Homo Sum:
humani nil a me alienum puto

I followed a stay Twitter link today that lead to this short discussion of how to deal with someone acting racist:

I found that interesting enough that I spent some time looking at other vlogs from the same dude, which lead me to this one, East Coast Cats and Christopher Street Boys, which I particularly liked:

I’m pretty New York ignorant–I think I’ve spent a total of about 5 days in Manhattan, and none in the other boroughs, so most of my sense of what’s what in NYC comes from literature and pop culture. I had a vague sense that Christopher Street had a relation to gay culture–I think mostly because I’ve loved Lou Reed’s New York since I was about 16 years old¹, and the song Halloween Parade makes the association–but I didn’t know any of the history mentioned here.

The clip is interesting enough on it’s own–I always like to see a bigot get given a verbal smackdown, and I always like to see a History Smackdown in particular, and I’m down with people who want to kick back at Authority Figures Who Are Also Bigots, especially in defence of their inherent rights–but what was even more interesting was following up on the Stonewall Riot reference.

I’m not going to summarize all the reading threads this lead to, let me just point you to the Wikipedia entry on the Stonewall riots as a starting place. (Oh, and the page for Christopher Street, which had me imagining a story where the ghost of e. e. cummings haunted Harlan Ellison with the riots as a backdrop–there’s almost a Tim Powers story there.)

I’m interested in everything human, so this kind of social history fascinates me–the moreso because it’s something I’ve never really been exposed to. A basic Canadian education doesn’t include anythng on the history of the gay rights movement, and neither my autodidactism nor cultural osmosis seem to have brought me the details in the same way as they have for say, the equivalent history of the Black struggle for civil rights. Maybe this is a particular blind spot of mine, but if it’s also an area where you lack some knowledge, starting at those links above and working out could be a profitable use of some of your time.

I’m always pleased to erase some of my ignorance–there’s so much of it, that I never regret getting rid of some–especially when it happens as a result of an off-hand comment, or an unlikely chain of associations.

1. I have a distinct memory of other nerdy teens, who should have known better, playing the “I’m cooler than you” card because I was listening to a song called “Last Great American Whale”, and that was obviously not something a person concerned about “cool” should be doing. From the perspective of history, I’m comfortable with who was actually a cooler cat: someone listening to Lou, or someone mocking him for it.(back)

While I’m posting about lovely things what you can get from the InterTubes for free, I should also point out that the most recent issue of Clarkesworld Magazine is out and that it contains something of particular interest to me.

See, as you probably know, I’m a fan of Peter Watts’ writing. And before the whole thing with the US Border cowboys, the most interesting public controversy Watts was involved with (well, maybe the second most interesting–the On Spec thing was actually probably more interesting, but didn’t prevent me from reading a Watts story, so it was less personally annoying) had to do with a story he had written riffing on “Who Goes There?” and one of its movie adaptations, John Carpenter’s The Thing.

I’d seen Watts bat around some pretty interesting sounding ideas, and then read some snippets of the story when he posted them. I’d heard some rumours that it was very good indeed, from editors who had read it. I believe it was planned to be released in Eclipse 3, which would have meant I’d get it since I’m buying those pretty automatically… but then it didn’t happen, apparently because of not-really-discussed-in-public stuff with lawyers worried about copyrights (although, as usual, Watts was pretty forthright in explaining his take on the issue, and Strahan is only slightly more elliptic about the details of what couldn’t be worked out in his congratulatory post on the publication). So it looked like I was never going to get to read the story… and then word came out that Clarkesworld would be running the story at some point in the future.

This, obviously, is that point. The new issue has the story, and an audio version of it as well–plus other interesting contents. I haven’t gone through the audio version yet, but Watts’ apparently thinks the reader did a better job than he could.

Anyway, if you’re interested in the original Campbell novella¹, or like The Thing, or have interest in the ideas that were Watts’ seed, or just like a good, dark, SF story… go check it out. It’s free², after all.

Oh, and in case it’s not utterly obvious, this is another example of that whole “excess of copyright restricts creation of new works” thing–the law that’s supposed to encourage creation nearly stopped us from having this added to our commons³, you know?

1. If you haven’t read the original novella, you could probably find it online or find an old time radio version, or something…(back)
2. While Clarkesworld is free, if you find things of interest there, you may want to consider citizenship. The Watts story alone is worth the $10.(back)
3. Yes, Watts retains copyright for the legal period, but we can discuss the work now–it’s part of the great dialogue–and eventually, assuming Disney doesn’t get their way completely, it will actually enter the commons. The alternative, where the work was never published at all, and thus couldn’t be part of our ongoing discussion, is much less appealing.(back)

Yes, that’s right, a new Kleptones album was made available yesterday as a New Year’s present for us all. I’ve been a fan since A Night At The Hip-Hopera (and have mentioned The Kleptones several times here over the years) so you can imagine that this is very welcome news to me.

Having listened to the new double(!!) album, Uptime/Downtime, a couple of times now–I’ve been playing it a bit obsessively tonight–I think it may actually have unseated HipHopera as the new reigning champion.

Go get it, it’s free and it’s awesome. (And if you haven’t already, get the back catalogue as well).

Oh, and if you like to play “spot the sample”, you might also want to look at the Wikipedia page for the new album which already (power of crowd-sourcing, etc) has a pretty significant sample list in place.

For form’s sake allow me to make explicit the should-be-obvious note here about copyright / creative remixing / fair use: What’s been produced here is an album that’s objectively¹ better than 99% of what was commercially released in 2009. This is proof that our cultural commons can be enriched by the production of new works that draw on pre-existing works to create something new–and thus is a strong argument for returning works to the commons, so they can be used in this kind of production of new works, and a strong argument against “copyright as infinite intellectual property”. My position on this hasn’t changed in any significant way since “the letter U and the numeral 2″², but it’s always nice to have things like this that so clearly prove the proposition.

(Aside for Nathan G: If you kept reading the blog, this post is especially for you.)

1. As my friend Greg Clark used to say “90% of music is subjective, 5% of it is just shit, and 5% is just great–and if you don’t recognize that 5%, you’re just wrong.”(back)
2. Jesus, that was 18 years ago–well, 19 I guess if it’s really 2010. I am an old man.(back)

Generally speaking I hate this time of year on the Internet–I am so tired of year-end wrapups, best of lists, etc. It’s even worst this year, since it’s also the end of a decade. Enough with the lists.

Having said that, I did see one list that actually got my attention: Paul Witcover’s list of his ten favourite F/SF novels of the year. (The list should be expanded on in his year-end piece in Locus, also something I exempt from my humbuggery about year-end wrapups–maybe even in that Locus that came in the mail today which I haven’t looked at yet…)

Since I quite like Witcover’s novels¹ and stories, and I appreciate his critical writing, I was already disposed to be interested. When I looked over the list and found that about half of what he listed were things I’ve read and liked this year… well, let’s just say that I now have a strong motivation to seek out information on the other items.

Here are the items from Witcover’s lists, with some annotations by me:

• The City & The City, China Mieville – bought it, read it, liked it. I’m a pretty big Mieville fan generally, but I liked this more than the preceding two. I got this in the Subterranean edition.
• Finch, Jeff VanderMeer – my favourite VanderMeer so far. I’d say it’s more easily accessible than some of the others, which might mkae it seem “lighter” to some folks, but I like the way Vandermeer fuses genres in this one, and I like the payoffs on narrative lines that have been brewing for several books now. I bought the supa-fancy edition from Underland.
• The Babylonian Trilogy, Seb Doubinsky – This one wasn’t really on my radar: the PS solicitations for it seem to have not drawn my attention, and I don’t think I’ve seen any reviews of it other than Liviu Suciu’s back in April. Liviu also lists it as a best-of-the-year, I see. Between Witcover’s recommendation and the fact that Moorcock wrote the introduction, I may have to think hard about getting this one.
• Last Days, Brian Evanson – This is another one I bought in the swank edition from Underland, primarily I think based on recommendations made by Jeff Vandermeer. Good stuff.
• Big Machine, Victor LaValle – Completely off my radar until I read it on this list. However, based on its presence here, and the Liz Hand review I just Googled up, I think I shall add this to ye olde wishlist posthaste.
• Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente – I bought this a while back based on some strong recommendations from friends, but I admit it hasn’t made it out of the to-be-read queue yet. Thus, I have no comment.
• Lifelode, Jo Walton – Still haven’t read any Walton, despite thinking I should for some time now, based on her reviews at Tor.com showing us to have very similar tastes (Fred C–you did that, your comments pushing Walton down the stack!), so maybe I’ll pick up this one and use it to get around to doing that.
• Madness of Flowers, Jay Lake – I pre-ordered this long before it came out, on the strength of Trial of Flowers, but again I have to confess that I haven`t actually read it yet. I expect it to be good when I get to it, though.
• The Dark Volume, Gordon Dahlquist – After reading the Subterranean edition of The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters, I was primed for the sequel, and ordered it from the UK back in May of 2008 because I couldn`t wait for the Subterranean edition (although I did get one of those to match, and expect it to be shipped pretty soon now). ’nuff said.
• The Silver Skull, Mark Chadbourn – I’ve been toying with picking this up for a while, primarily based on some good online reviews, and my growing respect for Pyr’s editorial selections (and selection strategy), and I think this is enough to push it onto the “pick it up next time you’re at the bookstore” list.

1. If you haven’t read these, and don’t believe me that they’re great… well check out what Rick Bowes, himself no slouch in the great writing department, says about Witcover’s second novel.(back)

I should mention, as a very long aside, that I almost couldn’t scan those picture for that last post.

When I left my old job I had to return all the corporate hardware–which meant all the machines that were even vaguely current in my house. Part of what I’ve been doing over the last few days is dragging some ancient machines out and setting them up with modern software–putting Windows 7 on the ancient workstation I’m writing this on (which was, until recently, still running NT 2000 server…i.e. it was at least three major Windows operating systems behind the times), taking an ancient Thinkpad and getting a clean install of XP on it (and making it work with a snazzy 802.11n card), taking a not-quite-a-relic Dell Inspiron and putting the latest Ubuntu on it (and getting that working with an 802.11n card as well–laptop wireless on Linux, still not painless, but WAAAAY easier than it used to be). I also got my snazzy new Ideapad S10-2 for Christmas and I’ll probably be Ubuntu-ing that soon, although for the moment I’ve contented myself to just stripping out all the pre-installed cruft.

Anyway, the point is that the scanner was plugged into the workstation, and I discovered that Win 7 just doesn’t support my old ScanJet2100C scanner–no driver, no plans for a driver. In theory I could have installed the software on the Thinkpad or the IdeaPad and used them to scan, but neither of those is supposed to live in the office where the scanner lives.

I was this close (I was doing review comparisons and checking stock online for various local stores) to just using this as an excuse to buy a new all-in-one laser printer/scanner thing (I had to give back “my” laser printer as well, and I miss it), when it occurred to me that I might be able to scan from the Ubuntu box–I’d never tried that before.

I popped into the Ubuntu Software Centre (something else I hadn’t really played with yet–I had still be using the Synaptic during the install) and searched for the term “scan”. The first hit was a program called XSane, and it appeared to already be installed. Apparently it’s part of the default install set. Nice.

So I plugged in the scanner, and ran the program. Long story short: everything just worked, and the XSane tools are much nicer than HP’s Windows tools were. Everything was completely intuitive, and without needing to open a manual or a web page I was able to scan exactly what I wanted.

So just to review: On XP, need special USB patch, and the UI is ugly and stupid. I have no idea about Vista. On Win7 the scanner is a boat anchor. On Ubuntu, it just works, and as a bonus the UI is smart and pretty. And preinstalled.

Draw your own conclusions.

Since the girls are gone for a couple of days, I am in Unemployed-Until-January Bachelor mode today.

This means that I slept in, and that upon waking I was allowed to relish the rare opportunity to lie about in bed and read something without needing to rush off to something or other.

Since it is a mini-bachelor holiday, the idea of pulling something Playboy-related off my “to be read” shelf seemed to be appropriate. I refer, of course, to the marvelous three-volume collection Gahan Wilson: Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons.

I picked this up earlier this month on a Beguiling run, and it’s been sitting on the shelf taunting me ever since–despite what you may think, this life of temporary unemployment hasn’t exactly been full of reading leisure time.

I could talk about who Wilson is, but let’s be honest here–even if you don’t think you know who he is, as soon as you see a couple of the images you’ll know who he is. I think it actually might be impossible for anyone currently an adult to have not seen his quite distinctive art style in several places, and I suspect that most people actually reading this blog will already be familiar with him and his work. I mean when you’ve been published regularly in several venues for more than half a century, people know you even if they don’t know it.

I could talk about the wonderful production job Fantagraphics did on this collection, but it’s probably more useful to point you to the page at their site for the book, which has an embedded video that shows off the set and some of the feature, or to point you to the production notes at their blog, which has lots of design porn info and photos.

All of that, though, is secondary to the contents of the books. This morning I went through the first volume (“1957-1973″) and enjoyed it tremendously. I’ve picked out a couple of early favourites to show you below, and Fantagraphics has made a PDF preview available with another 20+ images (there’s one overlap between what I picked to show off, and their preview.) If the quality of the other two volumes matches what was in the first one, I’ll be thrilled with this purchase. I’m pretty sure I’ll be reading the second book before sleep tonight.

I think this one might have been my absolute favourite from the first volume–it’s from very early in the collection:

Upon seeing this one, which is amusing enough in it’s original context, I couldn’t help but think that it also makes a fairly stinging movie review:

This one caught my fancy because it reminds me of the small Alan Moore “shrine” I had in the old house, and which I will presumably get around to setting up in this one someday.

The vast majority of the images in the first volume are full-page, full colour¹, but not all of them. There are a few examples of line art, often two-to-a-page. This is one of those, and one that addresses a theological problem that has served as source material for a lot of jokes:

There are also some full-page line art pieces. I quite like this one–it tweaks my Malaclypse The Younger buttons, you know?

And now, off to bed and a review of the second volume.

1. Actually, Hefner notes in the intro to the first volume that he restricted Wilson’s palette, but the images aren’t black and white, or one colour washes, or anything.(back)

It’s weird–or maybe not so weird, really–but reading certain news items my reactions are almost entirely filtered through my years of training as a science fiction reader. Sometimes I read the story and suddenly see all kinds of comparisons between some real world event and things I’ve read–either direct connections, or analogies. Sometimes I read something and can’t help but try to process the potential real world ramifications by working out “what kind of stories could you write from this…” (or perhaps more accurately imagining the different angles stories could take–I’m no writer, but I can see some of the obvious roads.)

The story today about scientists working on a synthetic intoxicant, for example:

An alcohol substitute that mimics its pleasant buzz without leading to drunkenness and hangovers is being developed by scientists.

So first the story (especially the comments about the instant sobriety pill) triggers associations with all kinds of stories and novels I’ve read–stuff dating back more than 60 years in some cases.

But secondly, and more interestingly, I’m trying to work out what something like this could mean in the real world and I can’t seem to do that without constructing stories and scenarios.

Take some questions:

How would this be commercialized? What companies would get involved? How would this be marketed?

Would it be initially taken up by a youth population? (They are traditionally the ones most interested in drinking to get drunk, and the ones least invested in the traditions, rituals, and subtleties of connoisseur-style drinking. It’s not too far a step from coolers and Boone’s, right?) Does this cause generational stress? Or just a bunch of stories in the papers about “the new binge drinking”? Does the drinking age change?

That kind of question would, of course, be inextricably linked with questions of regulation and legalization–how would our societies, and especially the relatively conservative and reactionary legislatures that trail behind social change, deal with something like this? We don’t normally act particularly rationally, and without the thousands of years of precedent that alcohol has how would this be viewed?

Would traditional brewers/distillers/vintners oppose something like this? They have a fairly healthy lobby as well–how does that interact with legislative questions?

Let’s assume we get past those hurdles–what are the broader social implications? Don’t you actually lose any of the high end cachet that certain kinds of alcohol have? I mean you can’t be a connoisseur in this case, can you? You pretty much flat out admitting that you’re drinking specifically to get drunk. That’s no change for a lot of people, but how does a widespread acknowledgment of that change the way we perceive alcohol and drinking as a society? The wine expert, the master of cocktails, etc? Is there little to no effect because this is just another choice–kind of an advanced case of Mike’s Hard Lemonade–or is there actually some kind of cascading effect?

And how does something like this get acceptance without altering society’s fundamental stance towards recreational chemicals? Or rather, making the illusion that the exceptions that we pretend ethanol and caffeine (and to a lesser extent nicotine) are less easy to sustain.

And, of course, where’s the line between recreational pharmacology, like this new booze, and medicinal pharmacology? Once we accept that taking drugs to achieve a desired mental or emotional state is both OK and common, how does that not blend into things like anti-depressants, or stimulants, etc?

And really, how do the social rituals change with the differing effects? What does it mean to “get drunk” without mood swings? Does the end of the night pick up experience change–either in what actually happens, or in how we perceive it? Without the possibility of addiction, do we lose the Bukowskis and the Parkers?

Does this actually lower crime rates and health care costs? Or do we find that people find ways to make it destructive, or tend away from it to something more damaging for the many and varied reasons people behave perversely?

And the purists? Do people keep drinking old style booze, even with all the negative effects? Because it’s not “authentic” otherwise? Because it’s not self-destructive enough otherwise? Because it tastes wrong otherwise? Does old school booze eventually become outlawed as a potentially harmful drug? And does that lead to a fermentation and distillery underground? (It’s pretty easy to make booze–underground “labs” can be built with technology that’s thousands of years old.)

I could see myself breaking the law for some black market “real oatmeal stout”.

I see hundreds of stories.

(And that’s without even looking at the whole “de-booze conventional alcoholic beverages, add in NuBuuze, and use the harvested ethanol as fuel” angle. There’s a couple dozens stories in there too.)

I can’t actually work out what it might mean, of course, because I can’t see a way to get something like that effectively legalized in North America… but it’s interesting to chew on some of the questions anyway.

I’ve spent some time thinking about religion today–primarily as part of working on my argument that Christmas as practiced in North America is essentially a secular holiday¹, and thus something I can celebrate non-hypocritcally.

So I was already primed to appreciate the new map at Lapham’s Quaterly (for the religion issue, which I hope will arrive here sometime soon since getting my subscription copies more than a week after I’ve seen the issue on the newsstands annoys me).

The maps shows some sacred sites around the world–just a taste to get you interested in some things you can Google up, of course.

I note though that it misses my favourite site here in Canada: The Place Where The Thunder Beings Rest. (A.k.a. “The place where thunderbirds nest”, a.k.a. Animikii-wajiw, Anemki-waucheu, Thunder Mountain, and most colonially as Mount Mckay.)

To make a long story short, the northern Ontario city of “Thunder Bay” takes it’s name from the body of water, which is in turn named because of the storms/weather that happen there. This weather is attributable, apparently, to the actions of the thunder birds, who nest on Thunder Mountain–later renamed Mount Mckay–at the end of the bay. Cool story.

And a really cool looking place. Check out this great series of photo posts by northshorewoman: part 1, part 2, part 3.

Of course there’s lots of other cool lore in the area, that ties in, such a the Sleeping Giant legend, and the story of the chapel atop the mountain.

(When Trish and I were touring the area a number of years ago, one of the things I made sure we did, in addition to going to the mountain, was to tour the Silver Islet mine stuff–not so much because of the story of the Sleeping Giant and the secret of the silver, but rather because of the true story of the missing coal shipment in 1883 and the subsequent mine flooding. And that story I only knew because of the Tanglefoot song.)

1. …with more pagan trappings than Christian ones among the commonly observed rituals, etc.(back)

Nice to see the Watts story get some coverage on one of the larger political blogs.

I quite like this bit:

It’s ironic, though, that the same day I was arrested one Mary Callahan, chief privacy officer for Homeland Security, was up here in Canada reassuring us that the border isn’t so bad a place after all, and the US doesn’t just arbitrarily grab people’s personal data willy-nilly. Almost as ironic as the fact that I still haven’t got my laptop computer, flash drive, or notebook back.

(I’m still keeping Truecrypt on any laptop that crosses the border with me.)

On a vaguely related note, I did some reading today on the Just-world phenomenon, which in a nutshell “refers to the tendency for people to want to believe that the world is just so strongly that when they witness an otherwise inexplicable injustice they will rationalize it by searching for things that the victim might have done to deserve it”. I can’t help but think this goes far to explaining the comments I’ve seen on some articles about what happened to Watts.