Filed under: Art, Augmented Reality, Bipolar, Blade Runner, Comics, Health, Humor, movies, Science Fiction, Writing stuff, YouTube
You know, this whole thing made a lot more sense at 3:43 this morning.
To quote from a favorite character*: “Let me ‘splain. [pause] No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”
I recently gave an example of the . . . creative froth, let’s call it . . . that I always live with. I think particularly when I am in the middle of a creative endeavor this stuff is a lot closer to the surface, as I am now with working out all the characters, setting, plot, et cetera for the prequel to Communion of Dreams. It’s like the barrier between the conscious and subconscious parts of my brain becomes . . . thinner. Connections become easier.
Here’s an example of what I mean:
A number of my friends are or were cops. Last week I was amused by the video going around which was a fan-made movie of an oddball webcomic called “Axe Cop.” Here it is:
Bizarre, eh? Most of my friends thought so. I thought it was hilarious.
Anyway, at about 3:42 this morning I woke up from a dream. Just *Boom* – wide awake. It’s the damned Prednisone (I’m taking another course of it for ongoing efforts with my rib/lung pain) – a common side effect, and one which seems to be hitting me harder this time around than previously.
I had been dreaming. About an “accidental cop.” Someone who had been a cop previously, but then had moved on. The situation developed that he was drafted back into being a cop. Think Rick Deckard being convinced to resume detective work in Blade Runner.
Well, upon waking, in just a few short moments, I developed a whole backstory to the dream, ideas on characters, plot for future development, et cetera. I toyed for a moment with the idea of pitching it as a screenplay, perhaps TV pilot.
Madness, of course. And I realized that when I woke up more completely. But thinking it through, I came to the conclusion that what happened was something of this kind of progression:
- Cop.
- Ex-cop.
- Axe Cop.
- Accidental Cop.
I blame the Prednisone. And a strong manic swing.
Jim Downey
*Inigo, of course, whom I have discussed previously in relation to my own history.
Just a quick note – my first article for Guns.com has been posted, and you can find it here: Ammo by the Numbers. Here’s the lead paragraph:
One of the most bewildering moments for a relatively novice shooter is selecting ammunition. Go online, or into a big-box store, or even into your local gun shop and you can be confronted with a huge array of choices in any given caliber or cartridge design. Most of the boxes have a sort of ‘code’ on the side; some have little charts or even graphs on the bottom. But which one do you want? What does this stuff even mean? Do claims of a certain velocity or energy tell you anything?
Response so far has been good. And this afternoon I got started on a sequel, on how to choose an appropriate self-defense ammunition.
Onward!
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Filed under: Art, NPR, Press, Promotion, Publishing, Science, Society, Writing stuff
I woke this morning, birds singing, the sun shining, and feeling wonderf . . .
No, wait. Scratch that. It’s winter. No birds. Greyness in the dark, as the sun wasn’t up yet. And I had the usual collection of aches and pains common for middle-age .
Still, nothing unexpected hurt, and while I’m not quite to the point where I am pleasantly surprised to wake up at all, I still tend to think that any day above ground beats the alternative.
Then I paid attention to the radio. To this, in particular:
Today AOL announced that it had agreed to acquire the Huffington Post website for $315 million. $300 million of this is in cash, the rest of the purchase in AOL stock. Arianna Huffington, who co-founded the site six years ago, will continue on as President and editor-in-chief.
Gah.
OK, I didn’t read the Huffington Post. No, not because of their slightly-liberal slant – their politics don’t bother me in the slightest. Rather, because I hated their overall design and shallowness. And their willingness to promote anti-science claptrap. And Arianna’s voice makes my teeth hurt, and I can’t read anything the woman writes without hearing her voice.
But still, something about the sale bugged me more than these little things would explain.
It wasn’t until I had some coffee and had a chance to get my brain completely up to operating speed that I figured out why the news rubbed me so much the wrong way: exploitation.
OK, let me explain. I used to own an art gallery. And for 8 years I, my partner, my wife, and my employees busted butt to create a great space to showcase lots of local and regional talent. Over that time we represented hundreds of artists, did well over a hundred featured shows, sent out tens of thousands of full-color postcards, and sold a bunch of artwork. We did everything we could think of to promote our artists, to display the artwork to its best advantage, and to make sure our partnership with our artists was to everyone’s advantage.
And one of the things which used to chap my ass the worst was local bars and restaurants which used to exploit artists by hanging their artwork on the walls and saying it gave the artists “exposure”. I even wrote about this in my newspaper column after I had closed the gallery. The bars and restaurants almost never displayed the work well, seldom had any decent signage about the work/artist, and rarely if ever sold anything. But in exchange for this “exposure” they got to put fresh artwork up regularly to decorate their walls, without having to actually, you know, buy real art from real artists.
And this is why it bugs me so much to hear that the Huffington Post has been sold for $315 million. Because they have a business model which doesn’t pay their writers – they just give them “exposure.” Oh, some celebrities may get paid for contributing. But the average blogger who creates content for the site doesn’t get squat.
Will any of that $300 million in cash from the sale be parceled out to the people who have been writing for the site? Nope.
So, the lesson is clear: there’s gold in them thar artists – so long as you’re the one to be doing the exploiting.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Augmented Reality, Music, Predictions, Publishing, Society, tech, Weather, Writing stuff
Last night, in the middle of a particularly impressive blizzard, I came in to my office to check the weather online and get the latest news. I clicked on the link for my favorite weather website, and was thoroughly confused. No, they had the blizzard there. But they had completely changed the design of the site – the switch had been made while I had dinner and watched a movie.
There at the head of the newly redesigned site was a friendly little note that scared the shit out of me:
Notice Anything Different? Click here to find out what’s new and improved at Weather Underground!
Oh, no!!!!
* * * * * * *
Three classic anecdotes/sayings, all related, but each with a slightly different lesson to offer:
1. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
2. Two cowboys are working on a fenceline. Without warning, a rattlesnake bites one of the cowboys on the leg, and he falls to the ground writhing in pain. “Do something!” he shouts at the other cowboy. The other cowboy draws his revolver and first kills the snake, then takes careful aim and shoots his buddy in the leg – right where he’d been bit. The first cowboy screams, “why the hell did you do that??” The second cowboy responds, “I don’t know how to treat a snakebite. But I know how to treat a gunshot wound.”
3. One evening, a guy is walking back and forth under a streetlight, looking down and obviously searching for something. Another fellow walks up and asks “lose something?” “Yeah, my keys,” says the first guy. “I’ll help ya look,” says the second. They spend about a half hour looking all around the lamppost. Finally the second guy says “I don’t see them around here anywhere.” “Oh, I didn’t lose ’em here. I lost them down there by the corner.” “Then why the hell are you looking for them here?” asked the second guy. “Light’s better here.”
* * * * * * *
I clicked the link, and got the explanation: they were introducing their new design tonight! After 2 years of hard work and functionality testing, they were confident that everyone was going to LOVE! the new site!
They were wrong. I didn’t love it.
And seemingly neither did a bunch of other people, as I found out on their blog and FaceBook page. Sure, some folks liked the ‘clean, fresh’ look (what, is this a mouthwash or something?) but a whole lot of others didn’t. Gone was a nice large page which gave you everything at a glance – current conditions, a small radar image, and easy to understand graphics forecasting conditions for the next five days. There was a ton of information there, and you could see everything easily, then go into further detail with just a click. It had been replaced by a series of smaller boxes slightly left of center, which contained much less information and in a smaller font. You could still find everything, but you had to scroll down the page or click tabs to do so.
* * * * * * *
1. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
This is perceptual limitation. Quite literally, you see the world in just one way. There is no ‘other’ option – there’s not even an awareness that another option is possible.
We all have this for some things. It can be a religious belief. Or sexual orientation. Or how to cook. Or a thousand other things. We just see one way that things are, and are completely blind to any difference, usually very stubbornly so.
* * * * * * *
I couldn’t for the life of me understand why they had done this, why they had made the change they did. It was clearly an inferior product – harder to use, large amounts of whitespace on my monitor for no good reason. Until someone use said that the site had been “iPadized” – that is, formatted for the iPad.
Ah.
* * * * * * *
2. Two cowboys are working on a fenceline. Without warning, a rattlesnake bites one of the cowboys on the leg, and he falls to the ground writhing in pain. “Do something!” he shouts at the other cowboy. The other cowboy draws his revolver and first kills the snake, then takes careful aim and shoots his buddy in the leg – right where he’d been bit. The first cowboy screams, “why the hell did you do that??” The second cowboy responds, “I don’t know how to treat a snakebite. But I know how to treat a gunshot wound.”
Here is still a functional limit, but one based on an awareness that there are other potential choices. That doesn’t really change things – there is still only one thing to be done, at least in the current time frame, no matter how clumsy it is in practice. Perhaps later you can learn about the other choices, turn them from being purely theoretical into actual options.
* * * * * * *
After much complaining and gnashing of teeth on the part of many commentators, someone at Weather Underground added a “Classic Site” link to the above announcement. Word quickly spread of this, with people explaining how to change the necessary bookmarks and whatnot to get back to their preferred website design. I did – it was nice to have all the functionality I expected back.
Of course, others now started to chime in that they liked the new look, and that the complainers were just resistant to change.
* * * * * * *
3. One evening, a guy is walking back and forth under a streetlight, looking down and obviously searching for something. Another fellow walks up and asks “lose something?” “Yeah, my keys,” says the first guy. “I’ll help ya look,” says the second. They spend about a half hour looking all around the lamppost. Finally the second guy says “I don’t see them around here anywhere.” “Oh, I didn’t lose ’em here. I lost them down there by the corner.” “Then why the hell are you looking for them here?” asked the second guy. “Light’s better here.”
This one is really similar to #2, but I think with one subtle yet important difference: there is an awareness of the limitations of a given tool/choice, but it is nonetheless still so appealing that it gets used in ways which are really inappropriate or counter-productive.
* * * * * * *
And here I think the mistake was made by the web designers. Perhaps they didn’t intentionally set out to optimize the new site for devices such as the iPad – it is entirely possible that this has just become a prevailing design aesthetic because of such devices, and since they are relatively new, the whole aesthetic seems new and exciting.
Technology changes things. Long poetic narrative was suited for oral presentation or a scroll-format codex – with the development of the book form we know now (pages gathered together) back around the first century, that probably had an impact on the decline of that literary form, since the necessity to flip pages back and forth tends to break up pacing. Old 78 rpm records could only play for about four minutes – the slightly smaller discs about three minutes – and so that became the standard length for popular songs. LP records opened up musical possibilities and so saw experimentation with longer songs. There are countless other examples.
But that’s just my perspective – based on my preferences and expectations. I’m not used to using an iPad, and don’t own one, so do not consider it as an option. It could well be that such a format will become the standard – and those of us with large monitors still tied to a desktop machine will be nothing more than dinosaurs. Until the next big change comes along and redefines things again. (Perhaps the cyberware augmented reality systems I predict in Communion of Dreams? We’ll see.)
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Guns, Promotion, Publishing, RKBA, Writing stuff
Thought I’d pass along a small note – I’ve been asked to do some freelance writing for Guns.com.
In spite of it being about the oldest and most obvious firearms-related domain name possible, not much has been done with it previously. Late last year a new crew took over management, and the new owners seem to have a pretty good attitude about what they want to develop it into. They like my writing on firearm-related topics, and starting next week I’ll be a regular contributor there. It should be fun, and I’m actually kinda excited to be involved with it!
This is very early in the game, but I think it has a lot of potential, not just for me but for anyone interested in almost anything to do with firearms. Check out their site if you get a chance. I don’t plan on cross-posting much here, but if something particularly interesting or noteworthy happens, I’ll probably mention it here and on Facebook.
Wish me luck!
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Filed under: Book Conservation, Connections, General Musings, Politics, Science Fiction, Society, Writing stuff
A break in my conservation work this afternoon, as I wait for some wheatpaste to hydrate properly before cooking it. And I thought I would take a moment and explain just a bit why I posted the political item I did this morning.
The basic answer is that I’m just . . . eclectic . . . in my interests. That’s a big part of the reason why I tend to write about so many seemingly unrelated things. Part of that is due to my political inclinations – independent, untrusting of dogma, skeptical of authority.
But specifically, the post this morning is related to the thinking/planning/research I am doing for the prequel to Communion of Dreams. Because that book is concerned with what a world where fear has won looks like – where we *have* given over (almost) all our civil liberties in an attempt to secure safety. That’s not all the book is about, of course, but it does form a big part of the context for the story.
To be a novelist – even “just” a science fiction novelist – is to be a generalist. In order to construct a convincing reality different from our own, you have to be able to look deeply into how and why reality works, and understand how what choices you make as an author change the reality you construct. A conventional novelist can just describe our current reality, and be convincing – the reader will fill in the details on their own, and map their own understanding of reality onto the story the author wants to tell. Someone writing about a different reality – whether it is from the past or the future, adjacent to our world or far from it – has to get the “how” of that reality right, and do so without killing the story with too much exposition.
Anyway. Just a small insight into why I blog about the things I do. Now the wheatpaste is ready for cooking, and I must get back to work.
Jim Downey
I don’t agree with everything he has to say. But this piece by Philip Pullman is excellent on several counts, this passage among them:
I still remember the first library ticket I ever had. It must have been about 1957. My mother took me to the public library just off Battersea Park Road and enrolled me. I was thrilled. All those books, and I was allowed to borrow whichever I wanted! And I remember some of the first books I borrowed and fell in love with: the Moomin books by Tove Jansson; a French novel for children called A Hundred Million Francs; why did I like that? Why did I read it over and over again, and borrow it many times? I don’t know. But what a gift to give a child, this chance to discover that you can love a book and the characters in it, you can become their friend and share their adventures in your own imagination.
And the secrecy of it! The blessed privacy! No-one else can get in the way, no-one else can invade it, no-one else even knows what’s going on in that wonderful space that opens up between the reader and the book. That open democratic space full of thrills, full of excitement and fear, full of astonishment, where your own emotions and ideas are given back to you clarified, magnified, purified, valued. You’re a citizen of that great democratic space that opens up between you and the book. And the body that gave it to you is the public library. Can I possibly convey the magnitude of that gift?
I’ve got a wide streak of libertarianism – I don’t want others, particularly government, meddling in my life as though it were a nanny. But I was like Pullman – I came from a home which didn’t have books, and without a local library I would never have grown into the productive, creative adult I became. Not all kids will avail themselves of the opportunities a library presents, but it seems very much to me that Holmes had it right when he said: “Taxes are the price we pay for civilized society.”
Jim Downey
I was finishing up some work in the bindery this afternoon, just as I was finishing listening to The Two Towers. And this passage caught my ear:
And then black despair came down on him, and Sam bowed to the ground, and drew his grey hood over his head, and night came into his heart, and he knew no more.
When at last the blackness passed, Sam looked up and shadows were about him; but for how many minutes or hours the world had gone dragging on he could not tell. He was still in the same place, and still his master lay beside him dead. The mountains had not crumbled nor the earth fallen into ruin.
That may be one of the most masterful depictions ever written of how someone reacts to the death of a loved one.
Jim Downey
I finished my shower, still thinking intently about the creative breakthrough I had just had. I toweled off, looked at my face in the bathroom mirror. Almost by habit, I reached over with my left hand and flushed the toilet – only noticing as I did so that I had done that previously, and there was nothing in there needing to be flushed away.
“Heh,” I thought. “Perfect.”
* * * * * * *
One of the most difficult questions I ever get about my writing is “What’s it about?” It seems like a simple question, but it isn’t.
Here’s a bit from the current homepage for Communion of Dreams:
At its surface level it is classic science fiction, in that a new discovery leads to a reevaluation of what it means to be human. Beyond that are levels of human psychological development and religious allegory, giving the text a depth which will appeal to a wide range of readers. Or so I hope.
* * * * * * *
An excerpt from an interesting article from the BBC:
“Dr O’Connor said ‘Karen what are you doing? Your hand’s undressing you’. Until he said that I had no idea that my left hand was opening up the buttons of my shirt.
“So I start rebuttoning with the right hand and, as soon as I stopped, the left hand started unbuttoning them. So he put an emergency call through to one of the other doctors and said, ‘Mike you’ve got to get here right away, we’ve got a problem’.”
The story is about a woman suffering from “Alien Hand Syndrome” – a medical condition which can occur from a number of different brain injuries or surgery. She had her corpus callosum severed in order to help cure epileptic seizures, and this worked, but it also resulted in this independent behavior of her left hand – a classic example of how the two hemispheres of the brain can operate separately under certain conditions.
* * * * * * *
There’s still almost nothing in the file I opened last week. But as I noted the other day, the weekend trip to Iowa gave me a chance to sort some things out. Since then, I have been working hard on the conceptual groundwork of the book. Well, a part of me has, anyway.
This is why it is hard to explain “What’s it about?” – only parts of my writing are conscious constructs.
To a certain extent, I play a game of tennis with myself, batting an idea back and forth between conscious thought and unconscious processing. Or between “sides” of my brain, if you will (though the left-right dichotomy of popular culture is not as simple as most people think). Part of the time I am thinking logically, working through problems. But part of the time I am processing emotion and insight below a conscious level. Last weekend I sorted out some ideas. This week I chewed over those ideas further, but in a way which I can’t really explain. And this morning once again they emerged into conscious thought.
It’s a breakthrough, an organizational insight. One of the basic levels of the book has now fallen into place. I’ve gone from the essential metaphor I mentioned previously to an understanding of how that structure plays out. Critical scenes are now starting to write themselves.
This is only another step, and in some ways a small one – I still haven’t written a word of text. But I have a deeper understanding of what I want to accomplish. I understand why my left hand is unbuttoning my shirt, or flushing the toilet, if you will.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 