Author: Ridley

If you can’t say anything nice, and there’s not much else to talk about, it’s hard to get a conversation going, isn’t it? I’m not going to pretend that the election and the parade of terrible news since hasn’t put a damper on my spirit this year. When you throw in the fact that mercury is apparently circling backwards around my office, I just don’t have a great deal of positive news to share.

I’d like to point out one story that’s flying a little under the radar. While everyone is focusing on the genuinely awful transition to a Trump presidency, the governor of Texas is trying to be the Mini Me to Trump’s Dr. Evil. He’s taken to twitter to link to conspiracy theories on non-news sites like WND, to attack electors for doing what the electoral college is meant to do ,  and to attack companies which exercise their right to boycott, which the courts have determined is protected by the first amendment.  He’s even taken to aping one of Trump’s signature lines. Texans like to say that everything is bigger in Texas. Apparently, this applies to political embarrassments as well.

I did get around to reading The Handmaid’s Tale and absolutely loved it. Good speculative fiction most often revolves around not just having a delicious idea, but actually executing on that idea. Larry Niven, for example, is chock full of great ideas and writes great short stories about them, but he struggles with stretching them to novel length. Margaret Atwood had a terrific concept and did it justice, all the way to the ambiguous and completely appropriate ending.

Oh, and there’s a new Nine Inch Nails EP! I haven’t heard the whole thing yet, but what I’ve heard is raw and angry and very, very promising. Alan Moulder helps out on production, and there are a few other familiar names on board as well. I’ve been in a tweexcore mood of late, but there’s nothing like a short burst of Trent Reznor to get me going on a chilly, grey Christmas eve eve.

And really? That’s about it right now. We’re going to be traveling the next couple of days and I’ll be thinking about what I’m going to do instead of end of year lists over the next week. There will be a good deal of football (the kind you play with your feet), good food, and the love of my life to keep me warm in these dark days of December, so I think it’ll be OK in the end.

-RK

I’m a little bit burnt out. That’s the only thing I can think of to explain it. I’ve had several people ask me why I look so sad and I’m not, really, I’m just thinking about something else and so not thinking about smiling. I’m not even in a bad mood, I just don’t have the energy to keep up appearances right now, you know?

Of course, reading J.G. Ballard’s Millennium People this week probably didn’t help. It’s rife with good ideas, clever references, and bags of satire. It also isn’t especially good. It’s overwritten, with more figurative language than a LiveJournal poetry group. It isn’t remotely believable, but I doubt that it’s meant to be. Ballard is in his element putting a magnifying glass on the warts and boils of the middle class and turning them into full-blow horrors, but I caught myself thinking “Oh, come on” at least a dozen times. It’s worth reading but I doubt that I’ll ever re-read it, if that makes sense.

So, to put myself in a better mood, I’m finally getting around to reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s one I’ve been meaning to read for ages and I finally picked it up when I saw it in the half price section at the book store. I’m sure it’ll be just the pick-me-up I’m looking for.

‘Tis the season for familial obligations, so I’ll be doing some driving up and down the interstate over the next few weeks. It is exceedingly unlikely that anything of interest will occur during these visits, so expect mostly updates about what I’m reading, how poorly my football team is doing, and some new song that hit me over the head and changed my life.

I’ll probably be dressing the cats up like little Santas if I can find the right gear.

A few days ago, I was walking by a creekside deck near my office and notice a sign had been posted in front of it. The sign indicated that anyone caught sleeping on, or even sitting for extended periods, on the deck, would be subject to arrest. As you have probably gathered, this deck is a popular spot for homeless folks to rest and sleep. I’m not a fan of giving people who have nowhere to sleep even fewer places to sleep, but that’s a subject for another day.

As I was walking, I was also playing Pokemon GO. The area near the deck is a pokestop and it’s normally surrounded by four or five monsters. It struck me as curious that there were none whatsoever. It struck me as strange when I didn’t see any monsters there the entire day, but the nearby stops seemed to have any unusually high numbers of monsters nearby.

The coincidence of the posting of the “no sleeping” notice and the lack of pocket monsters was almost certainly just that. The monsters have returned to that stop even though the sign remains. There were two unrelated events that caught my attention due to their being so close to each other in time and space, and it got me to thinking.

Pokemon GO is a step towards gamifying “real life.” To receive rewards in the game, you have to move around outside of the game. I expect this sort of thing to get more sophisticated, more immersive, and to become even more popular in the near future. Wearable technology will get less obtrusive so people can play whatever game they’re involved in at the same time they’re working or shopping or whatever. It’s a brilliant model and I expect it to continue to succeed.

So, the games can reward behavior in the real world, but who is deciding what those behaviors should be? Think about how impressive marketing technology is today. At home, Nicole and I have had conversations about a restaurant or a product near our phones and found ads for the same restaurant or product pop up on our browsers on our desktops. Imagine the kind of marketing database which exists for each and every one of us. This information could be used, in-game, to guide people down certain streets and certain shops at certain times of the day.

If that isn’t creepy enough for you, imagine the demographic knowledge in these databases and how it might be used. The game experience, overlaid on to real life, could offer be custom tuned based on your income, your ethnicity, your religion, your gender identity, or any number of factors. Imagine segregation enforced, not by policing, but by in-game rewards.

If this sounds like an episode or two from season three of Black Mirror, well, sure, I can see that. Charlie Brooker’s awfully good at envisioning this sort of scenario. However, my original point of reference is Bruce Sterling’s short story Maneki Neko. If you’re familiar with the story, you’ll see the connection right away. If not, you owe it to yourself to click the link and read it. As usually, Sterling was a good five years ahead of the curve.

Work’s been a bit demanding lately, so much so that I can’t say I really had a Thanksgiving break (although the food was spectacular). My fumes ran out a couple of hours ago, so I’m not running on anything but inertia right now. That’s all my long way of saying I’ll be keeping it short tonight.

I recently read Alan Lightman’s novel Einstein’s Dreams, which is the lightest reading I’m ever likely to do on the subject of the theory of relativity. It’s a tiny thing, easily read in an hour or so. Each chapter describes a dream in which time behaves differently than how we perceive, highlighting how that world would be different than our own. These dreams are the dreams Einstein has as he completes his theory of special relativity.

The reviews on Goodreads are wildly mixed between people who love it and people who find the central conceit twee. In that sense it’s sort of the Jonathan Livingston Seagull of physics. It works for me because I can’t resist a book filled with so many “what ifs?”  I can’t help but think it’s custom made for discussion groups, reading a single chapter, and then discussion the implications of that particular world. It’d be a great jumping off point for creative writing classes as well, as each chapter is a ready-made prompt.

Next up is J.G. Ballard’s penultimate novel Millenium People. I haven’t heard much about this one, but I love Ballard and it was on the discount shelf at the bookstore, so I was never going to pass it up. I get the impression it’s not considered one of his best (the discount shelf was my first clue), but lesser Ballard is still a treat. Here’s a sample, a conversation between an English couple about to fly to Orlando for a conference:

‘It’s having to shake hands with Mickey Mouse that drives me up the wall. Americans love these Disney hotels.’

‘Don’t be mean. They remind them of their childhoods.’

‘Childhoods they didn’t actually have. What about the rest of us–whey do we have to be reminded of American childhoods?’

‘That’s the modern world in a nutshell.’

So, lesser or not, I think I’m going to enjoy this.

-RK

P.S. Because the days are getting shorter and greyer, I’m feeling very sentimental these days. I’ve rediscovered the joy of using snippets of song lyrics for titles for my posts. It’s something I used to do on LiveJournal and we’ve reached the point where LiveJournal is something one can feel sentimental about.

Come to think of it, references to song lyrics pack a lot of memetic information into a small package. There’s the literal meaning of the words, the meaning of the song they’re references, the time, the place, the scene, and even the specific band referenced can shade the meaning. It still feels very high school to use lyrics this way, but I can live with that.

(title courtesy of Johnny Foreigner)

I just finished reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and I’m of several minds regarding it. It’s clearly brilliant literature. It’s chock full o’ allusions and metaphors and satire. There’s a good deal of humor in it, the pacing is solid, and the juxtaposition of the two stories is clever and inventive.

I just didn’t enjoy reading it very much. Most of the satire was lost on me. I suspect that, even if you’re familiar with 1930s life in the Soviet Union, you probably would have to have been there to really “get” it. I missed a great number of the references and, even after reading up on them, couldn’t grasp their significance. It was a great book, but it wasn’t a great book for me. It understand why people like and I certainly respect it, but it’s not a book I look forward to reading again anytime soon.

On the other hand, I just re-read all three volumes of Jamie McKelvie and Kieron Gillen’s Phonogram.* I enjoyed it enormously the first time I read it and it didn’t lose any of its charm the second time around. It’s a pitch-perfect tale series of stories of how people relate to popular culture (and specifically, my favorite flavor of pop culture, music), full of allusion, metaphors, satire, and the best glossary I’ve ever encountered. The second time through, I was less fixated on the cleverness of the conceit and paid more attention to the character arcs and…oh, just go read it. You can thank me later.

Twenty years ago I would have regarded the comic as a guilty pleasure, but now I know better. Don’t think for a heartbeat that popular culture is inferior to real culture. Even when pop culture is simply recycling old stories, songs, fashions, or whatever, and translating them into modern contexts**, it’s still the real culture of its era. Whatever Mozart can tell us about life, hip-hop or country and western can tell us in ways more relevant to our lives. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with liking Shakespeare. The Bard is certainly a massive influence on our culture, but influence is not the same thing as being a living element of who we are right this very moment.  Popular culture is our culture and I’m done with feeling ashamed of it. ***

-RK

* The collections, and you should read them all, are: Rue Britannia, The Singles Club, and The Immaterial Girl.

** And goodness me, does Phonogram ever address this particular feature of culture.

*** Of course, pop culture doesn’t always age well. Most of it looks cringe-worthy five years down the road, but who cares? It’s a reflection of right now, and not meant to stand the test of time. The trick is always knowing when to let go and move on.

2016 is not going to be “one for the ages,” unless you are referring to the dark ages. It’s been a grim year in a lot of ways, so it feels a little strange to be saying nice things about a lousy year. There have, however, been a couple of really fantastic things, and they’re what I’m going to remember when I think back on this year.

The lesser of the two is that my beloved Leicester City football club won the English Premier League. I won’t say much about this other than that the odds of the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series were nowhere near as long as those against my Foxes winning the title.

Of vastly greater importance is that I married Nicole last month. I occurs to me that I wrote a great deal about the honeymoon, but I haven’t had much to say to about the wedding. Part of that is that weddings are a lot like comets approaching perihelion*. There’s a long, slow planning and organizing phase during which Nicole, to my everlasting gratitude, did most of the heavy lifting. As the event gets closer, things start to move faster, picking up speed exponentially, until the actual ceremony, which flies by so quickly so scarcely have time to notice.

At least, for me, that’s how it was.

Looking back, though, it was a lot of fun. We had a terrific turnout. Dear, dear friends from all over the country and as much of my family as could make it were in attendance. Patrick performed the ceremony and he was absolutely perfect in the role and really ought to think about this sort of thing for a living. I cannot possibly thank him enough, although it’s going to be fun to try.

I’m going to leave the rest of the names out for fear of omitting someone, but I want to thank everyone who made the trip and shared the day with us. I hope everyone enjoyed the party as much as I did. We had a psychic, a face painter, a lobster roll truck, a disco ball, a bartender in Marie Antoinette costume (have a mentioned that this was a costume-encouraged wedding?), a “midway” with games, cardboard stand-ups for photos, seriously creepy Halloween decorations (I’m talking about actual bat skeletons here, not Party Barn plastics), and nigh-perfect weather.

Not everything went perfectly, but none of that really mattered. The improvs went largely unnoticed and in some cases might have been an improvement. For example, we didn’t plan on playing this song for our first dance, but I’m pretty happy knowing it was. Besides, Lil Jon makes everything better.

I hope everyone had a great time. The wedding wasn’t just about us, as we were as committed as people can be. We wanted to share what we had with people we loved, and I think that came across. I get to live this kind of life every. single. day.

So, yeah, 2016 was a poor year, but I’m always going to have a least a few fond memories of it.

-RK

* Yes, I’ve used the exact same analogy to describe the pacing of a William Gibson novel. I like the imagery of it, and honestly, how often do you get to use a word as cool as “perihelion?”

I have something really happy to write about, but for the time being, I’m not really in the right frame of mind to do it justice. I don’t know that I have anything to add to the discussionright now, but I would like to read some of the more insightful things I’ve read regarding last Tuesday’s election.

Laurie Penny: On The Election of Donald J Trump

“It is not elitist to look fascism in the face and reject it. It is not anti-democratic to carry on believing in a society where there is space for everyone. Fighting for tolerance, justice and dignity for women, queer people and people of colour is not frivolous and or vain. Who decided that it was? Who decided that only those who place fear over faith in their fellow human beings are real, legitimate citizens whose voices matter? That’s not a rhetorical question. I want to know. Give me names.”

Patrick Joseph: New Day

“We can be lighter, move faster, and are open to trying a thousand different approaches while they are limited to what their figurehead demands. What they may miss is that they are a part of the same whole as we are. A society like ours doesn’t function as top down, but as all together.”

Bruce Sterling: Notes On The 2016 US Election

“This is the Pandora’s Box of twenty-first-century politics, these rumor politics of modern power players organized for disruption, wherein the lines of play are drawn far outside the twentieth century’s staid political parties and its Fourth Estate of journalism. And, since it helps campaigners to seize power fast and cheap, it’s bound to get more like this, rather than less. Silicon Valley would call this a disruptive hack, since it undercuts debates, ground games, TV ads, and other expensive, tedious campaign clutter.”

Keith Law: Stick To Baseball, 11/12/16. This post isn’t entirely about the election, but the parts which are are good.

“If you support the erosion of the voting rights of American citizens, you stand in opposition to a fundamental principle of the modern democracy. Rolling the clock back to the time of poll taxes and literacy tests just to get your guy elected is wrong, and every one of us should be willing to see a candidate we oppose elected if that is the cost of letting everyone who is eligible to vote have the opportunity to vote. If you live in one of the fourteen states that worked to restrict voting rights, you need to stand up now for yourself and for your neighbors.”

-RK

I appreciate your indulging me in this. I don’t even know where to start, to be honest. I’m shaken like I’ve never been shaken by a national event before. Yes, that includes 9/11. Fifteen years ago, we were attacked and thousands of lives were taken, but that time, it came from without. On 11/8, the United States of America elected a man who ran a campaign appealing to racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and antisemitism*. He did this in the most brazen, unapologetic fashion this country has seen since George Wallace. Unlike 9/11, we did to ourselves, and that makes it worse.

I’ve been reading online reactions from people who supported this result, and one thing has become abundantly clear to me: I grossly underestimated how powerfully a socially conservative message would resonate with an enormous number of voters. I could have seen it coming; I’ve always considered the fiscal conservatives to be the drivers of the bus in the Republican party. The social conservatives were just being strung along, thrown the occasional scrap, but mostly just given lip service by the party leadership because who else were they going to vote for?

So, along comes Donald Trump, and while his economic policies were a mishmash of populism and extreme Norquistian tax reduction (strange bedfellows, those), his message on the social side of things was unflinchingly consistent: The traditional (white Christian) American way of life was under attack. Trump recognized this, and he wasn’t afraid to court the extremist factions, earning the endorsement of the Klan and turning over his campaign to the alt right. The fact that he wasn’t afraid to say it aloud, instead of dog-whistling in the dark, won him incredible loyalty, not just from the self-identified sexists and racists and religious bigots, but from huge numbers of people who longed for a return to the America they saw in black and white sitcoms.

This is why America feels foreign to me. Trump himself doesn’t worry me so much**, at least not yet, but it’s what his election says about what this country stands for. In the past, the endorsement of the KKK would be box office poison, not a late boost at the polls. The people who see blacks as “thugs,” Mexican immigrants as “racists,” gays as “abominations,” and Muslims as “terrorists” have won the day. They’ve been vindicated. They won, and I can’t feel at home in a country which embraces these values.

Like I said, I’ve tried to read up on the reactions of the folks who are happy with the election results, and, if I twist my mind around a little, I feel a little empathy for them. So many of them has said they no longer recognized America. A black man in the White House, and the White House lit up with rainbow colored lights? It was too much. They no longer felt at home in their own country.

So, empathy yes***, even though not much in the way of sympathy. Accepting people who do things differently is, I believe, a sign of progress and it speaks well of our nation that we were moving in this direction. I’m not saying that Trump will reverse everything good that has happened. I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying that he was elected in no small part because that is what so many Americans want him to roll back the last fifty years of social progress.

Before finishing up, I’d like to link a few other reactions to the election. There’s some good stuff in here:

John Scalzi

Will B. Macintosh

Chuck Wendig

Charles Stross

I’ll close with a Hunter S. Thompson quote I ganked from the comments on the Stross blog:

“This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”

-RK

* Just to be clear, I’m not trying to suggest that all Trump supporters embraced these traits. I am saying that all Trump supporters embraced a candidate who embraced these traits.

** I mean, sure, he worries me. He’s not prepared for the job, he’s not fit for it, and…I could go on. I just mean that concern for what his presidency will look like isn’t what is getting me down at this particular time.

*** Now, the liberals who voted for Trump or Stein because Hillary’s such an insider politician who can’t be trusted? Screw you guys. No empathy at all. Hillary’s competent, truthful and trustworthy (at least compared to her opponent). Getting into bed with the Klan and their ilk to make a stand against the status quo is not a defensible position in my book.  Что происходит дальше, на вашей совести.

Dear Trump-Supporters-Who-Just-Want-A-Change-From-Business-As-Usual,

I’m with you on this one. I want to see substantial change in Washington, and I don’t think either of the two major parties are going to be the agents for shaking things up. Donald Trump, for all intents and purposes, is a third-party candidate who managed to win the Republican nomination in spite of the wishes of the Republican party. That goes in the plus column.

Another thing he did that was right was reach out to people who felt (with some good reason) that neither party would give them the time of day. This is a good and laudable thing and I wish the Democratic party would stop taking so many of their traditional voters for granted. So, good for Trump on this count.

I have friends, people I respect, who have made noises about voting for Trump for these reasons. But, when you look at his actual policies, he’s not a guy who’s going to usher in meaningful change, and he’s not going to be the champion of the people he’s reaching out to.

I’ve heard that argument that, as an outsider, he won’t be able to do much of anything as neither party will support him. That strikes me as not only an incredibly weak reason to vote for someone, but also wishful thinking. Will Republicans confirm his nominations to the Supreme Court? Will they pass his tax cuts, his military spending increases, or his rollback of Obamacare? Of course they will.

So, folks who want change? I get it, but you chose the wrong champion.

I can’t give him credit for recognizing real problems when his solutions are as bad or worse than the problems. Donald Trump’s proposals will do nothing but entrench existing power structures and ensure that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. Even if he were a good person, his policies and general lack of competence would be enough to disqualify him.

The kicker, of course, is that he’s not a good person, either. Donald Trump is a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobic buffoon, and a shameless liar, who also just happens to have terrible policies. I want to vote for an outsider candidate, but that can’t be literally the only positive marker on the candidate’s resume. Please don’t want for him because you want “someone different” regardless of who that someone is. We can do better than Donald Trump.

-RK

Let me start with the conclusion here: That was the best vacation I’ve ever had. It turns out that a road trip with a few stops determined and the rest improvised, out in the middle of nowhere, is a style of travel that suits the two of us very well. Not absolutely having to be anywhere at any specific time took a lot of the pressure off and let us just relax and figure out it out as we went. I’ve never enjoyed travel as much as I have this week.

That said, it’s nice to be home, too. A little distance, particularly when the distance involves locales which are significantly different than your home, can make you appreciate where you live even if you had a great time being away. We live in a big city. Other than El Paso, that biggest city we visited was Alamogordo, which has a population of just over 30,000. The only other “big” cities we passed through were Carlsbad (26,000) and Fredericksburg (10,500). We most definitely got away from it all, and, honestly? I think I could get used to living like that.

I won’t, of course. We’re home now and there are cats and grocery stores and jobs and things, all of which I’m either fond of or have convinced myself I need. The car probably needs a respite as well. 1,500 miles without a hiccup? Take a bow, Mazda 3. Thanks to Mikki and Sophie for making sure the kitties were ok. Finally, I’d like to note that Nicole is an incredible traveling companion. She’d never spent any time in the desert, so this was all new and wondrous to her.

10/10 Would definitely do this again.

-RK