Fobs and combs

Now that Halloween is here, it's the official beginning of the season during which we complain that the official beginning of the holiday season shouldn't have happened yet. And that means it's time for a public service announcement.

O Henry's The Gift Of The Magi is terrible. Do not produce theatrical versions of it. Do not arrange it into songs. Do not host readings of it for defenseless children. Do not make allusions to it. Do not pontificate on its moral, or its applicability to the upcoming festive season.

Do not even read it. That's only encouraging it. And that's not the message we want to be sending.

In fact, don't even think about it. Since this post might have brought it into your mind, I hereby present the following mental palate cleanser:



That is all.

Orianthi

With all the press around Michael Jackson's death and the release of the "This Is It" film, there must be a lot of people discovering Orianthi right now just as I am, since her participation in Jackson's band in the would-have-been-upcoming tour is drawing a lot of notice. How had I not heard of her before?

Playing for Michael Jackson is hardly a good sign for a guitarist, as his music isn't really rock and isn't particularly guitar-heavy. (Yes, I know who played the solo for "Beat It," but even so.) However, watching a few of her videos and listening to some of her songs, I'm impressed. She's got chops, and is versatile about style. Her own single, According To You, is well-played but pretty generic pop-rock, clearly aiming at the same audience as Avril Lavigne, but that's not a bad thing. It's a good song, and her playing skill certainly shows. But here's a short example of her doing something bluesy very well:



Stylistically very different from the pop-rock of the other song.

Some of her playing seems derivative of one or another influence. Her obligatory guitar-noodle instrumental, "Highly Strung," just screams Steve Vai -- which again is not a bad thing. Other stuff is reminiscent of Carlos Santana, about whom many people are torn -- he's widely regarded and yet sometimes decried as a one-trick pony, but even if you agree to that criticism (I don't particularly, but I see where it comes from), she clearly isn't a one-trick pony even when imitating him. And there's plenty of other influences that stand out.

But even if a lot of her work seems to echo one of a dozen other influences, her sheer mastery of the instrument and all those diverse styles is praiseworthy in itself, and suggests we can hope she'll also add her own style to the mix. She's certainly at the point where the music comes naturally enough that she's fertile ground for her own contributions to arise.

Some of the praise I've seen for her feels overblown:



But there's something to it. You can certainly see for her age she's quite the virtuoso and full of promise.

It's a pity she's also trying too hard to have the kind of look that'll put her on posters on the bedroom walls of fourteen-year-old boys everywhere, because she's more impressive when she's letting herself be herself, both as a guitarist and as eye-candy. You can see it sometimes when she's focusing enough on the guitar work to forget to try to be sexy too.

In any case she's definitely someone to watch. But I feel dumb to have not discovered her until the same time that a big news event's got lots of other people discovering her!

Blink

I've just finished reading Blink: The Power Of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. This was a medium length book but it took a surprisingly short time to read: it's light and breezy, a very easy read. Which might be surprising, as it purports to be a study of an issue of psychology of considerable depth, but it still zips by with little effort and less time.

Most of the book is entertaining, engaging, and entirely unchallenging, since it consists of a series of anecdotes and real-world examples, told in an easy and enjoyable style, of the ways in which our subconscious perceptions and thoughts affect us where we usually don't notice. That's what 95% of the book consists of, and good thing, too, since that's where it shines. Had this been heavy or slow-going it might not have been worth it, but easy as it is, it's fascinating enough to bear the weight of reading it. Think of it as a smorgasbord of isn't-that-interesting moments on a common theme.

The author, however, probably intends it as an insightful commentary on human nature that will shock and amaze, and I suppose for a lot of people it is exactly that. But, without meaning to sound too arrogant, that's only the same way the "what is reality?" twist of The Matrix astounded so many people: these were people who had, previously, lived under rocks, and never heard of the idea before. (Aside: I know a lot of people loved The Matrix for reasons other than its philosophy, and these comments don't apply to those people. I'm only astonished by people who think it was a seriously innovative concept, rather than, as the creators intended, "an excuse to have kung fu fights with robots.")

The thing is, sure, anyone who's taken a semester of psychology, or pondered the nature of the creative arts, or investigated artificial intelligence, or studied epistemology, or even asked themselves why they like one band and not another, or one dish and not another, or one painting and not another, any of these people will have at least bumped into the question of how much of our thoughts and perceptions are happening at a level beyond our awareness. Only a slightly deeper consideration will have led us to conclude that in many cases, our professed thoughts are at best pretexts to justify unconscious ones. But there must be people who haven't thought about this.

I think the author probably also imagines he's not just pointing out that this is a fact of human existence, but also that he's shedding light on how it works, what it can and can't do, what effects it has on us. And certainly by time you're done with the book you will have some new ideas about those things, very likely. But those all come from the anecdotes and examples. His commentary offers no fresh insights; at best, it serves as effective segues between the real-world stories that tell the real story. He might also imagine it gives us tools for how to tap that part of our minds, but really, in the end, it just hints that you can learn to harness it with practice... which is no doubt true, but it hardly needs a book to tell us that.

If you've never encountered this idea, read Blink, stat. If you have, read it anyway, just to find a lot of elaboration in the examples. Either way, the fact that it will only take a few hours is enough reason to make it worth those hours.

Necromancy of the Light

As an example of what I wrote the last two days about originality in MUDs and other roleplaying games, let's consider necromancy in Lusternia, as it is, and as I might have done it.

The only practitioners of necromancy in Lusternia are the unabashed "bad guys", the city of Magnagora, just as you'd expect. However, this is not as firmly linked in history as it could have been; it's mostly a historical accident. The origins of necromancy are completely unrelated to the origins of all the other things that make Magnagora the bad guys (especially as the game was first developed, though some revisions have strengthened the connection since).

Necromancy was developed in a long-ago time as a means of sustaining more troops in the battle against the Soulless Gods, and it was a controversial technique, but it was being used by the "good guys" of the time -- the Vernal Gods, mortals raised up to godhood for the battle. Long, long after those battles were ended (with the last of the Soulless Gods, Kethuru, imprisoned by a set of Seals formed from the last of the Vernal Gods), necromancy was still used by some of the people of the Holy Celestine Empire, while others found it despicable, but they were all still parts of the same nation who just differed on tactics.

Largely by happenstance, it was some of the people who advocated for the use of undeath who chanced to be the biggest victims of the Taint, the bit of the influence of the Soulless that was released when explorers found a way past the Seals to Kethuru's prison. Those people were twisted by the Taint and embraced it as a means to more power, while everyone else recoiled in revulsion from the way the Taint disfigured both body and spirit. Thus, the Taint is the physical incarnation of, and explanation for, what might normally be called "evil", and the people who lived in the city that happened to fall prey to it... coincidentally including the advocates for the use of necromancy... became its standard-bearers.

There have been some elaborations later that posit necromancy as being related to the same fundamental force (excorperditio) that drives the Soulless, and hints that earlier experiments with necromancy in a still-earlier age (long before the Vernals) set the stage for the later development of undeath, so eventually, Lusternia will probably tie up the association of necromancy with the Soulless very neatly, leaving only the one coincidence that it happened to be Magnagora that was the "victim" of the Taint, as a result of an expedition that wasn't even sponsored by or originating from Magnagora's efforts.

So that's how Lusternia did it. Now, let's consider something about the politics of Lusternia. Out of the gate it had the same three sides that most MUDs start with: good, evil, and nature. Good took the form of New Celest, using faith and courage to seek to expiate their previous mistakes in unleashing Taint by driving it away for good. Evil took the form of Magnagora, embracing the Taint as a means of self-improvement and a pathway to power. Nature took the form of Serenwilde, a forest commune which resisted the Taint as a perversion of nature but which also disliked New Celest since cities are opposed to the natural order (though this was muted since Celest was also defenders of that part of the natural world that was underwater). Magnagora hated Serenwilde correspondingly (plus they just generally hated everyone). So in the triangle of relations, the reasons for Serenwilde and Celest to dislike each other were far weaker than the others, which tended to lead to a lot of alliances with "the lesser evil" and a resulting trivialization of those considerations -- Taint is so visible an antagonist that something as nebulous as "they're savages" or "cities are unnatural" tends to be forgotten and lost in the face of practical exigencies of battle. (Especially since Magnagora came out of the gate far more powerful than the others, due to skill imbalances, a larger playerbase, and a system with too much positive reinforcement.)

This combination of alliances got stale, and often, players flew in the face of it and formed different alliances. But they never lasted because the reasons for the "default" alliances were too strong to resist for too long. Later events made the political balance more complex (after quite a few false starts) and more interesting (and then eventually threw it all away in favor of a few bad ideas, but that's another story).

Putting this together, imagine if instead, undeath had been posited as a force of the Light, a holy ability to transcend and resist death. Instead of raising shambling, brain-eating zombies, suppose you raised light-infused spectres bearing the cold of the grave into battle against the infidels. Instead of becoming a rotting lich with a taste for human flesh, suppose you turned yourself into an undying vessel for an angelic presence which gave you strength to fight against evil, at the price of your humanity. And suppose this was all described in ways that were very clearly opposed to the natural order of life, death, and rebirth, the cycles of the world.

You could readily rebrand all the trappings of necromancy as being in harmony with the themes of New Celest and divorce it from the associations with evil. After all, there is plenty of symbolism in the space of the sacred for defying death, for resurrection, for transubstantiation past the weakness of the flesh. It would not only be a different, and less familiar, take on the ideas of necromancy, it would also serve to give New Celest and Serenwilde a fundamental, ideological difference as great as that between the Light and the Taint, one which could not be so easily brushed aside.

It's wandering too far down paths of unconventionality like that (and of which that is only the smallest of possibilities) which ensures my ideas would never make a MUD (or any other kind of game) as popular as Lusternia.

Original unoriginality

Thinking more of what I wrote yesterday about the unmarketability of my ideas, I considered the ways in which Lusternia is, and isn't, original.

By and large, all the familiar concepts from fantasy (and especially fantasy roleplaying games) are present, and in their familiar configurations. You have the same conflicts, the same imagery, the same types of characters, the same symbols, and the same concepts. Almost all the skills are cribbed from some aspect of fantasy or pseudoscience: the Runes skill draws heavily from Scandinavian runes, the Highmagic skill from Qabala, the Astrology skill from Ptolemy's vision of astrology, and so on. Cosmology elements are swiped from Tolkein, Lovecraft, Hinduism, and CNN.

And all these elements, swiped shamelessly from so many sources, end up arranged in familiar patterns. The forestal Great Spirits are aligned with meanings similar to that in Celtic myth, despite their juxtaposition against and association with elements from Hindu and Native American myths, so that everything ends up comfortable. Necromancy ends up associated with the forces of evil, even though its origins are not associated with evil. Angels and demons have just the same characteristics one expects despite the absence of Judeo-Christian origins.

(There's one notable exception. The four elements are present and have an important role, each of the cities associated with them and their mages tied to them, but they don't have the usual meanings. Air and fire do, actually: the city of air is full of people very logical and thoughtful, while the city of fire is wild and unconstrainted. But water has no associations with emotions or change, instead being tied to the stars and the Light, and associated with a very scholarly race. And earth has no overtones of healing, nature, or even resilience; it is, for historical reasons, the element of the Taint, the incarnation of what passes for Evil in Lusternia.)

What's really original about Lusternia is thus not the elements in it, nor their arrangement. Instead, it's a very original cosmology and story whose entire purpose seems to be to explain the presence and arrangement of all of the familiar elements. That is a brilliant solution and I give kudos to Estarra, the creator, for it. It means that Lusternia is steeped in familiar, comfortable, compelling elements, and you can make a character that's just like your favorite character from a book, from an AD&D game, or from your own personal beliefs, if you happen to run that way.

But the reasons why all those things exist, and why they are aligned as they are, are new and unique to Lusternia. And more importantly, and a bigger contrast to other games, there is a reason for it. (At least most of it. A few things just happen to be that way.) Which not only justifies all those familiar things, it adds new dimensions, gives you new perspectives on them. It tricks you into exploring some original stuff, by luring you in with the familiarity and then letting you consider the ramifications of the original explanations and origins for those familiar elements.

I've done the same thing to some extent many times. For instance, the starting concept for one of my roleplaying campaigns, ...And Hope To Die, derived from a few familiar elements I wanted new explanations for. (The first, the inspiration for the whole campaign: why do fantasy worlds tend to have all the animals and plants we have, plus a few extras? Why not have the mystical properties derive from the same animals and plants?) But even that campaign, which "coincidentally" ended up being a fairly conventional medeival fantasy world (albeit one with dangerous aardvarks instead of dragons), had a whole series of explanations (starting with a rogue mage in Ireland getting his hands on a book of Chinese magic during the time of the Black Plague) that led to lots of interesting and unexpected consequences overlaying the familiar castles, mages, warriors, and politics.

But even then, I tend to turn the knob a lot farther from "familiar" than Lusternia does. I include enough familiar elements to provide a hook, but more than that, to make the unfamiliar parts more striking. Dwarves as egg-layers with an insect-like hive mind? It makes perfect sense, and explains many of the things about how dwarves are traditionally depicted, but it also tends to make people reel. My worlds, when they aren't intentionally hewing close to a genre to milk every bit out of its tropes, tend to do that. Which is one of the reasons I would probably be able to make a popular MUD only because I set out to do so, not because of inspiration.

Akanbar

I've previously written how Lusternia has been mired in an escalation of conflict which has diluted the meaning of the conflict, and the aftereffects of that escalation, notably the almost complete extinction of culture. Because of that, I've been playing around with another MUD called Akanbar.

In a lot of ways, Akanbar serves to remind me of what's been so great about Lusternia when it isn't giving in to its worst impulses. Akanbar has virtually no events, is rife with bad grammar and even spelling errors, has minimal and shallow roleplaying from most people, and succumbs to the wrong-headed (but surprisingly popular) idea that you shouldn't be told how your skills or the mechanics work, you should have to figure it out by trial and error. (As a particularly egregious example, some things are cured by smoking herbs in pipes, but the help files not only don't tell you what is cured by which, they don't even tell you the commands used to fill, light, and smoke a pipe.) And its history is very minimal, mostly resembling a thinly-veiled story of why the creators decided to make the MUD.

And yet for all that, Akanbar's been more fun than Lusternia. Now, I'll admit some of that is the "new car smell" that comes from everything being new, the process of discovery. And a bit more comes from a friend who retired from Lusternia a long time ago getting involved in Akanbar, someone who's always fun to roleplay with but with whom I've had no chances to roleplay in a long time. (She and I are playing fraternal twin sisters.) But some of it is just that, even if Akanbar is kind of bad, and compared to Lusternia's best it's awful, compared to Lusternia right now, it's still just a lot more fun, and that shows how far Lusternia has fallen.

There are some glimmers that Lusternia is recovering, coming back out of its long sleep, but they are fragile at best: another nudge in the wrong direction and it could easily be reversed. It's still the case that the fighting has little or no connection to the reasons for the fighting, and while it's not quite 24 hours a day anymore, it's still almost omnipresent and tends to knock down any attempts to do something else before those attempts can get anywhere. But at least those attempts, very tentatively, are being occasionally made again. If things get better, the 20/20 hindsight people will point to this as proof that it was always going to get better. If it takes a while longer, this will be forgotten, so those 20/20 hindsight people will just point at something else.

For its part, Akanbar has some good things. While some of the skills are dumb (it takes a lot of investment to get some very basic things, even more so than in IRE games), a lot of them are very cool. (I especially like how the Shadows skillset acts like what Dreamweaving tries to be in Lusternia, only without the bug-plagued implementation.) It's also nice to see a combat system which has some of the interesting elements of Lusternia and other IRE games, but is five notches less complex, so that it's actually probable that if I keep around long enough, I can be a good combatant. And since roleplaying is pretty minimal, I have a real chance to make an impact on the shape it takes; it's easy to be a big fish in a small pond.

The contrast, though, still makes me ache for a MUD like what Lusternia used to be. For as many MUDs as there are out there, it's disheartening how many of them suck; and not just that they suck, but that they do it by choosing one of the same three or four paths rather than at least sucking on their own terms. I suppose those paths are the ones that attract almost all the customers. That's why I could never run a successful MUD; I'd be too interested in making something new instead of something that enough people would like. I can force my ideas into marketable shapes to some extent, but only to a certain scale; bigger than that, and anything marketable makes me say, "why bother, someone else is already doing that, in fact everyone else is already doing that" and lose interest.

Meniscus

Despite having a lazy day yesterday, and spending a lot of it (especially during Internet outages or while waiting for other things) watching the first two-thirds of The Dark Knight (at least until Siobhan got home... not sure when I'll finish it if ever), I did manage to get my new file/print server Meniscus put into production.

There are still more things to load, most notably PaperPort, the scanner software. (If it won't work on Vista, I will need to install it somewhere else, probably Siobhan's computer Heraclitus.) But the must-have stuff is there. That includes:

• All the Windows updates, AVG, Defender, etc.
  
• File shares with shared documents, software, and all our media
  
• Our laser printer and its share
  
• TVersity to stream that media to the PS3 and other devices
  
• HomeSeer to handle our home automation system
  
• DynDNS Updater to ensure that the http://tricklebrook.dyndns.org/ address to get to HomeSeer works
  
• The backup drive and a scheduled backup job
  

HomeSeer was the thing that took all the time this time because the old interface I have used to connect it to my Z-Wave home automation system is not compatible with Vista, so I had to order a new one, and that also forced me to move to a beta version of HomeSeer. I got the new controller yesterday, and finally got HomeSeer installed and working.

If and when we get that T1 line up and running, HomeSeer will also serve as a makeshift web server in case we feel like hosting anything. For now, all it serves are the two main interfaces to my home automation system, the built-in HomeSeer one and Rover, the stripped-down, sped-up interface intended for use on cell phones, tablets, and other devices with limited hardware or software. (Rover's my own program, released as freeware.)

Vista is everything everyone says about it, a pain in the butt with few if any benefits and lots and lots of shortcomings. I wonder how things would have gone if I had Windows 7. (I imagine I'd've had even more problems just with getting compatible drivers for everything.)

Lazy day

I've got a bunch of things I want to get done today but I'm having trouble getting started. Part of it is having had a late night last night (went to see Paula Poundstone at the Flynn and didn't get home until 11:30, then got up early to meet some friends for tool shopping, so I'm fairly tired). Part of it is my momentum being broken by a string of Internet and power outages. Part of it is the day being so gray and rainy. But it seems more than that; it's just one of those lazy days.

What I should be doing, apart from the chores I just finally finished, is finalizing the setup of my new server. The replacement Vista-compatible Z-Wave controller arrived yesterday so I'm ready to go. If I work on it today, it should be the case that I can pull out the old server Octopus and put in the new server Meniscus by the end of the day. And since tomorrow will be almost entirely taken up with shopping, it's today or nothing. Plus I'm supposed to be doing game prep for GMing, another thing I can't seem to get moving on.

But what I feel like doing is watching a movie, or reading. Even playing Rock Band, which I haven't done in weeks, is only half-appealing. Almost seems like too much effort.

So what I will do is just start on the server anyway. The best cure for this kind of inertia is to push through it. Once I get moving, these doldrums will fall away. Usually.

Antivaxxers

I normally avoid the topic of antivaxxers (people who advocate not vaccinating children, often based on a claim that vaccines cause autism or other problems) simply because it just infuriates me to no good purpose. I can't really do anything about it, so why get incensed? And it's sure to incense me.

It's a mild but constant irritation to realize how many people use entirely illogical reasons to do things like reject science-based medicine. It's not really different from people rejecting reason or science more generally. It's just a tarted-up form of willful closed-mindedness that lets a person spurn centuries of peer-reviewed, relentlessly self-criticizing and self-correcting, verifiable research because they know a time when it was wrong for a while (and ignore that it was the same process that made the error which found and fixed it, providing them the citation of its error in the first place); and yet, with the other hand, gleefully accept something patently absurd based on the most tenuous and unrepeatable of anecdotal coincidences.

But when you do that to your own detriment, that's one thing. Go ahead and treat your inflamed appendix with crystals, for all I care. You're mostly just selecting against yourself, which is just as well. Anyway, it's not my place to tell you what to die from. (Of course, you don't die in a vacuum; odds are, your intentional, easily avoided mistake is going to cost us all in our taxes when you end up costing a hospital $50,000 to fix what it could have fixed for $10,000 if you'd gotten it treated medically instead of with some black market herbal tea that probably made it worse. But everyone makes choices like that which affect others in this way; it's a slippery slope to get too obsessive about one, no matter how dumb it is.)

When you force a child, who gets no say in the matter, to be endangered, for your own stubborn blindness, that's far worse. But even there, that's inevitable. You can't take risk away from your child, you can only choose between different risks. You should do so out of informed and reasoned cause, not out of ignorance. You should know what the risks are, and have some idea how to compare what a one in a million risk is versus a one in a trillion -- because they're very very different but they sound very similar. But ultimately, no matter what you do, you're choosing a risk for your child and they get no say in it.

The real ethical failure is that when you choose not to vaccinate you are making that choice not for yourself, not for your child, but for every human being that's going to come into contact with your child, and every human being that's going to come into contact with them, and every human being that's going to come in contact with them, and so on. Each additional layer of separation reduces the effect, like gravitation receding with distance; yet as we do more traveling, have more vectors for diseases to spread, are more crammed together, those distances are dropping. 100 years ago, getting an infectious disease was endangering your town or city. Today, it's endangering your entire region, maybe a whole state or province, but we're on the edge of where it endangers an entire country, and more.

To do this over allegations that have been absolutely, unequivocally, thoroughly disproven, out of wild ignorance of the actual facts of the situation, is mind-numbingly stupid. It makes me angry in a way I rarely get angry. Like, angry enough to imagine hitting Jenny McCarthy in the face with a brick. Angry enough to think maybe it'd be better if an asteroid hits Earth, because maybe whatever evolves after us won't be so agonizingly stupid.

That people have the leisure, safety, and health to be complacent about medicine and reject it, is only possible because medicine gave them the life they're being so cavalier about. Fifty years ago, odds are good Jenny McCarthy would have suffered polio, which killed more people during the war years than World War Two itself did. A hundred years ago, the odds of Jenny McCarthy surviving childhood would have been relatively small. It's easy to take for granted the benefits as you reap them while rejecting them. But why embrace ignorance? Why are there so many people for whom truth is not even close to adequate?

So that's why I have to avoid the subject. I just froth for a while...

...and who needs that?

Austen and Shakespeare

It's very common to stage productions of Shakespeare's plays in a different time than they were originally set in, by changing costumes and sets, but not changing the lines. In fact, it's so common, The Onion wrote a typically biting farce about it: Unconventional Director Sets Shakespeare Play In Time, Place Shakespeare Intended.

MORRISTOWN, NJ—In an innovative, tradition-defying rethinking of one of the greatest comedies in the English language, Morristown Community Players director Kevin Hiles announced Monday his bold intention to set his theater's production of William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in 16th-century Venice.

"I know when most people hear The Merchant Of Venice, they think 1960s Las Vegas, a high-powered Manhattan stock brokerage, or an 18th-century Georgia slave plantation, but I think it's high time to shake things up a bit," Hiles said. "The great thing about Shakespeare is that the themes in his plays are so universal that they can be adapted to just about any time and place."

Of course, some of his plays are intentionally set up in such a way that they can easily be transposed -- The Tempest is an obvious example. With others, we transpose them with a little forgiveness for a few elements that might not make as much sense (e.g., the cultural acceptance of the idea of ghosts behaving as Hamlet Sr. did that suits Denmark but might not suit all settings in which Hamlet has been transposed), or we let other parts of the play simply get dropped (like the whole Fortinbras part of Hamlet).

We can do this in part because the original settings are already so far remote that transposing them to another setting has little impact: the timely parts of the plays have already become a footnote, while the timeless parts are what brings us back to them, so if we're already in it for the timeless parts, they hold up fine to transposition. Plus there's already a lot of oddness that's accepted because that's just part of Shakespeare, like how readily a little costume change completely disguises someone from their closest friends and relatives, so once you're already having to accept those things, it's easy enough to not think twice about the idea of the Queen of the Fairies in the woods outside a mall in Hackensack, rather than outside Athens.

I wonder if we can ever be so far removed from the world in which the writings of Jane Austen are set (essentially her real world) that her plays can be readily transposed. While it's been done, it was done only by rewriting around a common idea (Clueless is based on Emma in much the same way Forbidden Planet is based on The Tempest) or by integrating the stories into other stories (as in The Jane Austen Book Club or Lost In Austen), not by actual transposition, using the same dialogue in a different setting.

At first blush, the answer seems to be 'no' because any of Austen's writings is much more firmly entrenched in, based on, derived from their setting than even the most historically-rooted of Shakespeare's plays (such as his histories). It might also matter that they're books, not plays, so the idea of transposing dialogue is less relevant given how much of the book is retold in other ways when it's made into a film.

But I wouldn't sell the idea entirely short. If Hamlet can be made sense of by people who don't understand how kings were elected in Denmark, then Pride and Prejudice will one day (maybe not today, but maybe in the future) make just as much sense to people who have little understanding of how scandal could affect a family in Regency England. More to the point, they won't find that any harder to grasp than the idea of scandal working that way in pre-WW1 France, or the Byzantine empire, or any other setting just as alien to the audience as Regency England will be by then.

Pedestrian buttons

You know those buttons on intersections that pedestrians are supposed to press to get a chance to cross the intersection? Back where I grew up on Long Island, none of them, not one, did anything at all. I even timed it with the stopwatch that was part of every digital watch back then and confirmed it.

Now, depending on where you're from, you might be saying "well, duh", since apparently in most of the country this is the case. One wonders why these buttons are so ubiquitous when most people know better than to use them. Did they used to work and stopped? Can't be that simple: back on Long Island I saw new installations after new construction where they didn't work from the day they went in. Are they there in case of some future activation, that still hasn't happened after decades?

But here in central Vermont, at least, the buttons actually work. One periodically sees tourists being astonished by that, particularly during leaf-peeper season (which is now winding down). I remember one visitor to the area who was astounded, and told me that she likes to stop in Vermont on the way to other places just to press the button and see it work.

Flat tire

Had a flat tire this morning before we even got the car out of the garage, and good thing, because that would have been very hard to do on the road.

First, the instructions suggest you chock the opposite wheel to keep the car from rolling when you jack it up. I assume that if you are on the road and don't happen to have a chock with you, this step is optional? I did have one since I was in my garage, so I did it anyway.

The lug nuts were on so tight I literally had to stand on the wrench and jump up and down to get them all loose. No wonder they have you do that before jacking up the car.

Doing all this with gloves on (since it's bloody cold!) is hard. The hardest part, though, was flipping pages in the manual (and later, typing on my phone while I was asking for advice...).

Where I really got stuck was getting the wheel off once the car was jacked up and the nuts were off. It was stuck good and hard. I had to tap with a rubber mallet (and when I say "tap" I mean hit as hard as I could) and that wasn't enough. I finally had to pry with a crowbar with all my strength, which I was hesitant to do since I wasn't sure where to pry. Eventually I had to just hope I had the right spot and wasn't breaking my brakes. Which it turns out I did, and the tire finally came off.

Took about 45 minutes to change the tire, which is pretty ridiculous really. I'm sure it'd go a lot faster a second time though. But what if I didn't have a crowbar? The one built into the lug wrench might be good enough (now that I know where to pry) but I am doubtful. Wonder why the rim was so stuck in the first place.

T1 without fractions

The fractional T1 we were working on getting was going to be bought through a company called Megapath, but the actual wiring to the house would be done by the company that manages the local wiring: Fairpoint. So we had to talk to them about the location. Somewhere along the way it occurred to Siobhan to ask them if they could beat Megapath's price.

By sheer happenstance, they said that they had just, that week, instituted a new program for T1s and they could beat it soundly. Instead of $389/month for a 256Kbps fractional T1, they're quoting $209/month for a full T1 at 1.5Mbps. That's about six times faster than the 256K line, and not only isn't it any slower on throughput than the WildBlue line (where the 256K would have been a fair amount slower), it's probably even a little faster.

So we've cancelled the Megapath line and we're working on the Fairpoint account. As it happens, our account representative is someone I know. He used to work for the state's IT people and was the one to bring a T1 line to my office years ago. Cute.

Their install costs are no more than Megapath's: the primary difference is Megapath cites a flat price for the router and equipment, while Fairpoint leaves it to me to procure it. So I went out on eBay to get an idea for prices and found an older (but entirely adequate) Cisco router with the CSU/DSU (the bit that ties a T1 into it) included, about to end with a starting bid of $10. So I bid, so instead of the $599 Megapath wanted, I'm spending less than $30 delivered for the router.

Fairpoint says that the construction to bring the line to us will probably take a few months, but that would have been true through Megapath too (it's just that Megapath didn't know that yet), since it would be the same lines. So we have a bit of a wait, which is going to be agonizing. But the idea of a true T1 is really exciting, and the price being so much lower is certainly good news.

In fact, we're wondering if we might not be able to reduce or eliminate our satellite TV costs after there's a true T1. Between things like Hulu, Netflix, and other sources for TV over the Internet, we might be able to get everything we want. Or if not, we might be able to drop many of the channels and pay for a much cheaper service. We're not going to hurry through deciding that, though. If we can save money on that, that's great, but if we can't, we can still float this cost.

The Fairpoint account doesn't include any email boxes, but upgrading our POBox accounts from forwarders to mailboxes adds only $15/year, so I'm not worried about that. It's still hazy to me whether it will include a domain (tricklebrook.org if it does) or if we'll still want to use DynDNS to provide mapping to our home automation system.

This is definitely the kind of chicken you don't want to count until it's hatched. We got very excited about DSL once before when Verizon promised we could get it and then it fell through. Still, this seems more likely to pan out than that was. We're going to have to get in the habit of revisiting all those things that we always dismissed as impossible with our connection -- Skype, webcams, online gaming, streaming video, and more ideas keep coming up.

HomeSeer on Windows Vista

Since our home server Octopus is cobbled together with the failed parts of Siobhan's previous computers, it tends to lock up fairly regularly. I had hoped that sitting quietly and serving files and not being hooked to a monitor and being configured for minimum video performance might prevent that, but apparently bad video cards are stubborn that way. So when Woot! had a cheap computer system up, I bought it, and I have been transferring things to it as time permits.

It's been slow going since I don't have a spare monitor to hook up to it, so I had to share a monitor with my laptop (and for a while I had a problem with changing my laptop's video configuration to add or remove a monitor causing a bluescreen and painful reboot, but a video driver update finally fixed that). But by far the bigger obstacle has been Windows Vista. This is my first time dealing with Vista and I wonder if I shouldn't've formatted and reinstalled XP (especially now that I realize that the system was configured with the hard drive partitioned, which always seems to bite me later). But I figured I'd tough it out; about time I learned Vista, what with its successor almost here.

I eventually got file shares working, and got a VNC server to work so I can get around the missing monitor problem. (I've always used RealVNC before this, but the freeware version doesn't work well with Vista. UltraVNC does. Pity I wasted a day fighting with RealVNC before I switched.) I've also installed the most important utilities for the server, and a few handy tools. TVersity is working on it fine as well. And having bought a USB printer cable, I have the printer working too.

There are two applications that run on this server: HomeSeer and PaperPort. And they'll be the last things I set up. HomeSeer, my home automation system, is what I'm currently stuck on. Moving HomeSeer from one computer to another is tricky: I've found various "how to" posts and guides but they don't agree with one another and none of them even tries to address the transition from one version of Windows to another. I've tried various combinations of installing and copying over, but each one has proved problem-fraught in one way or another. And each iteration takes hours to try.

Today I'm going to try wiping all traces of HomeSeer, then doing a clean install and trying to get it working, then importing one bit at a time. It'll be tedious to redo all my configuration, reinstall all plugins (including the ones I wrote), etc. but at least it should work. And when it doesn't I can tackle each problem one at a time.

I sure hope PaperPort (the software that goes with the scanner) works on Vista, or I'll have to move the scanner to Siobhan's computer. Either way, I hope to have the new server installed and switched over to today.

Malcolm versus The Middle

There's a new sitcom out this year called The Middle which Siobhan has been watching while I've been in the room. At first, when I saw her watching it, I didn't know what the title was. It struck me, hard, how much the show seemed like an imitation of Malcolm In The Middle, to the point where many of the characters matched on a one-for-one basis, and I wondered if the creators realized and were doing it on purpose. But when I found out the title, that paradoxically made me think maybe they aren't, because that's just too obvious.

Actually, the title in this case refers to the fact that the show is set in the Midwest, the "flyover states", and this is made clear in the show's first episode's opening narration. However, essentially nothing in the show, as far as I can see, has actually referred to the Midwest in any meaningful way, or depended on it. There was one scene that took place on a highway in cornfields where there was no cell coverage, but nothing about it, not a single word or joke, would have changed if it was a winding road in wooded hills, or anywhere really you can imagine not having cell coverage. Another joke referred to Terre Haute, but it would have played out precisely the same if it had been Hackensack, San Bernardino, or Galveston. There haven't been any jokes that alluded to the culture of the Midwest (or if there have, I missed them!). The entire show could be transplanted to any suburb or small town in any part of the USA with no change other than the scenery and place names, without a single word needing to change. So it's doubly odd that the name of the show refers to something not (so far) central to the show, unless it's a very ham-handed way of drawing the comparison to Malcolm.

This just seems like a bad idea though because it is a comparison that can't go well for the new show. But I suppose they can't help it. The premise is very similar, with a family of about the same type and mix of personalities enduring the same kinds of challenges and trials. The biggest difference is no Malcolm, and no analog to Malcolm, which is a bad start. The mother character is the viewpoint character (though she does voiceover narration instead of talking to the camera), and because of that, she lacks Lois's most interesting traits, her fiery and terrifying will. There's nothing really replacing it either: she's simply tired and stretched out as Lois was. The youngest child is nearly a perfect match to Dewey and even resembles him, though instead of having Dewey's unrecognized obsession and talent with music, he has one with books. The oldest child parallels Francis's being an unmotivated slacker, though without any of Francis's wild (and admittedly over the top) tendency to cause trouble. The father is well-meaning but clueless but still isn't that much like Hal because his cluelessness is simpler, it's just that he's painfully honest out of a complete lack of awareness that there's ever a time to be anything else -- a trait which I can certainly appreciate, but which comes off as more of a one-trick pony than Hal.

And the middle child... well, she doesn't really correspond directly to anyone on Malcolm which is a relief. Her dominant character trait is that she's comically inept but doesn't seem to be discouraged by it. She's constantly trying to get involved in some new activity, she always proves unbelievably bad at it and doesn't succeed, but she's perenially cheerful, and each time her dreams and hopes are crushed she's only down for a short time (or not at all) before she's ready for another.

The characters verge on being caricatures. Not that the characters on Malcolm were rigidly realistic; they were very over the top, especially Francis. But there was a depth to them. Within their world they make sense. Now, I realize it's very unfair to be comparing several seasons of Malcolm with three episodes of The Middle; if I had analyzed Malcolm this closely after three episodes I suppose it would have failed the test too. But my gut feeling says that after two seasons, The Middle likely will still have characters that are more superficial, more caricature-like, less fully realized.

If you take any two characters in Malcolm and consider their relationship to one another, you will find that there's a lot to it, you can say something unique about that particular relationship, its history, and how it contributes to the characters, to who they are. The closer you look at the family, the more it holds together, the more internally consistent it seems, the more it becomes inevitable that each person would be just the way they turned out to be, the more clear it is how the family works. I suspect that if you did the same thing on The Middle it would fall apart under that level of scrutiny. You would have to turn to answers like "it's that way because the writers need it to be that way" or "he's just like that" too much, and you would conclude that, even in the unrealistic sitcom world they live in, the family wouldn't hold together.

Maybe not. Maybe after we get to know the characters better it will turn out that there's a depth we haven't seen. And if there isn't, that's okay. A sitcom can be perfectly serviceable and entertaining without that. And I am laughing when it's on. Malcolm in the Middle is a really high bar to set, after all; a sitcom needn't strive to match it just to be good. But it's not my fault; they're the ones who set themselves up for the comparison, so they have to live up to it.

Integrative Medicine

We've been going to the same family practice health center for many years. A few years ago our primary care physician left and we were assigned to a physician's assistant who turned out to be great, so we happily stayed, but now she's also leaving. There's supposed to be a new doctor coming on next year who the PA said we'd like.

However, with the other changes in staff, a new doctor is the head doctor of the health center, and he wants to change it to an "Integrative Medicine" center, featuring "holistic" practices such as acupuncture, herbal medicine, "body work", and the like. The language is not overtly worrisome: he's not actually talking about us getting our chakras aligned (I always wanted to have mine rotated and balanced, too, but no one does that) but some of it is worryingly close.

Not that I think that all forms of "alternative medicine" are hokum. There are some real benefits to treating the emotional needs of the patient in ways that reach them, there are genuine medical uses for the placebo effect, and in the wide variety of "alternative" medical practices, there have to be a few that have something scientifically valid behind them, if only statistically. So it's possible, barely, to advocate adding just a smidgen of holistic practices to actual medicine and still retain the realness of medicine. But virtually every time I've ever heard anyone advocate for even the smallest amount, they were actually going way overboard, casting aside such things as objectively verifiable claims and scientific method.

So my first worry is, they're going to gradually slide farther and farther from real medicine and more and more into stuff that's going to make me uncomfortable. My second worry is that even if they don't slide, there will always be an undercurrent of subtle encouragement that makes me have to bite my tongue to not say "Yeah, but that's bullshit, so what can we really do?" Plus I hate the idea of having to apologize to people every time I tell them where I go. "Yeah, I go to the new age woo-woo place, but it's okay, I was going there back when they were still into medicine, so I got grandfathered in."

Maybe I'm overworrying, though. After all it's really hard to find a good doctor. And they know us already, we have a history there, so maybe we should give them a chance. Maybe they won't be so bad. Maybe the new doctor we were promised will adapt to us and keep the bullshit at bay. I suppose we should give it a try.

Doors on the second floor

So many homes and buildings around here have doors on the second floor, ten feet off the ground, not opening onto a deck or something but just onto empty air. Seems like it's too many to be planning for decks people didn't build.

There's even one on a large brick business-type building which faces towards the street, so there isn't even room to add more than a tiny balcony or fire escape, hardly worth installing a door for (and a sturdy weatherized secure door at that). (It's not the one pictured, this is just something I found on the Internet that's somewhat similar.)

Is there some reason that eludes me for why these are so often being built in this area?

Ho-Hos

For some reason, while all the supermarkets around here have the Drake equivalents (Yodels, notably), no one carries most Hostess products including Ho-Hos. Siobhan insists there's a stark difference and won't even eat Yodels. But in New England, where Drake still remains dominant and the consolidation of Drake and Hostess (since they have the same parent company) is underway but far from complete, it's nearly impossible to get Ho-Hos, though Ding Dongs are oddly enough readily available.

Online grocery options are priced insanely; for instance, the only entry on Amazon (which is often competitive on other things, like the wasabi edamame we get) costs $16.99 + $4.99 shipping for a single box. And it hardly seems worth it for as simple a guilty pleasure as Ho-Hos to buy them while traveling (particularly since they're hard to transport, being so squishable, and they can get stale). But I promised I'd find a source for them. And there must be somewhere nearby that has them, but it's not like I can do a Google search (which is the real pity! someone should be indexing this kind of data), and I'm not about to go to every grocery and convenience store in Vermont to check. Anyone happen to know of a source?

Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy gets a bum rap. A lot of the time it's just another name for things like checks and balances, and the processes of accountability, the kind of thing you take for granted while bemoaning their cost, the way people whine about taxes while they drive on safe, paved roads.

But there's a good reason bureaucracy has a bad name: so much that is done in its service is mind-bogglingly stupid and wasteful. It gets lumped in with the potentially useful kind, because of superficial similarities in the type of procedures involved. But the differences are more telling than the similarities, even if they're less obvious.

The worst kind of frustrating, pointless bureaucracy is the kind that focuses on internal efficiencies. At this point in my job I probably waste about 1/4 of my year in mandatory "planning" or "streamlining" committees or projects, and their associated data gathering and oversight procedures. It's similar to the useful kind of bureaucracy that focuses on accountability because it's about covering someone's ass, but the key difference is it's covering a bureaucrat's ass, not that of the people who the bureaucracy is meant to be serving. That's not a trivial difference, any more than it's a trivial difference between collecting for a charity and embezzling from a charity. But it tends to get lumped together anyway.

Obviously, the best way to improve my efficiency is to abolish the runaway train of efficiency-improvement efforts and let me get back to work. I am not saying there aren't ways that efficiency in my office could be improved, and I'm not even saying that there aren't ways that haven't occurred to me that some process might help me find. But this process is not doing it. It's just dragging me down.

Today, at a three-and-a-half-hour training session about how to fill out some mind-bogglingly stupid data collection spreadsheets, while the presenters droned on and on reciting directions that they could have written down in two hours (and then I'd have them to refer to, while saving myself half the time), I was imagining how if this were a movie, the next thing would be me standing over the presenter bludgeoning him with a chair, shouting "shut up!" over and over. There would be a camera angle from below up at my face, which was getting spattered with blood. Behind me, the rest of the "audience" would be picking up their chairs to join me. Then there'd be an abrupt camera cut to me daydreaming while the guy kept blathering on with Office Space-level inanities. So I guess I can't just have the usual daydreams, I have to have a meta-daydream, a daydream about how I would film the daydream I should be having. That's what these meetings drive me to!

On meaning and principles

There's a concept I find myself struggling to convey in my arguments in Lusternia, both in character and out, and it is one of those things that I fear maybe you just either get or you don't. I've had it many times and usually it ends up being a dead end, so maybe I can use this blog post as a means to try to refine my expression. First, I need to establish some background.

In the game, a guild leader has the option of granting someone a special honor which will appear on the scroll of their deeds forever. The honor is like the Congressional Medal of Honor in that it's entirely symbolic (having one doesn't get you free drinks or higher security clearance or a boost in pay, it just gives you the chance to say you got it). However, if the guild's three leaders agree unanimously, the honor can be retroactively stripped.

Someone in my guild, and as it happens someone I always disliked and never got along with, was granted this honor a few months ago, and with my full support. For while he and I disagreed on many points, I certainly agreed that he had done many good things for the guild and the commune, and deserved the honor for his service. Recently, he changed sides, and is currently part of some very vicious attacks on the commune, and it has inevitably been proposed that his honor be stripped. Since it requires unanimity, I have shot it down, and gotten some guff for it.

In defending my stance, I am alluding to a much more endemic issue, where the meaning of words and actions is set aside in favor of tactics or retribution or other things that are merely meant to satisfy a superficial desire. But to keep things tidy I'll stick to this one instance for now.

I propose three scenarios. Bob appeared to work hard for the commune, but it was all calculated to put him into a position where he had authority, access, and information with which he could betray the commune. He abused that rank to sneak information to the enemy, then when the time was right, betrayed the commune, destroying things on the way out. Sue worked hard for the commune, and her work was genuine and sincere. Later, because of changes in her life, or personality conflicts with commune leaders, or other things, she left the commune, and eventually her path took her to where she was attacking the commune. Robin worked hard for the commune for many years too, but has since retired and is largely inactive, not involved in politics, just focusing on crafts in a hut somewhere.

It's clear to me that, if Bob got the honor, it should be revoked, because it was never really earned. He never really served the commune. He only gave the appearance of doing so for his own purposes. In this case, revoking the honor is saying "it should never have been granted in the first place." On the other hand, while Sue is not currently doing what she did to earn the honor, that's no more true for her than for for Robin. Her current actions don't undo her past actions; if they merited the honor then, they still do.

In arguing this, I am a lone voice. Everyone else is happy to argue that both Bob and Sue should have their honors stripped. Their reasons strike me as being rationalizations for an act of petty retribution, but maybe I'm being as dismissive as they are of my arguments. They interpret the honor as meaning that, at the time you look at the honor, not at the time it was awarded, the person is all that the honor claims, still worthy of being granted it again. Which might be internally consistent, if the honor claimed to be about what you are, not what you did. Anyway, why wouldn't they also strip it from Robin, if that's their reason? Yet no one ever proposes doing that.

I know that I'm being an idealist, that I'm standing on a somewhat abstract point of principle instead of going along with what everyone else does. And honors ultimately only mean what everyone thinks they mean, so if I just give in and forget this (which is inevitably going to be what happens next, since I doubt I'll persuade anyone) then it'll become true. If it hasn't already, since almost everyone else has already conceded on this point.

But I also feel like every step on that path is an erosion in which Lusternia ends up a little less than it was. When we treat enemyship as having no meaning other than the right to charge a fine and the ability to deploy guards and shrine powers, we further trivialize the rich history and setting that made Lusternia so much more than an overblown version of Stratego. And that's especially sad because, so far as I am able to determine, there is no MUD left in the world that is what Lusternia used to be, but there are plenty of MUDs that have long been what Lusternia is becoming. So the real problem is that we're sacrificing a choice and making the world smaller.

Each individual act of preserving the meaning of words and actions is trivial and petty in itself, since each word and action means only what most people agree it means. But collectively, all the acts of diluting meaning and sacrificing it on the altars of tactics or retribution are part of, or at least symptom of, what's turning Lusternia into a ghost of itself. And I can't see any way to persuade anyone that each of those trivial acts is worth arguing about. It's so much easier to say "ooh, he killed one of ours, let's do something about it!" and then, finding no way to do anything real, to strip an honor. That'll hit him where it hurts! (Ironically in this case it probably hurt him more than anything else we could do, which is not to say all that much, but even so, it's something.)

Why can't I make anyone understand this? Or am I just being hopelessly quixotic?