thing is that between the two types of searches that are performed, there are only 70 results, which would indicate that the full search does not include tags.

Which is why, after a week of looking for something to buy (or just download, if its free), I have nothing.

And to be clear, Amazon is no better. In fact, it is worse, as I have yet to find a way to filter by length and the recommendations are almost all books by authors I have bought books from in the past.

Furthermore, notice that I have said nothing here about quality. If I can find something that fits what I’m looking for, I will happily try a sample and decide for myself, especially since I have been burnt by high ratings too many times. What I want, to use the metaphor from this post’s title, is not to separate the wheat from the chaff, but to separate the wheat from the barley from the oats. I want to be able to filter by genre, length, popularity, intended audience, and tags. If the system is built on one big database (which it would almost have to be), then this shouldn’t be hard to do. Maybe someone can even be convinced to give it a shot. Of course, if not, we will have to do it ourselves, but that’s another post.

Dystopia Fatigue

2012-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

Dystopian fiction is everywhere.

Why this would be so isn’t hard to figure out, anyone who pays attention to the world beyond their big-box commerce node will tell you that things are not going so well out there. We are on the brink (quite possibly already over it) of ecological collapse; the cheap, relatively clean energy that we used to build 20th century civilization is dwindling, rapidly; we are something like four years into the largest economic catastrophe of our generation and no serious changes that would address the root of the problem have even been proposed in the private airstrips of power; social media is being harnessed to watch us ever more closely ;meanwhile the media is obsessed with celebrity rather than reality. Naturally, this sort of environment is going to produce dark, dystopian fiction.

And what’s so wrong with that, you ask. Isn’t part of the job of fiction to reflect the human condition? Well, yes, but the answer is contained within the question. Part of the job of fiction is to reflect, the rest of the job is something else entirely. Writing dystopian fiction is only natural when there appears to be no end in sight to our problems, problems that many do not even seem to notice. To a degree, it is necessary. After all, it is difficult to deal with a problem that you don’t even know you have. On the other hand, I think that it is safe to say that anyone who doesn’t yet realize that we have a problem will not be made to understand, no matter how rational or compelling the argument, for them, only experience will suffice. Furthermore, the continuing drumbeat of despair has outlived its purpose among those who do realize there is a problems, and simply adding troubles onto those already extant will more likely serve to paralyze than to galvanize.

We need to have the second half of the conversation. There is a problem, what is to be done? And what better place to have this conversation than in fiction?

Analog

2012-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

I’m not quite sure what to call this. It’s not poetry and not really prose. In any case, I wrote it when my friend Mike left town, and I think that you may enjoy it:

Analog

They say that we now live in a digital world, that reality is being subsumed by a tidal wave of bits so massive that it will one day swallow the entire universe. They believe that this seemingly perfect map that is coming into being will one day surpass the original in scope, detail, and quality.

It cannot.

For in its precision, it forgets that though you may leave, you take us with you just as we keep some small part of you here. In a digital world, you cannot be both here and there, and yet there you are, and here you are.

So farewell, friend, and remember that the world was, is, and always will be, analog.

Building on the Ruins

2012-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

Last night, I watched the season 4 premiere of Warehouse 13. At the end of the previous season, the warehouse was destroyed. It looked like the only way forward would be to rebuild (there had been 12 before, and the show had already indicated who would be the new warehouse protector). Instead, the entire episode was devoted to finding a way to undo what had happened. Fair enough, it would have been out of character for the warehouse agents to do anything else. What was disappointing was that they succeeded.

So now the show is left with what? A secret (Artie can’t tell anyone that he turned back time), a mysterious order dedicated to protecting the time-reversy device (can’t say that I particularly care), and possibly Claudia gone off to the dark side. And that is supposed to be a better story than having to deal with the loss of all of their work, having to rebuild something from scratch?

Stories should do one of two things, they should either reflect the world as it is or reflect the world as it ought to be (and I use these terms loosely, I think that the Lord of the Rings stands up to this test, as does Star Wars). Stories in which mistakes and catastrophes can be fixed after the fact fail this test, we do not live in a world in which we can undo our actions (outside of a computer, that is) and I don’t think that I would want to live in a world in which I could rely on a god on a crane.

There are, of course, reasons to have an undo button in your story, but I don’t think that any of them have to do with quality. Even if you do manage it relatively well, it creates doubt in your audience. If a catastrophe can be magically undone, why should your audience believe you the next time something happens? In the end, it allows you to do an over the top climax once. After that, your audience will lose faith in your story, and the only way to fix that is to have bad things happen that can’t be undone. Of course, your audience will expect things to be undone and if you let that beloved character die they will feel betrayed.

So if you are a writer (or TV executive, since I doubt that Warehouse 13’s writers had any say about the overall direction of the season) go ahead and destroy the world, just be prepared to build on the ruins.

Some hope for readers and publishers alike.

2012-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

If you spend enough time paying attention to the evolution of e-books, a curious trend emerges. It seems that readers and publishers are at odds. Readers say that they want to be able to read books on whatever device they want once they buy it, publishers say that they will lose their hats if their books aren’t locked down with DRM or if they were willing to sell to libraries. All of this seems to ignore the whole part about readers wanting to read books and publishers wanting to give them books to read. Of course there are exceptions to this, but they are just that, exceptions.

Yesterday, however, I ran across something that gives me some hope, a site called unglue.it. The idea behind unglue.it is that people want to read books and are willing to pay for them and that rights holders (publishers, authors, and estates, mostly) want to receive money for their books. How it works is that it negotiates with the rights holders for a particular work to determine a fair price, then raises that money through crowdfunding (similar to kickstarter) and pays the rights holder. In return, a Creative Commons licensed ebook edition is released, available for free, to everyone on every device with no DRM.

Of course, this won’t be a panacea for the dysfunctional ebook landscape, but it is certainly a step in the right direction.

The Future of Book Cover Design

2012-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The other day, I had just finished creating covers for a couple more of my Broken Shores stories when I saw an article by Craig Mod about cover design that a friend had shared.

The basic idea that is presented is that book covers are dead. In a digital marketplace, the book art is no longer the primary thing that a reader has to go by when trying to decided whether or not to give an unfamiliar book a shot. Now we look for metrics, namely aggregate reviews. To compound that, the cover is no longer life-sized, but has been compressed down to a thumbnail next to an Amazon listing or removed entirely by browsing your ereader’s list of books and then jumping immediately to the text itself, bypassing all of the hard work that a designer has put into it.

This is the point where the essay could have gone off the rails, lamenting about a bit of beauty fading silently from the world. But it doesn’t. Instead, he reminds us that all of the artistic features of a physical book have arisen from and evolved out of the physical requirements. This new medium, then is not so much a loss as an opportunity to do something new and exciting.

What is the future of book covers? Who knows. But I, for one, am excited to see where this leads.

If you’re interested in cover design, I have written a couple of posts on the basics of cover design, which you might want to check out: DIY e-book Covers 101 and DIY e-book Covers 102.

Epic Storytelling and the Art of Memory

2012-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

I recently finished Frances Yates’ book, The Art of Memory, which details the history of artificial memory from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare’s time. The basic idea of how artificial memory works is that you go to a place and memorize its layout, and then at distinct areas within, you place mental images which are linked to ideas. When you need to recall those ideas, you mentally walk through the building and find the image that is associated with the idea that you need to remember. Apparently, orators would catalogue entire speeches this way, and mentally walk through a building as they talked, using the stored images much as people in our society use cue cards.

One of the interesting ideas in the book was that Dante’s Inferno was used as a sort of memory map to remember the multitudes of virtues and vices that were important to Christianity at the time. Interestingly, Yates never brings up the idea that other stories with vivid imagery might have been created or used in this manner. Namely, I am thinking of Homer’s epic poems, which I understad were a cornerstone of classical education. Given that they are full of striking images as well as having a structure designed to make them easy to remember (in Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Weatherford asserts that the Mongolian system of laws was codified into songs, and that their accuracy was ensured by the songs’ structure), they would have been ideally suited to memorizing large bodies of knowledge.

How would such an education program work? Would students first be exposed to and then memorize epic poems, and then associate ideas with them? Or would it be more of a gradual process, associating ideas as the parts of the stories were memorized.

Obviously I am no scholar, and have no evidence for any of this, but it is an interesting idea. Something to chew on, at least.

A humble suggestion for Bantam Books

2012-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

Bantam is the publisher of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series, even if you haven’t read the books, there is a good chance that you have seen the HBO series, Game Of Thrones. The series of books is huge, consisting so far of five thick books with at least two more planned. Each of these books is divided into numerous points of view, and the story itself is getting so unwieldy that readers rarely see their favorite characters. One reaction to this would be to suggest more editorial oversight, but I have little expertise in that department. Instead, I would suggest that the publisher makes sure that they profit from it.

After the series is finished, imagine a massive e-book edition of ASoIaF (call it the Perfect Collection or Ultimate Edition or something) that contains all of the books. Now, let the fans remix the books. Not rewrite them or modify the text, but rather the ability to rearrange the chapters. Imagine reading only the Tyrion chapters or the Jaime chapters, with no interruptions, or only the chapters of peripheral characters. I realize that you could do this with paper books by skipping the chapters that you don’t want to read, but it would be a pain in the ass. In addition, fans could release ‘playlists’ of the book that other people who have purchased the uber edition could then view.

Of course, this wouldn’t need to come cheap, say $50 or $100 per license. Imagine everyone who has already purchased the entire series going out and buying the whole thing over so that they can remix it.

Personally, I don’t actually expect the publishing industry to do anything like this. They will almost certainly say that it is too difficult or too expensive, if they consider it at all. Fortunately, what we are talking about here isn’t video or music, but text, which is notoriously hard to control (or as Cory Doctorow says: “Behold . . . the typist!”), so whether or not Bantam wants my money, I’ll be able to get it.

Weekly Reading 4.6.12

2012-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

Books and Novellas

Sauerkraut Station, by Ferret Steinmetz - Described as Prarie Home Companion in space, this story was a lot of fun. Plus, GigaNotoSaurus allows you to download epubs of their stories, which makes them much more readable.
A Web of Air, by Phillip Reeve - After enjoying Fever Crumb, I thought that I would give the sequel a try. I was disappointed. First, the audiobook had a different narrator (the author did the first one, and was fantastic). Second, the simplistic view of spirituality that it portrayed (summed up as religion always hinders progress) annoyed me. Third, the most interesting part, birds with human intelligence that had decayed since their creation (but with the possibility of redemption) weren’t very well explored. Finally, the main character shoots someone by clamping a bullet in a vice and setting it off. Since the character is trained as an engineer, she should know that the bullet would need a barrel to achieve any sort of velocity. I won’t be reading the next one.
A Planet of Viruses, by Carl Zimmer - An excellent introduction to the world of viruses. Informative without being dry.
Palimpsest, by Charles Stross - This novella makes me look at every time travel story I’ve ever read and think that the authors lacked in ambition. I cannot overstate how much I enjoyed this book.

Articles

Real Spending, Real Dollars - Our spending priorities are just scary.
The $30 Billion Social Security Hack - I imagine that we will see a lot more of this in the future.
The Inadmissible Assumptions - Like a tiny Jaron Lanier sitting on my shoulder.
Not an April Fool - You know that saying about never attributing to evil what is more easily explained by stupidity? Well the corollary is that there is no functional difference between stupidity (or ignorance or incompetence) and evil.
It’s the Economics, Stupid! - Interesting look an energy prices and politics, although I think that he doesn’t take into account the effect of staring at a pump for a minute or two as you pump your gas, rather than simply seeing one number one time each month when you get your natural gas bill.
What Book Publishers Should Learn From Harry Potter - Namely that readers want to be your advocates, and that perhaps abject fear isn’t the correct response.

Comics

Cadbury Eggs - XKCD
Tumblr - EverythingIsTheSameSize “dot tumblr dot com”

The Nature of Television

2012-04-03T00:00:00+00:00

Let me preface this by saying that I watch a fair amount of TV. Not nearly as much as most of my fellow USians, but a fair amount. I am not saying that no one should watch TV, ever, but that perhaps we should be a bit more critical of it as a society.

Turn on your TV set (or imagine that you are). Find a show that you like that is not a sitcom or news and takes place during the modern era. Now wait for the protagonist to sit down and watch some TV. Chances are, you will be waiting for a while. Those doctors, detectives, scientists that you like so much don’t really watch TV, or if they do, it is to catch the big game or to watch a news snippet. They don’t go home every night and plunk down for an hour or two of TV.

Now, think of how you relate to those characters. At some level, you probably want to be as smart, funny, or interesting as those people. It would be cool to do interesting things, wouldn’t it? So what does that have to do with the amount of TV that they watch? Two things. First, watching someone watch TV is about as interesting as watching them go to the bathroom, less so even, since we see a lot more of the latter. Second, they don’t have time. If they went home and watched TV every night, they wouldn’t have the time to do all of the things that their fictional lives require of them.

What I’m saying is that by spending a lot of time watching fictional characters do interesting things, you pretty much prevent yourself from doing interesting (or heck, useful but boring) things, by definition.

Last year, the New York Times ran a story reporting that in 2010 Americans watched an average of 34 hours of television per person, per week. That sounds like a lot, but it sounds like more when you do some math with it. There are 168 hours in a week. Assuming that people sleep eight hours per day, that leaves 112 hours. Now, if you work 9-5 five days a week, and have a half-hour commute each way (and many work longer and commute farther), that leaves 67 hours. That means that Americans spend 30% of their waking hours watching TV, and over 50% of their free time. Another way of putting this is that Americans watch 4.85 hours of TV per day. On a workday, that would leave you a little over two hours each day to do things like eat or raise your family. Most people probably aren’t that determined to watch TV on weekdays, however, probably clocking in closer to three hours (a guess on my part), which would then mean that they spend 19 hours watching TV on the weekends.

You probably get my point by now. People in the United States watch a lot of TV. Maybe next time my neighbor comments on how much yard work we get done over the summers I will just point to the ever-present blue-white glow of their TV visible through their front window.

I’m going to go do something interesting, maybe you should, too.

Weekly Reading 3.20.12

2012-04-03T00:00:00+00:00

This was supposed to be posted on the 20th of last month, but due to operator error, it wasn’t. Oops.

Books

Last Week: The Statues That Walked, Ship Breaker, The Quantum Thief, The Third Reich, and One Way Forward. Of these five, my favorites were definitely The Statues That Walked, which made a rather persuasive argument that rather than polluting themselves to death/killing each other, the people of Easter Island were both peaceful and remarkably good stewards of the environment, and One Way Forward, which was one of the most hope-inducing political book that I’ve read in a long time.

This Week: Ragamuffin, Fever Crumb, and Dark Life. All of them were good, but nothing really bit me.

Articles

E-Books, Paperbacks, and Authors - A future of publishing.
Can A Local Currency Improve Resilience - It looks like the short answer is yes.
Alternative Currencies In Greece - More on alternative currencies, this time from Tobias Buckell.
Drones That Operate For Years On Their Own -
Why High Gas Prices Are Here To Stay - The title may say it all, but worth a read. Then again, I check oil-price.net every morning because it seems to be the best single indicator of what will happen in our society, so I may be a bit biased on this front.
A Writing Experiment - Basically, using Apple’s Siri to capture dialogue and a keyboard to capture the rest of the story. I’m not sure how well this will work out, as real speech makes terrible dialogue. Of course, I am still planning on writing a story that involves a group of people sending frantic status updates via text message, which I plan to frantically type into my phone to capture some of the autocorrect hilarity.
Locke Lamora Read-Along Bonus #4: YOU SUCK, LYNCH - Lynch provides some fascinating insight into what it means to not go back and fix the things that you wrote years ago, when you lacked the skills you currently possess.
Using copyright to keep kids from reading - I realize that there is another side to this, but really? Way to shoot yourself in both feet, publishing industry.
E-Books’ Uncertain Future at Local Libraries - I realize that this is a tough time for publishers, but I fail to see the rationale of not selling to libraries at all.

Weekly Reading 3-10-12

2012-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

Books

This week, I finished reading Richard Matheson’s Other Kingdoms, Sherman Alexie’s Flight, Tobias Buckell’s Crystal Rain, Tamora Pierce’s Tortall and Other Lands, Jonathan Hickman’s Red Wing, and Oscar Guardiola-Rivera’s What If Latin America Ruled The World. Of these, Crystal Rain was by far my favorite, and you should read it.

Articles

The Disappearing Virtual Library - An article examining the demise of library.nu. Particularly interesting because it deals with the phenomenon as a failure of publishers to meet demand.
Publishers Oppose Bill on Scholarly Open Access - . . . because they feel that we have no right to research that we have collectively funded. If they can’t make enough money from work that was taxpayer funded, that sounds like a them problem.
Siri’s big brother from Google - I don’t care how shiny it is, I don’t want to talk to my phone.
States’ Rights? - I really wish the government would stop curtailing my right to curtail other people’s rights. An excellent analysis of how most of the people calling for states’ rights are doing so in the interest of discriminating on a local level.
Locke Lamora: It came from Burger King! - Some cool meta about one of my favorite fantasy books, which you should read if you have not already.
You Don’t Need a Cyber Attack to Take Down The North American Power Grid - Security Theater is the best kind of theater.
US Attn General Eric Holder on The US Killer Drone Policy - More disturbing news from DC.
Playing the Game in Afghanistan - A glimpse into the Afghani psyche as well as a suggestion for a strategy that actually has a chance of succeeding. My favorite bit was her talking about “buzkashi, in which mounted horsemen vie for possession of a dead goat or calf. . . . Journalists compared the game to polo, apparently never having seen a game of polo. Take my word for it: it is not like polo.”

Weekly Reading 3.2.12

2012-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

As an experiment, I’m going to start keeping track of the various articles that I read and post them on Fridays. This week you get a short list because I only came up with the idea on Thursday. Without further ado:

How Empires Fall - An interview with the Jonathan Schell, author of The Unconquerable World, about the nature of nonviolent revolution. Fascinating, now I need to read that book.
Why Anti-Authoritarians Are Diagnosed As Mentally Ill - An article about the psychology of Authoritarianism.
Yet Another Way China and Google are Different - Don’t be evil. Please.
Lorem Ipsum - A brief look at just how sad journalism in the US has become, which reminded me of a video I saw on Tobias Buckell’s blog a while back.
The End In Afghanistan? - Another piece from tomdispatch.com, this time about the myriad ways in which we are in trouble in Afghanistan.
HR 341: Neo-Feudal Rights Bill - Some examination of a worrying piece of legislation that may soon become law. Imagine if everyone in OWS was arrested simply because someone under the protection of the Secret Service entered the area. As amusing as the idea of weaponized politicians is, I would prefer for it to stay fiction.

On Perfection

2012-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

If you spend enough time going through writing advice, you will eventually come to something about not allowing the need for perfection to prevent you from actually finishing anything. Or “Never let the perfect become the enemy of the good”. Perfection is, after all, something that we strive towards rather than something we achieve. What has me thinking, on the other hand, is the flip side.

Back in July of 2011, I had finally finished The Root of All Things. It wasn’t perfect, in fact I think that it was probably the weakest of the Broken Shores stories, but it was good I had reached the point where I wasn’t sure what needed to be done to improve it. So I posted it and started working on the next story, Trust and Vulnerability (which was about a different character so there was no continuity to worry about), which turned out much better. Then I posted The Forked Path late last week, which continues the story begun in The Root of All Things.

Only after looking at the site stats over the weekend and seeing a bunch of hits on The Root of All Things but none on The Forked Path did I realize my mistake. Of course there’s nothing to be done about it now (perhaps I should have just put in a link for The Forked Path and noted that it was a continuation but could stand alone, who knows). I guess that the take-away from all of this whinging is that when it comes to perfection, like in so many things, the Middle Path is what we should hope to achieve. A prospect more difficult than it sounds, I am sure. Back to writing.

DIY e-book Covers 102: Text

2012-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

As I mentioned in my first post on the subject, you can do a lot with nothing but text on your covers. There are four things (in my opinion) to think about when dealing with text: font, size, placement, and effects. I will go through each of them in turn below. Keep in mind that these are all guidelines, and that once you know what you are doing, you can break them.

Font

Pick a font that fits your story. Do not go for an embellished, script-style font when writing science fiction. Similarly, don’t use an angular, modern font when writing fantasy or historical fiction. When in doubt, choose a plain font over a stylized one. And you should probably stay away from Comic Sans (unless you are writing a story called “I Hate Comic Sans”).

Once you pick your font, stick with it for the entire cover. Consistency is often shorthand for “professional looking”.

Size

Since you are working on a cover for an e-book, there is something you need to remember about your text. It has to look good and be legible when shrunk down to the size of a postage stamp, because that is how people will see it when they are browsing through Amazon or Smashwords or wherever. What that means is that your title should be in as big of a font as possible (short of running into the edges).

After that, remember that people will automatically assign importance to the words based on their size. Which means that your name should be in a smaller font than the title. You will notice that the more popular an author, the larger their name is on the cover. That is because they are a brand, and readers are more interested in finding books by them than with what the actual title is. If you fall into this category, you don’t need this guide, just ask your graphic artist to make the book look good.

What this means is that once you figure out how big to make your title, drop the font size down a notch for your name and stuff like “a short story” or “a novel”. If you have blurbs from people, those should be smaller still.

Placement

Fortunately, if you got the size right, you can place things just about anywhere, people will pick up on it (which is how a tag cloud works, when you think about it). In general, people (who speak English at least, other languages have different conventions) will read from left to right and top to bottom, which means that its hard to go wrong with having the title up top (but centering it works well, too).

The more important part is having sufficient whitespace (or blank space for those of you not using a white background) around your text. If you don’t, things will run together and be difficult to read (impossible to read at postage-stamp size). Furthermore, whitespace around your words will make them stand out, so giving them a bit of a buffer will make them seem larger and more important. As a general rule, the importance of something on a page is inversely proportional to the amount of whitespace surrounding it.

Effects

Plain text may seem boring, but there are all sorts of things you can do with it. You can play with the colors (think of the Google logo), the alignment, the orientation, all sorts of things. I’m not going to talk about this much, as once you start paying attention to covers, you start noticing ones that use nothing but text and look amazing (the cover image above is a good example). So experiment and see what you can come up with.

Next time I’ll start to talk about images. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Fundamentals

2012-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

In 2008, the US economy crashed, bringing much of the world economy with it. The bulk of the crash was blamed on the housing markets, but really, it was about concentration of wealth. If incomes for the majority of the population remain stagnant for thirty years, but the median cost of a house increased tenfold and health care costs have gone through the roof, then is it any surprise that the economy crashed?

What is worrying is that nothing fundamental has changed about our economy. There are no new safeguards for consumers and wealth is still percolating to the top. Still people are starting to talk about recovery. But a recovery based on what? The idea that things will get better without some sort of fundamental change is naive at best. If you want to see what it looks like when you try to force things to get better without actually fixing the problem, I suggest you look towards Greece.

I don’t like it, but the more I pay attention to the news, the more I think that John Robb may be right, perhaps we are turning into a hollow state, after all. If you’re wondering what all of this has to do with writing, this is the sort of thing that is on my mind when I write things like Uprising and Soapbox (which I will start adding to again later in the month).

DIY e-book Covers 101

2012-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

One of the services that traditional publishing still provides is art. Many writers aren’t graphic artists, or at least not illustrators, and when I saw a post over at Cheapass Fiction, I realized that people might be able to benefit from my experience. First, let us define what we want to achieve with a cover: We want people to buy/download our stories. To make that happen, the cover should be professional looking and eye-catching (in a good way). Ideally it would have artistic merit in its own right and give the potential reader some idea of what the story is about, but both of those things, if poorly executed, will detract from point #1 (being professional looking). So, how do we go about doing this? Here are some basic rules:

Read the guidelines. If you are going to publish at Amazon, check out their guidelines. Same goes for Smashwords. Same goes for Apple (apparently they reject anything that has a web address on it). Same goes for anywhere you want to put it that isn’t your own website.
Keep it simple. Many people will be viewing your story from a list, which means that they will see a thumbnail. Many will also be viewing it on a smartphone. What this means is that your cover needs to look good postage stamp sized, so keep it down to what is necessary: Title, Author, image, and possibly story type.
Use a light or white background. As a general rule, the darker a background, the more difficult it is to make it look professional. This is partially because you need high contrast for the image to look good as a thumbnail, and with a black background that means white or light text.
Use a border. The problem with a light background is that it can blend into its surroundings, which is bad. So add border in black or grey.
Use as high quality graphics as you can find/afford. If you are a photographer or know one, this can be to your advantage. Same goes for illustrators. If not, go with professional stock graphics from places like iStockphoto.com or dreamstime (dreamstime has a catalog of free royalty-free images that you can use). You can usually get what you need for $20 or less. A tiny, professional icon is almost always better than a large-scale piece of amateur art. I hope that this next bit is unnecessary, but attention to licenses, do not screw other artists by stealing their work.
Look at how everyone else is doing it and don’t be afraid to ask them. Find covers that you like, and figure out what makes you like them. Also, if you see an author doing their own covers and you like it, ask them about it, they will probably tell you, this is how I learned about iStockphoto, I asked Tobias Buckell how he could afford to do the covers for his short stories, and he told me.

Keep in mind that these are just guidelines, all but the first can be broken once you know what you are doing. Also keep in mind that I’m not a professional Graphic Designer, and I’ll probably look back at the stuff I’m making now and wince, so if you have anything to add, feel free to drop a line in the comments.

Fantasy Literature as a Gateway Drug to History?

2011-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

I had been planning on beginning the follow-up story to The Root of All Things this morning, but instead I stumbled across this article by Adam Gopnik while skimming through Reddit this morning. The essential point here seems to be that Young Adult fantasy aimed at boys (the article focuses on Paolini’s Eragon series) teaches them how to think, absorb, and interact with history. I personally have not read Paolini, but I think that I at least partially agree with Gopnik’s central thesis, despite his dismissive treatment of the genre.

What I did find interesting was the degree to which he missed the point in regards to Tolkien, taking from the stories a sense of detailed description and “[in comparison to T.H. White’s exploration of morals] . . . a Tolkienesque treatment, focussing on clashes between armies, not within souls.” Yes, there were an abundance of detail and armies in Tolkien’s work, but I don’t think that either of those things were the point.

The thing that struck me, reading Lord of the Rings, was that everything rested on the books’ everyman, Frodo. The best and brightest of men (Aragorn), Elves (Legolas), Dwarves (Gimli), and Wizards (Gandalf) simply couldn’t get the job done. In the end they were nothing more than a distraction, a sideshow. Sure, they were important, but it was the guy with no special abilities or powers who has to get the job done.

I’m going to cut myself off here, before I get too far into my rant about Tolkien and how his imitators seem to copy every part of his work but the part that matters. Don’t worry, though, I’ll try to give you the whole thing sometime this month.

Wrapping Up November

2011-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

Only two days left in November. Whew. It’s been a busy month. I’ve gotten a lot of work done on Caldera, although it has gone slower than I would like. I’m hoping to finish it tomorrow. I’ve started a new project, Soapbox, which has been a fun experiment (and will continue to be so with any luck). Finally, I finished Trust and Vulnerability over at Broken Shores, and it has been well received. All in all, I’ve written something like 15-20k words this month.

As for reading, I’ve been continuing to read A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine, which has continued to be rewarding. Also, I have started to make my way through Neal Stephenson’s new book, Reamde, with which I have to be careful or else it will take over my life for a few days as I do nothing but read it. Finally, I’ve read some good short stories, most notably The Things by Peter Watts, which is the story of the creature from the movie The Thing, but from the Thing’s perspective.

I’m not sure how much I’m going to get done next month, hopefully a short story and flash piece for Broken Shores, more Soapbox, and maybe a new Horizon story (Interstellar Fish Larceny FTW!), maybe I’ll even get around to revising Caldera. Also, I want to make some improvements to this site (I want classification icons for the stories here: funny, SF, fantasy, free, etc.). In any case, I have a lot of writing ahead of me today, but there will be a new Soapbox piece tomorrow and a progress update for Caldera the day after.

Cliche and the Use of Language

2011-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

The dictionary on my computer defines cliche as “a phrase or opinion that is overused and betrays a lack of original thought”. I’ve never heard it used in a positive way, it is always a criticism. There is a good reason for this, prose that relies on cliches is flat, stale, dead on the page. Another way to define cliche is a phrase that is so familiar that it has lost virtually all meaning, it no longer engages the reader in any meaningful way and the work would most likely be better served by a direct statement. In short, avoid cliches.

The opposite end of this is purple prose in which the writing is so ornate as to distract from any point that it might otherwise make. This has traditionally happened in pulp novels, but has also started to happen in literary fiction. When you remove Plot, your only recourse is character and style, and there are only so many books about dysfunctional families that one can read, so it becomes easy to abuse style. (Yes, I do realize that I am painting with a very broad brush here. I am not saying that all literary fiction suffers from this, just some.)

As a general rule, I believe that the effect of any flourish, be it vulgarity or flowery prose, is inversely related to the frequency of its use. Which is really just a long way of saying that the more uncommon an element, the more impact it will have.

All of that being said, I now get to my real reason for writing this post. In my last weeks at Borders, I found an excellent book for adding a little freshness to prose: Merriam-Webster’s Easy Learning Spanish Idioms. It contains common Spanish idioms along with their direct translations and explanations. For example: “ser como en un entierro” which means “to be like a guitar at a funeral” and is analogous to “stick out like a sore thumb”. Obviously some of the phrases can be used verbatim, but I think that to do so exclusively would be to miss an opportunity. Through something like this, you can see how idioms arise from culture and history, which should get you thinking about what idioms arise from the culture and history that you are writing about (I’m thinking of the fantasy genre here, but I think that it applies equally well to the idioms that arise out of something even as small as a town or a family). If you don’t like that one, there are plenty of books about the subject, like I’m Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears and Other Intriguing Idioms from Around the World.

The point is, if you want to write fresh and engaging fiction, there is a whole world of diverse and fascinating people out there to draw on. Just do so sparingly.

An Industrial Religion

2011-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

Yesterday on Diaspora, I wrote:

I’ve been (slowly) working my way through “A Year In the Life of a Shinto Shrine” by John K. Nelson, and every couple of chapters something completely unexpected comes up like: “From an anthropological perspective that compares cultures worldwide, belief is one of the least important characteristics of religious activity.” Or a quote from the subject shrine’s head priest: “We hear a lot of talk about how Japan is regarded as one of the world’s advanced societies–and that may be true materially–but culture is something which can’t be classified as high or low.” he then goes on to talk about how culture can’t be quantified and that Africa has a richness of spirit that was once mirrored in Japan but is rapidly fading.

The second quote reminds me of what James Prosek said in his book “Eels” (which was fantastic) about how the eel plays a huge role in many early religions, but those religions only made sense for a society still in contact with nature and have not transitioned to modern life very well.

I picked up the book for an insight into an animistic worldview (after Voltaire’s Bastards made me consider it), but the read has been far more rewarding than anticipated.

After writing this, I started to think about classifying religions by their contexts. I would probably classify animistic religions as being natural religions, in that they deal in large part with humankind’s relationship to nature. Then there are the social religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism to name a few, which mostly concern themselves with humankind’s relationship to societies. What, then, comes next?

I would argue that we are seeing a religious attitude form around our relationships with technology, rationality, and causality (note that I do not include science, as science knows what its limitations are and a faith-based view of it would be better classified as faith in rationality or causality), an Industrial or Technological religion. What would be an example of this Industrial religion? Determinism is the first thing that comes to mind, even though it has some big problems.

I have some other thoughts on the consequences of this line of thinking, mainly about the utility of faith in dealing with things that are too complex to be properly grasped by the individual until some sort of mental toolkit is developed, but those are topics for another essay. Finally, it may seem that I am trying to smear logical thought. I am not. I do not view faith as intrinsically bad, as many do (I’m more worried about absolute certainty, myself), but simply an aspect of human nature, so please consider that before complaining.

The Sorrows of a Mass Produced World

2011-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

The other night I came home from work to find that my amazing wife had made caramel. If you are anything like me, you are thinking, “You can make caramel at home?”. It can, and apparently it doesn’t require anything in the way of special ingredients (mostly sweetened condensed milk and sugar), or any special equipment (a stove and a pot). The real surprise, however, was how complex and delicious the caramel was. Sure it had a caramel flavor, and was sweet, but there was so much more: a little bit of spice, savory undertones, things I can’t quite put into words. My entire caramel-eating life has been a lie.

I’ve been noticing this a lot, recently. The garlic that we grow in our garden bears little resemblance to the homogenous white bulbs you can find at the store (and easy, too, put garlic in the ground in the fall, then forget about it until the next summer and harvest). The honey from her bees is some of the best stuff I have ever tasted. The Dr. Horrible suit that she made for me a couple of years ago is one of the most comfortable pieces of clothing I own. The list goes on.

It may sound like I’m about to advocate a sort of Hairshirt Environmentalism (although I to believe that we over-consume), and say that everyone should be making their own socks from scratch. I’m not. I have no desire to go back to a preindustrial society in which what we would consider basic necessities are reserved for the wealthy and everyone else must do without. Rather, I’m saying that we shouldn’t unquestioningly accept poor quality so that we may have cheap abundance. Or to put it another way, eat at McDonalds if you want, but you do yourself a disservice if you never take the time to make your own caramel even once.

Thoughts on Terra Nova

2011-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

Last night I planned on watching Moon, but when I pulled it up on Netflix I found that it was no longer available on Watch Instantly. Being a cheapskate, I didn’t purchase it in order to watch it. Lacking in foresight, I didn’t have a second choice ready. So I ambled around the various subscription services. Nothing. So I watched the premier of Fox’s new show, Terra Nova.

The show was alright. I wasn’t so enthralled that I didn’t read some other stuff on my phone, but I did pay attention, for the most part, and watched the whole thing. Like everyone says, basically (Lost+Avatar)*Dinosaurs. I did have some issues, such as: if the portal is one way, then how are they communicating both ways? Either the portal is one way or it isn’t. Also, they mention how the moon is a lot closer, and so looks bigger, explaining it as the moon moving farther away from the Earth by 1/2 cm every year. Someone on the show says, “Do the math.” Well, the math doesn’t work out: 1/2 cm * 85 million years = 42.5 million centimeters = 425,000 meters = 425 kilometers. Considering that the moon is about 380,000 kilometers away from the Earth on average, it would be about .1% closer, and thus about .1% larger. I doubt anyone would notice (although it would affect the tides, I imagine). Then again, everyone wants to complain about how little effect gunfire has on dinosaurs, to which I would suggest they go bear hunting, but increase the size of the animal by an order of magnitude or two and add in hard scales.

But I’m not here to talk about plot holes, rather I want to talk about the attitude of the show. William Gibson made an interesting point in an interview. Basically, he said that one of the reasons that Neuromancer looked the way it did was that he was sick of science fiction that focused on an American future, where if things sucked, you just moved West (or to space, or to the past), where everything was shiny and new. On the other hand, there is a more European (or just about anywhere other than the Americas) attitude of not being able to leave when things got tough, where everything is built on the ruins of what came before. Terra Nova is definitely an expression of the former.

What the show asks us to believe is that we have the capacity to open a spacetime rift into another timestream 85 million years in the past but not the capacity to make the planet livable. The other (more likely) option is that there is not a deficit of technology or capacity, but a deficit of will. We would rather go and screw up a pristine environment than fix our mistakes (one might point out that this scenario gives us a sort of tacit license to continue screwing up our planet in the real world). It doesn’t matter how impressive our technology is, this attitude will kill us. Just give it some time.

The Bottom of the Totem Pole

2011-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

I just read an interesting essay on the state of city and local governments in the US by Michael Lewis (thanks to Global Guerillas for the link). He basically makes the argument (and quite convincingly) that the federal government won’t default because it can push its deficits down to the state level, and that the states won’t default because they can push their deficits down to the city/local level. The city and local governments, however, are screwed, because the only people that they push the deficit onto are the people who are broke, refuse to pay more taxes, or both. While I agree with the essay and found it very informative (and somewhat depressing), it was also lacking a couple of things.

First, the essay explains that an increasing percentage of local budgets are devoted to pensions and benefits for public employees. With the way that medical costs thave been going, is it any surprise that this is bankrupting us? It would be too easy to lay all of the blame on the public employees for this (I’m not saying that they don’t share in some of it, however), but I refuse to say that they don’t deserve health care. Everyone does. And the sooner we recognize that, the sooner we stop bankrupting ourselves pretending they don’t.

Second, it starts off with the premise of problems being pushed from the national to the local level, and the essay basically follows that structure, analyzing increasingly local governments until it gets to the city of Vallejo, CA and finally Vallejo’s fire department. Part of the problem here is that Lewis never ties this back in with the problems at the national level. He never points out that maybe if we weren’t spending so much money on our military, we might actually have money to spend on maintaining services.

Finally, much of the bleakness of the article comes from the fact that it proposes no solutions. Obviously, this is a complex issue with no easy solution, but even the suggestion that we as a society become more involved with our politics, vague as that statement is, would have been helpful. Delivering bad news with no suggestion of how to deal with it isn’t exactly helpful. As a society, we are facing many problems, and one of the big hurdles that keeps us from acting is a feeling of helplessness.

So, what would I suggest? What I said earlier. Become more active in community and politics. And by this I don’t mean voting. If you think that simply voting every couple of years is sufficient to ensure a functioning government, I would urge you to pay attention to the news. Instead, I suggest that you educate yourself about the issues on the ballot, and then the issues that your representatives are voting on. Once you understand enough about an issue to have a stance on it, vote or contact your representative. Furthermore, become active in your local community, they have hearings on what they are doing all the time. If you can’t be bothered to participate, then you shouldn’t waste everyone else’s time complaining when things don’t work out how you wanted. I know this sounds like a lot of work, a lot of reading, writing, attending meetings. It would be unreasonable to expect everyone to spend 20 hours a week doing this stuff. How about one hour, then? How about one hour writing an e-mail or attending a community meeting? How about listening to NPR on your way to work? How about subscribing to an RSS feed of a news site or two? How about taking a chance at being wrong and assuming that the person who you disagree with is trying to make the world a better place? Is that too much to ask? The problems we face are not ones that will be solved by simply voting the right person into office, the problems are simply too big and complex to be faced by individuals. Only as a community that is actively pursuing the greater good will we have a fighting chance.

Why do other languages sound so fast?

2011-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

According to Time, a group of researchers has brought science to bear on this. The short answer is that it is possible to calculate the information density of a given language on the level of the syllable and that density correlates inversely with the speed at which the language is spoken (so high density means low speed and low density means high speed). The interesting part of this is that the density/speed combination all seem to even out so that you are conveying roughly the same amount of information over a given period if you are speaking English or Japanese, even though they have very different information densities.

It seems like this could open up some very interesting questions about what sort of effects information density has in languages which have low density for verbal communication and high density for written communication (or the opposite). An example would be Japanese, which had the lowest information density of the studied languages (and the fastest speaking rate) but which has a very high density for written communications (Kanji are ideograms, in that each character represents not a sound but an idea, with the result that a very short sentence can have a lot of information packed in). Would languages like Japanese tend towards different preferences for communication than English (which I believe would have the opposite correlation between oral and written communication)?

Also, there is some interesting conversation going on around this study on Reddit.

A sad day . . .

2011-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

You may have heard that Borders has gone out of business and is in the process of being liquidated. I worked for Borders, and will be spending the next month or two liquidating the the place where I used to work. As you can imagine, this is a tough time for me. Since none of my projects really fit with how I feel, I will be putting them on hold for a while and working on something else that is a bit more appropriate (it involves squirrel zombies). I’ll let you know when I have more to say about it (hopefully in a week or two, the story is pretty fleshed out in my mind).

Until then, don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. I have a wonderful wife and a great group of friends.

Short Stories on the Kindle

2011-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

For the last month or so, I’ve been reading short stories on the Kindle App on my Android. Frankly, I’ve been enjoying the experience just as much if not more than the novels that I’ve also been reading. This is in large part due to Tobias Buckell’s Unbundled Mondays experiment, where he has been releasing short stories that had previously only been available in anthologies and selling them for $.99 a pop. Sure, it probably costs a bit more, but the fact is that I tend to buy anthologies and then not read them through, so it works out pretty well for me.

There is a problem, however. I want to buy and read more individual short stories, but have been having trouble doing so. When I search for, say ‘Science Fiction Short Story’ I get a few individuals, but I get a lot of other stuff (namely anthologies), too, and there is no way to sort them down to just short stories.

You may feel differently about anthologies, but if you are anything like me, you would like for it to be easier to buy singles. So what would a better system look like? First, it would have an option to filter stories by type (novel, short story, anthology, novella, etc.). Second, I wouldn’t be so opposed to anthologies if they were structured more like albums from iTunes either in the store or just in the app.

Here’s what you should do, you should contact Amazon’s customer service and tell them that you would like for them to make it easier to buy individual short stories. Be polite. Make sure that you mention that you would like to give them more of your money, and that it is theirs for the taking should they decide to help you out. The market is still maturing and with any luck we can see a renaissance of short fiction, but only if the markets know that we want it.

Let's Make May National Short Story Writing Month (NaShoStoWriMo)

2011-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

May is National Short Story Month, and what better way to celebrate short stories than by writing some? I think that the goal should be to complete a polished short story, and so the schedule would go something like:

Week 1 - Write a rough draft of a short story 2,500 - 7,500 words in length.

Week 2 - Read and critique a bunch of other people’s short stories.

Weeks 3 and 4 - Successive drafts, more critiquing, celebration.

What do you think?

UPDATE: ShoStoWriMo went great, and will happen again next year, but until then, the site has been temporarily shut down (It will be back up in April of 2012). See you next year!

The Executioness and The Alchemist Review

2011-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

For those of you who aren’t spending the day reading the new Rothfuss book, but still want some quality fantasy, do I have a treat for you. I just finished reading The Executioness by Tobias Buckell and The Alchemist by Paolo Bacigalupi, two novellas set in a shared world and now collected in The Tangled Lands.

The Executioness follows the story of a middle aged mother who follows a path of vengeance after her husband is killed and her children are abducted as part of a raid. The Alchemist follows the story of an alchemist who is attempting to build a device to fight against the bramble that is slowly choking their world. Although the stories do not directly interact, they both start in the same locality, and read together, they contribute to a quite fully realized world (a feat all the more impressive given their diminutive length).

I could go on at length about how developed the characters are, or about the plotting, but I will suffice to say that Buckell and Bacigalupi are both clearly masters of their art, and their works bear testament to that. What I really want to talk about, however, is about how these two stories are the epitome not only of what good speculative fiction does, but also of what good fantasy does.

One of the things that speculative fiction can do well that most genres struggle with is to take difficult issues that are laden with cultural and emotional baggage, and remove them from their context, allowing the reader to look at them in a different, and perhaps more objective, light. In this case, the entire world is an allegory of global climate change, with each bit of magic used causing the bramble to grow. Think of the bramble as blackberry on crack, but it doesn’t bear fruit (delicious or otherwise), reproduces at an increased rate when burned, and has poisonous thorns. Unlike many climate change allegories, the stories don’t feel preachy, the issues are being presented as complex and there are no easy answers

As for the fantasy specific aspect, one of the things that it as a genre can do that few others can is illuminate the connections and relationships that are otherwise invisible in our world. Often, causality is very difficult to determine, or at least very easy to cast doubt upon (think about the tobacco industry propoganda about cancer). In fantasy, however, an author can make those relationships explicit, and use that as a way to talk about things which would otherwise be clouded by doubt and uncertainty. In good fantasy, every action has consequences, moreso than the real world. Both authors have used this facet of fantasy to good effect, illuminating the channels of power and influence much the same way that fluorescent dye is used to illuminate fractures and schisms of apparently solid objects.

Did the stories have any issues? Sure. In Bacigalupi’s story I wasn’t quite satisfied with the ending, and with Buckell’s I felt that the other women were perhaps painted with too broad a brush, but each story was only about 100 pages, and I understand the need to make certain narrative choices. Also, I would have liked to see an e-book edition, as the books will probably look a little pricey at $20 a piece (I assure you, they are worth it), which is probably why the book store that I work at doesn’t carry them (although it should). They do compensate for that by being beautifully produced, and will find a home on my shelf next to another wonderful fantasy volume (also published by Subterranean), Scalzi’s The God Engines. With any luck, there are more of these stories yet to come.

In short, do whatever you must, but read these books, they are far and away the best fantasy I have read in a while, although that may be in part because they do so well what I am attempting to do with my Broken Shores series of stories (I know, shameless plug, but pretty smooth, right?) which you should go read while you are waiting for your copies to arrive in the mail.

Moral Complexity

2010-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

So, after recommendations by a couple of my coworkers, I read The The Warded Man by Peter V. Brett this last weekend. The book was good, but not great. The concept is good, post-apocalyptic fantasy setting in which demons come out each night. What this means is that the humans as a species are barely holding on, only able to be out during the day, and everything is scarce. Good so far.

Then we come to the wards. Apparently, there are wards that can be used to keep out demons (the old combat wards that would allow humans to fight demons on an even footing are lost). I don’t have a problem with the wards themselves, but rather how they are implemented. I was hoping for something like David Farland’s Runelords series (where runes are very powerful, but require scarce materials, knowledge, and a donor to work), but instead I get a book where all that is required to create wards is knowledge and time (Arlen, one of the central characters, can do it by instinct before his teens).

This leads to all sort of problems (such as why the wards aren’t tattooed on people at birth), but the problem that I’m interested in is that it is one-sided, there is no sacrifice. If power can be had without sacrifice, you can rest assured that humans will have exploited it to within an inch of its life. More importantly, when you have magic that requires sacrifice, it creates moral complexity, and that is one of the things that differentiates between a good story and a great one.

Ultimately, I believe that all storytelling is based on conflict, and that the conflict that we like is the conflict that we can relate to. You may be asking what relatability has to do with Fantasy. Well, in this case, I would say that one of the central aspects of every single person’s life is the concept of sacrifice and trade-offs, which we encounter virtually every time we make a choice. Combined with speculative fiction’s ability to take issues and allow us to examine them without the baggage that we have in reality, you can tell a very powerful story. In short, when you are creating a fantasy setting, magic needs to be balanced with sacrifice if it is to be at all relevant.

For the Win

2010-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

I just finished reading Cory Doctorow’s new Young Adult Novel, For the Win, yesterday. The book covers a very possible future in which gamers (especially those working within the game, gold farmers) unionize and the consequences of that action. It was good, very good, even considering that it has a lot to do with MMOs (think World of Warcraft), which I don’t play. One of the interesting parts about the book, however, was the use of sections that were just straight exposition, with no characters or plot, just Cory talking to you directly about economic principles.

I know that it violates the rule about infodumps (the recieved wisdom is that they are bad), but the conversational and engaging style kept them from being annoying. What was weird, though, was that he didn’t put in any sort of framework for them, such as Econ 101 articles from the Webblies web site or entries in Ashok’s notebook, and since there was no single central character (like in Scott Westerfeld’s Peeps, where the main character has a fascinating section at the beginning of each chapter on parasites), every time they came up, I was pulled out of the story a bit. Fortunately, the rest of thes story was strong enough that it didn’t matter, I tore through it anyway.

Overall, I would say that the book is both good and important, although how good would depend on the degree that the target audience feels they are being preached to. At first, I was worried about how his short story, Anda’s Game would translate to novel form, but it made the jump quite well.

Power

2008-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

I remember being young (no older than eleven, as my parents’ divorce was still in court) and wondering what power was. I was thinking about it in a purely one-on-one sense, if someone told me to do something, what was it that made me do it? This led to the question of whether someone could force you to do something. I didn’t have an answer for it then, but while I was reading an article about the lies that we tell our children (which is a good read, by the way), something clicked. No matter the situation, power is an agreement. Whenever someone (or a group) instructs you to do something either directly or indirectly, you have a choice.

The parties in the agreement are not always equal, for example when the government tells you to pay your taxes, you can refuse, but you will probably go to prison. The natural reasoning that comes out of this is that society is held together by a bunch of agreements, a sort of social fabric. This in turn brings up several issues. First, our society is much more stable than, say Roman society, with relatively few coups and such. My only thought is that perhaps as society is more complex than it was then, that the social fabric is more resilient than it was back then (or possibly that the coups are simply more subtle). The second is that there must be a limit to the resiliency of the social fabric. For example, with measures such as the PATRIOT Act, the agreement between the government and it’s constituents has been severely altered. The government has removed it’s responsibilities to its citizens while doing nothing to relieve citizens’ responsibilities.

The theme of power and responsibility is one that I am quite fascinated with, and that I have started to explore in Uprising, but it feels good to make it explicit. For those of you who are more familiar with the philosophical canon than I am, I apologize for going over topics that have doubtlessly been covered at great depth by better minds than mine.

The Changing Face of Short Fiction

2008-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

So how long, really, is a short story? Common definitions define the top end of the length spectrum at anywhere between 7,500 to 20,000 words. Those numbers are for the most part, arbitrary. I mean if you define a short story as having a maximum of 10,000 words, then what is it about that 10,001th word that puts it over the edge? Silly, right? A much better definition is the functional definition famously espoused by Edgar Allen Poe in “The Philosophy of Composition”, which defines a short story as a story that is able to be read in one sitting. This may seem vague, as how much can be read in one sitting will vary from person to person, and indeed for one person from one situation to the next (reading at home vs. on a train, for example). On the other hand, it is much more reasonable than arbitrary word counts.

So what happens when we bring technology into the mix? Reading on a computer is a much different experience than reading a physical book, and the comparison is not necessarily negative. I won’t go into the details of how the two mediums differ, but I will say that electronic text lends itself to shorter reading times. On the computer, for example, there are a million other things going on which conspire to prevent the reader from sinking large amounts of time into something like reading, and this trend will only continue as we get more multi-purpose mobile devices that also act as e-book readers. Second, dedicated readers will also have a tendency towards shorter works, albeit to a lesser degree and for different reasons. The reason I say this is that they are more convenient than paper books (or at least this is where they are heading, currently the point is debatable), and so they lend themselves to the reading in the short periods of time between other things.

As a result, the average time a person spends reading without interruption (a sitting) will shorten. This means that stories broken into smaller and smaller chunks (flash fiction) will become the normal medium of fiction. This is not to say that long-form fiction will go away, because it won’t, just that more of it will be distributed serially. Personally, I think that this is a good thing. As a writer, it forces me to look at scenes as individual stories that contribute as a whole.

I would like to give one example of how this could work (beyond my own project, Uprising, of course). I have just finished reading Word War Z, by Max Brooks, which was fantastic, and for those of you who are not familiar with it, it consists of nothing but fictional interviews with survivors of a global zombie war. Part of the appeal of the book was that most of the interviews were short, and so it was easy to pick up and put down. On the other hand it was written in such a way that it was nearly impossible to put down (partially as a result of knowing that I could at just about any time, I’m sure).

If they were available, I would gladly read other stories that were written in this format, but there aren’t. Instead, its something that we’re going to have to do for ourselves. Which is a topic for another day (a day that will probably be sometime next week, in case you were wondering)

The Purpose of Speculative Fiction

2008-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

I honestly started this with the intention of writing about Google Analyzer, but by the time I got to the end, I realized that I was talking about something else altogether. So I apologize for any meandering or lack of structure, but at the same time hope that you enjoy it.

It seems like I’ve been spending a lot of time recently talking about information overload, if not here, then in comments and other miscellaneous places. My take on it is that the human brain is an excellent filtering device - every instant that we are conscious, we filter out a good deal of sensory information. This isn’t a bad thing, as the alternative would be paralysis due to a tidal wave of trivia, and after all, it happens on a subconscious level, so we are never even aware of it.

Why does this matter? Because, much of technology today is all about bringing us more information, not necessarily better information. Take the internet, if you break it down, it’s probably something like 75% porn, 24.9% other irrelevant crap, and .1% useful information. That we can get anything useful out of it is in itself a wonder. We are in a process, however, of increasing the amount of raw data that we have access to, mainly through things like cheap cameras and automatic recording systems (every time you purchase something with a credit card, it creates a massive paper trail, or rather, data trail, it is only a matter of time before we do that for everything). This isn’t necessarily bad, but it does stem from the way we approach technology.

Currently, if you want to solve a computational problem, you simply throw processing power at it until you solve it. Very little resources are spent trying to improve the process, only trying to ensure that Moore’s Law will continue to hold true. So how do you improve the process? I’m not precisely sure. Improving processes is something that happens in non-intuitively connected leaps, and as such is something that is difficult to focus on. What I can say, though, is that the one area that will always pan out is basic research. By this I mean research that isn’t meant to solve a specific problem, that isn’t there to create a product, stuff that simply says, “we need to know more about . . .” and goes from there. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the more basic the question, the more we will have to be creative to answer it (read the analogy of the cave a couple of times and you’ll understand). The second is that Descartes was right, from every premise comes other premises. Every time you learn something new, when you connect it to the rest of your world-view, you can learn even more.

Unfortunately, it seems that basic research is not exactly a priority. Who would have said, a hundred years ago, that man would make it to the moon only to lose interest? Why don’t we have more large colliders? The list of questions is endless. Unfortunately, it seems that our curiosity as a species has been smothered by bureaucracy and self-interest (which is another discussion altogether, I’m afraid). I am hopeful, though, that our curiosity can and will be rekindled (as the alternative is extinction). The reason that I say this is that so long as people ask “what if?”, so long as people continue to read (or otherwise experience) speculative fiction, there will always be hope.

The Blurring Line Between Science Fiction and Fantasy

2008-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

In response to one of my posts yesterday, crochetyoldfan noted that it looked like I was espousing the view that the line between Science Fiction and Fantasy is being blurred (the rest of his blog is interesting as well). Although I hadn’t been thinking about that topic while I was writing, it is one that I have meant to write about for some time now, so now is as good a time as any.

First of all, I am not saying that Science Fiction and Fantasy are merging, unless you consider bringing them both under the banner of Speculative Fiction achieves that (which I don’t). What I am saying is that they share more similarities than differences. There are several reasons for this.

The first is that there is considerable overlap in goals. As I mentioned yesterday, one of the primary goals (in my opinion) for Science Fiction is to take current situations and remove the social baggage that is attached to them so that we can look at them from a fresh perspective. This definitely carries over to fantasy. There is room for debate as to which situations are best dealt with by which genres, but I would be surprised to see many fans of either genre say that either one is incapable of doing this.

The second reason is that both genres inherently contain elements of the others. For example, take Faster Than Light, right now it is as much fantasy as it is science fiction. On the other hand, what makes magic systems work for readers has a lot to do with how consistently they are presented, similar to the way an SF author will extrapolate science and technology to present a compelling vision of the future.

My final reason is that technology today has reached a level of incomprehensibility that effectively renders it magic to the majority of the population. This is not to make the elitist argument that people are stupid or ignorant, but merely that you have to have a compelling interest in technology to actually go to the trouble of understanding it (and a lot of this probably has to do with our education system, but that’s another discussion). Most people could not tell you what a horsepower is or what clock speed means, much less explain something like cryptography, although these things all figure prominently into our daily lives. As a result, the perspective of a person reading about magic and looking at technology will become increasingly similar.

So is this blurring of boundaries good or bad? One could make the argument that it is simply the result of the growth of the genres and as such can’t be classified as either good or bad, but I would disagree. I believe that both of the genres are important, both as forms of entertainment as well as art that is meant to make the world(s) a better place. Very little bothers me more than when I see Science Fiction fans/authors bashing Fantasy or the reverse, usually with claims of things like escapism, as though one genre can gain some legitimacy by bashing the other. Both of them are valid, and every second spent criticizing any genre or art form is a moment that could be much better spent promoting whatever it is that you enjoy. The world is a messed up place, and if we are to have any expectation of progress, it can only come about if we abandon our prejudices, whether they be about race, sex, religion, or art.

The Purpose of Science Fiction

2008-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

Sometimes, when I am writing, I worry about how accurate my depiction of technology will be, but I have recently come around to the point of view that it doesn’t matter all that much, so long as it is internally consistent and has a compelling story/characters. This is because only one of Science Fiction’s jobs is to deal with the future. Another is to take situations that we see today and look at them in a different light, from different perspectives, stripped of all the glit that is placed on them by tradition, the media, and society in general.

One of the reasons that I’m bringing this up is that I’m currently working on my Uprising project, which is the first science fiction that I’ve written in a while (having mostly been focusing on fantasy). I’m sure that the majority of my predictions will either go too far or not far enough, but I’m not writing simply to try and guess what the future might look like, I’m writing with the hope that readers will be able to positively affect that future.

Music Industry Piracy Surcharge: A Precursor to Social Art Patronage?

2008-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

I know that my focus is on writing, but I thought that this was interesting. On Wired today, there is an article about a proposed surcharge that the RIAA would leverage on ISPs. Basically, they want to charge every broadband subscriber in the US $5/month, which would then be divvied up between artists based on their popularity on the internet.While the prospect of it being run by the RIAA sounds terrible (it is too expensive and would probably screw indie artists), some form of the basic idea is inevitable. Which doesn’t seem like such a bad thing, really. People’s first reaction is that it is a punishment. But if you look at it as an investment in culture, rather than a punishment, then it begins to make sense.

The current business model (of selling CDs that cost as much as DVDs and suing single mothers for downloading music) is not working. This point has already been well covered elsewhere, so I won’t go into it in depth, but it has three major points:

Charging $20 for a CD is simply insane, especially with the cost of production diminishing.
Downloading music is cheaper, faster, and more convenient.
Treating your customers as criminals is unlikely to generate much loyalty.

So why does a blanket license make sense? The main reason is that it is the best way to actually get paid for music that is distributed online. Sure, there are things like iTunes, but if you don’t want to deal with DRM and reduced quality, then your best remaining choices are to steal it of be robbed at the record store. With a blanket license, you are ensuring that money gets put into the system, and after that, it is only a matter of distributing it. Which is where the problem comes in.

Who gets the money? The obvious answer is that the money should be divided up based upon who popularity. The problem with the RIAA’s proposal is that it would probably only cover artists in their cartel. So obviously, an impartial third party needs to decide who gets the money. For that, they need a way of tracking popularity that isn’t susceptible to manipulation (I can guarantee you that the first thing people would try to do would be to inflate their actual number of downloads). This is a daunting problem, but a technological one, and a solvable one at that.

How much should it cost, then? $5/month? Sure, if production costs were high. But they aren’t. With more than 50,000,000 broadband subscribers, that would work out to $250,000,000 a month! I imagine that if the charge were closer to $.10, it would still make sense, and people would be willing to go along with it. In addition, if you view it as an investment in culture (and therefore in society itself) there is no reason why you couldn’t levy the charge on the entire population (after all, how long will it be before 90% of the population has broadband?). Frankly, it doesn’t bother me that big bands might lose truckloads of cash, I just want artists to be able to make a living, and for that all they need is a steady enough income to subsidize live shows, which is where the real money has always been (and which the increased downloads would help publicize, anyway).

Something like this will happen, sooner or later. The key is to try to make it happen in such a way that it benefits society as a whole, rather than a group of worthless suits who are just now waking up to the the fact that suing single mothers is not a viable business model. So why, as a writer, am I writing about this? Because there is no reason why online media can’t head the same direction. Everything from ebooks to photography to illustration could be covered by something like this, and will probably have to be. The problems that the music industry faces are the same problems that anyone who creates a product in a digital medium, are similar. So far the two answers are to use DRM (which can never work, being based upon the principle of preventing the user from using the media) and to give it away for free as promotional material. At the moment, the second approach is working for fiction, but when the electronic medium becomes the primary one, it will cease to be viable.

Some things to read and think about:

Lawrence Lessig’s book, Free Culture
An excellent presentation by Cory Doctorow on DRM
The Creative Commons Project (which I use)
Michael Stackpole has some great stuff to say in his newsletter, The Secrets (subscription required, but well worth it)

Depth

2008-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

This is something that has been sort of brewing in my mind for the last couple of months, but didn’t actually burst to the forefront until I started reading the comic series Doktor Sleepless by Warren Ellis this past week (which is brilliant, by the way). Other than that, I just read Selling Out, by Justina Robson (the excellent sequel to Keeping it Real). Before that, I read Red Seas Under Red Skies, by Scott Lynch (the sequel to Lies of Locke Lamora, which you really need to read). These three pieces of work have something in common, and that is depth.

When I say depth, I don’t mean that the characters are three dimensional, or that there are multiple levels of meaning in the plot, although those things are true as well. Rather, what I am talking about is a level of sophistication in the worldbuilding itself. In Doktor Sleepless, Ellis has created an entire mythological backdrop for the story. In Selling out, the connections between the various worlds are so complex as to render them unmappable. In Red Seas Under Red Skies, there is an angle to everything.

Why is this important? Because it makes the reader guess, trying to figure out the motivations behind things, the meanings of events. This invests them in the world, and if you can get a reader to invest themselves in the world that you create, you have them. At that point, they are no longer passive observers of a foreign land, but residents there, and people hate to leave a place where they live.

This may seem to go against what many have said about the dangers of worldbuilding, but I do not think that it does. The reason is that the depth is effective because it consists mostly of things mentioned only in passing, or hinted at. If you, as a writer, explicitly state something, it can have the effect of making it seem less real, artificial even, than something that is taken for granted by the characters. A possible reason for this is that when a character shows that something is common knowledge, the part of your brain that doesn’t want to be left out of the loop immediately tries to fit it in with your worldview, making it seem normal.

This all leads to several suggestions for writers. First off, know your worlds well. The better you know the backdrop the more effectively you will be able to drop references. Second, make random references. There is no rule that says everything has to be explained, chances are, if its really interesting, readers will come up with an explanation on their own. Third, make sure that everyone has more than one motivation. Think about it, everyone in real life is acting upon multiple motivations (some of them conflicting) at any given time, you characters should be no different, although this will require you to think about what their environment is more than you might otherwise.

Episodic Writing

2008-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

As an aspiring writer, I run into a dilemma that, if not unique to aspiring writers, is at least accentuated by that circumstance. The question is whether I should write a bunch of short stories or a novel length story. It may sound like not much of a dilemma, but it is. Short stories have the potential for a writer to work on specific aspects of their craft, and in addition to that, they are much easier to sell (and if they don’t sell, its a much smaller investment of time). Novels, on the other hand, are much closer to what I want to do in the long run, and I find it much easier to work on novel-length stories.

With an episodic approach to fiction, however, I should be able to write an episode, write a short story, write an episode, and so on. It may seem that this is little different from simply taking breaks from a novel. I would argue that it is different, however. The whole idea of an episode is that every single one has a beginning, middle, and end. What this means is that there is a natural breaking point, and also a natural point to pick things back up. The problem with taking a break from a novel is not that you are taking a break from it, but rather that you are leaving something hanging, making it easy to just drop it. In theory, by taking a break, hopefully I will be letting my subconscious work on the story, making the next episode easier to write.

As I am about to finish with the first episode of the story that I’m working on, I will have a chance to see how it works. The only remaining problem is what I should write before starting work on the next episode. Should I write something within the same world? Or should I work on something completely different and self contained? I’ll let you know as things go on.

Archaic Writing Implements

2008-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

When I first moved to Olympia, I made the mistake of putting the charger for my laptop in storage, where it did me absolutely no good. As a result, I was forced to write with pencil and paper (gasp!). I have long thought that writing on paper was a good thing for me, but I actually felt guilty to not be using my computer to its fullest extent (the same reason that I refuse to use a paper day planner).

This approach has its obvious downsides (slow paced, blisters on fingers), but it also has significant advantages (beyond having an excuse to buy elaborate writing supplies . . . and portability, of course). The first one is that when you eventually enter it into the computer, you automatically do a rough edit, which is nice. The second advantage is much cooler, though. So cool, in fact, that it deserves its own paragraph.

As I was saying, the second reason is that writing with a pencil or pen forces you to slow down. This may sound like a bad thing (heck, I’ve already listed it as a disadvantage), but I think that writing too fast can be a bad thing too. When you write quickly, there is less time for your subconscious to work on the words before you put them on paper. I find that when I write in a journal or a notebook, my thoughts are at least a sentence or two ahead of what I’m actually writing. The result is that I find my first drafts to be more coherent than they otherwise were, in addition to having more of the twists and details that I usually add in on the second or third draft.

It really does feel odd to be saying this, as I have written everything primarily on the computer since middle school, but the fact is that it does work for me. So, if you are a writer, this is definitely worth a shot.

The Little Book of Pandemics

2008-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

When I first started flipping though The Little Book of Pandemics, by Dr. Peter Moore, my first thought was that it would be really useful for writing post-apocalyptic fiction. It quickly dawned on me that if you’re writing about a superbug, this probably isn’t the book for you. Although there is plenty of scary stuff in here, if you’re looking for something of truly civilization-ending proportions, you would probably be better off inventing something new like airborne AIDS or something that has a Children of Men sort of effect.

Where a book like this really comes in handy, though, is with fantasy. Most fantasy relies on the assumption that things like cholera and typhoid are simply dealt with by means of magic. If you want to include that sort of detail (or possibly write a story where magic or technology simply ceases to work), this is the book for you. It does a fantastic job of describing how, exactly, these diseases are spread, how they affect the body, and what environments they are found in, as well as other interesting information.

Aside from it’s already mentioned utility, the book is well laid out and interesting in its own right, although some may find it a bit grim for pleasure reading. This book definitely has a spot on a writer’s reference shelf, regardless of what sort of story you write. Highly recommended.

A final note: My wife bought this book for me while we were in Canada. Unfortunately, it will not be released in the states until February 12, 2008. If you need it now, you can order it from Amazon Canada.

Thoughts on the Structure of Episodic Fiction

2008-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

One of the things that I’ve been hearing about again recently is serialization. I’ve been predicting it for a while, but with Amazon releasing the Kindle and the eventual release of an e-book reader for the iPhone, the age of serialized novels appears to be approaching (although there are still problems, such as DRM).

The question, then, is what does that mean for those of us who write?

Originally, I thought that it would just be a matter of releasing a chapter at a time. I’ve changed my mind, however. The reason is that a chapter in a book is usually determined by a set amount of time or a location. Instead, what is needed is something closer to an episode.

How would an episode of a written story work, then? Well, the first thing is that it should probably be a bit longer than your average chapter. The average chapter is about 2500 words, but if that is all you are able to read at a time, then 2500 words just won’t cut it, readers want something they can sink their teeth into. It will take some time to figure out a good length, but I imagine that it will be anywhere from 5k to 10k words (although this is just a guess). This makes an episode start to sound like a short story, which is good, but not entirely accurate.

Since the work will be released serially, it is important that something be accomplished in the story. There is little worse than reading something and thinking to yourself “that could have been skipped”. So an episode should have a beginning, middle, and an end. It still differs from a short story in two ways, though. The first is that it there is an overall plot that connects the episodes, so you really have two arcs, the overall arc and the episode arc. The second difference is that the episode does not need a strict conflict that must be introduced, developed, and then resolved. Instead the point is that the character(s) should grow through the course of the episode. In addition, although it would be ideal if each episode could stand entirely on its own, that is probably infeasible, and shouldn’t be too much of a problem, so long as they are interesting enough to motivate a first time reader to check out the earlier episodes.

I don’t think that serialized fiction will require any drastic changes to the way we write. We will still break stories down in similar ways (scenes certainly aren’t going anywhere), but I think that we will need to focus on balance in our storytelling. Too much description and nothing gets accomplished, too much action and it seems shallow. It will be up to the individual writer to figure out what works for them. No matter how it works out, though, it certainly is an exciting time to be writing.

Fantasy Worldbuilding 102

2007-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

Last week I wrote a bit about how to tell when to stop and when to keep going when you are doing worldbuilding. The next question, then, is what do you focus on. To put it another way, what should your goals be? The reason why it is important to talk about goals here is that it is another way to keep you from doing too much worldbuilding (by too much, I mean that it keeps you from actual writing). I could go on, but I think that you probably get it, so I’ll get on with the article.

Goal #1 - You need a place for stuff to happen. Frankly, having everything happen in an empty room or a misty plain will probably make for a boring story (not necessarily, of course, but if you go that route, make sure that your prose not only jumps off the page, but latches onto the reader’s imagination like a facehugger from Aliens). This is probably the easiest goal to meet (and obvious to boot), so I won’t say much more about it.

Goal #2 - Your world should help to distinguish your work from that of other writers. You don’t want people to pick up your story and immediately think that its happening in a clone of George R.R. Martin’s universe. How do you do this? Add local flavor (a little goes a long way), mess with the system of government (this is fantasy, so it doesn’t have to be a monarchy), the basic rules of the world (what if the forests were made of giant ferns instead of trees, what would people build stuff out of? How would it affect society?), or some combination of the three (or other elements, its up to you). The key here is not to add shallow flavor, you don’t want something that looks, smells, and acts like a horse but is called a wulleyup, it doesn’t add anything to the story, and readers will probably reject it.

Goal #3 - Make it a place for a story to happen. Even stories that are very character driven rely quite a bit on the world for plot. The world you create should not be at a state of peace, but rather should have conflict built in (and trust me, even in a perfect society, there will be conflict somewhere, if not everywhere). This will provide for better characterization fodder as well as subplots and world story arcs, all of which are good.

Goal #4 - Make it work. You want readers to have to suspend their disbelief as little as possible. I’m not saying that you should not have magic, but rather that once you get the reader to buy into the magic, you don’t want to have to invent a new kind of magic to explain something that could have easily been explained by the first. What I’m getting at here is that the key to all of this is internal consistency. Ideally a story should have a few basic premises that people have to accept, and everything else is derived from them (in addition, when a reader sees other stuff built on top of an original premise, and it works, the net effect is to reinforce the original premise).

I think that is about as much as I want to go through today, and next time I’ll try to touch on some specific things that you should shoot for. Until then, feel free to give me your thoughts on the subject.

Fantasy Worldbuilding 101

2007-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

I just finished listening to the Dead Robots Society’s podcasts (part 1, part 2) on building a universe, and while I liked them quite a bit, they made me wonder, what should go into a world when you’re starting from scratch. As a result, I’m going to give you some of my thoughts on the subject. Keep in mind, this isn’t meant to be only for fantasy writing, but I think that fantasy writers will get the most out of it, as that is my personal focus.

The first thing to remember about worldbuilding is that you don’t want to do too much of it. On the other hand, it is just as big of a danger to do too little. So the challenge, then is finding the right amount. The four rules below are not hard and fast (except for the first one), but I think that they provide a good basis from which to talk about how to go about worldbuilding.

Rule #1: The story dictates all. The amount of worldbuilding you have to do is dictated almost entirely by the story, after all, if the entire story takes place on an isolated island, then who cares about the continent on the other side of the world that no one on the island has ever heard of? If there is any one thing that you should take away from what I write here, this is it. Everything else that I write will be stuff to help you determine just how much the story does dictate.

Rule #2: If you can’t picture the environment that your characters are walking around and doing stuff in, then you haven’t done enough. It is easy to do just enough that you can get a sense of what is there, but everything is sort of blurry and vague. You don’t have to know what sort of wood the lord’s house is made out of (unless its critical to the story, in which case, it had better be damn interesting), but you don’t want to rely on residual memories of other authors work to paint in the details for you (your readers will not have read all the same stuff you have, and besides, its boring). Corollary to this is that a few rich details are worth reams of mundane description, focus on the interesting stuff.

Rule #3: Stop when it gets easy. If you can write down five pages on just about anything in your world without thinking about it too much, then you already know enough about the world to start writing. The point of worldbuilding is not to work out every single detail, but rather to get your head inside of the world, where you can see it, so that your prose will be authentic.

Rule #4: If its hard, ask yourself why. If its because you’re still making basic decisions about how things will work, then you should keep on going. If, on the other hand, its because you’re making decisions that are so small that there isn’t enough to go on, then you should stop. Too much worldbuilding is something that keeps many new authors from actually writing. Remember, its a step in the path to a destination (the finished story), nothing more.

As always, feel free to leave comments. I am doing this for me as well as for everyone else, and since I am not a master of it, I may (and probably have) get a few things wrong, in which case I expect you to call me on them. Good luck and happy worldbuilding.

Is Fantasy Inherently Authoritarian?

2007-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

I just read an interesting article by Jonathan McCalmont over at SF Diplomat, where an argument is made that Fantasy is inherently authoritarian. According to McCalmont, since many fantasy works take place in worlds that contain racism and other reactionary elements, and the characters rarely challenge the status quo, the authors themselves must be authoritarians.

First of all, the article starts out with him admitting that he is biased against fantasy, so I have to wonder how widely read he can possibly be in the genre. That being said, I will assume that he is quite well read, and that his conclusions are drawn from sufficient evidence (i.e. – not just going by Lord of the Rings and a handful of others).

The second point that I want to bring up is that how progressive or reactionary a society is is largely a function of its technological sophistication. What I mean by this is that history is, overall, progressive. When it was founded, the United States was the best game in town (being a sort of democracy), but they still had rampant sexism. What I am coming to here is that it is impossible to judge a past (or fictional) society by our standards, as to do so would mean removing the historical (or fictional) context, and would render such a judgement practically worthless. To look at it another way, do you think that in 1000 years they will view our current society as the one that finally got it right? I hope not.

Finally, an authoritarian setting does not hinder the ability of a story to deal with issues of authoritarianism. In fact, I would argue that the only way to deal with issues of authoritarianism is by looking at the situation in context. Its easy to point fingers at people who didn’t risk their lives to prevent Hitler from coming to power in Germany, but really, how many people are active in trying to stop the genocide in Darfur, or get US troops out of Iraq?

All of this is not to say that I think the fantasy genre is a bastion of progressive thinking, but merely that I do not think that it is inherently so. Indeed, it is up to fantasy fans and authors to ensure that it goes in a healthy direction, and the only way to achieve that end is through constant self analysis and the challenging of old ideas. No matter how much I disagree with Mr. McCalmont, I appreciate that he has helped to bring about serious debate on this issue.

Thoughts on Editing a Serialized Story

2007-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

For all of its advantages, serializing a novel on the internet has two inherent drawbacks. The first is editing, and the second is publicity, which I will cover next week.

Why do I say editing? Because, when you put something out yourself, there is no editor. Many writers (especially unpublished ones) dislike editors due to their status as the gatekeepers of the publishing industry. They do serve an important purpose, though. A good professional editor will be able to look at a manuscript and see the problems, problems which the author is often blind to. That is not to say that editors always do a good job, just that they serve an important purpose in publishing, and the task of editing is to be taken seriously.

So, how do you do a good job editing? There are already a ton of resources out there that cover editing, but there are a couple of things that I want to point out. The first is time, which is interesting with serialized works in that you usually have a deadline (although what I’m about to write probably applies to freelance work as well). When you write something, if you read it immediately afterwards, you will see what you meant and not what you wrote, which is where you get things like missing prepositions and such. In addition, time gives you emotional distance. If you are unable to cut an unnecessary passage because you simply love it too much, then you are doing yourself and your readers a disservice. How much time you need is up to you. Personally, a few days for a chapter is good enough for me, but a short story may need a week or more. In general, the longer the work, the longer the period you must wait before touching it again.

The second point is reading it aloud. You should read your work aloud for at least one of your edits (preferably one of your later edits, so that you don’t have to stop as often to make notes). I had been doing this for a while, but the other day, I read a post over at Walter Jon Williams’ blog, Angel Station, that was talking about audio books. He says that when a passage is read aloud, every little error sticks out and every awkward sentence is unbearable, which is exactly what you want when you edit.

Finally, I would say that as you are publishing your work online, it is up to you to make sure that your work looks professional, because no one else is going to do it for you. That means not putting out your work when its “good enough”, but making sure that it is as close to perfect as you can get it. Frankly, I am guilty of being a slacker in this area, and a lot of that is because I didn’t keep to a writing schedule and had to rush to get something out. I’m not proud of this, and I realize that, to some degree, it is inevitable. The important part is that you are aware of what is working for you and what is not, as that is the only way to really progress.

19th century solution to a 21st century problem?

2007-08-21T00:00:00+00:00

“Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the Democrats, promoting 19th century solutions to 21st century problems. If you don’t like it, ride a bike. If you don’t like the price at the pumps, ride a bike.”

Patrick McHenry (R - North Carolina)

So I ran across this quote earlier today over at Bike Portland, and even though I usually don’t do the whole political thing (I don’t particularly like either party), as a cyclist I needed to comment on this. The rest of his speech is available at his site, but basically he is saying that spending $1 million to promote cycling is a waste of money. There are a lot of things I want to say about this, but I’ll just list a couple here.

First, how is promoting a means of transportation that is cheaper, easier on the environment, reduces traffic congestion, and helps to promote a healthy lifestyles a bad thing? Even if you only agree with a couple of those reasons, do you really think that $1 million is too much to spend? Why?

Second, I would argue that getting from point A to point B despite scarcity of resources is as much of a 11th century problem as a 21st century problem. By his argument, you could say that building homes is a 21st century problem (after all, we are doing it now, and it is the 21st century). Does that mean that nails, screws, and simple machines are no longer adequate?

Keep in mind that I am not saying that cycling is the final solution to our energy problems, it isn’t. But it is part of the solution, and given the advantages, spending some money to encourage it is a reasonable course of action.

The Future of Short Stories, Part 3: Conclusions

2007-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

If you haven’t already, you might want to read part 1 and part 2 of this series, although it isn’t absolutely necessary.

Other than to say that they are shrinking, I haven’t really talked about where short story markets are at right now, which is something you sort of need to know if you want to talk about where they are going. So what is it like out there, in short story land?

Basically, there are two large, well established types of markets. The first is magazines, genre ones include Asimov’s and Fantasy & Science Fiction. These are on the decline, seeing shrinking subscription numbers, bookstore sales and placement. Nonetheless, they are still the backbone of the short fiction market (and some would argue the entire publishing industry). They pay anywhere from contributor’s copies to pro rates (which, in genre, is anything over $.05/word). The other type of market is short story anthologies, which are collections of short stories in book form. I don’t have the numbers on anthologies, but I would be surprised if they were on the same level as the magazines.

In addition to print magazines and anthologies, there are several newer mediums for short stories. The first is the online magazine. Although some magazines have added an online component to their offerings, this isn’t what I’m referring to. I’m talking about magazines like Strange Horizons, where the primary (if not only) component is online. The reason that I separate them is that due to a totally different business model, they really are not the same thing as their print counterparts. The second is Amazon Shorts, where you basically pay $.49 per story and get a copy to download. Instead of an upfront amount like you get with the already mentioned markets, the author gets a cut of every sale that Amazon makes. I have mixed feelings about this, as I do believe that if the author gives up first publication rights to their work (or any other rights for that matter), they should get some sort of compensation up front, although with the royalties model, I don’t think that it needs to be as much as if they had sold it to a traditional magazine. Finally, there are podcasts like Escape Pod, which is a paying market for short stories. It doesn’t pay professional rates, but its also free to listen to, so I think that its fair (especially since it doesn’t count as print publication, so the rights usually work out pretty well for the author).

Finally, there are the markets that have all but disappeared, and what I’m talking about here are short stories in traditional (nonfiction) magazines. In one of the comments on the piece that kicked this series off, Why Short Stories Are Still Important, a reader said that they missed the days when you could find short stories in the back of just about any magazine. Unfortunately, as the cost of materials increases, it will become harder and harder for magazines to justify keeping fiction, as it was considered more of a bonus than a feature, and thus, expendable (as far as I can tell, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong).

That about covers where we’re at. Now to discuss what’s going to happen to all of these places. First of all, anthologies are pretty stable, and will reflect the general short story environment (as short stories gain in popularity, so will anthologies, and the same relationship applies to falling popularity, as well). As for print magazines, they will probably continue to shrink, for a while at least, but will probably reach an equilibrium point where they continue to do well, but on a smaller scale. This has very little to do with the magazines themselves, though, and I don’t regard it as a bad thing. Basically, when they were at their peak, magazines were it, if you wanted short fiction, that was where you went. Now, as more and more alternatives appear (digital and audio, for example), the market as a whole increases, but the magazines shrink as people diversify how they get their fiction. The reason behind this is that for someone who really loves the fiction, but would rather get it in a different format, they will read magazines until their preferred format appears, and then they will switch to the new format.

Although TV and movies have eaten some of the demand for written fiction, it is by no means gone, and I would argue that good narrative creates demand for more narrative, not less, which means that we will see continued growth in fiction, including short fiction. Online magazines are definitely going to play a large part in this, as they can afford to publish a greater diversity and more fiction than their print counterparts while still paying well due to the decreased cost of digital publishing. Podcasts are also going to take a large chunk of the new growth. People spend appalling amounts of their time commuting, and much of it is not amenable to reading fiction, so there is a massive, untapped demand for short audio fiction.

That leaves the Amazon Shorts business model. As I mentioned above, I think that it could be better, namely by paying the author a bit up front, but it isn’t an inherently bad deal. Unfortunately, Amazon isn’t doing such a great job with it so far. For example, I haven’t noticed much effort on Amazon’s part to promote this service. I am a good representative of their target audience, yet the only way I even heard about it was reading other authors’ responses to the press release. I haven’t seen any integration with the rest of Amazon’s offerings (go to amazon.com and try to find shorts on their homepage, if it is there, it is very well hidden), and I really don’t see any direction here. I do see potential, however. It offers a nice way for authors to sell their short stories through their websites without having to do all of the technical shopping stuff, but what would really change it would be something like the iTunes music store but for short fiction (and without the DRM, of course). I don’t see why Amazon hasn’t done this already. If I’m looking at a book, but can’t make up my mind, there should be a link right there to the authors short fiction, because although I might not be willing to pay for a book and wait to have it shipped to see if I like it, I’ll gladly pay $.49 to read a short story by the author right then and there. What I’m saying is that if Amazon fixed their implementation of the program, it could really do well.

To sum up all of these myriad thoughts, the future of short fiction is not about technology or content, as we already have those, the future is about convenience. Instead of putting up roadblocks like DRM, publishers need to make reading short fiction as intuitive as picking up a magazine at a gas station used to be (back when people still filled you car for you). Some people say that electronic books won’t catch on because people just don’t want to read things off of a screen, but the problem here is that its a pain to get things onto that screen. The iTunes Music Store is successful not because it offers a better price or product (it doesn’t, not in a world where you can download free, uncrippled music from a plethora of sources), but because it does what its supposed to do, it leverages technology to make paying for music easier than stealing it. This can be read as saying that people are inherently lazy, but isn’t what I’m saying here. What I’m saying is that people have a certain indignation to jumping through hoops, and rightly so. The only future that makes sense is a hoop-free future, and I hope to see and read you there.

P.S. - Finally, I’ve only been talking about paying markets, and I realize that quite a bit of fiction falls outside of that classification. Right now I’m working out what I would need to do to create a directory or network of free fiction, and when I have a better idea of what it will look like, I’ll post it here.

MediaPredict: Interesting Concept, Poorly Executed

2007-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

I just read an interesting bit by L.E. Modesitt about MediaPredict. He had some good points, and for the most part I agree with what he said, but I have a couple of things to add:

First of all, I would say that the one issue I have is his suggestion that people who prefer to read books via an electronic medium are likely to have a significantly different mindset about fiction than people who prefer the traditional method. I agree that they do probably have a different mindset, but I don’t see how you get from there to saying that the difference is significant. One way to look at the difference between the two is that it is like audio books vs. traditional books. It could be argued that audio book listeners have a vastly different experience than readers, as they are listening to voices (with inflection and the like) and it is difficult to review a passage when one is listening to it. On the other hand, there is very little difference between the physical process of reading on a screen as opposed to reading on a page, all it amounts to is packaging, not so different from people who prefer hardbacks and people who prefer trade paper backs.

That being said, I still think that his conclusion stands. I think that the role of editor isn’t going to be replaced by that of the focus group any time soon, and for the exact reason that L.E. mentioned, namely that they are concentrated, persistent players in the publishing industry. Persistent really is the key term here, as editors can make judgments informed by history (both their own and that of the industry), that casual readers simply cannot.

So what role do readers have in publishing (aside from being, well, readers)? As technology makes it easier for authors to reach a wide audience prior to actual publication, editors will be able to start looking at authors’ pre-commercial success as an initial filtering tool. What this means is that if Author X starts to release fiction for free on the internet, and it achieves some measure of popularity, then an editor will be able to look at that and use it as a gauge to help decide which manuscript to read first. Of course, the more we move in this direction, the more we move away from the ideal situation of each work being judged on it’s own merits. That ideal situation hasn’t been the case for a long time (if it ever was), though, and so it makes sense for us to have the best tools possible to minimize the inevitable problems with our system (good work getting overlooked). At the other end of the spectrum, it should help editors evaluate books that don’t fit very well into any one category, but that readers love anyway.

The important point is that how publishers acquire books will be changing in the near future, whether they like it or not. I once heard the Porsche 911 described by a mechanic as a bad idea, wonderfully executed (the whole rear engine thing is a bit strange, if you ask me), and I think that the opposite is true here, MediaPredict is an interesting idea, but the execution is lacking.

A note: this selection process by means of free fiction is already happening, to some extent. A good example would be Scott Sigler’s Ancestor getting a book deal after it was a huge success in the podcasting world.

The Future of Short Stories, Part 2: DRM

2007-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

Part 1 can be found here.

OK, I know that a lot has been said about DRM, by people much better known than me (Lessig and Doctorow to name two), but it has a huge role in the future of short fiction (in fact all digital media). To be clear, the future of fiction (including short fiction) must include a digital component. The reason for this is that its both expensive and wasteful to print books, so economics will eventually drive at least some segment (probably a large one) of the market over to a digital medium, although it may take some time. That is not to say that I don’t love my paper books, because I do, but rather, that with the exception of hardcovers and trade paperbacks, there is no inherent advantage of physical books that goes beyond sentiment. Paper books take up more room, are harder on the eyes, degrade over time, the list goes on.

“But you can’t do everything with a digital book,” I hear you say, “you can’t share it.” That is true, but it is not something that is inherent to the medium. Rather, it is something that was tacked on afterwards, it is DRM, which stands for Digital Rights Management.

The argument for DRM is that basically, there is nothing to stop people from copying and giving away your work for free. Therefore, the only way to deal with work in a digital medium is to prevent people from copying it. There is an unspoken assumption here that if people can do something for free, they will, every single one of them (or at least the majority). This makes no sense. How many songs have people bought from iTunes? All of them are available for free (if illegally), but still people buy from iTunes or other online music stores. I do. I won’t go into why, but the fact of the matter is that the assumption must be flawed.

In addition, there is a good argument against DRM, which I first heard from Cory Doctorow. Basically, as an aspiring writer, my biggest problem is not that people are stealing my work, but rather that no one knows who the heck I am. In my current situation, theft would actually be a step forward, as it would imply that I was making money at writing, too.

With books in particular, there is an even better reason to get rid of DRM. Many books are sold based on personal recommendations, but what’s even better than a recommendation is actually lending someone a book. I lend out all my books, and my friends usually end up buying the really good ones after they have already read them. That doesn’t even bring into account people getting hooked on series’. You can’t do this with e-books presently (though there are some exceptions), as they are locked down.

Short story markets have pretty much been on a steady decline since their heydays several decades ago. I have heard several reasons for this, everything from competition with TV to not being placed well in gas stations. It doesn’t have to be this way. Short stories are just about perfect for digital distribution, they’re short, portable entertainment. In order for them to build an audience, however, people need to be able to share them. DRM is a hurdle for this, and the only future in which short stories are a viable way for authors to make a living is a future in which DRM is relegated to it’s proper place as a relic of reactionary thought on behalf of the publishing (and music and movie) industry.

The problem, then, is how do you build a new market? We’ll talk about that next week.

Part 3 is now online.

The Future of Short Stories (part 1)

2007-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

Over the weekend, I wrote a piece about why short stories are still important. In it, I mentioned that I would write more about the future of short fiction, this is the first part of that.

If you look at TV shows today and compare them to shows a decade ago, you would probably find that the type of shows that are on have changed. A decade ago, TV was dominated by loosely joined self contained shows (think Friends or Seinfeld), today it is dominated by shows with strong, detailed plots (think Heroes, Alias, Lost, etc.). What happened?

I think that it was several things. First off, the more involved an audience is with a show, the more likely they will be to watch susequent episodes, and one of the best ways to do this is with an intricate plot. The second part is that technology has made it possible for someone to watch a show even if they missed an episode or two (or even the first half of the season). The result of this is that seasons are beginning to look like long movies, rather than series’ of independent stories. To be fair, intricately plotted shows have been around for quite a while, but the problem was that if someone arrived late or missed an episode, that was usually it, they wouldn’t watch the show any more.

What does all of this have to do with short stories, you ask? It shows that lowering the technological bar can drastically change the landscape, even if it doesn’t revolutionize the market (I don’t know many other people who watch most of their shows off of downloads). In addition to providing a viable medium for short stories, the internet has also lowered the bar for serializing longer works, and as one grows, so will the other. I will be focusing on serialized works for now. This has already worked out for podcasted works (just ask Scott Sigler or J.C. Hutchins), but there isn’t any reason why it wouldn’t work for traditional (written) stories as well.

How would this work? You could release a book in serial form and then offer it in print form if there were enough demand. You could also release the book in serial form at a set schedule, while offering the print version as well if people don’t want to wait. You could release a work serially, charging for each piece for say a month before offering it for free. You could do a tip jar. The possibilities are vast.

The problem for an author here is twofold. First, there is no standard business model that has been proven to work, but that will presumably be worked out. The other problem is that it is difficult for an author to build an audience. You may say that this is always a problem for authors, but I think that it is more so right now, as there isn’t even a place for people to start looking (and hopefully find you).

The first step is for a directory to be created, sort of like Podiobooks.com, that will allow people to find authors who are digitally serializing their work. If one exists, I would very much like to hear about it, if not, it will be necessary to create it. Either way, the key to success in this arena is organization.

Why Short Stories Are Still Important

2007-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

Issue 81 of the Secrets Newsletter came out the other day, and it was about character change and growth, and the difference between the two, and it was a case of right-advice-at-right-timeism for me, because it helped me understand what is wrong with Caldera so far (or at least one of the major issues, I have no doubt that I will find more as I learn and grow as a writer). The problem is that although my prose is perfectly readable, Caden’s (the main character) story just isn’t emotionally engaging after the first chapter. It won’t take too much work to fix this, I don’t think, because its in there, it just needs to be brought into the foreground a little more.

My next thought was to apply this to the short story that I’m currently writing, and it helped a lot there, as well. All of which brought to mind a post I read on Whatever recently, about the decline in pay for short stories, where Scalzi basically wonders what effect the stagnation of the short story markets has on short fiction itself.

Now, I know that I’ve heard this before, but short stories, in addition to being an important art form in and of themselves, are important as a method of developing writing skill. The first reason is that short stories are harder to write. With a novel, you have 80,000+ words to get what you want to say down, in a short story, you have less than 15,000, and although they are often used for different types of stories, no matter how you look at it, that’s a lot less space, and so requires more skill to do well. The second reason is that, due to that compression, things are more obvious. In a novel, you have all those words over which your characters should subtly grow, but in a short story, you only have a fraction, so it is usually easier to pick out the elements, and is therefore more useful as a tool.

Now we need a revival of those markets (although I suspect that many of the traditional short story markets will have to make some tough choices or die). That is a post on its own, though, and I’ll have to put it off for some other time, as I should be writing/climbing/making waffles.

Alternative Publishing

2007-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

I was just listening to episode 10 of Writers Talking (yes, I subscribe to something like a thousand RSS feeds), which was about Alternative Publishing featuring Evo Terra of podiobooks.com and Kristopher Young of Another Sky Press. I have written before about why the publishing industry needs to change, and how that will happen, so I think this stuff is really cool. I won’t talk too much about Podiobooks, as it seems they have good web presence and if you want to know more, visit their site. That leaves Another Sky Press.

Basically, Another Sky Press was described on the show as merit-based publishing, or as they call it on their site, neo-patronage. How it works is they sell all of their books at cost (they also release their stuff online for free), and then the reader is able (at any time) to contribute an additional amount, which is then split up between the people who worked on the book.

My understanding is that a mainstream press offers a new author basically three things: the book gets professionally edited, the book gets professionally designed (including jacket design and typesetting) and the book gets distributed. It looks like they do offer editing services, and I would be surprised if they didn’t do a good job, but there would be no way for me to know without reading some of their stuff (which I intend to do in the near future). That they also publish art books makes me optimistic about the presentation that their books have, especially since there are so many covers out there that are just bad (I actively dislike the majority of genre covers that I see, I would be happier with nice text and maybe a simple logo most of the time). The books look nice on the site, so I have faith that they will look nice in person as well (these people don’t seem to be of the sort to do things halfway). As for the distribution, I think that they have their act together. Overall, this looks like a good thing.

As for how this changes my view of the future of the industry, it doesn’t. I still think that the future lies mostly in using inexpensive paperbacks and e-books to sell nice limited editions like Subterranean Press does, and it would be cool to see ASP do something like this, but that is something that would obviously have to wait until they get a bigger audience/market going.

P.S. - Caldera 7 will be out later today.

Night Watch

2007-07-17T00:00:00+00:00

The other night I watched a Russian movie called Night Watch. It was fantastic, the best vampire movie that I’ve seen in a long, long time.

The entire movie was well done, but the thing that made me enjoy it so much was that they didn’t try to make it PG 13 to maximize profit, but seemed to stick to aiming it at adults. It was nice to see something with rough edges in a world that is all too often filled with pastel Disney niceties (not that I don’t appreciate those, as well, I just want to see other stuff too).

The visuals were great, creating the feel of the movie: dark, rough, somewhat ambiguous. The story was good, too, but I want to read the books now to see if they have a bit more character development.

If you rent/buy this (and you should), the disc has two sides, subbed and dubbed. I watched a few minutes of the dubbed version, and it was pretty good, but the subtitles were fantastic. This is what subtitles should be, not something tacked onto the movie, but something that blends into the movie.

Genre Rant

2007-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

I was listening to episode 20 of Adventures in Scifi Publishing the other day, featuring an interview with author Kay Kenyon, and I need to comment on some of the things that she said. Just to be clear this isn’t about the podcast itself, which I love, but about the opinions of the guest. Enough of that, on with my thoughts.

In the interview, Kenyon expressed the opinion that Science Fiction sales are dropping relative to Fantasy sales because Science Fiction, as a genre, inherently challenges the readers world-view whereas Fantasy inherently comforts it. She went on to say that Fantasy can rise above, as has been done by authors such as Justina Robson (Keeping it Real- a fantastic book, read it if you have not already). Basically, she is saying that Fantasy is escapist (it is also worth noting that the examples that she gives for the Genre being “as engaging” as Science Fiction are authors whose books have Science Fiction elements in them).

As someone who enjoys reading and writing both Science Fiction and Fantasy, I find this, for lack of a better word, offensive. Both genres are capable of being either comforting or challenging. The genre has more to do with the setting of a story than anything, and I would argue that how challenging a book is has more to do with the author than the genre. Another way of looking at it is that the point of view which Kenyon is expressing sounds a lot like the stereotypical Literary Fiction vs. Science Fiction snobbery, which basically argues that almost all Scifi is escapist. In addition, anyone who thinks that Fantasy is incapable of challenging the reader should read L.E. Modesitt, Jr..

Escapism is an interesting concept in and of itself. All fiction (including other mediums such as TV and cinema) is inherently escapist, after all the readers are immersing themselves in what amounts to an imaginary world, all that differs between stories is the degree of escapism. This brings up the question about what is so bad about escapism anyway (I have to credit Michael Stackpole with this, as I had never considered it until he mentioned it on one of his podcasts, probably The Secrets)? Everyone needs to escape at some point, and as far as escapes go, few would argue that fiction is worse than alcohol and drugs (which isn’t to say that there isn’t a limit to its usefulness).

Finally, I’d like to say that the different elements, whether they are from Fantasy or Science Fiction are just tools to help tell a story, thats it. Cory Doctorow has said that Science fiction is more about the present than it will ever be about the future, and I think that the same can be said about all fiction. That is not to say that it might be easier for different genres to deal with different issues (they are different tools, after all), but I don’t see any benefit to trying to figure out which one is the best. Just write the story, using whatever elements make sense for you, what the reader gets out of it is up to the reader. Every word that is spent dismissing another form of fiction or medium is a word wasted.

A Rough Weekend

2007-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

Before I really get into what I want to say, I need to give some acknowledgments. First, and always foremost, I need to thank my beautiful, talented, supportive and generally awesome wife, Jennifer. Without you, I do not know where I would be today, but I do know this: I would not be writing and I would not be happy. No matter how often I say this, it is not often enough. Second, I need to thank people like Mur Lafferty (of I Should Be Writing), Michael Stackpole (The Secrets) and Cory Doctorow, who helped me realize that there is nothing exclusive about writing, anyone can do it.

What brings this post up? On Wednesday, I went to a reading given by Cory Doctorow and Rudy Rucker, which was fantastic. There, I bought Cory’s collection of short stories, Overclocked, when I got home, I started reading it, and was just blown away. The book is fantastic, I’ve read all but two of them, and I don’t think that its too much of a stretch to say that this is some of the best short fiction I’ve ever read. So what’s the problem, you ask?

You see, for me, there are basically three elements to writing. The first is having something to say. That doesn’t mean that you have to have an agenda for what you write, but only that you have something to say in general, either way, it will show in your writing. Politics helped me with this part. The second part, and this is the big one, is being totally willing to write crap. This sounds odd at first, I mean, who wants to write crap? The truth is that the quality of your writing is not something you should worry about, as it will cripple you. I’ll go more into this in a minute. The third part is actually sitting down and writing, which I don’t seem to have much of a problem with, once I get started.

Part two is where the problem came in. After reading through some of the short stories in Overclocked, I realized where, exactly, I was at as a writer: not far. I spent two days thinking about what I wanted to write, what would be interesting and meaningful. I never came up with anything, but I wouldn’t characterize it as “writer’s block” (which I personally doubt the existence of, actually). The crisis is over now, however. How? Basically, I just resigned to the fact that I might just write crap. And I’m OK with that.

Sorry about that. I know that this is sort of a rambling/ranting post, but I needed to say it. Especially the stuff at the beginning. Thanks.

This is not a blog.

2007-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

Yes, yes, I know, its on Blogger, which sort of makes it a blog. But I don’t intend to do much, if any, actual blogging. Instead, what I am planning on doing is to use this site as an online home for my work. Hence, none of that “this was my day, isn’t my cat cute” stuff. So don’t get upset if you don’t find that here.

Shit. This was a blog post, wasn’t it.