The Wrath of Kon

Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

  • Why I am not an indie writer

    I hate the term “Indie Writer”.  Hate it.  Hate all of the variations: indie writer, indie writing, indie books.  It’s one of those terms, like “sammies.”  Any time I am in a restaurant that has the term “sammies” on the menu, I want to burn the fucking place to the ground.

    Over on Self Publishing Review, there was an interesting article about this (here.)  In recent years, I’ve had a certain unease with the sudden popularity of self-publishing, and I could never really explain this effectively. But then I read this article, and it was like I’d spent the last X months staring at the splotchy acid-trip picture at the mall and something shifted and I could magically see the 3-D unicorn.

    Back in the day, I was tangentially involved in the underground death metal scene; I published a zine, wrote for another, and spent a lot of time trading tapes and writing obscure bands around the world.  This was independent music at its most fundamental: people recorded albums in their own garage, dubbed them onto Maxell C-90s with a jambox or tape deck, then photocopied j-cards and mailed them off to zines for review, or sold copies through the mail.  (“Enclose carefully hidden cash!”)  Some bands “sold out” and signed to major labels, and you could have arguments forever with people over whether or not Nuclear Blast America was a “major” label, but I’m sure their most popular band sold about as many albums total as Sony gave away during promotion of a new Mariah Carey album.

    Then Nirvana showed up, and the metal scene completely died.  And all of a sudden, all of these “indie” bands appeared.  And we were constantly told that a band like Smashing Pumpkins was “indie rock,” even though they shared a label with the Spice Girls and Janet Jackson.  And this must have been a major pain in the ass for alternative or punk bands who were still pressing their CDs in batches of 1000 and dragging their own orders to the post office.  But it was even worse for the metal bands who saw a recently functional ecosystem completely dry up, replaced with a bunch of guys in flannel.  The only valid solutions for metal bands were to a) cut out all of the satan references and play mopy college rock; b) get a job at a gas station; and/or c) wait it out until all of the alternative bands had kids and got old and metal once again ruled. Meanwhile, MTV and the mainstream press beat this “indie” label to death until it had no meaning.

    There are two different axes to graph this stuff on.  One is “indie” as meaning independent of a massive corporation for your publisher.  The other is “indie” as a term describing rebellion against common conventions in literature.  And I think many of the people who write genre fiction and self-publish it take up the “indie” moniker to show that they are somehow bad-asses raging against the machine, although they’re still writing vampire romances and murder mysteries.  And most self-publishing forums and groups I encounter have little to nothing to do with pushing boundaries, and are mostly about how to make a product that looks like and competes with the same exact things released by the Big Six.  And anyone calling themselves an “indie” would be the last to admit any of this, and respond with “but MY book isn’t just like Tom Clancy – it’s like Tom Clancy with zombies!”

    Self-publishing suddenly became “indie publishing” because people wanted self publishing to sound legit, and shed the baggage of being associated with people who paid vanity presses a few thousand bucks for a box of a thousand books, 974 of which would sit in a box in their attic forever.  And some people may be staging a revolution against the Big Six by doing it themselves, while others may have tried to get an agent and get a deal and failed.  And maybe they failed because the industry is failing (nobody reads, economic downturn, the damn 1%, choose one or more), or maybe they just didn’t make the cut, because their stuff was no good.

    And I know you’re probably just thinking, “He’s just jealous his piece of shit books didn’t sell as much as Twilight.”  That’s not the point.  That isn’t my world.  I’m not Pavement complaining about Smashing Pumpkins.  I’m Captain Beefheart for the sake of that comparison; I’m doing something that’s not meant to be appreciated by anyone but a small number of people.  I’m fine with that.

    The problem is, I self-publish.  I’m an “indie” in the sense that Random House is not handling my output.  And for whatever stupid reason, that automatically lumps me in with every Stephenie fucking Meyer wannabe that’s self-publishing for profit.  I don’t self-publish to make money.  I self-publish because I don’t happen to have an offset press in my living room.  And I write because it’s a way of channeling my subconscious and my thoughts on finding a meaning to life into a format that can then be consumed and possibly felt as emotion by other people.  And the way that happens isn’t about a perfectly carved out plot arc or a nicely packaged consumer product or a compliant genre-specific thriller novel.  Jackson Pollock did not paint crying clowns and landscapes.  Albert Camus did not pen murder mysteries for the YA market.  I don’t have to adhere to the bullshit rules people keep spouting off, any more than G.G. Allin had to dress like the members of Pearl Jam, even though they both released albums in the same era.

    It’s irrelevant.  And it should be for you, too.  Write what you want.  If someone tells you to develop a marketing plan, tell them to go fuck themselves.  This is Art, not Amway.  I am not an “indie” writer.  Underground?  Maybe.  Cult?  I probably need more cult members first.  But “indie”?  Ugh.  Someone’s mom is an indie writer.  I’m anything but.

  • iTunes Bankruptcy

    I think when I sit down to write, I now spend more time trying to figure out what I want to listen to than I do actually writing, and that’s a problem.  My mind bounces between two solutions: one is to spend some inordinate amount of time and money finding all new music that moves me.  The other is to declare iTunes bankruptcy, and either delete every song in my iTunes library, or rate every single one at zero stars, then put it on shuffle and re-rate everything until the 11,000-some tracks more accurately describe what I like, instead of the current rating situation.  I think I “finished” rating all of my music, aside from new additions, in about 2007, and I would like to think I have evolved since then, but who knows.

    ( A few more facts.  Total tracks: 11,397.  Added in 2011: 426. In 2010: 504. Added since the beginning of 2007, which was my last big iTunes crash/rebuild: 5334.  Number of tracks that are “from” 2011: 122.  Number from 1989-1995, when I was in college: 2114.)

    I think when I’m at the height of my collector snobdom, my worst fear is that I will become one of those people that lock into a certain artist or time period and never acknowledge that there is any music outside of that sphere of influence, ever.  I dated a girl in college who was like this with Billy Joel, and it (plus the fact that she was bat-shit insane, but there’s a cart/horse situation here) were the reason I walked away from that relationship like an unemployed person walks away from a $500,000-underwater mortgage.

    But keeping up with new music is work.  I briefly tried to do this when I was reviewing new music for a now-dead web site, and it seems like the easier it is to get music, the harder it is to find music.  I can turn on iTunes genius and fire up Pandora or Spotify and point my web browser at a million different news sites and fan sites and get up-to-the-second email blasts from my favorite artists, but it seems like I find about 4% of what I used to find by wasting half my Saturday going from A to Z at a half-dozen different local record stores.  And it seems like the more I buy or download, the less potent the music is.  When I was in high school and could only afford to buy a tape a week, almost every one of those tapes was gold.  Now. I can add a hundred tracks at a clip to my library, and I still can’t name an album I bought in the last year that can stand up to repeat plays.

    Albums are always time machines for me, but I’m finding the harder it is to find an album, the higher the chance of it being powerful to me.  An example: I accidentally found out about Gary Moore in 1988, while on a record buying spree in Canada.  A guy working at a store in Stratford told me I should really check him out, and I did, and I loved it.  A couple of those albums were indelibly marked on my past, and of course those tapes got lost or fell apart, and I went for years wishing I could hear them again.  And in the 90s, finding those things was next to impossible; they were out of print, or were “imports” and I never could track them down, and doing a web search on Gary Moore (Alta Vista back then, I think) would turn up maybe four hits, none helpful.  When I eventually found those albums, they were absolutely efficacious, and transported me through time like I suddenly had a Delorean with attached flux capacitor.  I think if I would have been able to just type two words and a credit card number into a browser and instantly hear those songs, it would have been nowhere near as powerful as spending months scouring every non-chain record store in Seattle.

    But now I worry about listening to those tracks so much that they won’t work anymore, just like how I worry about drinking my twelfth diet coke of the day and still feeling lethargic.  I wonder if I should set aside that discography and find something new, and hope it will someday be my bridge back to 2011.  I hope that someone else out there is making something as mind-altering as the music I cherished 20 years ago.  And I wonder how I will find it, especially when I mention this to people and they say, “Oh, you need to listen to Arcade Fire.  They have like ten members or something.”

    OK, now take this entire article and replace music with books.  Same thing.

  • 10 Absolutely Bizarre Wikipedia Articles

    Whenever I get writer’s block, I hit wikipedia.  It’s arguable if it’s better or worse to fall down an internet k-hole by reading every single serial killer article you can find on wikipedia, but my hope is that I’ll eventually mine all of this for a good reference to throw in a story.

    Here’s a short list of wikipedia articles that I’ve read recently that are truly bizarre:

    1. Banana equivalent dose – The amount of radiation you absorb by eating one banana.  (Yes, you absorb radiation from eating bananas.  Helicopter parents: let’s ban them!)
    2. Berners Street Hoax – Two men had a bet that one of them could turn a random address the most talked-about address in London in a week; antics ensue.
    3. Ota Benga – The Bronx zoo had a human as an exhibit.  In the 20th century.  This is a truly fucked up and sad story.
    4. FedEx Express Flight 705 – Want to read about one of the most demented hijacking schemes ever?  Here you go.
    5. Self-surgery – If you ever read alt.tasteless, you already know where I’m going with this one.
    6. Dyatlov Pass incident – When hikers wander off for no reason barefoot in heavy snow in the Ural mountains and are later found with fractured skulls, missing tongues, and no signs of struggle, a serious WTF situation occurs.
    7. Human Interference Task Force – How do you tell people for the next 10,000 years not to screw around with a buried crypt of radioactive waste?  The US government formed a task force of scientists, anthropologists, and science fiction writers to brainstorm this.  One linguist proposed creating a religion based on radioactive waste, that would create myths and legends surrounding the spent fuel rods, which would be handed down from generation to generation and eventually produce some asshole that would take people’s money to build a water park.
    8. New Swabia – Did you know Nazi Germany still has a territorial claim on Antarctica? You do now.
    9. Phineas Gage – My favorite story of a railroad worker having a metal spike drilled through his skull by an explosion and surviving.
    10. List of unusual deaths – This one is the god damned mother lode.  You could kill an entire day reading this.

    Happy reading, and let me know your favorites, too.

  • Your Holiday Shopping List, Should You Choose To Accept It

    It’s almost Christmas!  Or it’s almost Hanukkah, and maybe it’s almost Kwanzaa (not sure), and it’s definitely almost the Firestorm, if you worship Satan.  But it’s definitely that time of year where you spend your hard earned money on carefully thought-out presents for all of your family, and maybe get a fruit basket in return.  And a week from today, the criminally insane will converge on local big box stores to beat the shit out of each other to get a crappy DVD player made by slave labor in China out of toxic plastic, that will work for roughly 37 minutes before exploding.

    So, you looking for some gifts that aren’t made by children in sweatshops that might actually promote an artist and maybe make a person think?  How about some books?  Here’s my list of books I’ve read lately that aren’t big-6 published, written by people without a massive marketing budget:

    • Small Town Punk by John Sheppard – This is probably one of the best self-published books I’ve ever read.  All of John’s stuff is awesome, and maybe I’m biased because I published Tales of the Peacetime Army.  Make sure to get the original 2002 edition, and not the 1997 abortion. (It’s not in print, but there are many copies floating around for $5, which is the best five bucks you could possibly spend.)
    • Mostly Redneck by Rusty Barnes – I only know him as a friend-of-friend through Timothy Gager, which was enough for me to put down the cash.  This is 18 short stories of hard living in rural Appalachia, and each one is so precisely crafted, with absolutely no waste.  He’s got a way of really haunting you, getting something wedged very deep in your head in a thousand words.  Great stuff.
    • Treating a Sick Animal by Timothy Gager – Speaking of, check out Gager’s latest collection of flash fiction.  It contains 40-some shorter pieces, each just as lethal as the last.  What’s even more amazing than the quality of his writing is the tremendous speed at which he turns out this precision work.  He’s probably written four stories better than anything I’ve ever done in the time it takes me to finish this post.
    • How Some People Like Their Eggs by Sean Lovelace – Lovelace is a writer in Indiana (he teaches at my sister’s alma mater of Ball State) and he has a blog that almost entirely talks about nachos.  There’s two things I like about this chapbook, aside from the quality of the prose.  One is that Lovelace has a way of coming up with very unique forms, twisting and clever structures that make me think, “god DAMN why didn’t I do that?”  (Example: the titular piece is a list of how famous people like their eggs.)  The other thing I like is that this is a real damn chapbook: a carefully designed, really printed on quality paper chapbook.  It’s not just a POD 6×9 trade paperback, which is awesome.
    • Johnny Astronaut by Rory Carmichael and I, An Actress: The Autobiography of Karen Jamey by Jeffrey Dinsmore – These are both kindle reissues of the Awkward Press editor’s earlier novels.  He’s added bonus materials to both, and priced them at 99 cents each, so they’re well worth the look.
    • Between Panic and Desire by Dinty W. Moore – This is truly awesome creative nonfiction, the telling of a person’s life in hilarious autobiographical sketches, knitted together in a way that tells more than the whole story, and then breaks to throw in some quiz questions or go off on a different tangent.  It’s like a mix of Vonnegut at his best, but replace the aliens with tripping acid at the top of the World Trade Center.
    • Powering the Devil’s Circus, Redux by Jason Jordan – A collection from the editor of decomP, this is a dozen stories and a novella of experimental work, with plenty of mention of metal, which I of course like.
    • Tomorrowland by Grant Bailie – The UPS guy literally showed up with this one as I was typing this post.  It’s a collection of interwoven stories, and looks promising.  I loved his books Cloud 8 and Mortarville, so this looks awesome.
    • Fistful of Pizza by Jon Konrath – Most importantly, buy my damn book!  Nine twisted stories, and it’s only 99 cents on the kindle.  Break in that new Kindle Fire by reading about a parody of the Ben Hur chariot race, filmed with small breed dogs around a set designed like a 1970s Times Square filled with heroin addicts and pornographers.  Also available in print for you luddites.

    I’m sure I forgot a few others, but check these out – thanks!

  • The Ides of November

    This is how clean my car currently is.

    I can’t believe it’s almost Thanksgiving.  Living in California has really put the zap on my ability to discern between months, since it perpetually feels like it’s April.  I guess we’re now going into the rainy season, and we’ve got more constantly gloomy weather.  This is the season where I never know when to wash my car, and it’s even worse now that I only fill up my car’s gas tank maybe every 6 to 8 weeks.  I usually go through the coin-op drive-through wash that gives you a $2 discount when you also buy a tank of gas.  The last time I did this, the person in front of me drove on the tracks wrong, then kept backing up and resetting the machine over and over.  I would have gotten out, went up to their window, and asked “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING” except I was 100% sure that the second I stepped into the wash bay, the machines would start.

    I haven’t updated in a while, and it’s more of the “what should I be writing here?” sort of thing.  Earlier this year, I made a concerted effort to post more weird stories here, and that resulted in a few issues.  First, the stories were all great, as far as I’m concerned, but I don’t think enough people found them.  And because I published them here first, I basically could not submit them to other zines or journals, who typically want first publication rights.  I realize what I should have done is submitted all of them elsewhere, and then reprinted them here later, or put the rejects that nobody wanted on this site.  Or I should have saved all of them and sewn them together into a new book, then published excerpts of it here.  There is something to be said with the constant demand to put new stuff here, and how that deadline forces me to produce more.  I’d honestly love to have a weekly column somewhere that absolutely forced me to write a thousand words, due at midnight Tuesday, every single week.  I just read that latest Bukowski collection, and that’s basically what forced him to write for a long time.  But print is dead, and blogs are dying, and within a year, there will be something like twitter that only lets you post a single word per update,  and super-micro-mini-flash fiction will be all the rage, which doesn’t bode well for a guy that can barely warm up in 500 words.

    The other issue with this is that I never want to write journal entries here, the creative nonfiction sort of thing where I chronicle current life or past memories.  I’ve had a long conflict with which fork in the road to take with my writing, either the ‘straight’ fiction like my first book, or the strange absurdist humor stuff like my second book.  And the answer is very clearly the latter, since that is who I am and what I do best.  But sometimes I feel like I need to write a quick status update or rant or whatever, and maybe that’s the stuff that needs to live here.

    So, yeah – status.  I tried to write a book for Nanowrimo and that did not work, for all of the usual reasons.  I started by loading up on caffeine and just capturing straight brain dumps of my unconscious memories, pure automatic writing at its most random.  The first takes of this were pure genius, but as I started to think about the scaffolding needed to continue this for 50,000 words, a plot started to unfold, and it became yet another generic Campbell Hero’s Journey ripoff about zombies and time travel.  And the more I overthought this, the more it became hackneyed and cliched and stupid.  So I quit just shy of the halfway mark.  I think there are some good pieces in there that could be turned into decent shorter things, but I need to seriously set that one aside and work on real stuff.

    I also switched to a Kinesis Advantage keyboard, which has been a real albatross around my neck.  The contour and the key tactile operation is awesome, but it really requires you to be a touch typist, and I am not.  I practiced with a touch typing tutor program, and used the exercises that came with the keyboard, but it is still at maybe 50% of my normal typing speed, with a lot more mistakes.  The more I type, the better it gets, but I’m noticing a lot of common actions rely on muscle memory.  Like when I copy and paste, I don’t think “command-c, command-v”; I think left thumb and the two keys up and to the right of said thumb.  Moving the command key to roughly where the H is on my old keyboard makes me have to stop and think as I cut and paste.  And I don’t want to think when I type – I want the words to pour directly from my brain to the buffer.  Thought control would be nice, but I think that’s in the same category as jet packs and commercial travel to Mars.

    My last book, Fistful of Pizza, has continued to sell at the rate that makes this most definitely a labor of love.  But I have been getting some very good comments on it from people, which is nice.  I have about enough stories to publish another collection like this, and I’ve been editing and messing with that a bit.  I have no title and no idea on the cover, and I don’t want to sink my productivity by spending all of my free time browsing stock photo sites forever.  I also don’t want to pay someone hundreds of dollars to design a cover for me, so this might take a while.

    Things have been otherwise quiet.  Sold the old house, just about to finish buying the new one.  I’ve been reading a lot of independent authors lately, and should probably post a list  of all of them.  I got the new iPhone, which I like.  I had to upgrade to Lion, which I do not like.  It’s cold here now, although I now define “cold” as 50, whereas I was born in a place where “cold” was roughly -60.  I will feel the wrath of this when I do the usual Midwestern holiday visit next month, which typically involves a temperature change of at least 50 degrees, an almost mandatory head cold, and some amount of shoveling snow.  It should be interesting.

  • Everlong

    I somehow got sucked into watching this documentary about the Foo Fighters yesterday.  I have a generally neutral attitude toward Dave Grohl and his band; I vaguely thought he was an interesting guy, based on the fact that he later did some work with Lemmy and other heavy metal icons in Probot, and he could have just fucked off after his time with Nirvana and played golf or something, but he decided to keep going with music and keep grinding it out, which is more endearing to me.

    I was probably too busy trying to collect every obscure Carcass bootleg to really pay attention through most of the Foo Fighters’ rise, but I found a lot of the music in it oddly familiar.  Back when I worked at Spry, a fair amount of CD swapping went on when we spent long hours locked in our respective offices, and someone had a copy of the band’s first album, which I must have spent some time playing while toiling away at whatever Windows Help project I was screwing with at the time.  I think I also heard a lot of the songs on the radio back in the late 90s.

    That part of the documentary set off the nostalgia works in me, the stock shots of mid-90s Seattle that reminded me of my time there.  I lived in two different Seattles, and one was those cutaway shots of Belltown coffee houses and the old Moore Theater and a monorail in the background, the Seattle of Singles and Sub-Pop bands and freaky art galleries and experimental films in the back of the Speakeasy bar and grill where 17 people showed up to watch a video of a guy from Idaho dressed as a very unconvincing Olivia Newton John singing badly at a talent show.  (Seriously.)

    (The other Seattle was the one that, I think, made me eventually leave, which was the October to March solid grey sky and pissing rain and constant 48 degrees depression.  I liked my time in Seattle greatly, but that part of it, that seasonal affective disorder catalyst really put the zap on me, made the walls close in on me.  I think if I would have moved to a bigger apartment, would have gotten into the habit of jumping on a flight to Vegas for a 4-day weekend every once in a while, and would have bought a full-spectrum light, I probably would have hung in for much longer.  But I didn’t, and I lasted four years.)

    I used to listen to a lot of radio back then, which seems strange to me now, especially since radio has all but died.  But between tapes, I’d listen to 107.7, which was the big “grunge” station in the 90s, when Seattle was the capitol of alt-music fame.  I never really got into grunge, and by the time of my arrival in 1995, the movement had all but died, but Marco Collins and the rest of the KNDD staff still pumped out a lot of now-classic alt-rock that got stuck in my subconscious.  I had my own very specific programming for writing and in-car music, but I would fall back to whatever The End played, especially during late nights.

    I remember many Fridays when I’d do the usual routine of Denny’s and Tower and Borders and back home for hours and hours of trying to write these god damned books.  I’d load up my 6+1 CD changer, and after those ran through, I’d flip on the radio.  And all of these songs would play: Smashing Pumpkins, Presidents of the United States, Everclear, Beck, Garbage.  And the Foo Fighters would always appear in the mix too.  At that point, that late at night, or early in the morning, I wouldn’t be paying any attention to the lyrics or artists or whatever, because I’d be so burned into the words and the muse, but now I hear some of those old songs and it reminds me of those late nights, trying to get the rest of a chapter done before the automatic sprinklers seven stories down would switch on and fill the background with their hissing and clicking, signaling that it was once again 5:00 AM and the sun would start burning across the horizon and it was time for me to dose up on Tylenol PM and quit for the night.

  • On the death of a New Balance customer

    So Steve Jobs died, right on the heels of everyone taking a shit on the iPhone announcement and the new model not being able to read minds, turn straw into gold, or last sixteen weeks on a one-hour battery recharge.  Cause of death is assumed to be his pancreatic cancer, but this is a guy who was in the middle of a fierce legal battle with a company that uses PowerPoint for design documents, bug databases, legal briefings, and product mockups, so it’s possible he bought it from extreme eyestrain.  At any rate, the internet is swimming with heartfelt tributes from weepy Apple fans who are all remembering how Jobs invented the Apple II, Mac, and iPod, which is news to Steve Wozniak, Jon Rubenstein, and Jef Raskin, respectively.

    I got started on the Apple II way back in grade school, although when it came time to actually own a machine, I got a Commodore 64.  That was a no-brainer; a C-64 cost $200, and a similarly-equipped Apple was about two grand.  And when it came time in college to gear up, a Mac Plus cost about $2500, while a cobbled-together PC cost a few hundred bucks.  By that time, Jobs moved on to bigger things, like the NeXT computer, and I took many a walk across campus to screw around on those high-end magnesium black cubes.

    Even though I made a living helping people deal with their dying Macs over the phone (“shut down all of the other apps; reboot; zap the PRAM”) I never actually owned one. I did, however, identify as a Mac User.  Between a few long-term loans of old classic Macs and the hours spent in the Mac labs on campus, I did quite a bit of work on the machines.  I laid out my first zines in Pagemaker, and used the GUI-fied version of WordPerfect back when the 5.1 PC version was just a blue and white DOS box on a screen.  I probably identified with the Mac as some form of rebellion, of being different than all of the other masses of business school droids sitting in front of Windoze machines, plunking away at Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets.  And back in the early 90s, if you wanted to edit images or record sound or cut movies or do page layout, you used a Mac.  PC people could whip out the virtual dick measured in kilobytes and megahertz and brag about how much more they got for their dollar, but at the end of the day, they were sitting at a C: prompt, typing in all caps.

    I eventually bought my own Mac, and have since bought a bunch of different iPods and iPads and iPhones and other iStuff that has made life easier and more fun.  And Steve Jobs was somewhat responsible for that, or at least responsible for the company from not completely going into the shitter in the late 90s.  But it always irks me a bit when people say he “invented” the stuff.  I’ve always been more of a fan of the Other Steve and his hacking of hardware that eventually led to the Apple II, or the futurist (and former tech writer) Jef Raskin, whose ideas about different computing paradigms eventually transformed into the Macintosh.  I’ve always liked the design of the Mac, but that’s also not entirely his deal, either (Jerry Manock).

    Jobs falls squarely into the schizophrenic relationship Americans have with CEOs.  They don’t deserve their high salaries, but when a company fails, it’s entirely their fault.  They don’t invent things, but they do.  I am not saying either of these is right or wrong, but it amazes me when people believe both of these things.  And in the case of Steve Jobs, it always infuriates me when people think a CEO should single-handedly be involved with every aspect of a company.

    This management belief is the one thing that pissed me off the most about Jobs.  Not that he did this incorrectly, but that he led so many managers to believe that if you acted like an egotistical asshole and got your thumbs in every aspect of a product’s lifecycle, you would be treated like a goddamn genius and get fantastic results.  I’ve worked for several managers like this, the kind of people who are in charge of a billion-dollar company, but need to copy-edit every single page of a stupid user manual that nobody will read, and then waste all of your time insisting they know more about technical writing than you do.  Just because Steve Jobs did the same shit, doesn’t mean anybody that did that would get the same results.  It’s like suddenly becoming a Nazi sympathizer will somehow help you become a leading auto manufacturer.

    Probably the thing that freaks me out the most about the death of Steve Jobs is that he was only 56, and I’m now pushing 41, and I’m not exactly making billions of dollars on any of my companies.  I’ve always hoped that by the time I got some form of cancer, the medical community would be able to inject cell-repairing nanobots into my veins and the whole thing would go away in less time than it would take for me to jet-pack over to the local Mars shuttle and catch some lunch on the red planet.  Of course, now 58% of the country believes that science should be banned from schools, and I realize I am fucked.  I should probably eat some more vegetables or something.

    Anyway, Command-Option-P-R, Mr. Jobs.  Thanks for not making me spend a fifth of my life trying to figure out what the fuck copy of d011v109.sys I need to download every other time I need to read a CD-ROM.

  • Targeted Nostalgia

    Two unrelated things that aren’t have thrown me into a fit of nostalgia today: baseball and Target.

    It was the last game of the season today, and despite the fact that the Rockies had a catastrophic time this year, I forced myself to listen, to take the pain and punishment of hearing them fail miserably. They won, despite having a skeleton crew of almost all third-string players and late-season replacements against a World Series-defending team. It got rough for an inning, and I thought it would all fall apart, but they pulled it out, and ended a dismal 2011, well below the .500 mark.

    I listened to almost no games this year, because after about May, things imploded like an old Vegas casino making way for a new chrome-and-glass monstrosity. And this is the first year I didn’t see any Rockies games in person. In fact, I only went to one game all year, mostly because I can’t stand watching the Giants about as much as I can’t stand going to games at Oakland Coliseum. So there was a certain nostalgia to firing up the game audio today, the same way I feel after it’s been a long winter and I tune into that first game, hear the familiar announcers, get all of the standard commercials and station identification bumpers and little audio touchstones that bring me back to the summer I lived in Denver, pulling in the 850 KOA signal on my AM radio.

    My year in Denver had two distinct eras, the first being the summer of 2007, when I worked from home for Frankov’s startup, and went to every day game I could afford at the one-block-away Coors Field. But then, almost exactly four years ago to the day, I got a job as a tech writer for this internet security firm. I didn’t know anybody in Denver, and suddenly found myself driving an hour a day to this high-tech campus, or as high-tech as the area had, at least. I was the second tech writer, and the first was totally consumed with his work, so we almost never talked. And because of the strange reporting structure, my own introverted mannerisms, and this mild disconnect between me and the work culture of the tech industry, I didn’t hang out with many people at work.

    What do I mean by the work culture? I guess every place I lived had its own style or flavor of the tech industry. Seattle in the mid-90s was very Microsoft-driven; MSFT was practically printing their own money, and every company was either trying to keep up with them compensation-wise, was somehow dependent on them for their livelihoods, or was trying hard to be the exact opposite of them. New York was very Wall Street, except for that minor blip of “silicon alley” doofusism that vanished when the NASDAQ did. Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley, the gold standard of tech company behavior, no explanation needed.

    But Denver had its own odd little identity. There were pockets of high tech, but it was held back by this attitude by some who thought it was still the wild damn west out there. Denver 2007 was just barely Seattle 1997 to me, and socially, it felt like one in maybe five people belonged to some outback conservative christian church with kids in a lockdown academy and a barefoot wife at home. This was the land of Promise Keepers, Ted Haggard, megachurches. I’d seen worse — I spent a dozen or so years in Indiana where the ratio was more like 5 out of 6.  But it wasn’t just the politics or religion; it was a combination of that, of age, of technical background, that made me feel like an outsider there.

    The job didn’t have a cafeteria, and we sat four people to a mega-cube with low walls, so the idea of brown-bagging didn’t appeal to me. Instead, I’d get in my brand new little car, and drive around the neighborhood until I landed at a fast food joint. The office sat on the edge of nowhere, a half hour south of Denver, an area with a few golf courses, an executive airport, and a whole lot of high mesa desert occasionally punctuated with strips of prefab big-box culture dropped on straight roads spaced apart at a mile per. Twenty years before, it was probably all barren cattle-grazing land, when an invisible SimCity player in the sky clicked and dropped all the big names down: Safeway, Chipotle, Chili’s, and Target, with a peppering of Subways and cell phone stores. From horizon to horizon, you’d see the orange-brown Colorado high plains, littered with the same exact stores I’d seen in every other place I’d lived or visited.

    I’d always end up at the same two or three places, mostly Taco Bell or McDonald’s. I’d always bring a book, sit in my car, eat the same thing every day and read. The Yaris still had the new car smell and the novelty of car ownership I’d missed during my time in New York. I think I told Sarah one time about how I preferred to eat alone like this every day, and it depressed her, but I liked it. After almost a decade of being surrounded with ten thousand people in the same city block as me, it felt so nice to be absolutely alone.

    It would take me five minutes to drive to Taco Bell, and ten to eat my Mexican pizza and nachos. That meant I’d had another 40 minutes to kill, until I’d need to tech write my way through the back half of the day. I’d inevitably end up at the big Super Target on Lincoln, this massive version of the familiar red department store, a two-story version with a double-decker parking lot and a grocery store welded to the side. I’d sit on the top deck of that garage, and you could see this great expanse of nothingness to the south, rolling hills and scrub brush and mountains in the distance, the ribbon of I-25 stretching from Lone Tree and vanishing on the horizon of Castle Rock. I’d go to Target for everything and nothing, to look at the twenty-dollar polo shirts and the seventeen different kinds of car air freshener, and end up with a case of Coke and some new cat toy we didn’t need.

    But I mostly went to watch, to see who ends up at a Target in the middle of the day. And the answer, at this Target, was apparently nobody, because I’d only see a small trickle of stay-at-home moms, all younger than me with a gaggle of kids in tow. This wasn’t like the LA I’d know a year later, where in the middle of the day, you’d see all kinds of people and wonder who in the hell actually worked in a town like that. This reminded me of the solitude of working a day shift at the mall back in Indiana, where you’d only run into geriatrics and pediatrics. It had this certain feel to it, a feeling that I shouldn’t be there, the same feeling I had when I skipped a day of high school and saw a world I didn’t belong in.

    And the visits to Target tied into that first era. Sarah worked a lot at her job, working nights, weekends, long days. And we didn’t have cable, didn’t watch TV, didn’t do much of anything outside of work except try to regroup to get ready for more work. And it seems like we spent an inordinate amount of time at the Stapleton Target, undergoing consumer therapy by experiencing the big box lanes of SKUs in a store that we didn’t get to experience in Manhattan. We’d end up with hundreds of dollars of damage in those white and red bullseyed bags, Method, Archer, Market Pantry. I’d have the next PlayStation game that would consume my off-hours in my little office, and whatever little cellophane-wrapped junk food I’d consume at my desk while listening to those games and not writing my next book. But those trips to the world outside the womb of my home office were strikingly themed by the uniformity of the Target experience. And when the first era quickly ended and the second era made me miss it, those trips to another branch of the same outlet let me briefly revisit my lost summer.

    Now, four years, later, twelve hundred miles away, and 5280 feet lower, everything is different, except a daytime run to Target. They just built a new one, about a mile from my house. Now that I work from home, I’ll end up there after lunch, to pick up a case of (now diet) Coke or a box of Claritin. And it’s a different shape, a different layout, but the same experience, the same types of daytime shoppers, the same red-shirted staff and aisles of things I don’t need but will probably buy.

    This nostalgia is a painful and potent drug for me, something it’s very easy for me to get lost in.  I can waste far too much time exploring the connections and bridges of a present day to the past, grasping at these raw feelings I try to replay as a time machine to a distant era or pleasant memory.  I stumble across these things, like the smell of a faded air freshener or an old receipt to a lunch from 2002 stuffed in the back of a book, and it can trigger this rush of thoughts back to that time.  And I spent 1999 wishing it was 1992, and 2008 wishing it was 1989, and now bits of 2011 wishing I could open a window to 2007 and take a quick look again.  I wonder if I’m the only person who does this, if I’ve accidentally segmented my life into these predefined periods by moving and changing jobs, or if it would be the same if I still lived on the same street in the same town where I grew up.  It’s hard to be present in now, except that I know at some point in the future, I’ll be looking back and remembering 2011 again.  And maybe the bridge will be a consumer store, or maybe it will be a kind of food or a song or the sound of an appliance or the smell and feel of an autumn breeze at the tail-end of a long summer.   But I know that it’ll happen, at some point.

    And now, I’ve gotta stop doing this, and go immerse myself in the now of trying to write my next damn book.  Stay tuned.

  • Eversion and the mass-hallucination we call life

    So Facebook recently fucked over its entire interface.  That’s big news and not big news; I mean, it’s been beaten to death in various memes, even though it just happened a matter of hours ago.  It’s big news in the sense that a somewhat-usable product has been made into a much less usable product.  It’s not big news in the sense that we’re all marching to our graves at a rate of an hour every hour, some a bit faster than that, and nobody really gives a shit about various wars and economic disasters as much as they care about the order and sorting of various updates from their friends describing their bowel movements.

    What’s interesting to me is how social media sites have changed our abilities to disseminate information.  I’m almost convinced you could film an entire movie backwards, or edit it together so the events happened in reverse-chronological order, because people are so used to following feeds of information like blogs and twitter backwards.  Everyone complains about how twitter and texting is killing the letter or the long-form prose entry, how people used to write long letters, which were replaced by long emails, which were replaced by blog posts, which were replaced by 140-character bursts of information.  And I suppose that’s true.  But I also wonder about people’s ability to glue together narratives from disparate entries of text, and how that will change our perception of reality.

    William Gibson, the guy who invented cyberspace, later claimed that we are already in cyberspace.  (He called it everting.) He didn’t mean that we had stupid goggles glued to our head or were immersed into some Tron wet dream.  I think back in 1995, those Lawnmower Man days, I thought there would be a sudden tipping point where computers would get enough horsepower and the right neural tap so that we’d be able to spend time in a simulated reality.  What happened instead is a parallel reality was created, and it slowly became woven into our daily lives, until we reached the point where more of this cyber-reality existed than our actual lives, and I don’t think anybody really realizes it.

    Maybe I’m a bad example of this, but the bulk of my social interaction now takes place over TCP/IP.  I work from home, and aside from two meetings a week, I conduct all of my work through emails and chat rooms and bug tracking software and wikis.  And technically, my phones run through VOIP, so those are also funneled through the ether.  I talk to friends in email; I post on this blog; I write twitter updates and reply to Facebook posts; I do pretty much everything online.  I shop online; I sell books online; I post the high scores of my video games online, and prior to cutting my copy of Call of Duty in half because it was consuming all of my free time, I played against and with other people solely through my network connection, in a virtual reality where we blew each other up in deathmatches.

    Look at all of the stuff that has been replaced by a digital counterpart: you download songs in iTunes instead of buying a physical CD; you get your software in binary form from an app store instead of a shrink-wrapped box.  All of your photos are JPEGs and TIFFs instead of printed on Kodak paper.  Maybe you haven’t moved to e-books yet, but a lot of people have.  Films?  Tax forms?  TV shows?  Calendars?  Maps?  It’s all another subdivision of cyberspace.  Sure, you aren’t sitting at a digital desk in the Matrix and whipping your hands around in the air to manipulate these objects.  But instead of having this completely separate world you enter by jumping in a holodeck or a VR isolation tank, you’ve got an infestation of these objects peppered throughout your regular blood-and-guts reality.

    All of this works, until part of it radically changes.  In the real world, you don’t wake up and suddenly find that every house in your subdivision, instead of being arranged on streets in numerical house-number order, were sorted by their frequency of use or color.  But in a virtual world, you’re at the whim of its maker.  When you get used to consuming those status updates in chronological order and they’re suddenly sorted by some piss-poor AI that thinks it knows what’s most important, you obviously throw a fit.   Another example of this — also this week — was when Netflix suddenly decided it would be a great idea to take their existing service and split it into two parts, which completely upends the decade-old experience of putting stuff in a queue and expecting the discs to come in the mail, by complicating the situation with two entirely incompatible queues, one of them having a bafflingly stupid name.

    I don’t know anything about human factors (I’m sure A’s dad could give me a lesson on it) but there’s gotta be a term or a threshold on how people react to sudden changes like that.  But is it something learned?  Will the kids born in 2011 who live a lifetime of CEOs with completely stupid UX ideas making dumb adjustments on the fly instantly adapt when their reality is suddenly shifted?  And how will a generation of people like this change the way companies work?  I grew up in a generation that, for the most part, always had email and always knew how to get on a computer and enter in a URL.  So companies started saying “fuck it – don’t ship a manual; just put the URL on the box and let them figure it out” or “we don’t need to staff a toll-free hotline, just have them email when they need to order new checks/change their password/whatever”.  And I’m fine with that, but the generation before me freaked the fuck out, and every Andy Rooney type started in with the “REMEMBER WHEN YOU COULD GO TO THE BANK AND GET THE TELLER TO HELP YOU” crap.  In twenty years, will I be saying “REMEMBER WHEN EVERYTHING WAS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER?”

  • Dot Matrix and Word Processors

    I was writing about something completely different the other day, and went on this side diversion about dot-matrix printers, and thought about how a giant subset of the population (like everyone born after about 1985) never had to deal with them, while I spent far too many hours fighting them in computer labs, pulling apart the intricate pieces to pry loose jammed scraps of paper that got worked into the machinery.

    There’s so many distinctive features of this whole era of printing that are long forgotten.  Dot matrix printers usually used eight little pins to stamp a ribbon as the print head jumped across the page.  My friend Matt had one of these, the Commodore 801, and the thing I remember most about it was that it was unidirectional; the little print head would zip across the page at a breakneck 50 characters per second, then the page would move up a line, and the head would return to the left.  But it didn’t print on the sweep back to the left, which meant it was half as fast as the expensive printers that would print on both passes.

    The printers were also tractor-feed back then.  The paper had those little perforated runners hanging off of each end, little strips with holes in them, and the box of paper was fan-fold, so you could feed in the sheet and it would continuously chew through the giant thousand-page sheet of paper in a carton.  Then, after you spent 20 minutes staring at the printer, hoping the thing got through your term paper in one pass, you then had to fold and tear apart each page, then tear off the feed strips on either side.

    And, of course, that never worked right.  If you didn’t line up the paper exactly, turning the little knob on the side of the printer, the end of the physical page would not match up with what the computer thought was the end of the page, and you’d get this mangled mess with a blank strip of what was supposed to be the top and bottom margins in the middle of the printed page.  The whole operation of aligning and feeding and advancing paper was a precision thing, and if the paper got folded or creased or otherwise fucked up, the printer would have no mercy and create an origami disaster out of your precious schoolwork.

    The output of a dot-matrix looked like shit, and they did a lot of little tricks to get it to resemble actual type.  Like some printers had this “near letter quality” feature, where they’d do multiple passes on the same line to get a higher resolution, and they started adding more pins.  When I was at IUSB, we had armies of these Panasonic KPX-1124 printers, which had 24 pins instead of 8.  These pieces of shit were the bane of my existence back in 1991, and I spent untold hours tearing jammed paper out of these while some dumpy housewife screamed at me about her Psych 101 paper getting trashed.  (If you ever did time around one of these, watch this video and tell me if the clunking sound of that print head slamming into the left margin over and over doesn’t make you go full postal.)

    It seems like everyone forgets the other bastard child of that era that made perfect typewritten letters, at the sake of glacial speeds and 120-decibel print runs.  The daisy wheel printer had a hub with a bunch of little spokes coming off of it, each one carrying a little type letter.  It could spin the wheel with a servo motor and then hammer it against the ribbon with a solenoid, making an ink impression that looked exactly like a typewritten page.  These were a big deal if you were printing out things like college admission letters, or you had an English teacher that had a hair up their ass about dot-matrix printers and wanted you to hunt down a selectric and hammer out the damn thing the old fashioned way.  Daisy wheel printers were louder than fuck, and a low-end model typically cost more than your entire computer.

    But not everyone had computers.  When I was in high school, I had this “word processor” which was a glorified typewriter, except it had a single line of an LCD display, and it used a thermal print head.  It took these cartridges of some kind of crap that it could transfer to a page with a set of heated pins.  If you have one of those label maker machines, it was a similar deal, but masquerading as a desktop machine.  I think you could only type in one line at a time, and then hit return and wait a minute for it to etch onto the paper.  This wasn’t the best machine for stream-of-consciousness writing, but it was way faster than hunt-pecking on the K-Mart manual typewriter I got at a garage sale as a kid, where you’d type any faster than three characters a minute and all of the little hammers would get wrapped around each other and jam.

    I somehow lucked into finding this girl in my freshman year of college that thought I was some kind of writing genius, and got her to type my papers for a semester.  I guess that sounds sort of chauvinistic, but that’s an arrangement that I feel sorry the current generation won’t find themselves in.  The “can you help me type my W131 paper?” pickup line has gone the way of the dodo.

    After I wasn’t able to fully seal that deal, I dated someone who bought one of those Brother word processors, which were a very brief halfway-house between a typewriter and a computer.  It was this huge microwave oven-sized thing that was a fusion of a printer, a tiny CRT monitor, a keyboard, and the Notepad.exe program in ROM.  You could type a few pages at a time and then save them to a floppy disk (which was totally incompatible with any other computer) and then when you got it all situated and edited, you pressed a key and it would spit out the creation on actual paper.  My roommate Kirk later had one of these beasts, and I think I remember Larry working off of one for a while.  Here is a nice video of one in action.

    Now, computers are cheap as hell, something it seems that most people forget, and laser printers or nice inkjets are everywhere, and we don’t really think about stuff like this.  But I remember the smell of the fine paper dust inside of a monster line printer on campus, one of these washing machine sized beasts that would mass-print thousands of pages off of VAX computers, so long as one of us consultants hooked it up with the occasional corrugated cardboard box of 17″ wide tractor feed paper, that cream and light green-lined stuff.  Every now and again, some idiot would send an ASCII-art dragon to the printer, a giant picture rendered in letters that would print banner-style across three dozen pages of paper, over the course of an hour.  (Even better, when you’re sitting in a public lab and someone in a dorm sends through a picture of a Penthouse Pet done up ASCII-style.)  That was all infinitely better than when someone would accidentally dump a binary file to the DEC LG06 in the library, and it would spit out page after page of random junk until you could get an operator in the machine room to kill the queue.

    My last hurrah with dot matrix was about five years ago, when I bought a Tandy 100 off of eBay.  The guy threw in a bunch of other random crap, including a Radio Shack printer from circa 1985, with some bizarro serial cable and no chance in hell of ever working with a machine produced this century.  It went straight to the dumpster, but I probably should have videotaped it going off of a four-story building, or getting it Office Space style with a baseball bat.