Mark's Musings

It’s weird to be bridging this gap. Digital copies of books are here but when publishers are still releasing physical books as ‘standard practice’ prior to releasing the digital version of them, it’s hard to do anything but roll your eyes in annoyance.

The fact that they’re still called e-books or digital books or whatever, instead of just “books”, means we haven’t yet made the leap in our collective consciousness to the digital medium.

I’m looking forward to the point where a book can be published and it’s understood that that means electronically and not physically.

A long time ago, I remember watching a film about the ubiquity of television. I saw it some time in the 80′s but, thinking back on it now, it must have been made in the 70′s or 60′s. The part I remember of it was short, but it showed a family in their house, and no matter which way the family members looked, there was a television screen. No matter which way they turned, they could still follow the show they were watching without missing an interlaced frame of it.

Back then, of course, the video portion of the television was implemented using something called a “cathode ray tube”, which is big and bulky. And they had this weird 4:3 aspect ratio. Strange, right? Anyway, what sticks most in my mind is a short portion of this film: the homemaker wife in the kitchen being able to see the television show even when she’s putting a food tray in the oven to bake because the baking tray had a small CRT built into it.

I remember thinking how ridiculous this was and how much it made it sink home to a know-it-all teenager how bad a television addiction can be. Especially when it becomes culturally accepted. That’ll never happen, I thought to myself. Nobody could become that addicted to TV that they need to see it wherever they turn. I wish I could see it again, but it’s kind of hard to just use Google to find it, you know? I bet I’d be able to find it on YouTube if I knew what it was called or what the film was trying to promote.

What made me remember was this commercial I saw recently on TV: 2010 FIFA World Cup: Fan’s Point of View. And, what do you know, it’s now apparently culturally acceptable to watch TV everywhere you go.

Just don’t throw your iPhone in the oven by accident.

Yeah, so. Apparently Twitter is down right now. But there are so many 140-char-or-less thoughts I need to express! I wonder of there’s going to be a tweet flood once the service returns.

I’m typing this on my iPhone into the official wordpress app, just to see how painful it is. Answer: not too. I may try it again some time.

Anyway, the thing I wanted to tweet was that Julie and I just finished watching the first season of Veronica Mars tonight. It was loads of fun. They did a great job of revealing who the season’s bad guy was, and a casual viewer like myself was (mostly) satisfied with how the various plot threads were addressed. High School is not really my ideal setting, but detective fiction is right up my alley, so I was totally into the stories. Looking forward to season 2!

Yeah, so.

When I was five or six years old, I saw my first Star Trek episode. It was called “Operation: Annihilate!” and I found it to be extremely scary. In it, creatures hiding on the walls and ceilings would swoop down and attack the good guys by attaching onto their backs. I remember being unable to watch the entire thing because of how scary it was. On the positive side, I’ll always remember where I was when I saw the overgrown amoeba latch on to Spock.

So I should know better than to show Star Trek episodes to my kids, yeah? Guess what I did last night.

The episode they saw, from Star Trek: The Next Generation, is called “Aquiel“, and it’s a kind of mediocre effort. However, at the end of the story, when the mystery is solved, there’s a blobby sort of peanut-shaped blob that blobs after Geordi. He takes care of it fairly easily (I don’t think it’s a spoiler to reveal that Geordi doesn’t die in this episode) but, for the few seconds that Mr Blobber was on-screen, it scared the be-blobbus out of my two elder kids. My youngest wasn’t around to see it, fortunately.

Of course, then it’s bed-time, and they both complain that they’re too scared to go to sleep. *headdesk*

The headdesk is for me! Not for them.

I talked to them about the episode. I told them the blob wasn’t real. “But what if it IS?!” I told them the story was just fantasy. “But maybe there’s a real blob out there!” I tried again to convince them there’s no such thing. Samantha supposed that she would need a sleeping pill to get to sleep. Man, what makes an eight-year-old think of something like that? I tried a different tactic and asked them what happened to the blob in the story. “Geordi killed it.” A-ha, a bit of a breakthrough. It’s dead, I told them. Even if it had been real, it couldn’t come after them.

This calmed them down until Samantha said, “maybe there’s more of them.”

*headdesk*

Yeah, for me again.

I said there were no more. Geordi took care of the only one. They’re fine. They seemed to relax, and I turned off the light and left the room.

Minutes later they’re coming down the stairs claiming to have heard a thump noise come from one of the walls. Back up I go to get them into bed. I listen to the wall; I have them check out the room on the other side of the wall; I thump my head against the wall to see if it would make them laugh — *headwall* instead of a *headdesk* maybe? Eventually they agree to try to go to sleep.

Half an hour later, I’m coming up the stairs. The door to their room is closed and locked, and the light is on.

*headdesk*

Lesson learnt: no more Star Trek just before bed-time.

(Yes, they eventually got to sleep, after I had them unlock the door and turn off the light and I promised I would be in the next bedroom over from them.)

It started in a park, on a hill, amongst trees and grass. PAX was over, and it turned out they were selling passes for next year’s PAX over by the large oak. What? Dammit, they were already sold out by the time I made it over there. I commiserated with the other IF folks as … wait, I’m in the sea now, and there are some mice in a mouse-sized rowboat, floating beside me. Suddenly, shark! Crunch! Ah, it’s because the bottom of the mouse’s boat was black, and therefore a high contrast against the water’s surface. Let’s try again, this time with a white-bottomed boat… floating along again beside the mouseboat, looking down, I see the sharks swimming about 20 feet under. Dammit, I bet I make a good outline up here at the surface! Please, sharks, don’t attack, please, please, please….

And then I wake up. At 5am. No way I’m going back to sleep with the fear of death hanging over me.

Stupid brain.

I was tempted to make a second joke post consisting of “God my legs are sore”, but I prefer not to drive my friends away. My calf muscles did get very sore after I had walked so much with a heavy backpack on. But that’s not what this is about.

I think I do better with one-on-one than with crowds. I don’t know if there’s a skill I can acquire that will let me level up my crowd-interacting abilities, but I’ll have to look into that. I did spend most of the weekend in “stunned” mode but, amazingly, I had a great time. I got to see a bunch of presentations, talk with a bunch of really bright folks (including a bit of a chat with Don Woods!), watch a bunch of cool-looking videogames, and, in all, it was an absolutely wonderful experience.

I couldn’t really have written anything substantial until now: three weeks after the actual PAX event. A quick summary of my time: Friday, drove to Boston, stopped by the IF suite, missed the Wil Wheaton keynote by around ten feet, got into the IF Storytelling panel through subversion, ate sushi with Iain, Emily, and Jacqueline, got into the Get Lamp premier without any versioning (sub or otherwise), and then I had to crash. Saturday, got up early enough to get into the Bill Amend presentation, headed to the IF suite to hang out, had lunch with Iain, Rob, and inky, then back to the suite to chat with IF folks (see Don Woods(!) above), attended the IF Outreach panel, played a bunch of SpeedIF entries, crashed again. Sunday, one more event at PAX (Kris Straub & Scott Kurtz doing a Blamimations presentation), then back to the suite to hang out some more.

The “holy cow” joke post I linked to above pretty much summed up my entire experience. I meant it to be funny, but it’s also accurate. I felt overwhelmed… in a *very* good way. I’m so glad that I’m part of the IF community; I’m so glad that I’m fascinated by something that so many brilliant people are passionate about. It’s inspirational, really. I love hanging around people that are smarter than me (ok, so the bar is set low, but that doesn’t change my feeling). I wish I had been more social, and that’s something I definitely see I need to work on: filtering out the distractions so that I can just *talk*. I remember chatting with Rob and inky, but I can’t remember the topic. I remember being very interested in what Emily was talking about over sushi, but I can’t remember what she said now. I remember seeing baf in the IF Suite, and having to push “introduce myself” onto the stack so that I could finish doing other things, and then not being able to pop that item off the stack until the following day. Insert image of sad markm here for missed opportunities.

I’m glad Sean Huxter’s “got lamp?” buttons went over well. I’m sorry I missed out on the PAX East scarves. I’m happy I finally got a chance to meet maga. I’m sorry I didn’t get to talk with Sargent more. I’m thrilled to have gone, and I came away more energized and more psyched up about IF than ever before.

I met so many people I only know as names on the mud, or in game credits, or in film credits. All my memories are a giant jumble, much like this post is.

PAX East 2011 has a great deal to live up to, but if it’s half as good as ’10, I’m going to have an awesome time.

Holy cow.

I’ve talked about The Final Empire before and it’s time to revisit it now. In that trilogy, Brandon Sanderson did a great job of world-building, and I’ve discovered that I really eat that sort of thing up. Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is an excellent example of this, as is Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon“. I just get sucked in to a story a lot more quickly if there’s a consistent world propping it up, and I enjoy it all the more for that.

Sanderson’s trilogy has a complete and consistent magic system that he very cleverly revealed slowly over the course of its three books. Many people have said that his skill at characterization needs work. My characterometer must need some calibration, as I didn’t really find anything amiss with the people in his stories. Maybe the magic system he designed overwhelmed my ability to detect this issue. It certainly has affected the way I dream, as I’ve written before.

His skill is good enough that I have added him to my internal Trusted Author list. Three good books in a row will do that, and he certainly measures up in that respect. So it was much to my dismay to discover that he agreed to complete Robert Jordan’s “The Wheel of Time” series after Jordan’s untimely death left the final book unfinished. I’ve gone on record as being Not A Fan of that series and yet here I am, a professed Sanderson fan. True, Jordan has written some of the final part of the story — which he famously promised to finish with book twelve — but Sanderson’s writing would still comprise a large chunk of it. Did I want miss out on that?

My magic eight-ball still says: all signs point to “no”.

It was with great reluctance that I decided to read the rest of the books in the series. I finished the eleventh book on a flight from Denver to San Jose where I’m actually typing these words, even though you won’t see them for a few days. It took the better part of a year to get through them all. Sure, some of that time was spent waiting for inter-library loans — there’s no way I was going to buy any of these books — but I did my best to make time to read them. What I’m trying to say is that they’re huge. Huge in the sense of the number of pages, yes, but also huge in the sense of great huge lumbering beasts of books.

Was it worth it? My only response to that is below. The only thing that can salvage this is if Sanderson kicks some major, major ass in the final three boks. Yeah, three. Even though Jordan stated that he’d finish the story in one book, when Sanderson started writing it, he and his publishers reluctantly came to the conclusion that it would take three books. I knew that before I started reading the series again, so I didn’t have the soaring hope followed by the crushing horror of two more books than I thought I was going to have to read. I don’t know how the series’ fans took the news, and I’m not about to search the web to find out.

Books two through eleven all lead up to, but don’t quite reach, the Last Battle between Light and Dark. And either Jordan vastly underestimated the amount of work that he was going to have to put into it, or he just simply didn’t want to stop writing about his world, because the plot just drags on and on and on. Jordan is constantly throwing new twists into the story, and new adventures for his characters to have.

It certainly seems like he doesn’t quite want to reach the Last Battle. Character A decides to get married, and his wife is captured, and then he has to go after her. Character B has to find the person he’s going to marry and make clumsy attempts at wooing her. Character C has to spend vast swaths of book-time hiding from various nefarious bad-guy characters, to say nothing of intending to marry three women. Character D has to appear to die, and then we have to set up a prophecy for D’s rescue. No marriage sub-plot for D, alas.

And so on and, y’know, so on. How do you count the main plot to be advancing when there are separate sub-plots that start and stop all over the place? And sub-sub-plots branching off sub-plots? How do you keep track of the thousands of characters that Jordan introduces and are mostly interchangeable except for their location? I can’t express in words the level of my annoyance when Jordan would start a new chapter and name three or four new characters. A lot of the time, at least, they’re new. Sometimes he’d name what I thought were new characters, but ended up being some minor nobodies from a few books earlier that I had forgotten. Note to self: remember to forget them all again.

I also can’t express in words the levels of sheer frustration at the advancement pace of the main “Last Battle” plot. As the sequels continue, plot advancements are fewer and further between. In book eleven, virtually *nothing* has anything to do with the main story. Oh, sure, they keep talking about the Last Battle to be happening Real Soon Now, but name me one thing that any one of the characters does to take a step towards that Last Battle.

If Jordan believed that the books he was writing were each complete in an of themselves, and told a noticeable story complete with beginning, middle, and end, then he was mistaken beyond belief. As the books came out, the more “middly” they became. Each one was less of a story and more of a way of advancing time towards the mythical Last Battle. Book nine, Winter’s Heart, was the only book that really had any story to it, and that was a veneer on top of the aggravating machinations that the characters were attempting to pull off. As I said earlier, I decided to borrow the books from my library instead of buying them, and it was the best choice I could have made. These massive, story-less tomes would have taken up valuable shelf space. They aren’t very good, and I still feel pity for everyone who has read them. Yes, I even pity myself.

Curse you, Mr Sanderson, for making me have to read these. I know you like Jordan’s books and, if by some miracle you read this, you probably hate me now for trashing them. The thing is, your writing is so much better than Jordan’s that I had to find out what happened prior to you taking over. I look forward to reading the final trilogy. Hopefully you won’t get Jordan’s curse and start saying “one more book… one more book”.

Was it worth reading the rest of Jordan’s books just to read Sanderson’s conclusion? I can only answer the question once I’ve finished reading the final three, so stay tuned.

Last night we were watching the Nova episode “The Pluto Files“. It was all about the hullabaloo surrounding the demotion of Pluto to Dwarf Planet status. One sequence in the episode started when Dr Tyson brought out an eight-foot weather balloon to use as a scale model of the Sun. He then proceeded through each planet, starting with Mercury, using a scale representation to show the relative size of each planet. Jupiter ended up being a kick-ball, for example, and Neptune was a croquet ball.

After each planet was introduced, I heard Samantha making small noises. Grunts of appreciation, maybe? I took them to be the verbal expression of learning new facts about our universe. But after each planet was introduced, she was a bit more vocal about it. I kept quiet. Finally, Dr Tyson takes out a small ball-bearing from a roller skate and places it in the dish for Pluto.

At this point, Samantha can no longer contain herself. She interrupts the show and says “Daddy?” I pause the DVR. “Yes?” I ask. And then the source of her agitation is revealed. “Daddy, do they really make eight-foot balloons!?”

(OK, that’s really “Nook eReader” but I like it better the other way.)

Two weeks ago my wife bought me the Barnes & Noble “nook” e-book reader. I had looked at the Kindle and the nook, and I had a — completely subjective, I admit — preference for the color touch screen. The Kindle has a nice keyboard (and a little joystick too), but I was just attracted to the nook’s clean design.

I took it on a business trip to California to see how well it worked. My thought was it would be easier to carry the nook with me than the usual three paperbacks I take when I go on trips. I used to bring just two, but I ran out of reading material one time, and went hunting desperately through the airport bookshops during a layover trying to find something appealing to read.

The nook worked very well. I had no problems transferring pdfs (I used “calibre” before upgrading to Snow Leopard, but now calibre crashes on me), and I bought Singularity Sky to read based on recommendations I got prior to the trip.

I initially had problems reading the book. They weren’t due to any issues with the nook proper, but actually reading a book on a brand-new piece of hardware was very distracting. I kept wanting to play with the features — browsing available books, looking at what was free, flipping around on pdfs, using the built-in dictionary, and so on — instead of read. I think I restarted Singularity Sky three or four times before I finally actually was paying attention to the book itself.

Once I got past the newness factor, the nook made reading really easy. No more worrying about bookmarks, or losing my place, or forgetting a book (they’re all right there!). I did notice some rendering issues, though, especially with italic text, but I’m sure that can be fixed with a software upgrade. After playing with the fonts a bit, I found that using the “smallest” setting, with the built-in serif font, worked the best. Any larger, and I was turning pages too frequently, which in itself is a distraction.

My one complaint about the nook is the responsiveness of the touch screen. They must have skimped a bit on the CPU because it’s kind of sluggish when compared with, e.g., an iPhone. But it works; it’s serviceable. And the built-in 3G and WiFi work very well for browsing and downloading.