Mark's Musings

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.

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.

It’s still following me around:

(Via youtube)

In a recent column, Cringely writes:

We didn’t need Google, or didn’t think we did before Google came along. I don’t recall sitting around complaining about Alta Vista and Excite and the other pre-Google search engines, which seemed to do a pretty good job in their day.

Is he serious? Does he not remember all the search engine arguments from the mid-to-late 90′s? There were dozens of them. Search engines, I mean. Even more arguments about them. Some sites aggregated results for you. Some sites would present all the results in separate frames in your browser, nine at a time — nine frames at a time — so you could scroll through tiny windows and hope your results might be buried somewhere within. On one day, search engine X would find what you’re looking for, and you’d rejoice and praise it. Then on another day, another search would fail miserably on X, and your colleagues would mock you and tell you to use Y. There were enough search engines out there that this could go on for some time.

The early version of the web was chaotic. Even more so than it is today. Many sites purporting to cover a topic were just lists of links to other sites. Yahoo! eventually grew to be a well-respected site, before it grew too large for its own good, just by providing “high-quality” links: links to sites that had content. But when a search engine would dump you onto a page with a score of links to other pages, you’d have to slog through then, one by one, to see if any (a) still worked, and (b) had what you’re looking for. This was a mind-numbing experience when browsers lacked tabs, and when every webmaster thought animated gifs looked cool. Insert here a casual damnation of the inventor of the <blink> tag.

(As an aside, who remembers “web rings”? You joined a ring site by signing up and linking to the site “before” you and “after” you. That didn’t last long, of course, as pages disappeared almost as quickly as they appeared, leaving most web rings broken and useless.)

Today, using Google, you find what you’re looking for. And if you can’t, it’s more likely that it doesn’t exist at all. So, yes, Mr Cringely, we were complaining about the state of web search. We were looking for something better. We did rejoice when Google went live.

Of course, this just means I needed to find something else to complain about.

Especially if it’s done in a clever way.

I would like to take an opportunity to promote the webcomic called Jump Leads, set firmly in the sci-fi comedy genre but, given its premise, can take on almost any setting. It has elements of Sliders, of Doctor Who, of Red Dwarf, and others.

Given this, it’d be easy to assume that there is nothing new here, and you’d be right if you feel that once someone has done an adventures-in-space comedy, it’s done. Since that’s untrue, you of course would be wrong.

The title, “Jump Leads”, refers to the two main characters: Meany and Llewellyn, not to those things you use to start a car with a dead battery. They’re trainees at a space station charged with keeping order in parallel universes and making certain nothing goes wrong. Their title is “Lead”. And they get the “jump” bit from their ship, which jumps among parallel universes much the way checkers jump about a checkerboard. Only not as predictable. Maybe Quantum Leap should have been thrown into the mix earlier. On top of that, you can add plenty of explicit and implicit sci-fi references for some meta-humor.

Which brings me to Ben Paddon’s writing. I’m the first to admit that my sense of humor doesn’t align with most, but there are enough of us who prefer “dry, subtle, and clever” that Jump Leads can not only exist, but thrive. The good news is that they’ve got dry, subtle and clever in spades. For example, when Our Heros are thrown into a supplies cupboard security brig which just happens to have shelves full of paint, we get an interrogation scene.

The drama is good as well, and has successfully avoided the “melo” prefix. Paddon isn’t afraid to kill off characters and it really lends a sense of danger to this otherwise comedic story, and writes the action sequences well as well.

The art, done by “JjAR”, is very nice as well, with a unique style that’s angular yet organic. The backgrounds are well done too, having the right level of science fiction-y feel without being distracting. The characters themselves get plenty of variation, with wonderfully expressive eyes, and pass the silhouette test nicely. The second issue (the one they’re making now) introduces the first female character who, unfortunately, has succumbed to pinup-itis: baring a midriff and/or wearing figure-revealing clothing. Not that I mind, mind, being as I am all too male for my own good, but it’s a flaw in an otherwise excellent production.

This is a comic that quickly made its way to my rss reader and, as they’re only on issue 2, looks like it’ll be there for a while. If you’re interested, start here and don’t miss the extras (scroll to the bottom; hopefully the extras will get their own link page some day).

Available at the Watchmen production blog

Argh!

I just read a blog entry by Catherine Sanderson and it roiled up all sorts of feelings of annoyance. And anger, too. Every time I read the title “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” I get irrationally angry about it.

I will buy the British editions of books written by British authors in order to get them in their un-”translated” form, even though it means spending quite a bit more money on them. My copies of Iain Banks’ books were all published in Britain. My copies of Roald Dahl’s books are all British editions. My copy of Philip Pullman’s trilogy is British.

I wonder if any American publisher has ever tried to publish an original British edition without the need for modification. Oh, I don’t mind changing spellings like color or traumatized, but it’s the wholesale replacement of entire sentences with ones that sound more American that bother me.

Consider my (whoops, here comes the anger again) earlier example of replacing “Philosopher’s” with “Sorcerer’s”. What was the point? The Philosopher’s Stone is a well-known story that I learned about as a pre-teen. It made sense in the first Potter book. The character of Nicolas Flamel was not something that J. K. Rowling made up – he was a real person who really existed in real life. For real! He was brought into the Potter mythology to give it an air of realism. Some idiot copy editor decided, for whatever reason (“hey, Sorcerer sounds more magickky!”), to change the title and now it makes no sense whatsoever.

So, here’s a mini-open-letter to all you American publishers out there: If you publish a book by a British author and change anything more than spellings, you just lost at least one sale. I am not a nit-wit who needs to be coddled through the reading process. I am not a simple-minded fool who refuses to read books from which I will learn new things. I can indeed be taught. If an author uses a phrase or idiom I never encountered before, I have access to a vast array of computers all networked together in a global orgy of tubes that will teach me its meaning – and from then on I will know it. And I will not have a problem when I encounter it again. And I will have enjoyed learning something.

Therefore, a challenge: next time a British author writes something in British English for the British public, try publishing it here in the States unmodified. Just try it, I dare you. It’ll be OK, really. I am currently reading Chamber of Secrets to my son. He’s eight, and enjoys listening to it. He reads along silently with me and, whenever I encounter a non-American word or phrase, I tell him what it means. When we encounter it again, I ask him if he remembers it, and he does. If an eight-year-old can handle learning non-native words then for chrissakes an adult can as well.

Argh!

“Emilio Lizardo is a top scientist, dummkopf.”
“So is Mr Wizard”

Alas, Mr Wizard is no more.

Rest In Peace, Mr Herbert. You brought the love of science to more kids than anyone could have possibly imagined.

After seeing some of maga’s Library Thing entries, I decided to try it out too. It looks like a pretty easy site to use, and they make it as straightforward as possible to add and review books.

One good thing about it is that you only need to enter a username and password to get started. No registration process, no email validation, no barriers to entry. As there’s also no competition, there isn’t any incentive to “cheat” with multiple accounts.

Adding books is easy too: just type in the name, or the author, or an isbn, or any bit of information you’ve got, and it will present you a list of matches. Click on the book cover, and bingo it’s on the list.

I signed up with the name mmusante, so you can see my virtual bookshelf and even subscribe to an rss feed of the books as I add them to the site. As of this writing, I’ve only put on the four books that I’ve read this year. But now I’ve got something fun to play with between Solaris compilations.