July 17, 2008
Bound for Last HOPE
Enjoying the free wi-fi at the Tampa airport as I wait to board my flight to La Guardia airport, New York City, and what is likely to be the last ever Hackers On Planet Earth con, or at least the last one at the Hotel Pennsylvania.
I've only been to one HOPE - the last one was in 2006 - and I had a really great time. That trip I was all about the research, going to talks, meeting people, and planning to serve as a guinea pig for Stave Rambam's test case of how privacy is dead. Well, Rambam ended up getting wrongfully arrested by the FBI, which launched our friendship and eventual collaboration on our forthcoming book, Stealing Your Own Identity. This time, once again, I'm planning to be part of the big show with Rambam. this time we've got a huge, prime time slot Saturday night starting at 5 PM. It should be awesome and interesting and hopefully it will all come off without any further federal interference.
The rest of the time I'll be in the dealer's room, selling and signing books. I've got a bunch of copies of both Geek Mafia (2nd edition!) and Geek Mafia: Mile Zero for sale, so come on by and say hi and pick up a few dozen copies for you and your friends and any strangers you might meet or attractive people you might be trying to seduce. Working a table at a con selling books is now old hat for me. Hell, I've even done it at the Hotel Pennsylvania before (for a comic con). It's exhausting but fun, which is actually true of hacker cons in general now that I think about it...
July 09, 2008
Media Glutton: Battlefield Bad Company, Space Invaders Extreme, Mad Men
Right now I'm in the middle of three or maybe four different books, some of which I probably won't ever finish, so this week I'm gonna concentrate on bright shiny moving pictures and explosions.
First of all, I've been playing a lot of Battlefield: Bad Company on the X-box 360. At this point in my life I've come fully to terms with the fact that I really enjoy first person shooters more than just about any other kind of game. But I'm still discriminating, especially after five-star greats like Bioshock (with its amazing story and art design combined with excellent game play) and Call of Duty 4 (with it's addictive multi-player and short but great single-player mode). Battlefield: Bad Company isn't as good as either of those, but it is totally fun. And fun is what they're going for here. The story and character have a lot of humor, most of which works pretty well. They're going for a kind of Three Kings vibe with the game, which involves you laying part of a squad of misfits fighting in the former Soviet Union who get side-tracked by the tempting lure of mercenary gold. The combat's solid and fun, a lot like Call of Duty 4 although not quite as polished. But the added feature of having most of the terrain destructible adds a really fun dimension to play. There's nothing more tense than trying to hide behind a house from an enemy tank only to have it blow the building to pieces in order to get a clean shot. And it's even more fun when you're the one in the tank leveling those buildings. I haven't really enjoyed the multiplayer yet - it's more like the other Battlefield games and thus feels really spread out and diffuse. Unlike Call of Duty 4, I never seem to know where the enemy is or why I'm suddenly dying.
I've also been playing Space Invaders Extreme on my DS, which is also fun. It's like the 30 year old Space Invaders but, you know, extreme. Different colored invaders drop different weapon power ups and the game plays fun and addictive. It's a great little DS game and I know I'll play a ton of it on my various airplane voyages in the next month or so.
On the DVD player I've been watching AMC's series, Mad Men, which is about advertising execs in 1960 New York. It's a really good show, well written, well acted, and nuanced in almost every way. There's an occasional false note, especially when the dialog woodenly highlights some obvious difference between now and then, but those moments are few and far between. None of these characters are entirely likeable, and as most critics have noted, the racism and sexism of the time are shown in unflinching detail. OF course, that's the point of the show, and it makes that point very well. I'm halfway through the first season, with the rest coming from Netflix today. The discs are packed with commentaries too, which is always cool, and if I was still the kind of guy who bought a lot of DVDs like I used to, I'd probably buy this boxed set. But I'm not that guy anymore.
July 07, 2008
What has Rick Dakan Been Up To?
Well, I thought I'd jump in here and let people know what's going on with all the various projects that I've got, well, going on.I've been busy (is that why blogging has been light?) and there's some cool stuff coming down the pike, headed right for your brain.
In order of how long I've been working on them, we've got what's looking like it will be my next novel to come out. It's called The Cthulhu Cult, as I've mentioned before, and it's a Lovecraft inspired novel as the name suggests. But it's not quite what you might think. It's definitely a kind of horror story, but it's not a Lovecraft pastiche. I'm still perfecting my one-sentence description, but the gist is: After leaving town under a cloud of controversy, Shelby Tyree returns to Sarasota with a mysterious woman at his side and begins recruiting followers to a new church based on his obsession with the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. It's 97% done, just waiting for my publisher to give it one last go over and then I'll do a round of tweaks and it should be ready to go. Hopefully it'll be out by the end of the year.
Then there's the much discussed non-fiction book, Stealing Your Own Identity, which I've been working on with Private Investigator Steven Rambam. It incorporates details of the contest we had last year where I tried to hide from him and he came hunting and gives a pretty compelling overview of the sorry, scary state of privacy in this modern world of ours. Steven and I will be at Last HOPE next week and will be talking about the book during the keynote at 5pm Saturday night. Plus I'll be around the con the whole weekend, so come say hi (and buy a book or t-shirt!).
And then there's Geek Mafia 3 (not the final title). I'm blitzing through the first draft and am on track to have it done by the end of this month. There will be plenty of revising and editing between then and when it comes out next year, I'm really pleased with how the book's developing. It's the most complicated of the novels yet, and it incorporates a lot more hacker stuff than the first two books, plus new characters and plenty of twists and turns. Yummy.
Speaking of Geek Mafia, I should have some cool news about an audio project that's due to launch in the next month or so, maybe even sooner, so keep a look out for that! All good stuff, yeah?
So that's what's up with me lately. August 19th I'm setting sail for Germany and will be spending three months in Berlin doing research for a new series of novels and working on finishing up another project. So hey, anyone in Germany, drop me a line and will have beer or three.
July 01, 2008
Media Glutton: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao vs. lesser books I liked more
I'm about to start y second year of MFA in Creative writing work through the Ranier Writer's Workshop. the first year was great for all kinds of reasons, most of them having to do with improving my writing. But I also was forced to read a lot of novels I probably never would have picked up, expanding my literary horizons and deepening my appreciation for good writing. It was a really useful, sometimes frustrating, but overall very worthwhile experience. When I finished up my first term's work back in May, I went on an orgy of reading whatever the hell I wanted to, including a lot of sci-fi and some thrillers and some nonfiction. Good times for the most part.
When I heard about Junot Diaz's book, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I knew people at school would be expecting me to have read it. The main character is an old-school role-playing game geek obsessed with sci-fi and fantasy who dreams of being the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkein. Once the book won the Pulitzer Prize and the author appeared on the Colbert Report I figured it was time to see what all the fuss was about.
So let me say first of all that it's a really well-written book. I mean, damn. It's written in voice, actually a few different voices, and all of them are evocative and often poetic in a Dominican street slang kind of way. The prose comes at you full speed with the lingo and the Spanglish, with David Foster Wallace-worthy footnotes to explain some of the more intriguing and obscure references. Judging from the obscure 80's pen and paper RPG references alone, all of which I am almost embarrassed to admit I caught, Diaz really knows his old-school geekdom personally. Not that the book gets mired down in these things. The geeky protagonist Oscar is only the focus of about a third of the book, with the other parts about his sister and even more about his mother's life growing up in the Dominican Republic. I learned a ton about the DR, which I really knew nothing about before this book, and found it all compelling.
But here's the thing. I didn't find this book to be at all satisfying. Part of it is that I really don't enjoy coming of age stories, and this novel is not just one such story, but rather three. And second, and even more important, I just didn't like Oscar much. Which is to say, even though I could relate to his experiences and understand his point of view, I didn't empathize with him. And when the end of the book plays out and his brief but not at all wondrous life comes to an end, I was just pissed off at him. It wasn't a tragedy, and it wasn't the so-called family curse or fuku that the book was supposed to be about. It's a story about people making bad decisions for bad reasons over and over again, and really I don't give a damn. People making bad decisions for good reasons, or because of bad information is more interesting. People making good decisions for bad reason is also interesting. Blockheads who should know better doing exactly the wrong things even though they know better: I don't care. Yeah, yeah, blinded by emotion and love, unable to see the truth because he's living in his own fantasy world or whatever. Here's the truth for me: when I finished the book I threw it across the room in disappointment.
But here's the other truth. It's a really well-written book. Like I said above, Damn. So as I've moved on to other titles this past week, I've seen the difference. Plots that engage me are flat and uninteresting in less talented hands. After Diaz's spellbinding, characterful prose, the flat, mono-tone dialog of the current sci-fi thingy I'm reading seems all the worse by comparison. Now of course not all stories are for all people, and I can see why lots of critics and readers have fallen for Oscar Wao. Me, I'm just left looking for some happy medium between storytelling talent and actual story.
June 28, 2008
Media Glutton: Senseless but Fun Violence: Conan
I've recently rediscovered the joys of renting videogames. Even though they cost more than a DVD, it turns out that renting a game is the perfect solution for the way I usually play games - which is to say, not all the way to the end. There are notable exceptions, those being the exceptionally notable games like Bioshock for example. But most of the time I don't get around to making it all the way through. Five or six days of solid play is all I really need.
I started with the Conan game for the X-Box 360 that came out a while back. I'd played the demo and thought it was kinda fun, but not worth buying, and that initial reaction still holds true. But it's definitely worth renting, assuming that is that you've got a hankering for bloody sword swinging, button mashing combat, and rescuing bare-breasted digital maidens from harms way. The game is straight forward, much like the title character. Each level has you slashing your way through an environment, fighting mostly human or humanoid type opponents. There are occasional puzzles to break up the action, but nothing too ridiculous except for a couple jump puzzles that had me wishing one of the game developers was sitting next to me so I could slap him.
The gameplay has a good balance of experience and variety. you can wield any weapon you pick up from your fallen foes, and there are three basic styles: sword and shield, two weapons, or double-handed weapon. Each style has its own combos that you can spend experience points to improve. I liked this customization system quite a bit, and the fact that the game makes you spread out among the styles because certain foes are more susceptible to certain kinds of attacks (although by the end of the game I was all about swinging the biggest two-handed sword I could find). You also gain some magic powers which are all sort of interesting looking but boil down to the same thing in the end: an area of effect attack against everything around you. I like the one with the demonic ravens that tear apart everything in a swarm around you the best.
In the five days I had the game I think I even almost finished it, although I got tired and frustrated with fighting the final bad guy on the last day and so felt no qualms about returning it uncompleted. So hey, if any of that sounds fun, I say rent it or maybe even buy it used if you really like chopping things up or looking at 3-D models of topless women in slave-girl outfits who say "Crush me with your love!" No, I didn't make that last part up, that's really in the game. And more power to 'em, I say. Well, more power to 'em and hopefully they'll use said power to hire better writers.
June 22, 2008
Future Compliant: Enki, Androids, and Enhanced Reality
I first came across the idea in William Gibson's novel Virtual Light, and he plays with the idea some in his new novel, Spook Country. But for my money, the coolest sci-fi interpretation is in Vernor Vinge's award winning novel, Rainbows End, which I loved through and through and recommend to one and all. Let's call it enhanced reality - the concept of layering "virtual" images and facts over the real world as you look around it. So, for example, say you're wearing some special goggles or contacts or what have you, and they're connected to the internet and downloading information in real time about the world around you. When you look at something, you not only see the real thing, but you see information and even other images superimposed on top of reality, or in Vinge's book, an entire alternate version of whatever you're looking at. What you see would be entirely context sensitive, tied into GPS location and map databases and maybe even info beacons attached to RFID chips or other devices in the objects themselves. In a store the items' prices and details would sow up. Wandering around the streets, you could have street numbers, addresses, and even a directional arrow overlaid to help you find your way. I always thought this enhanced reality concept was a really cool idea, and of course I'm not the only one who felt that way. Naturally enough, someone's working hard on making it come true.
These two researchers are developing a project called Enkin and it aims to do just that, and they're going to do it on your phone. Go ahead and watch the video on their site. It's only about five minutes long and while it is in early prototype and therefore a little rough around the edges, it is in fact super, crazy, cool, and awesome. They were participating in Google's Android app development competition, although for reasons passing all understanding they weren't chosen as one of the 50 winners. But never fear, they say Google has contacted them directly and there's no way they're going to pass up on this kind of technology for their mobile phone platform. Android, by the way, is Google's cross-platform, open source cell phone development platform that's supposed to launch later this year. I'm in love with the idea of Android and am psyched that my carrier, T-Mobile, is on board with it. As cool as the IPhone is, the fact that it's so locked-down and controlled by Apple makes me go crazy. Not that my Blackberry's much better mind you, but still, it drives me nuts. So I'm really looking forward to this open source alternative.
I have to say that, looking at this list of the 50 that did win (on this post there's a link to download a pdf) none of them strike me as nearly as super cool as the Enki project. On the other hand, all of them do seem much simpler to implement and more likely to be ready to ship when Android is first released. There are some cool ones in the mix, including lots of nice, location-based apps that accomplish some of the same things that the sci-fi version of enhanced reality I talked about early promise. There are a couple of apps designed for use with location based reality gaming, which sounds very fun to me, and others, like some sort of Golf thing, which might be really great if I played golf. What's great is that because these are open source and will be available on multiple phones from multiple carriers they're going to see a lot more uptake then the walled-in, Steve Jobs-controlled apps that make their way onto the IPhone. At the same time, if any of them prove really useful or popular, Apple will be forced to adopt them as well, spreading the open source love even farther.
I really do think portable phone-sized computing is the future of computing in general. I already do as much work on my tiny EeePC as I do on my other computers, and as things get smaller and more powerful and wireless broadband starts to become actually ubiquitous, things are going to get even more portable and I'm going to love every minute of it. More and more, I think the big, heavy desktops are going to be the sole domain of people who need serious computing power like video editors, artists, programmers, and so on. For 99% of home users, it's all going to get smaller, and easier, and more portable, and very much cheaper. I look forward to the day when my glasses or contacts overlay a virtual screen on the table in front of me and I fold out the keyboard from the side of my mobile device to do my touch typing on. That's probably a few years off, but I do have a message for Google - bring my Enki for my Android phone, and bring it soon!
June 18, 2008
Media Glutton: Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition
I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons off and on for a really long time. If my math and memory are right, I started iin third grade which makes it somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 years. Oh, man, I hadn't done that math before. That's a really long freaking time. I played D&D and other role-playing games all through my school years, although less and less in college. But then more and more in grad school. And then, through some freak combination of luck, desire, and hard work, I started writing books for role-playing games in the mid 1990's and even almost got a job at Wizards of the Coast, the company that makes D&D these days. But I wrote my last pen and paper RPG product in 2000, and ever since then I've been just a fan and a player of tabletop games. It's become a really nice, cheap, fun release to get together with my gaming group of mostly married 30-somethings and play games on Sunday nights, although we'd mostly been playing other things besides actual D&D for the last year or more.
Then, a couple weeks ago, after months of anticipation, the long-awaited Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition came out. I'd been following ruors and leaks and hints about the new overhaul for six months, and I was excited to see what they designers had changed and what had stayed the same. Indeed, the last time I'd been this excited about playing D&D was back in 2000 when they released 3rd Edition. They'd hinted at big changes, and quite frankly that was something that really drew my interest. I have no particular attachment to any of the grand old traditions of D&D, although I can be as nostalgic about my youthful playing days as the next gamer. But it was't like I was playing 3rd Edition anymore (or 3.5 for that matter). Bring on the newness, I thought.
And new and different 4th Edition D&D is. It's a complete overhaul from the ground up, with only the most basic elements of the game the same as they once were. You still play fantasy heroes from various mythical races. There are Clerics and Wizards and Paladins and Rogues (the names “thieves' and 'magic-users' having disappeared in 3rd Edition). Your ability scores are still the classic six and you of course roll a 20-sided die to see if you hit your enemy in battle. But beyond that, even where some of the names have remained the same the game, and especially the way you actually play it from moment to moment, has changed a lot.
My biggest worry when I first heard about some of the changes they were planning was that the game would be more like a World of Warcraft-style online game than a traditional tabletop game. As turns out, the worries were well-founded, because that's pretty much exactly what happened. As it turns out though, that's not nearly as bad a thing as I was worried it would be. It makes sense, actually. MMORPG's like World of Warcraft have been borrowing heavily, almost entirely even, from pen and paper RPG's like D&D since their inception. It would be surprising if they didn't make some improvements of their own along the way that the tabletop games could turn around and steal back.
The most obvious changes come in the area of balance and focus. Online games have to do their best to make each class of character balanced, which is an area the tabletop games have never really excelled at. The new D&D breaks down each class and really focuses hard on exactly what role that class plays in combat and then makes sure each class has some specific role to fill and offers the player plenty of options during play. From a role-plying purist's point of view, this seems to suck out some of the imagination and flexibility of the traditional gaming experience, and I think it probably does do that to a small degree. But the trade-off (and risk) is, in my judgment, well worth the trade, because D&D 4th Edition is now more fun to actually play, especially moment to moment and encounter to encounter.
Players have fewer options about what kinds of powers their characters get, especially the spell casters like wizards and clerics (although the fighters and rogues probably have more options). As many have said before me, the trade off is that, whle characters have fewer desigs options, they have a whole lot more optios during actual combat. This makes every round for the players a new set of tactical decisions and choices. That makes for a fun game.
The one thing I'm theoretically opposed to even though in practice I don't mind at all, is that to really enjoy the game you pretty much have to play it with miniatures and a grid board. The whole game system assumes this setup, which is not the way I like to play role-playing games besides D&D. For me the new game has become less about the role-playing and much ore about the series of tactical combat situations you find yourself in. Here too the game is a lot more like a modern dy MMORPG than anything else. The story is there, the characters are there, but the meat of the experience is in the combat.
The only question I don't really feel qualified to answer about the new D&D is whether or not it's a good jumping on place for new players. My gut instinct tells me that it probably is. The system makes sense, and is well laid out and, if not easy to understand, then at least not incredibly complicated. The thought processes behind it and general structure of character advancement will make a lot of sense to those used to playing RPGs on computers or consoles. Add in the inherent pleasures of playing around a table with real, live friends and the added flexibility and fun that comes with a human DM who can take into account and easily gloss over the weird rule bits and improvise in unexpected ways, and it's a great, unique kind of fun. So why not give it a try? I know I'll be playing this Sunday.
June 13, 2008
Media Glutton, June 13, 2008: HULK SMASH!
Just got back from seeing the early show of the new Hulk movie. I really do like the AMC $5 morning movie rate on weekends - it makes seeing films so affordable that I don't mind risking some cash. I wasn't very excited about the new Hulk, and as far as I can tell that seems to be the general attitude from most people I talk to. I seem to remember enjoying Ang Lee's Hulk film when I first saw it, but being annoyed by it in retrospect. I think I was so dazzled by the cool moving split screen storytelling at the beginning of that other movie that I ignored a lot of its faults. Although the fact that I never saw it again says something about how lacking I found it. This is a better Hulk movie than that one, chiefly because it dives right in with a very abbreviated origin-story flashback during the first couple minutes and then plops you into watching on-the-run Bruce Banner living the slum life in Brazil. The first act of the movie takes place there, and it was definitely the strongest part of the film. I really liked that whole half hour or so, from the exotic locales to Edward Norton's strong, engaging performance. I was smiling a lot during this section, from the top right on through the first big Hulk-sized action sequence.
As the story moves into its second act, it remains strong for the most part, and it kept me going. It's clear that the script writers are borrowing a lot from the Bruce Jones-written arc on the Incredible Hulk comic book from several years ago, and that's a very good thing. They capture the quiet, worried desperation of Bruce Banner on the run from the government without ever sinking too deep into despair and depression. There aren't the kinds of laughs that there were in Iron Man, but there are some funny nods to the old TV series, including a great cameo by Lou Ferrigno which everyone in the audience who noticed it also enjoyed. The second big Hulk action scene is really solid too, with some cool Hulk vs. Army action sequences and a nice taste of what (in a weird way) we might someday see in a Captain America film in terms of super soldier action. I do have to point out though that the digitial Hulk effects are only ever OK, and sometimes they're just not good. I think the Ang Lee digital Hulk achieved greater heights of both effect and action than this movie ever does, but this film isn't saddled with either the muddled lows or any Hulk-indused poodles. The final action sequence, as shown over and over again in the previews, takes place between the digital Hulk and the equally digital and for some reason more loquacious Abomination. These CGI vs. CGI battles always leave me cold, and this one was no exception. There were enough little nifty bits and tricks I hadn't seen to carry me through with a basic level of interest, but I was never thrilled. It's just hard to care that much about these computer generated titans, and the human actors who get swept up in the conflict end up being distracting reminders of the contrast between real and invented images (not to mention kind of annoying).
Still, on balance I reccomend The Incredible Hulk. Check it out if you have any interest at all, and if you're a comic fan it's probably a must see. Here again, like Iron Man, we have Marvel Studios as the producers of the film, and I think they really benefit from taking the reins themselves. There are some nice crossovers to the world they started establishing in Iron Man, paying of most of all in the final scene of the movie where someone cool makes a guest appearance. No need to wait through the end of the credits this time - they wanted to make sure no one missed this, and it had those in the audience (even those like me who knew it was coming) excited and in some cases cheering. As someone behind me in the audience said after we'd waited through the whole credits just to be sure there wasn't anything else (there wasn't) - "I just want to sit right here until they make the next movie." I don't know if I'd go that far - I've got things to do between now and 2009 or 2010, but I'm pretty sure I'll b there opening weekend when the next Marvel Studios flick does come out, no question at all. Unless it's more of that crappy Fantastic Four series. Or Ghost Rider. Or maybe even Spider-man after that last horrible movie. OK, they've still got a little more work to do before they earn my complete trust, but they're on the right path, no doubt about it.
June 11, 2008
Future Compliant: Electoral Math, Vaccines, Paranoid Linux
The big future issue in the US these days is of course the very, very near future of the presidential elections in November. Now that we've got our candidates, one of who will make a great president and the other of whom is John McCain, the pundits, reporters, coffee shop wags, and everyone else is wondering if Obama can really win. Lots of people hope he does but have some niggling feeling that maybe he can't. They think that very backwards looking, non-future compliant factors like racism and xenophobia will make it impossible for him to win. Put another way they just don't think this country is ready to elect a black man as president. I disagree, although I'm sure those kinds of small-minded jerks are out there. But he doesn't need every single vote to win, and most of those types were never gonna vote for him anyway. The truth is, he doesn't even need most of the votes. All he needs is 270 electoral votes.
And that's where this really cool electoral vote counting interactive map comes in really handy (hat tip to Talking Points Memo). It allows you to play prognosticating pundit and do some looking into the future of your own. The map comes pre-set with the solid red and solid blue leaning states already marked out and the swing states yellow. You can click on them to change from yellow to red to blue and the map automatically adds up the electoral votes for you down at the bottom. Viewed this way, coupled with Obama's strong showing in soe swing states like Virginia and Colorado where Democrats haven't won in years, and the picture looks pretty grim for John McCain. If he loses any single one of the mid-sized states that Bush narrowly carried in 2004, then he's screwed. If Obama holds Kerry's states and wins some combination of Colorado, Ohio, and Virginia he wins. And there are lots of other ways for him to win too. So spend some quality time with this lovely map, and plug in your poll results as they come in. All I'm saying is, change is gonna come.
Since I'm on a roll here with the unavoidable mixture of technology and politics, lets move on to another much more scientific and yet (unfortunately) almost as politically charged topic: vaccines. There's been quite a movement afoot of late attributing all sorts of supposed horrors that come with vaccination. Jenn McCarthy and her boyfriend Jim Carrey have been spearheading a new Green Our Vaccines movement that is just a thinly veiled attempt to ban vaccines entirely based on a lack of understanding of how chemistry really works and what the real health issues are. With politicians like Robert F Kennedy Jr. stepping in on this one and many of the candidates, including McCain and, to a lesser but not make me happe level, Obama, giving lip service to this fabricated issue. This Time magazine online article does a good job of preventing the science and cutting though a lot of the BS.
Now here's something to make a writer of hacker-inspired fiction green with envy: Cory Doctorow's great new young adult novel, Little Brother, includes a number of scenes featuring his protagonists using a hyper-secure, privacy-centric version of Linux called Paranoid Linux. Well, lo and behold, someone has gone out and started a Paranoid Linux group devoted to making just such a distribution a reality. I really hope they follow through, as this is a great idea and just the kind of thing Linux is perfect for. If they're especially smart, they'll shoot for making it as user friendly as possible and try and bring these kinds of privacy tools into the hands of users who're hooked on something like Ubuntu or the EeePC Xandros distro - they're basing it on Debian it seems, so hopefully that'll be the case.
Did any of that talk about distributions make any sense to you at all? If it didn't, then maybe you need to work on your own future compliance and look into switching over to Linux. Go ahead and try it out, especially if you've got an older computer lying around or something. I'm at about 90% Linux for all my computing needs, although I'll admit, it sometimes takes some work arounds, mostly in the hardware department. My old printer is the one thing keeping me tied to a windows based machine, but I hardly ever print, so it's not that big a deal at all. But don't take my word for it. Someone else has kindly provided the world (including you!) with 25 Reasons to Convert to Linux. So, what're you waiting for? Check it out.
June 10, 2008
Media Glutton, June 10, 2008: Kung Fu Panda, Firefly Rain
So let's start with Kung Fu Panda. I haven't really gotten on board the animated movie bandwagon. I know in theory that Pixar flicks are great, but I've only seen the Incredibles and one other one. I don't even remember which one, one of the early ones. Not Toy Story. For whatever reason, I just never feel like going. Now, Kung Fu Panda's a Dreamworks film, not Pixar, but it's the same kind of thing. Plus, it's really, really good. This is just about a perfect movie. It's not a great movie, and it doesn't break any new ground or transcend the genre, but it is certainly a great time and does everything it's trying to do with precision, grace, and style. It's the story of an overweight dreamer of a panda bear named Po (voiced with perfect verve by Jack Black) who dreams of being a kung fu warrior only to be recruited by seeming accident into just that fate. But of course there are no accidents, as the wise sage turtle who runs the kung fu temple keeps saying. I don't even need to go through the plot - it's mostly exactly what you might expect from the set up, but the brilliant parts come in all the details, from subtle and broad jokes to the little twists and turns that surprise just enough to keep things interesting. We were in an audience full of kids who loved the movie - and in the end when Po beats the bad guy (that's not really a spoiler is it?) he does it while saying a cute little Jack Blackism. And it was great. It was awesome! I wanted to repeat the little word outloud I was so swept up in it. The kids sitting behind me did just that, and I laughed and laughed. So if any part of you thinks catching this flick sounds like a good idea, listen to that part; it's totally right.
So let's on to books with Will Lavender's Obedience, which was recommended to me by one of those Suggested Summer Reading lists, maybe in the New York Times or possibly on Salon.com. I'm not going to link to it, because, quite frankly, I don't think it's to be trusted. Obedience jumped out at me from its description: a mysterious college professor at a small university manipulating his students into some strange and possibly dangerous mental game. It called up memories of one of my favorite books, Donna Tart's The Secret History. I went and bought it that very day, in hardback no less. That was, it turns out, a mistake. Obedience is not a bad book by any means, but I found it very unsatisfying. It treads in territory where others have gone before, which is fine and good, but it's tricky territory. We're talking the same kind of story that John Fowles handled excellently in The Magus and David Fincher was less convincing with in his film The Game. It's a mystery combined with a bunch of mind games that may or may not be spinning out of control. Everyone's playing an angle, and you don't know who to trust. Except it soon became pretty clear who to trust and who switched sides, and the final resolution was unpredictable only insofar as it was an even less plausible version of what I'd expected all along. I finished the book out of sheer orneriness and a compulsion to find out what happened, but I can't say I'm happy I did.
On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, we have Rich Dansky's new horror novel, Firefly Rain. This is a Southern Gothic ghost story, working firmly in that tradition, although updating it for contemporary times. The fact is, unlike tales of college professors manipulating their students, I don't much go in for Southern Ghost tales, but I did some freelance writing work for Dansky a decade ago, and I liked his writing, so when I saw him at BEA promoting the book, I was excited to say hi and pick up a copy.
Firefly Rain sucked me right in. I started it Tuesday and finished last night, staying up until 2 am to finish it off. It is a classic ghost story, at least in the set up – a prodigal son returns to his ancestral Carolina home after his mother has passed on and his big-city career has fallen apart. Almost immediately things start to go weird, as his car gets stolen and his neighbors give him the stink-eye. This is a small, family ghost story, with just a few characters, all of them interesting, and some genuine yet subtle scary moments. It's been a while since I read a good ghost story, and Firefly Rain not only satisfied me, but whetted my appetite for some more at some point in the near future – hopefully Dansky's next book isn't too far away.
June 04, 2008
Media Glutton June 4, 2008: Book Expo America
I've just returned from Los Angeles where I was doing a reading at the Write To The City event being held in unofficial conjunction with this year's Book Expo America. The event went amazing - a tone of people showed up and the venue was packed for all nine of the crime writers' readings, along with some really moving speeches by local housing activists. I think everything exceeded everyone's expectations for the slam, and I was lovin' life all night long.
The next morning I got up and went with a friend downtown to the LA convention center to check out the actual Book Expo. The expo is THE main event in the book world in the US, particularly for publishers, distributors, and book sellers, but for authors as well. It's a huge trade show where publishers big and small show off their wares, highlight upcoming titles, and feature various authors. It's the kind of place where thousands of deals get made and many, many more thousands of dollars gets spent. I'd been to the BEA in 2006 to promote my first edition of Geek Mafia, which I'd published under my old Blue King Studios imprint. It was, all things considered, a financial disaster for me. I spent a ton of money and made nary a useful contact nor did I even get any press out of it. I learned an important, vital lesson: if you're a small player in the book game, it's insane to try and take on the big companies on their home turf. 99% of the people who attend are there for the big name authors and the big ass publishers. While some might be open to something small and new if it's interesting enough, it's almost impossible to stand out in the obscenely crowded field or arouse much interest when you're competing for attention with most of the authors on the best seller list. So, as a micro or self publisher, I don't really see the point in attending an event like BEA. I saw one guy there doing exactly what I'd done two years ago - hawking one book with a kind of catchy title in his own little booth. My heart went out to him because I think I know what kind of disappointment awaits. But I picked up his book, and if it's good I'll let you know. If it's not, I won't - no sense kicking a guy when he's down.
When I say I picked up a copy, I mean he gave it to me. You don't sell books at BEA - not individual ones. You give copies away and hope that the person either orders a bunch for their store/library or writes you a nice review or...something, anything that results in sales. Of course most of the people you give the books away to won't help you in anyway, but there's no way to really no or discriminate easily, and so you give them to whoever asks. When I was there, I gave away 500 copies of Geek Mafia. Yes, 500. Ugh. This obviously sucks if you're not a big publisher with money to burn. However, it's totally awesome if you're just an avid reader looking to score a shit load of free books!
My friend Laurie and I went together, backpacks ready and empty. Here's a secret for you if BEA comes to your city - they don't check or care who pays to come in. While it's an "industry" event, they're not strict on that at all. I was ostensibly there at the pleasure of AK Press, my current distributor, but my name wasn't on any list. I just walked up, said I was with AK, gave them my name, gave Laurie's name as Chloe just for the fun of it, paid $40 for each pass, and in we went. Once inside there were plenty of heavy duty paper bags available to carry loot. And loot we did. Not every booth gives stuff away - the Taschen booth for example had a woman on guard against people swiping any of their beautiful and expensive photography books - but there are plenty who do. Plus there are scores of author signings every hour, where they give away the book AND let you shake hands with the author. The more famous writers, like Neil Gaiman for example, require tickets (which are free), but most just need you to show up and wait in line at the appointed hour. But there are plenty of free books on the main show floor too, and I hate lines, so the only one I waited in was to say hi to Cory Doctorow and pick up another copy of Little Brother (so now I can give my unsigned copy to a mischevious teen I think it will be perfect for). My only real regret was not coming back the next day to get the new John Hodgeman book and meet him, so I'll have to wait 'til September like everyone else.
But I got quite a haul - 32 books in all, with Laurie picking up another 21 and there being very little overlap between us. I'm particularly excited about the new fiction line that Wizards of the Coast has started, Discoveries. They had all five of those books there, and I got four of them signed. Right now I'm tearing through Rich Dansky's Firefly Rain, which is a lovely southern Gothic ghost story. Again, a fuller review once I finish. I had to ship a box of books home to Florida and I'm pretty sure I'm set for the next couple months. Definitely, definitely worth thr $40 entrance fee. The show's back in New York in May of 2009, so New Yorkers. don't miss a chance to con your way into a whole summer's worth of free reads. I'll be the big guy with the bulging backpack...
May 27, 2008
Future Compliant, May 27, 2008: Wii Fit!
Wii Fit!
I've seen the future of exercise and it looks a lot like a scale without any numbers on it.
OK, "the future of exercise" might be a bit hyperbolic - the Wii Fit is by no means the most perfect exercise aid ever invented, and there is plenty of room for improvement and expansion, but it is, I think, a significant step forward. It's something new, and fun, and most important of all, effective. I've had mine for about a week now and have enjoyed it a great deal. The work outs I get are effective and so varied that the time flows by with ease. Some are simple, others quite challenging, and the Wii Fit ramps up the difficulty at a smooth, sensible rate.
The big, heavy, exciting new component id the balance board, a white, durable plastic board a couple inches thick that looks just like a scale with no numbers on it. It connects tirelessly to your Wii and works in synch with the Wii Fit software that guides you through the various exercises. There balance board really only does two things - weighs you and senses where you're putting weight on it with each of your two feet. But that's enough to really create a whole variety of exercises most of which focus on maintaining your balance while doing something challenging. The board is very sensitive to exactly where your weight and thus your balance is and gives you instant feedback so you can adjust your position or timing to fit the exercises parameters.
Wii Fit offers four categories of exercise - yoga, strength training, aerobics, and balance games. I've only ever done a little yoga, although I've done similar exercises in my various martial arts training routines, and I find the Wii positions a lot of fun. The constant balance feedback makes a huge difference in keeping the position correct, and has a meaningful impact on my ability to achieve and maintain the poses with good form. The Strength Training is more challenging, and includes things like squats, push ups, crunches, and lunges. Again, I was surprised at some of the inventive ways they use the balance board to guide these exercises. The aerobics feature jogging in place, which works by holding the normal Wii remote and the machine deduces your pace from how the remote shakes up and down. This actually works pretty well (note, you don't jog ON the Wii fit), but jogging in place isn't super compelling. There's also a kind of step aerobics that works well and is fun, but the real star is the hula hoop, which is surprisingly challenging and after a minute or two can really get the heart pumping some. The balance exercises are the most like games and the least like exercise, and include variations on skiing and some other odd little games that are enjoyable if not particularly sweat-inducing.
The key feature for all of these exercises is the feedback the game gives you. Much like having a personal trainer in the gym encourages you to do exercises the right way and exhorts you to greater efforts, so the interaction with the Wii graphics on your TV engages and drives you in a way that just working out alone or even with a video cannot. The active feedback, critiquing your stance and rating your performance focuses the mind and fend off that mot pernicious of fitness enemies - boredom.
The Wii Fit is not without its problems of course. First of all is its reliance on Body Mass Index (BMI) for judging your fitness. The BMI is an outdated and not particularly useful measurement scale, especially for people like me with broader, larger body types that don't conform to the human averages. Yes I'm a little overweight, but even when I shed some pounds and get down to what would be a more ideal weight for my body, the Wii will still think I'm fat. So the thing is, you have to do some research on your own and determine how well the BMI applies to you before you give it any credence. On the other hand, the scale is really handy, and seems quite accurate to me, so that feature alone adds a lot of value to the Wii Fit. It not only weighs you, but tracks your weight from day to day and gives you reminders about whatever fitness goals you've set for yourself. I've heard different philosophies about whether you should weigh yourself every day or at longer intervals, but I've always found that weighing myself every day helps focus me on my diet and exercise program more effectively than anything else, and apparently the Wii Fit agrees. It also encourages you to weigh yourself at the same time each day, pointing out that our weights fluctuate by a couple pounds throughout the day.
The one big feature I think is missing (as far as I can tell anyway), is the ability to program a set workout into the Wii Fit instead of having to chose each exercise individually. The selection process provides breaks, but sometimes, especially with the shorter exercises, I'd like to roll right into the next yoga posture or strength exercise without any delay. But that's a minor quibble. Overall, I'm super pleased with my Wii Fit, and excited to not only use it, but to see what other, even more exciting home exercise gear comes along in the future.
May 22, 2008
Media Glutton, May 22 2008 - Indiana Jones
Media Glutton May 22nd, 2008
So I decided to wait until today to write up this week's gluttony because I wanted to write about the new Indiana Jones movie. I can say with some assurance that it was not, in any sense, worth the wait. The movie is aggressively mediocre in its execution, and from the first appearance of a digital ground hog in the opening shot, I started to have a bad feeling about the flick. Now let me say right now that this is not a terrible movie. It's even a mildly enjoyable movie. There are some fun action sequences, especially an early chase scene that takes place in a normally staid environment, and a later, protracted action sequence in the jungle that makes little sense (and suffers from one glaring continuity error) but is a lot of fun while you're watching it. But the dialog and acting are both pretty flat across the board, although it's really the plot that fails on the most levels. Strangely, the thing I was worried about most, Shia LaBeouf's character, is actually just fine. He strikes the right balance between rebellious and reasonable, adventuresome and supportive. His particular stereotype could easily have gone very wrong, but it never did.
I must say though, I'm not surprised it's mediocre. The other Indiana Jones films, with the important exception of the original, are also mediocre movies at best. I re-watched The Last Crusade this past week, and it's a deeply flawed film with some terrible supporting performances and more than its share of goofiness and illogic. I guess I would put this new film a little below that, but only a little.
OK, I'm not gonna give any real spoilers, but I'm going to talk in really general terms about the ending and so there might be something here people consider spoilerish (I would consider it so), so don't read the rest of this paragraph if you care. The last act of the film, when they finally get to The Place and deal with The Big Mystery, is a real let down. I mean, the sets are awesome and the effects are cool, and the resolution is pretty much what we've been expecting all along, but there's no reason for Indy and friends to be there. If they'd just given the bad guys the skull at the beginning of the movie along with some directions and then gone home, the ending would have been exactly the same. Nothing the heroes does - nothing at all - determines the final resolution of the film. Nothing. I mean, this is sort of true in the original Raiders of the Lost Ark as well, but there it worked much better. Here it would be bad on its own, but as a pale reflection of the original its even more trite and insignificant. Yeah, the effects are cool, but they're also so far out there that it takes you out of the more visceral realm where these movies work best. Actually I found that throughout the use of digital effects compared to the practical ones in the first film make this movie less compelling at almost every turn - especially the damned digital gophers or groundhogs or whatever they are.
Alright, that's it for the spoilers. I guess on balance I can't quite reccomend this movie (as if you hadn't guessed by now). I wasn't bored watching it, but all I did as soon as it was over was start complaining about unresolved plot points and stupid decisions. No, that's not true - I was complaining about some of those things during the movie as well. I've read rumors that Lucas or Spielberg (I think Lucas) expressed an interest in carrying on the series with LaBeouf as the lead adventurer and Harrison Ford in a mentor/cameo type of role. I might be OK with that actually, although really the problem here was not Ford's age but the bad script and lousy plot, both of which present much greater challenges if the same people make the next film. I'm actually surprised that Speilberg and Lucas spent all this time and effort to put together such a mediocre movie. Well, Lucas has been doing a lot of that lately, so that's not really a surprise, but I would have thought the least they could do would be to get a really top notch script and story and, most of all, a decent ending. Although come to think of it, Spielberg has used pretty much this exact ending before in other movies, so maybe he thinks it actually is really good. He's wrong.
May 17, 2008
Future Compliant, May 17, 2008
I was having a debate with an old high school friend a couple years ago about the war in Iraq. We hadn't seen each other in quite a while, and he'd grown up more than a little right of center and I'd drifted far to the left, so our points of view were quite different as you might imagine. Still, he's a smart guy, and it was a spirited debate, but soon it became frustrating. He was smart enough to see the obvious - there was no defending the war as a good decision, not even strategically and in no possible way morally. It had been a disaster. So he didn't try to win that argument. Instead he decided to continually shift the grounds of debate. I tried not to let him draw us away from the topic at hand, but he kept coming up with more and farther afield digressions. The last one was a "fact" that I'd never heard before. That the suffering of innocents in the Iraq war paled in comparison to the tens of millions who've died from malaria as a direct result of the ban on the pesticide DDT in Africa. I'd never heard that, didn't know anything about it, and so couldn't argue with him. Given the source and how slippery he'd been all evening, I didn't believe him, but without any facts at hand I wasn't prepared to say as much. And so the debate ended. Well, maybe we argued about nationalized health care after that, I'm not sure. That might have been before.
So I went home and looked it up. Surprise, surprise, it's a whole load of BS. I wanted to call him up and tell him, but that felt petty and might seem well, a little obsessive on my part. Besides, he didn't really care about the truth of it or not. It was just a debating point. As it turns out, the central premise is false. DDT was not ever banned for malaria control, and is indeed in use in some countries to this day. There were calls for restricting its use in agriculture as a pesticide, not just because of the health effects, but also because overuse would cause strains of mosquitoes to evolve that were resistant to DDT (which is what ended up happening in any event). Even the numbers quoted by the DDT "supporters" like my friend were inflated beyond the actual malaria deaths. A whole bunch of baloney. But it gets better. As this recent article outlines in fascinating detail, the whole DDT myth was caused not by some pro-DDT interest per se, but rather by people funded by tobacco companies as part of a larger effort to call legitimate science into question and thus help them in their various battles against smoking regulations and law suits.
This inanity is the very opposite of being future compliant. This is trading in a reality based world view, stirring up needless controversy, and accusing innocents of mass murder all to make more money. It's driving the world backwards as fast as you can so you can pick up the money that falls out of their pockets as they slip back down the mountainside. What idiocy, what monstrousness. And then there's the minor, but annoying collateral damage - it gives right wingers like my old high school friend bogus arguments to bolster their prejudices against environmental regulation. It gives them false outs in their thinking that let them somehow thing that killing hundreds of thousands of people isn't so bad because the environmentalists killed tens of millions. It's just galling, isn't it?
So again, read the articles - Here's the published version and here's the longer version on the author's blog.
Last week I talked about the nasty business of customs agents assuming the right to search through the data on our hard drives when we cross borders. I also mentioned that there were more than a few ways to get around this ridiculous privacy invasion. Well, one of them is TrueCrypt, a free, open source encryption program that you can use to encrypt all or part of your hard drive. I'm going to install this on my laptop sometime this week, and I'll get back to you when I've played with it some more. Until then, here's a description from the company's Web site describing in part how it works:
"Files can be copied to and from a mounted TrueCrypt volume just like they are copied to/from any normal disk (for example, by simple drag-and-drop operations). Files are automatically being decrypted on-the-fly (in memory/RAM) while they are being read or copied from an encrypted TrueCrypt volume. Similarly, files that are being written or copied to the TrueCrypt volume are automatically being encrypted on-the-fly (right before they are written to the disk) in RAM. Note that this does not mean that the whole file that is to be encrypted/decrypted must be stored in RAM before it can be encrypted/decrypted. There are no extra memory (RAM) requirements for TrueCrypt. For an illustration of how this is accomplished, see the following paragraph.
Let's suppose that there is an .avi video file stored on a TrueCrypt volume (therefore, the video file is entirely encrypted). The user provides the correct password (and/or keyfile) and mounts (opens) the TrueCrypt volume. When the user double clicks the icon of the video file, the operating system launches the application associated with the file type - typically a media player. The media player then begins loading a small initial portion of the video file from the TrueCrypt-encrypted volume to RAM (memory) in order to play it. While the portion is being loaded, TrueCrypt is automatically decrypting it (in RAM). The decrypted portion of the video (stored in RAM) is then played by the media player. While this portion is being played, the media player begins loading next small portion of the video file from the TrueCrypt-encrypted volume to RAM (memory) and the process repeats. This process is called on-the-fly encryption/decryption and it works for all file types, not only for video files."
May 13, 2008
Media Glutton, May 13, 2008
I want to confess one of my new guilty pleasures. Last summer I started work on a project that will probably never see the light of day, but it involved doing a heck of a lot of research about modern and classic stage magic, including interviewing magicians and some of the engineers who build tricks. It was pretty freaking cool. As a result, I developed what will probably be an abiding interest in magic and magicians, while at the same time learning just enough to be an annoyingly picky spectator. I'm definitely in the "those who can't, criticize" half of the equation as opposed to the "those who can, do" half. Well, I know one cool mind reading trick, but I flub it about half the time I try. The point is, I think magic's cool, and there's not much magic on TV these days, so I take what I can get. Right now that means watching VH1's Celebracadabra. It's exactly what it sounds like - d-list celebrities learning to do magic tricks and competing with each other each week. Like Dancing With the Stars, but with magic. And the fact that I hadn't heard of half the stars on the show tells you something about who they got to sign on, but that's OK. Because here's the thing: it's actually a pretty good show. The stars (except one) are really trying to learn these illusions and they have real, professional magicians as coaches. The show doesn't reveal how any of the tricks are done, which I think is a good thing, but it does give you an interesting behind the scenes look at magic. I'll still call it a guilty pleasure, but it's one I think more people than magic nerds like me will enjoy. Also, the new magic podcast, Magic Wire, has been doing excellent long interviews with the judges, magician coaches, and some of the celebs from the show. These are really entertaining and informative as well, and have added a whole new dimension to my enjoyment of the series.
Here's something else I feel guilty about. I think the last few episodes of Battlstar Galactica have been sort of dull. There's a lot that's still great about them, but things are moving along very, very slowly. And there was a whole b-plot this week with the President and some visions that, while being excellent character development stuff for her, just ground the show to a screeching halt every time it came on. And not an exciting screech, but instead a really dull, makes you want to fast forward screech. I put the blame for this squarely on the shoulders of show-runner Ronald Moore. Why? Well, because I felt the same way about his season of Carnivale - lots of great, great stuff, but also drawn out and slow and needlessly ponderous at times. Galactica hasn't always been that way, but it sure has seemed that way lately. I think it'll start to pick up this next week as various threads start to come together, but these past few weeks have smacked of creators in love with their ideas and the inner lives of their characters to the point were concerns of plot and pacing slip a little bit. The show's still solid, I'm still looking forward to more and more of it, but for me anyway these last few episodes have been a slump (again, despite lots of cool stuff happening).
This past week I also read a hot new political book that's all the rage in the left leaning blogosphere - Matt Taibbi's The Great Derangement. I guess the rap on Taibbi is he's sort of this generations Hunter Thompson, except he stopped doing drugs and is more about going "undercover" and having wild adventures instead of just being himself and having wild adventures. I enjoyed his first book, Spanking The Donkey, but I like this new one much more, even though it suffers some from being unfocused and kind of all over the place. Taibbi admits as much himself from the intro, explaining how the book really is the synthesis of three different ideas that he worked on at different times and sort of forced together. The heart of the book tells of his time "undercover" as a member of Texas Pastor Hagee's megachurch in San Antonio. Here he gives us detailed, hilarious, and occasionally heart wrenching, but always on some level depressing accounts of life inside a church where the pastor and most of the giant congregation believe that the end is nigh and that all we need to do is help Israel out so we can usher in Armageddon. It's nutty stuff to be sure, and Taibbi has lucked out in that since doing his research, John MacCain has actively courted and received John Hagee's endorsement. And the stuff he says is just as offensive and crazy, if not more so, than anything Rev. Wright ever said. This part of The Great Derangement is just about perfect, not too long, not too short. The second section is about how Congress really works these days, focusing first on Republican and then Democratic shenanigans over ear marks. All this stuff is good too, although there's not quite enough of it for my tastes. There's sort of one detailed example from each Congress with not much in the way of synthesis or analysis. Finally Taibbi takes on the 9/11 "Truthers," those deluded conspiracy minded maniacs like the Loose Change jerks who've come up with all sorts of outlandish, unproven, evidence-free conspiracies around 9/11. One of the highlights of the book for me is a fictional transcritpit of the kind of discussion that must have taken place between Cheney, Wolfowitz, and others if the ridiculous conspiracy theories had any basis in fact. He does a terrific job of pointing out just how far fetched it all really is.
I blew through The Great Derangement in a day and a half and really enjoyed it. If any of that sounds interesting to you, then by all means, pick up a copy for yourself. And go see Iron Man. Did I mention that recently? I love that movie...
May 11, 2008
Future Compliant, May 11, 2008
Cory Doctorow has a new book out this past week, and normally that would be something for my Media Glutton series, but in this case I think it falls squarely under the heading of future compliance. I was lucky enough to read the book several months ago when Cory sent me an electronic version to look at. By the way, you can download your own electronic version of the book for free right here if you like. Cory's following a trend that I have mixed feelings about, although less so in this case than most of the time - he's written a novel for Young Adults instead of for a more traditional sci-fi audience. When China Mieville did that for his last novel I was disappointed, because while Un-Lun-Dun was full of Mieville's imagination and style, it wasn't the thick literary soup that I love from him. With Little Brother, Cory has made the transition to Young Adult without giving up much of his normal techie style, and while the plot and characterizations might be slightly two-dimensional in some regards (especially compared to the bizarre yet compelling characters of his last novel), it all works and the story's a fast, exciting, fun read. Also, who knew you could say "tranny whore" in a young adult novel?
But that's not what makes the book future compliant. Little Brother is a novel about hacker teens fighting the Department of Homeland Security. That sounds almost outrageous when I put it that way, but this story is much more deft than that and it builds up the protagonist's indignation in a realistic way that'll have you wanting to sign on to fight the man right along with him, even as he and you both are scared for how dangerous it is. Little Brother weaves in a great deal of technical knowledge and explanation along the way. Cory does a solid job of explaining sometimes very complicated security and hacking facts. And while I already knew most of the stuff he's teaching here, I think a newcomer to these topics will learn a lot. I love the idea of teaching through fiction, but it's a tricky business. This novel slips just a little from storytelling to pedagogy in a few places, but not egregiously so and never for very long. I'm not the first reviewer to say this - according to the back of the book it was Neil Gaiman - but I'd definitely love to put this book in the hands of as many precocious young teens as I could and see what kind of hacking adventures it inspires in them.
Plus, and here's the real future compliant part of the post, Cory's teamed up with Instructables.com to do a series of how-to posts covering different hacks, tricks, and techniques described in the book. Originally I thought this material might actually have been included in the physical book, which would have been awesome. But having them online is pretty cool too. So go here to see how to fry RFID tags, start flash mobs, find pinhole cameras, and other important skills for the modern teen. I really like this idea of including how-to and instructional material alongside fiction, and down the line as e-books make more inroads (and I, unlike Cory, think that they eventually will) it'll be great to see how the two are integrated. In the meantime, I'd like to see some more of this kind of thing in today's books. I'm thinking about incorporating some similar how-to hacking sections into my next Geek Mafia novel, either in the text itself or as an online component.
It's the kind of information you might find useful next time you're traveling back into the US from abroad. Customs has apparently decided that they have the right to look at everything on your laptop as you're crossing the border. I think this is beyond insane, but the government doesn't agree with me. The idea that we don't have a right to privacy over our own data when we fly from one country to another is absurd. There are ways around it, including encrypting the data on your drive. But then the chances are that if they really think you're hiding something, they'll just take it from you. Of course there are many, much more effecient ways to move encrypted data across international borders. The internet springs to mind as a useful conduit, although I guess Fed Ex might work too. The idea that border agents will accomplish anything worthwhile snooping around people's private files at the airport boggles my mind. One option is of course to load all your files onto a server somewhere in the internet and then erase them from your machine before you travel and then download them again when you get to the other side. Of course then you have to trust the server you're using, and even then the government might be able to snoop if they want. Did I ever mention that privacy is dying, if not all the way dead in this world of ours?
May 08, 2008
Media Glutton, April 29th 2008
OK, let's talk Iron Man. Iron Man freaking rocked. It was, for me, a great, great super hero movie, which is saying something, since there haven't been a lot of those. Moreover, it's a great super hero movie about a character that I've always liked in theory but seldom actually enjoyed in reality. But this movie takes the coolest, most interesting parts of Tony Stark/Iron Man and then puts them in the hands of RobertDowney Jr who just knocks the ball out of the park. When he was cast I thought he was perfect, but in reality he was more than perfect - he was transcendent. I mean that almost literally. His performance lifted the character into something more interesting than he's ever been in the comics. Plus he really pulled off what I think is one of the most appealing (to me) aspects of Tony Stark - he's a super sexy nerd. He's rich and famous and a sex symbol because he's a technological genius and a funny, personable, sarcastic dude. Geek as alpha male - what more can I ask for in a hero. So go and see the movie, and don't forget to stay through the credits to the very end.
I'm going to turn now to a twenty year old novel that I read over the weekend and just loved. I'm currently working my way through a low-residency MFA program and have been reading almost exclusively more "literary" novels on assignment. Most of it is stuff I would probably never have read on my own, which is great, because almost all of it has been really great. But Ian M Banks' sci-fi novel The Player of Games is definitely something I would have picked up, school or no school. I mean come on, it's a science fiction epic with a hero whose sole heroic qualification is that he's the greatest game player in the galaxy. And since it's set so far in the future, it had aged quite well - no embarrassing technological "innovations" that seem quaint by today's standards. But most important of all, it's a great, expertly told story that drives you right through to the end. And while its prose is not overly baroque or complicated, Banks' playful use of language and thrilling descriptions of invented games we never know the rules for make the tale all the more enchanting.
The past couple weeks also offered me a double-DVD helping of one of my favorite actors, Philip Seymour Hoffman. First I watched Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, which is quite an experience. The movie is a crime drama of sorts, although the drama comes not from pulling off the crimes but from screwing them up in a tragic way and then suffering the consequences. the emphasis here is definitely on the drama, and the rapid, totally believable disintegration of both Hoffman's character and that of his brother, played expertly by EthanHawke . It's not a tough movie to watch, but it's definitely a tough movie. Not a lot of smiles and giggles going on here, but plenty of great acting, directing, and writing. The other film was Charlie Wilson's War, which stars Tom Hanks. I really enjoyed this movie as I was watching it, moving along from moment to moment, scene to scene, it sucks me right in and I liked it all. In retrospect it feels a little scattered in focus, and the end comes rushing on too quick. The plot, about a playboy congressman wheedling and conniving to provide arms for theAfghans to fight the Soviets in the 80's, rambles around a bit, focusing on one thing and then another. But the performances and writing are top notch (but then, I'm a huge AaronSorkin fanboy), and I definitely recommend renting it. Plus, hey, true story with relevance to our current life. What more could you ask for from a political thriller/comedy/drama?
This week Speed Racer opens, and originally I'd had no intention of seeing it. But it's been getting a lot of interesting, positive reviews from sources I generally trust, plus it's apparently an incredibly novel and maybe even strange film going experience, which makes it very hard for me to turn down. Now, I've always actually kind of hated everything about Speed Racer except for the theme song, so I'm still going in with low expectations. Plus it's a kids movie, which is fine in theory, but it means the theater might be full of kids, which may or may not be fine in practice depending on howcurmudgeonly I'm feeling.
Next week I'll give you a longer review of Matt Taibbi's new book, The Great Derangement, which I'm finishing up now. It's quite a ride. Until then, see Iron Man! Read Player of Games! Rent Before the Devil Knows You're Dead! Go forth an be gluttons.
May 03, 2008
Future Compliant, May 3, 2008
Future Compliant May 3 2008
I'm computing in the clouds right now. I've written about this new buzz-word trend before - the idea that all your computing needs will live in the data clouds of the internet, available to you anywhere where you have some bandwidth at your disposal. I'm on record as loving the idea. As much as I like my various computers, I hate being tied down to any single one of them. I've got three different machines that I use for different purposes (although really that could be 2, maybe), and I've had to either move files back and forth between them or just limit one kind of work to one particular machine. For some annoying software (looking at you itunes and audible.com), I'm mostly stuck on one device, but the more I can free my data up, the happier I am.
This week I dived full on in to Google Docs. Indeed I'm using it right now in the coffee shop with my EeePC running linux and using downtown Sarasota's free wi-fi. I'll finish it up later on my other, bigger Ubuntu laptop when I get home. Google Docs made the crucial leap for me recently when they added an off-line component to the software. Up until that point hated the idea that I'd have to be online in order to get work done. That would be pretty worthless on a plane or in an airport that doesn't have free wi-fi or, well, sometimes this coffee shop. That free internet is less than 100% reliable. I didn't even consider using the software before Google remedied that oversight.
Now I've been using it for a week solid, writing not only these blog posts, but also working hard on starting my new novel, the third in my Geek Mafia series. I intend to write the whole first draft of the new book on Google Docs, although I'm saving off a copy in Open Office to my local hard drive every day, just to be safe. Google Docs doesn't have nearly the functionality of a full-on word processor, but it turns out it has all the functions I actually use on a regular basis. I can seamlessly edit the book from each of my computers and not have to worry about synching up different versions. I do have to be a little careful when I work offline that I make sure I upload the latest version from my offline computer before I edit it with another one, but so far that hasn't been a problem.
I'm also interested to see how well the sharing tools work. You can open the documents to other google docs users to either just read or also edit. Since I rely a great deal on the kind and helpful input of friends ad family on my early drafts, it will be interesting to see how many of them I can suck in to using Google Docs' collaborative tools and how useful I will actually find them. I have a couple of other, smaller projects (and one far off, much larger one) that I plan to work with co-authors on, where we would both have access to the document and would build it up together. Google Docs then tracks who made what changes so you can keep on eye on each other's progress and additions. I think that's how it's supposed to work anyway. I'll let you know how it goes.
There are down sides of course. The first one that springs to my mind is privacy. The fact that all my documents and data are sitting on Google's servers somewhere, subject to internal or federal inspection (with or without a warrant?) cannot be ignored. I can say that I would never put anything up on Google Docs that I didn't intend to some day be public. I consider the early drafts of a novel to be private of course, but there's not going to be anything in there that I really want to be forever private. Although in this day in age, if it's something I really want to keep private, then I just never commit it to digital form at all - it's the only way to be safe.
Since I've spent all this space and time recommending a privacy smashing but useful Google app, I want to assuage my paranoid guilt and point you in the direction of a cool tool from the Chaos Computer Club that you can use to help actually preserve your privacy some. It's called anonbox, and it's a private server that lets you set up totally anonymous, one time e-mail programs that you can use to sign up for Web sites and other services that require a real, working e-mail address to use. For example, some government archive sites, many newspaper archive sites, and a wide variety of others all require an e-mail address to set up a "free account." Maybe you have no interest in living forever in their databases, on record as having downloaded a specific file. I can certainly understand that. Anonbox offers a great, free work around for those situations - another fine service from the kings of future compliance, the Chaos Computer Club.
April 30, 2008
Media Glutton, April 30, 2008
I hadn't really planned on playing, much less buying Grand Theft Auto 4. I'd tried the last two games, and while I could see that they were well made games and had a certain appeal, they just didn't do anything for me. It wasn't the violence or the language or the protagonists fundamental lack of morals or sociability. I'm cool with all that stuff in games. Nor was it the sex and language. I'm cool with that even outside of video games. No, for me it was the driving. I just don't much care for driving games. I'm not good at them, I don't have fun playing them, and, well, I just don't care much. I put up with all the driving in the great Simpson's Road Rage game because the character and story and humor content was so great, but I never got far enough in the previous Grand Theft Auto games to get sucked into the stories or care about the characters, which just left the driving. Which in turn just left me playing something else.
Despite my studied indifference to the new release of GTA 4, the hype started to get to me. First came all those reviews with the perfect scores. Best game in years according to some. An experience not to be missed. OK, I started to feel some sort of obligation to try it out and see what all the fuss was about. Then G4 TV tarted giving it wall to wall overage and I got even more sucked in. Then they were saying it was going to be the biggest, best selling release in video game history - maybe even in media history. They expected to sell 9 million copies in the first week, which by my calculations would be a gross sale number of over $500 dollars. That's crazy! But also cool. Good for video games. And then something snapped in my brain. Maybe it was the fact that it was also the 4 year anniversary of the release of the video game I helped design, City of Heroes. Maybe it was just media saturation. Maybe I've developed an addiction to release-day lines at my local Game Stop. Whatever. With 30 minutes before they closed I drove over Monday night and put my money down so I could be one of the lucky millions to have a copy on day one.
And yesterday morning at 10:30 there was a line, and I waited in it. I waited and texted about the fact that I was waiting, which seems sort of digitally decadent of me. There were 30 or 40 of us total in the otherwise mostly empty mall. I then proved my adulthood by actually going home and working on my new novel for a few hours before I actually loaded the game into my X-Box 360 and fired it up. I was excited. The intro was cool. It looked great. The first thing you do is drive a damn car...
You drive a car and for five minutes I hated it. But all the time the story is unfolding around you, as is the really well designed and rendered city you're driving through. The voice acting and dialog are both top notch - as good as I've ever experienced. The characters may be very familiar in tone and spirit, with little that seems groundbreaking at first but they're familiar in a way that feels right rather than cliched. They have depth and dimension and, while I'd hate hanging out with them in real life, they're immensely compelling as protagonists in a crime drama. As the story eased me into the world, the game play eased me into the whole driving, and later the car jacking and the shooting. It all builds up seamlessly, one element after another. I drove my cousin to a poker game. I went out on some dates. I drove a getaway car, I helped run a protection racket, I became a gunman for a drug dealer, I killed someone in cold blood. It all fit, it all made sense in the game's twisted world, and most importantly of all, it was all a hell of a lot of fun. By the time I went to bed, I'd played about 5 and a half hours of Grand Theft Auto 4, and if I hadn't come here to the coffee shop to get work done, I'd probably be fighting the urge to play some more right now.
At 5 or so hours, the game tells me I've completed about 10% of the game's content. I'm going to take my time with it and really let myself explore some of the smaller, hidden moments in the game, because often that's where the humor is hidden. Like the TV shows you can sit and watch in your apartment (including a great Halo goof), or the DJ's on the radio stations as you drive around, or the little mini-games. And oh my god, the magic show I went to on my third date with Michele - hilarious. A lot of the game is hilarious in fact, even in some of its darkest moments. It never takes itself too seriously, but it also doesn't undermine its own drama either - that's a fine line to walk, and I congratulate the writers/designers for bringing it all together so adeptly. I've now played more of GTA 4 than I did of the predecessors combined, and there's no way I'm stopping now. Hell, I even like the driving parts now.
April 25, 2008
Future Compliant, April 25, 2008
Here's another installment of my Future Compliant blogging from allvoices.com:
Continuing the trend I started last week, I'm going to once again rant (although not as much) about another prime example of future non-compliance: Astrology. Now there's not a thing in the world that I've ever seen, read, or heard that makes me think there's a lick of sense or truth in astrology. The fact that it's so widely accepted makes me cringe in embarrassment for people. There's nothing sillier than a sentence that begins with something like, "I'm such a Libra, I always..." Man oh man oh man. But I've had several good friends who believe in it whole heartedly and have assured me that there's lots of good evidence for it and a long tradition of scholarship and science behind it. I agree there's a lot (a LOT) written about the so-called "science" of astrology, but it's one of those cases where I don't think that word means what they think it means. Astrology is not science. But science has taken a good, hard look at astrology, and recently published their findings. The result - looking at 2000 people born within minutes of each other (time-twins as they're sometimes referred to), researchers found no correlation at all between their astrological birth circumstances and their real, actual lives. No surprises there, although I'm glad they did the research...
Read the rest here.
April 23, 2008
Media Glutton April 23, 2008 Plus Future Compliant
Well, here it is, another Media Glutton entry, this time mostly about Frontline's great piece on universal health care systems around the globe:
I really do like PBS. It makes up a surprising amount of my TV watching each week, pretty much entirely for their non-fiction and commentary shows like Charlie Rose, Nova, Bill Moyers, and Frontline. Those are all great, interesting, high quality programs. Nova in particular is the gold standard of science television, and puts most of what you see on other science channels to shame. And let's not eve talk about the alien-loving, ghost-mongering, sensationalist claptrap that is The History Channel (the gold standard for low standards). But Frontline is probably my favorite. Even-handed, well researched, compellingly produced, it makes even subjects I'm not interested in fascinating. When they cover something I really care about, I'm beyond sucked in - I'm enthralled. And here's the other great thing about Frontline - they put their whole shows up online, plus lots of bonus material, making the information available all the time to anyone.
Last week's great episode was about a topic that I care a great deal about, a topic that is a national embarrassment here in the United States - health care. Many Americans who really should know better have some sort of visceral objection to nationalized or single payer health care systems. They cling to the delusion that the US system is the best in the world and that universal health care means endless waiting lists, low standards of care, and lack of choice. They cherry-pick the worst anecdotes they can remember and extrapolate the rest, forgetting that the plural of anecdote is anecdotes, not data. Thankfully Frontline, along with many actual researchers over the years, has gone out and collected the data and hopefully dispelled many of the myths about universal health care programs around the world....
Also I've got a new Future Compliant rant against Ben Stein up here which I couldn't post a link to last week because I was having site issues.
Future Compliant April 19, 2008
Yesterday marked the official release of a movie that is the antithesis of future compliance an anti-science, ignorant, biased piece of propaganda called Expelled. The film claims to be about academic freedom and open discussion of scientific controversies, but that's all just a smoke screen that thinly veils its real purpose: to promote the religion based, utterly unscientific proposition known as Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design is merely warmed over, watered down creationism and i not a scientific theory, much less a hypothesis. It's the latest gambit from religious radicals trying to sneak their god into classrooms, a desperate, hopefully futile attempt to block true science (and real facts) from impinging on their superstitions and un-founded beliefs. It's been debunked and destroyed time and again, but it keeps rearing its ugly head, and this time that head is Ben Stein.
Ben Stein has never held much of my esteem, although I did used to watch his game show and enjoyed it. But here he's either shown he's an idiot or a total sell out. I don't think he's an idiot, although he might well be, so I'm inclined to believe he's just a sell out, willing to hitch his wagon to the creationist gravy train for a while. Either way, he should be ashamed of himself for his role in this film. The fact that the film explicitly states that there would not have been a holocaust if not for Nazi's getting inspiration from Charles Darwin is not only stupid, wrong, and ignorant, but also hateful, arrogant, and dismissive of the real causes of one of history's worst tragedies. Plus here's the worst part - even if it were true (and it isn't) the idea that Hitler might have been wrongly inspired by Darwin DOES NOT MEAN DARWIN WAS WRONG. This is a pure propaganda move on the film makers' part, a huge logical fallacy that's utterly embarrassing, or would be if the film's creators were capable of embarrassment....
April 16, 2008
Media Glutton April 16, 2008 and others
OK, well, I was lazy last week and didn't actually post the links to my blog entries, even though I wrote them. Lame of me, I know. So here's the new Media Glutton:
This past weekend I went up to New York City to do some readings and help promote my Geek Mafia and Geek Mafia: Mile Zero at the NY Anarchist Book Fair. It was a pretty interesting experience all things considered. I did two events at the wonderful Blue Stockings Books, a collectively run radical book store that is a great locus for reading, activism, and hanging out. I had a reading there Friday night which was, well, not packed. Still, it was fun. Then the next night wa part of a group salon of authors and artists and we had the place filled to the gills, which was awesome. I had a great time ad encourage anyone in NY to stop by the store and see what other events they've got coming up - they're always doing something cool.
The book fair itself was a little smaller than the one in San Francisco, but it's only in it's second year. The room got to sauna-levels of heat and humidity by the afternoon, but the location across the street from Washington Square was nice and let me slip out and get some air (and delicious street food) pretty much at will. Again, I was almost the only novel there and I'm not sure the attendees come looking for much in the way of fiction. I didn't do a reading or presentation this time, so without that to drive some interest there wasn't a whole lot. There was one other novelist there that I saw, but he was giving away copies of his book. I talked to him for a while and was surprised to find he'd printed up 10,000 copies and had been giving them away for a while now. It wasn't even really a marketing gimmick as far as I could tell - he just wanted to get his story out there. I'm sad to say the story didn't grab me at all as I tried to get through it that afternoon, but I admire his mad devotion to his art.
And Here's Last Week's Future Compliant
April 02, 2008
Media Glutton, April 2 2008
Here's my latest Media Glutton from AllVoices.com:
So I've been reading a lot this past week, mostly for my MFA program and thus nothing you would call new or even terribly recent stuff. Great stuff, but nothing you haven't heard about a bunch of other places before. I'm more interested here in highlighting new and/or relatively unknown content, although I might write up the book I'm reading (and enjoying) now once I'm finished later this week.
But I did get to see The Mist on DVD, written and directed by Frank Darabont, based on Stephen King's novella. I'd listened to a really great audio version of this story many, many years ago, but all I remembered was people trapped in a grocery store by some creepy mist with crazy monsters in it. As it turns out, that's about all there is to remember, but it's also enough. This is a really solid, fun, survivor/horror movie, with some cool monsters, some unusual and interesting character arcs, and an ending that some people probably hate but I really love (although you couldn't call it the feel good hit of the summer by any means). The special effects are OK. Apparently the Blu-Ray disk has a black and white version on it, which I think might actually be pretty cool. I don't know that I've ever seen black and white CGI monsters before, but maybe that would make them look a little more realistic. If you like monster movies, check this one out.
I also saw this announcement about doing a big budget movie version Huxley's Brave New World. I'm pretty excited about this one. It's great to see Ridley Scott doing sci-fi again of course, and I like the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio's behind it as well (read the article linked to to see why). I know a lot of people are anti-DiCaprio, but they're just being weird and reactionary, probably a hangover from the horrifying Titanic-phenom days last decades. The fact is, he gives good to great performances in good to great movies again and again, and usually takes on pretty interesting roles. I loved him in The Aviator for instance, and Blood Diamond is a really solid, entertaining-yet-thought-provoking flick.
March 29, 2008
Future Compliant, March 29, 2008
Here's my new Future Compliant post on allvoices.com. Next week I'll have some "just for rickdakan.com" stuff as well...
If I were to name one area where the future and the present have clashed in really interesting and unpredictable ways, well, I couldn't name just one. That's sort of the thing about the future, it's always surprising us - or at least me. But one area I pay a lot of attention to and which has a big impact on all of us is politics. There's the bad stuff, like hackable voting machines that leave no paper trail that piss me off. There's the other bad side, where politicians bow to industry pressure to mess with things like Net Neutrality or try to censor the internet. And then there's the good stuff, first and foremost being (in my opinion) how much easier it has become to organize and communicate your political message. Nothing new there, lots of people have been saying that for years, but I wanted to point out one site in particular that came on line recently because I think it's worth checking out. The widely recognized problem with everyone having a voice is that it can sometimes be hard to figure out which voices are worth listening to. I actually don't think that's much of a problem compared to the enormous benefits, especially since it means people get judged by their individual merits and reputation rather than being fed to us by some large media conglomerate. Word of mouth becomes vital...
read more here at allvoices.com
March 25, 2008
Media Glutton, March 26, 2008
New Media Glutton post at allvoices.com:
So I had a rather unusual but quite exciting media overload experience this past weekend - spoke and worked my publisher's table at the San Francisco Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair. It was, in fact, a lot of fun, and really quite strange on occasion. Not that I'm unfamiliar with the strange. I've been to gaming conventions and hacker conventions and sci-fi conventions and comics conventions and academic conferences. I've seen people in weird costumes, history professors doing "this little piggy" in latin with their infants, and impassioned, glorious rants on everything from civil rights to secure computing to what makes a good gaming experience. So from that point of view, the Anarchist Book Fair was very familiar, although all the details, issues, and glorious rants were new to me (in person anyway - I've read quite a bit of anarchist writings and written some myself in a way).
I was there promoting my own books, Geek Mafia, and the sequel, Geek Mafia: Mile Zero on behalf of myself and my wonderful new publisher, PM Press. New not only to me, but to everyone else as well, as they're only a few months old (although the people who make up PM have decades of publishing experience and contacts). I gave various version of my one-line sales pitch for Geek Mafia that I've said thousands of times before, although I tried a couple variations in an effort to appeal to this crowd's particular tastes. There wasn't a lot of other fiction at this predominantly serious-minded event, so I think my book there was both a little bit of fresh air and maybe a little confusing. People seemed a little unsure as to how fiction fit into the broader themes and politics of the event and movement, but once we explained out goal of coming at those same themes from another angle and perspective, most people really liked the idea. In one of my talks this weekend I likened my books to a big helping of ice cream with some little vitamins of politics and inspiration slipped in there. Mostly they're about the fun and the exciting stories, but there's stuff in there to make you think too.
With that in mind, I thought I'd highlight a few other forms of radical fictional ice cream that I particularly admire and would encourage anyone to go out and read (right after they go out and read my stuff of course).