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Baseball 2012

I haven’t been writing any posts about baseball this year.  Reason being, the wheels fell off the Rockies pretty early in the year, and then things just went from bad to worse.  I think I got a few weeks into April before I decided to stop watching, and things got exponentially worse after that.

I don’t know why I still follow the Rockies.  If I had any sense, I’d just jump on the Giants bandwagon, spend twice as much on tickets, and coast into the postseason with no problems.  But I started on this baseball kick when I lived a block from Coors Field, in that magic 2007 season, and now the curse of the whole thing is that I was programmed to like Colorado and hate the Giants and the Dodgers and the Diamondbacks and so on.

Okay, so 2011 ended in a shitstorm, a strong April start for the first damn time, and then the train completely derailed.  In 2009 and 2010, I had the ritual of counting wins and losses and magic numbers, coming out of a movie on a Saturday night and frantically starting up the MLB At Bat app on the iPhone to see if they managed to whittle away another half-game in the standings.  In 2009, they made the wild card; in 2010, there was hope, but they fettered it away.  In 2011, not even close.

Then you enter that period from October to February, where you hope the owners make some changes, dangle some big money out there for the free agents, hunt down some good roster moves with other teams.  Or, in the case of the Rockies’ ownership, it’s more like shopping for used tires in the five-dollar rack behind a shady gas station, picking through the leftovers for a mismatched set with almost enough tread to last you a month or two.  The Rockies almost never spend money on anything big, and this offseason was no different.  They did grab Marco Scutaro to fill in at second base, which seemed like an okay signing.  But the big need was pitching, and they got… Jamie Moyer, who is older than dirt; Jeremy Guthrie, a pop-fly pitcher, which never works out at Coors; and resigned to the fact the rest of the pitching staff would be the various minor-league parts and back-of-rotation pieces they had left over from 2011.

The 2012 injuries have been phenomenal. Here’s a partial list:

  • Jorge De La Rosa tore his arm apart in 2011 and had surgery.  There was talk that he’d be back early in the season; it’s August and after a couple of rough starts and setbacks, he’s just now starting to throw.
  • Juan Nicasio broke his neck last year after he got hit by a comebacker, and miraculously was throwing by spring training and started the season.  He’s now out with a leg injury requiring surgery.
  • Jeremy Guthrie, the #1 pitcher in the rotation, fell off his damn bike on the way to the park and screwed his shoulder.  He came back, had a complete meltdown, and was then pulled out of the rotation and later traded.
  • Jhoulys Chacin hasn’t pitched since May with some nerve inflammation issue.
  • Chris Nelson ended up in the hospital in July with an irregular heartbeat.
  • Jonathan Herrera went on the DL at the same time as Nelson because his arm got infected from his watch.  (Did he buy one of those Ro1ex watches in Chinatown?)
  • Troy Tulowitzki left with a groin injury in May that required season-ending surgery.
  • Christian Friedrich just got shut down for the season with a stress fracture in his back.
  • Jason Giambi’s been out since mid-July with the flu.
  • Todd Helton just had season-ending (and maybe career-ending) surgery on his hip.
  • Add to that a dozen and a half or more trips to the DL for various strains, sprains, and minor problems.

What’s even more laughable is how the ownership and management have treated the problem.  First, the plan going into this year was stupid, this “veteran movement” where a bunch of late-30s/early-40s players got slated for everyday positions.  That alone should have gotten the GM Dan O’Dowd fired and manager Jim Tracy demoted to equipment manager for the way he handled things day-to-day.  But instead, Tracy got an “indefinite contract extension”, and O’Dowd went on and on about how he was the greatest GM in the game.

So, the pitching rotation fell apart.  Only one pitcher (Drew Pomeranz) in the five-man rotation remains.  When everyone got gangrene or anthrax or hoof-and-mouth disease or traded to a minor-league team in Mexico, the powers that be thought it would be awesome to switch to a four-man rotation with a strict pitch count.  That essentially means none of Colorado’s starters will pitch more than 100 innings this year; none of them will be out of the single-digit win range, and what’s left of the bullpen will be majorly overtaxed.  This caused pitching coach Bob Apodaca to cry uncle and quit; he was replaced by “co-coaches”.

The Rockies were neither buyer or sellers at the trade deadline, which was odd.  I didn’t expect them to go hunting for new talent, which they did need, but wouldn’t do much good when you’re 20-some games out of first in your division.  But I also expected them to offload more of their long-term liabilities to get some younger prospects to start rebuilding.  They did trade Scutaro, and inexplicably added Jonathan Sanchez (who then lost three games and… wait for it… moved to the DL.)  But the inaction on O’Dowd’s part was a clear indicator that he thinks everything’s a-ok.

Everyone wants O’Dowd to quit.  And it looked like he would, but then he pulled some half-assed “co-managing” stunt, where he named his assistant the part-time GM or some lame bullshit like that, with him still “overseeing” everything.  It reminds me of when I worked for the university, and there would be these endless re-orgs, but with the same idiots in charge of the same flunkies, just with fancy new acronyms.

And I know running a baseball team’s probably hard work, and probably involves a certain amount of luck and momentum and blah blah blah.  I realize that if you can spend a quarter-billion dollars on salary, everything will be golden, and if you are in a small market, you’ve got to scrape and beg and borrow.  And I know that Coors is hell on pitchers.  But when you have a bunch of Jesus-freaks pushing their “everyone’s a winner” crap and never having the balls to just fire someone or maybe spend a few bucks on some outside talent, this is what you get.

And yet, I’m strangely nostalgic for the bastards.  It’s no fun to watch, and I will only occasionally check a score just to make sure they’re not getting no-hit.  I’m definitely not paying a couple grand to fly out to Denver and watch them drop two or three games to the Cubs or Padres.  And I’m not paying the now-hyperinflated AT&T Park ticket prices to sit in a sea of orange and watch the Rockies lose 16-2 to the Giants.  The season was over in April for me, and I do miss it, but it’s hard to grin and bear it at this point.

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Recalling Total Recall

I always love to hear about a new movie adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story or book.  But I’ve been on the fence about the new Total Recall remake, mostly because I’ve always enjoyed the 1990 original movie.  It seems like almost every movie that comes out now, especially the big summer blockbusters, is just recycled garbage, reboots of comic book franchises that don’t need yet another reboot, or movies based on TV shows, video games, board games, and I’m predicting that by next summer, they’re going to do movies based on classic fast food items.  (Seriously, if you could get Jerry Bruckheimer to turn out McRib, it would do at least $100 million if you marketed it right.)  Most remakes are nothing but the lamest parts of the original movie, with a bunch of fake CGI and needless chase scenes.

I almost went to go see the new Total Recall this weekend, but I chickened out.  Instead, I dug up my DVD from the original 1990 version, and decided to give it a spin.  What’s interesting is that pretty much every reviewer that slams the new version says “the original was better,” but after a decade of distance from the movie, the 1990 version… kinda sucks.  I remember it as being pretty incredible, but after a re-watch, I’m of the opinion that aside from as the basis of a drinking game, it’s probably not worth watching again.

Here’s my list of reasons I thought the movie was much worse than I remembered:

  •  Arnold Schwarzenegger simply cannot act.  Or maybe he can act, but he can only play the kind of tough guy caricature that doesn’t work for the film.  I could see why the Terminator franchise was so good for him: the role of an emotionless killing machine with mechanical movements, minimal lines, and no required facial expressions works well for him.  Here, there were lots of places where the role of Quaid/Houser needed some finesse, and he simply did not have any.  Like the scene at the beginning of the movie where he’s in bed with his wife is like feeding peanut butter to a dog and watching him try to lick it off the roof of his mouth.  It’s so horrible and cringe-worthy, it eventually becomes hilarious, and none of those are the emotions needed for the scene.
  • Speaking of that scene, it’s a good example of how this 113-minute movie could have been better in a 90-minute cut.  It goes on and on and on about his dream, and his wife’s (phony) reaction, and it’s like a 14-second scene dragged out to nine minutes.  It’s like when someone writes a one-page paper and then fucks with the margins to get five pages out of it.  I’m almost tempted to rip a copy of this whole movie, drop it into an editor, and crank out a hot 88-minute version, but that would involve watching it a hundred more times.
  • I think enough fun has been made of Arnold’s one stock yell (“aaaaaiggh!”) but he does it so damn much in this movie, it’s almost like he registered it with ASCAP and gets a fixed royalty every time he says it.
  • A lot of the technology has not aged well.  There are huge CRT screens all over the place, like in the subway or at the hotel registration desk.  I don’t know if this was just because they wanted to throw real graphics on them, or because the idea of just having a flat screen seemed unrealistic in 1989.  (It’s not like they couldn’t have thrown the images on there via chromakey.)  And the blocky futuristic cars and trains all look silly.  The biggest laugh is when he’s on his way to Rekall and he stops at a kiosk in the lobby to look for directions.  The kiosk has a clone IBM Model M keyboard glued onto it, which dates the whole thing almost down to the year.
  • Speaking of graphics, every place where there are computer graphics looks absolutely stupid.  When they show something like a graph on a screen, you can totally tell it’s done on an Amiga.  And in places where there are terminals, they use a lot of green monochrome monitors with screens that look like a timesheet program written for an IBM mainframe back in 1986.  I almost expected someone to open up VAXPhone or an emacs window in one of them.
  • It’s always hilarious when 80s cyberpunk movies decide to show the world of the future as being wall-to-wall advertising by plastering the sets with logos from companies like Curtis Mathes.
  • This was probably one of the last movies to rely on miniature models instead of CGI for all of its effects, and it shows.
  • Aside from the technological anachronisms, the sets in general convey this 80s feeling of the future.  There’s a lot of brushed aluminum and stainless steel and poured concrete walls and neon tubes.  It’s an interesting little time-slip issue, when you look at a scene that is supposed to scream “2071” at you, and it’s very much “1990”.  I haven’t watched Blade Runner recently, but from what I remember, it had a different kind of griminess to it, probably because it didn’t try to look like the far future, and because the lighting design was much more subtle about the way it conveyed the grunginess.
  • There are plot holes that are catastrophically obvious because of the timing of the movie, as I mentioned above.  For example, when Quaid arrives at Mars and pulls off the fake head, the scene where he “loses control” of the fake head’s voicebox must go on for minutes, with everyone in the spaceport standing still and staring at him.  From the time the bad guys spot him to the time he throws the head at them, you could seriously count out a 100-Mississippi.  By act 3 of the movie, every fight scene is exhausting, because you know it’s going to be like when British troops in the American revolution would line up in a straight line, fire, and then wait until the other side fired until they returned fire.
  • There are tons of minor gaffes, mostly attributable to the editing down of the movie from an X to an R rating.  People get stabbed once and then at second glance are drenched in blood from head to toe; people shot in the back suddenly have bullet holes in their head.
  • I still like the overall plot of the movie, the “is this real or is he dreaming?” aspect of it.  But the hammy acting fat-fingers all of the scenes explaining this so much, it’s impossible to take it seriously.

Overall, like I said, the movie has not aged well.  I don’t know if that’s because effects are so good now and we’re all accustomed to lightning-fast edits and action sequences, or if I was just too excited about cyberpunk movies twenty years ago and needed the distance to see all of this.  Either way, I think I’m going to pass on the remake, or at least wait until it’s a free movie on Netflix streaming, so I don’t have to shell out money to see it.

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Age of Aquarius

I’ve talked a few times about my old Commodore 64, but this wasn’t my first computer. I actually owned a much weaker computer for about a year before the C-64: the Mattel Aquarius.  I thought I’d told the story before, but looking through the archives here, I didn’t find much.  So here’s the deal.

The personal computer pretty much started happening when I was in grade school.  I guess before that, you could solder together your own Altair, but in about the 5th grade, these platinum-cased Apple II computers showed up, and I learned how to do the 10 PRINT "HELLO" thing on one of those green-screen monitors.  If your parents had money, you could get one of these things in your home, but with an original 1977 list price of $1298 for the 4K model (plus monitor, plus disk drive, plus software), there was no way in hell I’d ever own a computer.  But as the 70s became the 80s, an explosion of cheaper machines hit the market.  Atari came out with their 800, which listed for about half the price of an Apple, and then the C-64 machine started selling at $595.  There were also some cheap-o machines with more anemic specifications, like the VIC-20, which dropped to near $100, and the Timex-Sinclair, which was even cheaper.

At the beginning of 1984, my parents split up, right around the time of my 13th birthday.  I didn’t know the political angle of being a child of divorce, and I didn’t consciously want to pit one parent against the other, but getting a computer was stuck in the front of my head.  I needed one of these things.  There was no world wide web that I needed to browse, and I didn’t need to type papers or balance spreadsheets.  I just needed to be able to hack at a machine and write programs and develop games.  I’d taught myself BASIC, writing programs on paper and getting to try them out on friends’ machines or with the very narrow slivers of time afforded to me with the school’s few Apples.  I wanted to be able to waste all of my copious amounts of free time writing some kind of Dungeons and Dragons game on the computer.

And right around then, the Kay-Bee toy store at the mall by my house started selling these bundled computer systems from Mattel.  And they were only a hundred bucks, and included games and joysticks and the whole nine yards.  I didn’t know anyone with one of these machines, and this was long before I could plug this into wikipedia and look up the specs.  But I needed one, and $100 was an easier target to reach than the $200 or $300 price of a Commodore, so I begged and pleaded, and before I knew it, at the end of one of those “every other Sunday” visitations, I had this big huge box full of computer, ready to hook up to the TV set’s antenna screws.

The Mattel Aquarius has a strange history, one that I didn’t know for decades. Mattel made the Intellivision video game system, and promised in ads and brochures that they’d come out with a magical keyboard that would plug in and turn the thing into a real computer. This was a big deal back then, because if you were already dropping a few hundred dollars on a video game system, there was a certain enticement in being able to avoid spending another grand on a home computer. Problem was, they didn’t have this computer expander system ready. They turned to the manufacturer of their Intellivision, Radofin in Hong Kong, and they had a low-end computer system of their own, which they rebadged as the Aquarius.

The Aquarius was quite likely the worst home computer of the 80s. It was based on the Z80 processor, which was used in a lot of other systems, and it ran it at 3.5 mHz, which wasn’t horrible for the time. But it came with 4K of RAM. Once you booted the system, the screen memory, other buffers, and the BASIC interpreter took up most of that, leaving behind just over 1K. That’s a K and not an M; we’re talking about just over a thousand of characters of memory. This blog post is twice as big as the available memory on an Aquarius. There was a very rudimentary sound generator, and support for an 80×25 screen with no real graphics.

The BASIC was a version of Microsoft’s, and it was a fairly rudimentary implementation. If you programmed BASIC back in the day, you may remember that there were good BASICs and bad BASICs. Like the Commodore V2.0 BASIC didn’t have an ELSE statement for IF-THENs, which meant a lot of spaghetti IF-THENs that were an eyesore in a language with no indentation. And the CBM version didn’t have any sound or graphics functions, even though its chipset supported decent functionality; you’d have to PEEK and POKE to do anything cool, or spend some cash on Simon’s BASIC or some other extension of the language. The Aquarius BASIC, most likely because of the memory issue, was even more crippled than the Commodore version, with an extremely limited subset of commands.

Design-wise, the Aquarius was a fairly tiny machine. It came with a 48-key chicklet keyboard, these little rubber keys spaced far apart, and the machine wasn’t much bigger than the keyboard. The keyboard was essentially what they give you to type when you go to hell for eternity. A few other machines came with a membrane keyboard (the Atari 400, and the Timex) which was pretty bad, but these rubber keys were the worst. You could not touch type in any way, not only because of the keyboard’s spongy feel, and because it had a substandard layout. For example, it didn’t have a space bar; there was a a space key off to one side. The one saving grace was that there were keyboard shortcuts you could use when typing, so if you needed to type GOTO, you could use a function key and hit G or something like that. Cartridges usually came with these two-piece keyboard overlays, thin pieces of plastic embossed with all of the special functions for the program. There was almost no extensibility to the machine, either. It came with plugs for a printer and a cassette recorder, plus the RCA plug for the TV set. It had no other plugs; even the power supply didn’t have a plug, and the cord and power brick were permanently attached to the back. It did come with a single cartridge slot, which accommodated these weird wedge-shaped cartridges that matched the angle of the top half of the console.

The Aquarius was a huge flop, and was discontinued after a few months. Most of them sold were bundled with accessories for liquidation, which is where I got mine. My system came with four games, and a thing called the “Mini Expander”, an oversized cartridge that plugged into the machine and hung off the back end, providing two cartridge slots (so you could plug in a program cart and a memory expander), two joysticks, and the three-voice sound chip from the Intellivision. The joysticks were similar to the Intellivision, those weird disc controllers that were almost unusable, with a set of six chicklet buttons on the top of the controller, and no other fire buttons. (I think the Intellivision joysticks were actually better than the Aquarius ones.)

One of the huge issues with the Aquarius was that it was somehow perceived as a sibling to the Intellivision, but it was more like a second cousin by adoption, and even though some assumed it could play Intellivision games (which were generally better than Atari 2600 games), the gaming support was fairly horrible. In fact, the joke was that Mattel used to put programmers on the Aquarius team as a punishment. The games couldn’t use high-res graphics, and had to resort to using the machine’s extended character set to draw stuff on the screen. (The machine did have some cool characters in the extended character set though, like little explosions and running dudes and aliens.)

I got four games with my system, in order from best to worst:

– Dungeons and Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin: This game was actually awesome. You moved through a maze, Doom-style (but with much worse graphics), with the right third of the screen an inventory list of the couple of items you could pick up and carry, including swords, bows and arrows, potions, and keys. You crawled through the levels of this massive dungeon, and when you ran into a dragon or orc (all drawn with this random collection of ASCII art, like prehistoric emoticons), a round of combat would ensue, with fireballs being traded and hit points lost. There were supposed to be 99 levels of this dungeon, or if you killed the white dragon, you’d win. Despite the sub-par graphics and sound, this was an incredibly playable game.

– Snafu: You and another player had these ever-growing lines on the screen, sort of like the Tron light cycle game, and you could not collide with the other person’s line. This was pretty fun if you had another player, but it was otherwise very basic.

– Night Stalker: This was a Pac-man style maze, there were no dots to be eaten; you just wandered around while alien dudes tried to shoot you. This could have been a much cooler game if it had more levels or mazes, but we’re talking about 4K of RAM here.

– Tron Deadly Discs – This game was straight-up worthless. It wasn’t really a Tron game; it was just two emoticons throwing chunks of ASCII at each other. I would play it about once a month just to see if there was something I missed, but within five minutes, I’d realize how I was duped.

The worst part of the Aquarius was that Mattel Electronics went bust about 15 minutes after I got the system, so there was absolutely no support. The market exploded with add-ons for the Apple and Atari; the Commodore could use Atari joysticks, and you could buy tons of games, or buy any of the dozen or two magazines like Compute! and type in your own games. But there was no support for the Aquarius, and I could not buy any software or accessories. And this was long before you could hop on Amazon and search for stuff to buy. Aside from the lack of games, I did not have a disk or tape drive to save my own programs, and I couldn’t even print out my stuff to a printer. Every once in a while, I’d see the Aquarius mentioned in a computer magazine, but it was always a “what happened here?” takedown piece.

The biggest pain point to the whole thing is that Mattel had released a bunch of cartridges, including an extended BASIC and memory expansion, and planned even more stuff.  The box for the system showed all of these unavailable items, and then had some black stickers covering pictures of vaporware items, like a master expansion chassis that would sit under the unit and provide a disk drive.  There was also an Aqaurius II that was very briefly sold, that had a real keyboard and the extended BASIC built in.

My tenure on the Aquarius was brief; by the next Christmas, the Commodore 64 was on my list, and I graduated to its much roomier 38,911 bytes free and full-motion keyboard that wasn’t designed like a calculator you got for free at a Shell station when you bought a tank of gas.  But we did play the hell out of those four games, though.  And now my daily driver is a machine that has two million times as much RAM available.  But that Aquarius is an interesting little footnote in my computing history.

And some linkage for you:

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The Death of Paper Notes

One of the changes in OSX Mountain Lion is that it has a dedicated Notes application.  It’s just a basic text editor, except it syncs with other Apple devices.  This isn’t entirely new; iOS devices have had a notes app for a while, and it would sync with an IMAP server and show the notes in the Mail application.  This meant I could create a set of notes that lived in my gmail account, and then edit them on my phone, my computer, or my iPad.  That was pretty much the end of trying to remember to carry around a little notepad or Moleskin or whatever, and now I just jot down any stray thoughts or ideas there, and they get synced in all three places.  And I guess in some extreme emergency where I didn’t have any Apple devices with me, I could always point a web browser at gmail and get at the notes there.

This new workflow saves me a ton of time, and avoids the issue that my handwriting is all but unreadable, even to me.  But one problem with it is that I don’t have a hardcopy of any of my notes about a book.  I was digging around for something else in my storage recently, and found a vinyl three-ring binder containing all (or most all) of the notes from Summer Rain and Rumored to Exist.  One of the first things I realized about this binder is that it’s actually from when I was a computer consultant for the school.  UCS had these beginning-of-year training sessions where they gave you a binder full of stuff you’d never read, and this happens to be one of those binders.  It was probably given to me in 1991 when I started working there, and after I chucked all of the lists of phone numbers and rules, I used it as a school folder.  It’s still got a couple of papers I wrote in it, including the two papers I wrote in the summer of 1992 that I mention in Summer Rain.  I can’t even try to read them though; I’m sure they’re horrible.  I distinctly remember losing the 3.5″ floppy disk I used that summer for my WordPerfect files – I left it in a Mac in one of the labs.  Part of me wishes I still had those files for some sick reason, but I guess if I have the hardcopies, that’s just as bad.

A big chunk of the material in this binder is research material and notes on Summer Rain.  That book is fiction, but it’s based on fact, and I burned a lot of cycles trying to keep track of dates and times.  I’ve got an insane amount of post-it notes and scraps of paper reminding me of stuff like that Ray visited Bloomington on July 11, 1992 and I broke my arm on September 30th and I ate lunch at Burger King on August 7th.  There’s a bunch of report cards, a complete recapitulation of every bursar charge I had during my time at IU, and a small stack of snapshots of the campus in the early 90s.  And there are pages and pages of outlines.  I tend not to outline before I write; I usually write until I get stuck, and then I used to go back and write outlines of what existed, so I could navigate through all of the files without getting lost.  I have dozens of pages of these outlines, inventory sheets of what happens in what file.  There are punchlists from 1998 of what parts are missing from what chapter, and long essays to myself on 1996 on what direction characters are heading.  The 1998 notes even contain a combination of all of these, a list of chapters and what date they would have happened in real life.

The notes from Rumored to Exist are also pretty interesting.  When I worked in Seattle, I would sit with a PC in front of me, a Mac Centris 660AV on my right, and a legal pad on my left.  I would write this online help on the PC, and then compile it on the Mac.  The Apple machine also served as my CD player.  But while I worked, I would write down any random nonsensical thought on the legal pad.  And by the end of the day, I’d have a page or two of these scribblings, random quotes and names of designer drugs and medieval weaponry and genetic disorders and long-forgotten TV shows, and all of these became raw material for what eventually became that book.  And I’ve still got a bunch of these, along with a post card from Larry from the Astrodome, which is something that appeared in the book, but that he later really sent me.  There’s a shot of all of this on the back of the now-out-of-print annotated version of the book, but I’ve also got all of it here.

There’s also a printout of a 1998 draft of Rumored here, one that I must have given Marie, that she marked up and sent back to me.  It’s so different than the finished book that it amazes me.  I still have a lot of these drafts in electronic form, because I’ll usually zip up a copy at a big logical stopping point, but it’s amazing to me to see it captured forever on paper.  When I moved to New York, I was almost to the point of quitting this book, and decided to start a new draft, a completely blank document.  I sifted through the old version, and only carried over the things I absolutely loved.  Everything else stayed behind, and I think I probably rescued maybe 80 pages.  But those old bits — I started writing this thing in 1995, so there were pieces that stayed in the draft for three years before being clipped.  It’s fun to see those bits again.

Now, I do all of this stuff online, and it’s much more efficient.  I can tear around in Scrivener and keep a digital outline and easily checkpoint documents to save old drafts.  I have no idea why I kept any of this old paper stuff — I think there was some assumption that I’d sell millions of copies of the book and some university library would want to purchase all of my letters and notes.  I mean, not really, but that’s a hoarder’s rationale.  Now, I wonder if any of the bits I threw out are worth publishing, but I’ve already done so many editions of Rumored, I’m in no hurry to rush out another one.

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Mandelbrot and Genre Writing

I’ve been in the post-book-release period of my writing cycle where I don’t know what I’m doing next, and I don’t know what I should be reading, so I start poring over non-fiction, usually some junk science book.  Specifically, it’s that James Gleick book Chaos, which is about chaos theory and the butterfly effect.  I mostly read stuff like this to pour random facts into my head with hopes that I’ll go off on a tangent in some wikipedia-reading frenzy and end up finding the pieces of my next short story.

Part of the book talks about Benoit Mandelbrot, who once said this:

Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.

That got me thinking about genres, and writing.  I’ve been knocking against this invisible wall with regard to genres, because I don’t really fit into any one category.  And every self-publishing make-money-fast scheme online talks about how you need to market yourself by finding your niche and building your platform to sell to that slice of the reading public.  Every person out their schlepping their own advice on publishing will tell you about the importance of hitting up the forums relevant to your category.

When I’m depressed about not having stellar book numbers, this feeds into a horrible cycle of negativity.  I don’t sell books because I don’t market.  I don’t market because I can’t find the people to market to.  I can’t find the people to market to, because I don’t know how to categorize my work.  And I don’t know how to categorize my work because I don’t really like any of the categories.

That’s a big part of the problem.  I don’t read a lot of straight genre fiction, because it bores me.  While I like picking at the edges of the science fiction genre, I find the die-hard stuff to be so goddamn serious.  I can’t stand fantasy.  And romance and thriller aren’t even on my radar.  The books I like are combinations of different things, or aren’t representations of the category as a whole.  Vonnegut wasn’t a science fiction writer per se; he sometimes fell into that category, but his stories had a humor you aren’t going to find in the typical outer space robot book.  Burroughs had the same distinction.  Was Hunter S. Thompson a journalist or a humorist or an essayist or what?  And Mark Leyner wasn’t literary fiction, but he wasn’t general fiction, either.

The big issue is that when you define success as straight-up numbers, nothing but copies sold and dollars taken in, you’re competing more than you’re creating.  You’re not going to push boundaries or do what you truly want; you’re going to stick to that same narrowly-defined plot structure that everyone uses to maximize the number of readers you can satisfy.  You’re going to think of how to market a book and then write it, instead of creating what you truly need to create as an artist.  It’s like the difference between a painter like Jackson Pollock laying his soul and his inner demons onto the canvas, versus someone being handed an RFP by a hotel chain for a thousand identical paintings that meet certain requirements.  When you write for the market, you may sell, but you probably won’t innovate.

I don’t want to dole out yet another hero’s journey monomyth novel because I can plug it by saying “it’s like <current hit> but with <other thing people like>”.  I feel like I need to continue down the path I’ve followed with the last few books, but I also feel like it’s okay if I suddenly want to write some non-fiction, or a book of essays, or whatever else.  I’d hate to wake up someday and be told I can only write dystopian literary occult police procedural fantasy fiction, or that I couldn’t do what I want because it won’t sell.  Life’s too short to back yourself in a corner like that.

 

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The Feel of a Book

I really do wish I could switch to an all-digital book library, buy every print book in this house in some e-book format, and haul all of this shit to the goodwill, or sell it in the Amazon used section.  Someday, books will kill me, and I’m not talking about being buried alive via hoarding.  I mean, these books are all collecting dust mites, and I’m horribly allergic to dust mites, and I’m sure ten out of ten allergists would tell me, “well, just get rid of all of your books and watch more TV.”  And of course, 87% of the books I have here aren’t available on the Kindle, and even if they were, the second I’d buy all of them, they’d change the Kindle format to some incompatible thing and force me to re-buy everything, just like the whole vinyl > 8-Track > Cassette > CD > MiniDisc > DVD > BluRay > whatever trail of tears.

I tried remembering when my whole relationship with books started, and of course, I can’t.  My parents started buying me books before I can remember, those “I Can Read” books like Danny and the Dinosaur that you got from the grocery store or some mail-order club.  I remember being in the Weekly Reader book club, getting these corrugated cardboard mailers every week or two, containing another few hardcover books, each one getting progressively more advanced.  I thankfully learned to read before I started school.  I lived in a tiny village in Michigan with no kids as neighbors, in an age before cable, when an endless amount of adjustment to a set of rabbit ears got you four or maybe five channels of TV, so those books were my lifeline.

In thinking about this, I think one of the reasons I like to collect books is their physicality.  I’ve still got a couple of these Weekly Reader books, from almost forty years ago, and I loved the oil paintings in color on the cloth-bound hardcovers, a square spine and a design that is obviously very pre-Photoshop. Some books had spine lettering faintly embossed in a metallic gold color, and looked distinguished and official.  Some were paperbacks, the Choose Your Own Adventures and Encyclopedia Browns and pocket editions that felt the perfect size in your hand.  I devoured all of these books, and no matter how many of them showed up in our rural route mailbox, I always wanted more.

I always got locked into these series books, things like junior encyclopedia, where they’d sell the first volume at Kroger and then swindle you into mailing away for the next twenty.  I remember this junior history series I had, an endless collection of books on American events like the construction of the White House or the battle of Iwo Jima.  My parents would sometimes go to a friend’s house to play euchre, plop us in front of a TV in their living room, and hope we’d fall asleep eventually.  I would always drag along a huge collection of these books, so that instead of watching a Love Boat re-run, I could read the illustrated history of the Washington Monument or the D-Day invasion.  And I would always have to bring an entire armload of them, partly because I felt a need to always have access to every volume (this predates Wikipedia by a few decades) but also because I enjoyed the physical feeling of having all of these books, the weight and feel of these perfectly square books filled with illustrations and maps and pages that smelled like fresh paper and ink.

I always wonder about this with kids that are being born right now and handed an iPad thirty seconds after they leave the womb.  There’s something magical about being able to zap an animated book filled with background music and hyperlinks to your kid, but are they missing something by not having an actual, physical book in their hands?  A device that plays Angry Birds and shows videos is pretty cool, but do you miss out on something that you get by hoarding these little bits of dead tree?

I do like loading up my Kindle with books before I get on a plane.  And most of the books I sell are on the Kindle.  But it doesn’t feel like I’ve “bought” a book unless I have it sitting on a shelf, and I like the physical rituals of either going to stores or having a delivery person hand me a cardboard mailer filled with books.  I also don’t like that I always hold the same device when I’m reading different books, the same size and weight and thickness, and I’m even deduced to the same exact font and margins. I’m not pro- or anti- on the e-book, but it makes me hesitate before I buy anything, and I end up purchasing the best stuff twice.  I can’t seem to fully jump on either bandwagon, which means I probably will either be buying a spacesuit to keep out the dust mites, or googling away to find clinical trials of some new steroid treatment to keep my eyes from swelling shut.

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The Loudness War

The loudness war is a weird k-hole I recently fell into, trying to find out more information about a Stooges remaster.  Let me explain.

Okay, have you ever owned some album, and listened to a song a million times, and then heard the same song on an FM radio and it somehow sounded different?  It was probably because the station used dynamic range compression in their outbound rig.  Here’s my best attempt at a no-math explanation of compression.  Let’s say a sound wave is a bunch of waves, ranging in strength from 0 to 11.  (I was going to say 10, but, Spinal Tap.)  So a song, in some greatly simplified form, would be something like this:  “0 8 11 8 10 2 3 7 7 8 11 0 10 7 2 4”.  If you wanted to make the song sound way louder, the obvious way to do it would be to change that to “0 16 22 16 20…” and so on, but 11 is the most you can get.  But what you can do is boost the lower numbers, and keep the higher numbers the same, and the song will “seem” louder.  So, you’d run it through some magic digital box and it would change to something like “0 8.5 11 8.5 10 7 7.2 8 8 8.5 11 0 10 8.5 7” or whatever.  It basically smooshes the lower end frequencies, and makes the song seem louder at the same volume, although this sacrifices some of the sound quality, which isn’t as big of a concern when you’re just schlepping pop music across the airwaves and you want your station to get the most attention when someone is flipping through channels.

The loudness war started back in the days of jukeboxes, because you the consumer can’t change the volume on a jukebox, and everyone wanted their 45 record to sound the loudest.  On a digital CD, that magic number 11 I mentioned above is called “full scale”, or the point where signal has reached as much as it can go.  A measurement called dBFS, or decibels relative to full scale, is used to measure levels, where -6 dBFS is 50% of full scale.  Most albums were mastered with -14dBFS being used as the highest peak level of the album, or what used to be the “red zone” of an analog record.

At some point in the 90s, the thinking changed on this, probably around the time record companies started re-releasing old albums, so if you bought that Iron Maiden album on CD in 1988, you suddenly had to buy the remastered version in 1996.  Yes, they would fiddle with bonus tracks and new artwork a fake gold CD and yes Ray, they included that fourth side of the Live After Death album you bitched about for twenty years, but they also fiddled with the mastering so the “hotter” album would make the old master sound wimpy.  And new albums started getting massively over-compressed in this loudness arms race.

I started googling all of this because of the 1996 Columbia remaster of the Stooges album Raw Power.  When recorded in 1972, Iggy Pop did the initial mastering himself, and through the magic of heroin, decided to put all of the instruments on one side and the vocals on the other, and do all kinds of weird shit with the tone.  The record company refused to release it unless it was remixed, and got David Bowie to spend a single day in a crappy studio, getting the album to sound mostly normal.  For the 1996 re-release, they gave Iggy free reign to go back and remaster the album, and his response, in an attempt to bring back the raw aggression of the original recording, was to completely turn every knob to 11.

I don’t know if this is still the case, but when I bought the 1996 remaster on CD (back when people bought CDs), it had a huge warning label on it, saying the CD did not meet the Phillips Red Book standard and could destroy your equipment.  I thought that was cool, threw it in the player, and set my volume at something marginal, like 5 out of 10.  “Search and Destroy” came on, and it sounded like someone had replaced my speakers with those paper-cone things you got with the stock Delco stereo on the AM radio of a 1981 Chevette, except with pencils jabbed through them.  Within ten seconds, my receiver SHUT OFF with a strange error message on the display, and I had to unplug it from the power, wait the longest 60 seconds of my life before restarting it, almost certain I’d bricked my stereo.  I was only able to listen to the CD by ripping a copy to MP3 first, which I guess just clipped the hell out of it in the computer’s digital-to-analog conversion.  Still a great album, though.

Another Stooges fun fact:  if you really like the album Fun House, you can go over to iTunes and pick up a complete collection of everything they recorded for the album.  It’s a 142-track “album” that contains every take of every song, plus all of the studio dialogue recorded – basically everything that ran through the sound board back in 1970.  At $99.99, it’s definitely in the “do not accidentally click purchase” category for iTunes.  I haven’t bought it – I think if it was $30, I would be tempted, but I know I would only listen to it once or twice.

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Snowcone and Haystack

I didn’t remember it until this morning, but today is the anniversary of the first moon landing.  It’s hard to imagine it was 42 years ago (mostly because I was -1 years old at the time) but it’s also hard to fathom that it’s been something like 33 years since Skylab fell back to Earth, and I actually remember that one happening.

Space exploration in general is a huge k-hole for me, and I can burn up unlimited amounts of time by googling the Apollo missions or the Mir space station or the Space Shuttle.  I got knocked back into this last weekend, because we saw Apollo 13 at the Paramount Theater, and that got me thinking and reading Wikipedia and researching how exactly that tank explosion happened and who was originally supposed to fly that mission and all that.

A great lull in manned space flight, at least from the US perspective, happened when I was a child.  The last Apollo mission happened in 1975, with the Apollo-Soyuz test project. I was four then, and shortly after was when I got into space exploration trivia and started poring over encyclopedias and searching every garage sale for one of those GI Joe Mercury capsules.  The US didn’t fly into space again for six years, and it seemed like back then, the Soviets were sending up guys every other week, and keeping them in orbit for weeks and months at a time.  I couldn’t confirm this though, with a lack of internet connectivity and an impenetrable Iron Curtain preventing the free flow of information on the Russian space program.  There were those Mars probes, and Voyager and other unmanned stuff, but aside from an occasional reference on a PBS program, this stuff got almost no mention in our Indiana newspaper.

That meant that before they sent up the first Space Shuttle, I memorized everything I could find on Apollo.  I knew about Apollo 13 before there was a Tom Hanks movie on it; I could tell you about the 1967 pad fire, and explain translunar injection, and tell you all about lunar landers and lunar rovers and lunar life support backpacks and lunar samples and how Wally Schirra was a lunar asshole when he got sick on Apollo 7.

The technology of the Apollo program amazed me as a kid, because it seemed like the future, like we’d be going back to the moon any time now, that the Space Shuttle program would flourish, and they’d start cranking those things out like Boeing puts out 737s, until pretty much everyone hitched a ride into space like most of us have flown an MD-80 from one regional airport to another.  In the 70s, computers were rapidly getting smaller, and it only seemed logical that we’d all be astronauts in a couple of decades.

Now, Apollo seems astounding to me because it was so low-tech.  The computer they carried in the command module and lunar module had roughly the same amount of processing power and memory as an Atari 400.  (Luckily, it had a better keyboard.)  The command module talked to the Earth at a fast rate of about 50 kilobits/second.  And not only were all of those checklists analog printed material (this was long before the iPad could have made them obsolete), a lot of the calculations done by the crew were made with an analog computer, aka a slide rule.  I’ve seen a couple of the command modules at museums, and the interiors resemble a low-end Volkswagen from the 70s more than a high-tech interplanetary space vehicle.  It’s simply amazing that people would climb into these tin buckets, strap on a million horsepower of explosive rocket power, and aim for the moon.

It’s also odd to me that thirty years after sitting on the floor of my grade-school library poring over every book about space, I’m now just a couple of miles from Alameda, which is now home to the USS Hornet.  When Apollo 11 returned and splashed down in the Pacific, the Hornet picked up the crew and capsule, and then quickly ushered them off into a converted Airstream trailer, where they sat in quarantine for 21 days, to make sure they weren’t carrying any moon viruses.  I’ve been to the Hornet a few times; the trailer is still there, as is an early test capsule and lots of patches, photos, and other assorted stuff from the program.

Now we’re back in one of those lulls.  There’s no Space Shuttle, and I guess there’s people going up to the ISS on Russian rockets.  There’s also China’s space program, which has been successful as of late. But it feels like it did back when America didn’t really have a space program, except this time, there’s no Shuttle plans in the future to look forward to. There’s a lot of talk about privatized space travel, and maybe that will be the future, but I probably won’t be driving out to SFO and buying a ticket on Delta to go into low earth orbit.

Oh well.  Maybe I can scrape together my cash and try to build a working rocket for one of those GI Joe capsules, like this guy did.  I see much eBay sniping in my future.

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Listicles Are A Window Into The Soul

I am stuck in that “what do I post here” mode lately, so it’s time for another big long list of random stuff.

  • I’ve been re-reading Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, a book I think I haven’t read since 1995.  It has not aged well, for two reasons.  One is that the technology is obviously obsolete.  It talks about using a modem to dial into the Information Superhighway; the main character calls a travel agent to buy a plane ticket; people still use fax machines; Microsoft releases products people buy.  The other is that in 1993, a peek into the working day at Microsoft was revolutionary to straight America.  Now, every company from here to Kansas has tried to replicate their corporate culture, so much so that it’s incredibly cliche to have free soft drinks and ask interview candidates why manhole covers are round.  It’s still an okay read though, although it’s more of a glimpse into the distant past for me.
  • Two new donor Commodore 64s arrived via UPS today.  Both are missing a couple of keys; one is missing a couple of chips.  I plan on building a computer inside of a C-64 case, ala the x64, but for several hundred dollars less.
  • Allergy season is full tilt right now, and I’m contemplating a move to northern Alaska.  It’s been almost two years of allergy shots with very little improvement, plus my allergy clinic is dropping my insurance this fall, so I’ll need to find a new one.  I don’t know if switching doctors and trying something more drastic will help.  I’ve already tried OTC meds, prescription eye drops, nasal spray, inhalers, and pills, acupuncture, and allergy shots.  I’m thinking if there’s a stem cell therapy treatment, I’d be willing to sink five or ten grand into trying it.
  • I have not been watching baseball this year.  The Rockies have something like a dozen position players on the DL right now.  I heard the other night, one of their backup infielders went on the disabled list because of an infection he got from his watch.
  • I haven’t been writing much since the last book came out.  This is always the most depressing time for me, and it takes a lot of effort to get a good idea percolating, which is where I’m at.
  • I helped my brother-in-law buy a new TV the other day, and we went to Best Buy to look at their selection.  That place is seriously circling the drain.  There was almost nobody there on a Sunday afternoon, and their TV selection was worse than what they had at Target.  They were also fiercely pushing their “TV calibration” service, which as far as I could tell, involved paying hundreds of dollars to have a high-school dropout set the brightness and contrast on your new set.  Do people seriously pay for this?
  • I went through all of my old books and pulled all of the bookmarks out of them.  I usually use business cards, but I extricated this stack of store bookmarks (Elliott Bay, Morgensterns, Title Wave in Anchorage, Coliseum) and a bunch of receipts and bank slips, some of which were humorous.  Like I found a grocery receipt from Mr. D’s groceries in Bloomington from 1994 that was nothing but candy bars, TV dinners, and beer.
  • I have somehow become addicted to the show Friday Night Lights.  These things would not happen if it were not for Netflix streaming.
  • I am trying to avoid Benadryl, because it messes with my sleep schedule too much.  I don’t dream correctly when I take it, and then I’m hung over the next day.  I’m taking Allegra instead, although it doesn’t knock it out as well.

OK, that’s all for now.

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Calculator K-Hole

Something I sometimes do when I don’t have time to waste but still want to lock into some useless pursuit that will eat up hours is to try and find various things I owned as a kid.  The other day, I started thinking about old calculators, and went on an endless search to find some of the ones I used in high school and college.

It’s odd to even think about a time when people used calculators.  Now, when I want to figure out if an actress is 18 yet by subtracting her date of birth from the current year, I either use the calculator app on my computer or my phone.  I also have an actual four-function solar calculator I stole from my job’s office supply closet in maybe 1996, which was useful when I used to balance my checkbook, back when I actually wrote checks and couldn’t just look the crap up on my phone.  But the calculator on my iPhone is generally easier to use, and I know where it is at any given point.

I recently had a discussion with my sister about old calculators.  When we grew up, our parents had some old TI calculator, from maybe 1975, which had a hundred buttons and a flickering red LCD display and took a giant 9-volt battery.  We had no idea what TAN or SIN meant, so we’d randomly hit the buttons, trying to get the machine to print out some cool stuff.  We also had one of those Little Professor calculators, which had a face on the front of it (which always looked like an owl to me) and would print an equation like “7 + 9” and then wait for an answer, printing EEE when you entered an incorrect answer.

Calculators weren’t allowed in school for years, because when you’re supposed to be learning how to multiply single-digit numbers, a pocket calculator was as unfair as having a multiplication table in your hand, if not worse.  And then when I got to high school, this completely reversed, and some classes required you to have a calculator.  In a physics or trig class, the ability to quickly multiply and divide was a requirement, and we were suddenly allowed to use these electronic devices.

Something I never thought about, though: I was probably the first generation to have this luxury. When I was born in 1971, the first solid-state calculators were being manufactured.  In 1965, Sharp introduced the CS-10 calculator, which weighed 55 pounds and cost $2500.  By the end of the decade, they were fitting in shirt pockets (like those big Android phones “fit” in a pocket) and cost more like $500.  When I started grade school, you could probably get a good four-function calculator for $50, but minimum wage was also something like $1.60.  Prior to my generation, the only way you could “cheat” on math was maybe writing the answers down beforehand, or using a slide rule, which was probably more difficult than just memorizing stuff.  When I started high school, did they change lesson plans to accommodate the ubiquitousness of digital calculators, or did math suck that much more before then?

I took an electronics class in my freshman year, and we were told to buy a scientific calculator.  I don’t remember the requirements we were given, but I know it was something beyond the level of the crappy calculator you’d get for free at a Shell station with the purchase of a tank of premium.  I got a Radio Shack EC-4006, which at the time was a pretty amazing machine.  It ran on two AA batteries, and had a ten-digit display.  It could convert hex to decimal and display (some) letters on the screen, plus it handled negative numbers, trig functions, and had some amount of basic programmability.

What I remembered most about calculators back then was nobody had the same make and model.  There were dozens of different permutations of the basic calculator from TI, Casio, Radio Shack, Sharp, and lots of no-name or knockoff brands.  The cream of the crop was the HP, which were incredibly expensive and used RPN.  Someone in my class had one of these, and it looked nice, but I could never get the hang of entering all of the numbers and then entering an operator.  I also remember Ray having some high-end Radio Shack that unfolded and had the display and main keys on one side, and a set of advanced function keys in the inside lid.  Any time anybody touched it, he gave a twenty minute lecture about how you weren’t supposed to bend open the cover all the way, or it would stretch and break the microscopic conductive traces between the two halves.  (This meant that everyone would try to take his calculator when he wasn’t looking and vigorously fold open the cover as far as it would go.)  But we were all, in some sense, defined by the calculators we used and carried.  Some of us took great pride in the calculators we used, while others were ashamed of their hand-me-down crappy drugstore ripoff version that couldn’t even do exponents.

I think I kept the same calculator until my second year of college, when I replaced it with this Casio graphing calculator, the fx-7000G.  I still have that one in storage, although I don’t have batteries for it.  (It used flat watch batteries.)  That one had a 96×94 pixel screen and could be programmed in a crappy version of BASIC, although it had a whopping 422 bytes of memory.  I remember spending the Christmas of 1990 at my then-girlfriend’s parents’ place in Toledo, trying to write a chess game in BASIC on that thing, which of course was impossible, as was actually saving anything with no disk drive or printer.  My math career didn’t last much longer than that year, and I never had a good reason to carry around a graphing calculator, so I didn’t use it after that.

What’s astounding to me is how familiar the key layout of that Radio Shack calculator looks to me now.  I carried that thing around for years in my book bag, toiled away on those chicklet-style keys, and spent many a boring lecture trying to spell out 7734-derived numeric sequences that, when the display was flipped, would spell out words.  The layout of those grey and orange keys is burned into my head, and reminds me instantly of when I was hacking out story problems back in 1987.

What’s also amazing is how collectible some of the old calculators can be.  I was looking to see if I could score one of those old HP calculators on eBay, and even the most basic of the RPN scientific calculators are untouchable for under a sixty or eighty bucks.  HP, after twenty years of not releasing them, brought them back in limited editions, and you can get a brand new HP 15C for about $99.  There are scores of web sites with pictures of old eighties calculators, just like the obsolete computer museums you find online.  I don’t foresee myself doing anything more complicated than calculating interest on a loan, and it’s probably easier to use one of those online calculators for that, so I probably won’t be buying one.  But it’s neat to see that people are still into it.