Topic: Posts

I just wanted to pop in out of lecture mode (sigh) and give a brief sort of “meta report,” of what I’m working on, where I am in life, and what my plans are for the blog are in the next little bit.

First off, as next Monday is a national holiday (whew) and I’m going to be out of town doing family stuff for the long weekend, I’m not going to have a `Critical Futures <http://criticalfutures.com/>`_ post on monday. The current story, “Visa Riots” (in Trailing Edge) will run through Wednesday (6 parts) and then I’ll have a little two part Station Keeping story so we’ll be able to start September with a new section of something fun.

I’ve been hard at work planning a new novel, writing more Station Keeping. I’ve also been working a lot, but my current employment situation is going to be changing significantly in September (I’m in a “hurry up and wait,” situation, but I remain optimistic.) In any case, the next job will be more flexible, whatever it is, and I’m pretty confident that the impending changes in my life that happen this fall will be exciting and productive.

In terms of the blog, I’ve decided that unless something seems really important I’m not going to talk about things I’m writing and the writing process. I might still post book reviews and thoughts on reading, but I’ll probably tone that down as well. I’m not sure that it’s been helpful to my process and workflow to spend time reflecting on these sorts of things, and I’d rather spend my blogging time talking about other things, like…

Knitting and technology. I’m starting to knit more again, and I’m pretty aware that you all in blogland are--at least for the moment--primarily knitters. So, I think blogging about knitting will be helpful and fun.

In terms of technology, I’ve been through a couple of phases about my writing about technology for this blog, and I’ve not been incredibly happy with my previous modes. I think writing about material technology gadgets/hardware, endorses consumerism in a way that I don’t thinks interesting or fun. And while I remain interested in productivity and technology, writing about being productive isn’t productive (ie. productivity porn) and in my experience always gets hung up on fadish systems or tools, and that’s not interesting. So I’ll probably continue to blog about producivity, but much less than I have been.

I’m interested in writing more about open source stuff. My post about drupal was a lot of fun, and I’ve had some other thoughts which will (hopefully) germinate into full grown posts in the next couple of weeks.

I understand that the geeks might not get the knitting and the knitters might not get the tech stuff but stay tuned in any case, I’m a generalist in both camps, and I promise to be enthusiastic.

Also I have a little script to ease in the posting of links and other miscellany that I find along my travels through cyberspace, I just have to get better at using it. That should help even out any over specialization that I might be prone to.

So that’s what’s on my plate and mind. What’s on yours?

On/up!

I read Cory Doctorow’s recent story on the new tor.com site, “The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away.” and it left a funny taste in my mouth.

The story is well told, and I read a lot of Cory’s stories and listen to his podcast and so forth, and as a result I’m pretty familiar with the kinds of issues that he’s writing about, because I’ve heard him talk about a lot. Which is fine, just back drop. Anyway, this is a story about a future police state where dissidents go missing all the time, where everyone’s spying on everyone else, and where habeas corpus and due process are suspended/withdrawn.

You may choose to call this the logical extreme of the “post 9/11”/war on terror policy that’s given us the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security. I think that’s pretty clearly the intention of the story.

You may also choose to think of this story as depicting fascism. Which it does, basically. I think this is a pretty dangerous, move and though I was initially struck by a few other jarring aspects of the story, when I thought about it more, I realized that the combination of “the logical extreme of post-9/11 fear” and “fascism,” was pretty troubling.

I should interject and this is a bit of a spoiler that the story has a dark ending where, the character is given the choice to either go back to his old life as a double agent or get sent back to the gulag. And he’s going to go back as a double agent, but he doesn’t and before he can tell anyone what’s up he gets taken back by the police and it ends.

Here’s the thing, fascism has never appeared without the assistance of some sort of violent extra-legal action. Hitler had the SS and he bombed the parliament. Franco overthrew the government in a war. Mussolini had a personal police force with which to wreak havoc. We could think of other examples, but really I don’t think that this is a terribly original process. I think it’s fairly safe to say that fascism isn’t the result of slowly eroding the liberty of a fearful population until people wake up one morning and realize that they’re slaves, but rather a process of creating fear and then grabbing power for a falsely relieved population.

I know that this is a cautionary tale and that this story takes a current phenomena to a logical extreme to inspire us to get upset about the little erosion of civil liberties. The thing is that false consciousness (and fascism as an extension) isn’t something that you have to slowly lull people into, it’s something that’s always already active in the political sensibilities of a people. Better, I think to get mad about surveillance and an erosion of privacy not out of grief for a lost freedom, but because oppression and societal norms needn’t be fascist to impinge upon the quality of our lives or do harm. And always be vigilant in the crusade against false consciousness and fascism, but don’t become confused into thinking that the vestiges of fascism are it’s cause or sole offense.

Onward and Upward!

On a recent I Should Be Writing episode Mur Lafferty got a question about writing gay characters. One of the replies to that response (so we’re a couple degree’s out,) made a suggestion along the lines of “write characters who are interesting first and gay second,” I think the actual wording used the phrase “just happen to be gay.” Mur handled this deftly, but I think it’s worthwhile to add some more to this.

Here’s the biggest problem in my mind. The experience of being gay isn’t--for the most part--something that queer folks “just happen to have/be,” and to write about queer/gay characters in this way, I think fundamentally misunderstands the experience.

I’m not sure if I could add anything to underscore that, or illuminate that further. No matter how enlightened these times are, being gay marks you as being different and positions you in opposition to normative culture. Living and loving in this condition has a profound effect on us. I’m not complaining, and I think being different has pretty good effects, but I don’t think that this makes the social situation less relevant.

Part of the benefit of existing within a normative culture is the ability to think about sexuality as just happening rather than being a hard fought battle. And as more people start coming out (at younger and younger ages), as marriage rights are won, as non-descrimination rights are slowly gained,¹ it’s easy to say “gay folks are just normal folk,” but I don’t think that’s the case at all.

The truth is that I mostly don’t write gay characters as such. I’ve been interested in other things, and/or interested in dealing with issues of sexuality in different ways. But in Station Keeping, I have a gay character. Part of the deal about SK is that it’s set way in the future. Call it 10,000 years. (I wanted to be able to tell a 19th/20th century geopolitical crisis story, and have it not be a techno-thriller.) Anyway, so in this backdrop there’s a gay couple.

And even the diehard cynic in me has to admit that in the next 8-10 thousand years, that this pesky business about being extranormative is going to have to settle down, and people really won’t ever swallow hard or bat an eyebrow over queer folk. And I tell you that’s incredibly difficult to conceptualize, and so much not like what I think writing gay characters typically is like. This isn’t a question of writerly skill, but I can’t imagine being able to nail this kind of dynamic in a contemporary or even near future world.

But maybe that’s just me. Thoughts?

Onward and Upward!

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. I caught wind of this twitter the other day that encapsulated perfectly the kind of fear I have about getting cornered (by someone else, or my intention) into making a “community site” that seems to beg for drupal.

For the not-as-geeky among you, feel free to skip to the end where I hope to extrapolate on the larger lessons about audience and technology users.

Let’s get into it, shall we:

Drupal is great software. There’s a lot of developer energy, there are a lot of tools, and by god this is a program that can do everything. You want to host a community of bloggers? Done. You want a discussion forum? Done. You want wikis and/or collaborative tools that you can use to write structured documents? Done. You want to tie into other popular services? Done. You want to create custom content views and insulate certain kinds of content with very granular access menus? Done.

And so forth. Oh, and by the way it’s free software/open source software to boot. Who can argue with that? Certainly not me. Though I wouldn’t consider myself a drupal master, and I don’t use it on any of my sites, I’ve played around with it a bit, and while I liked what I saw, there were a couple of major problems for me.

1. The administrative interface was complicated and non-intuitive.

   To be fair, I really don’t like to interact with programs through a web browser, and it seems to me that all I was doing with drupal was clicking through page after page to try and find the one bit that I needed to flip, but I’m hypersensative to these things. The cause of this, as near as I could tell was the fact that the admin interface and the front end of the site are differentiated by the users access level not anything in the interface. This is confusing and not, I think good form, visitors to the websites and admins need different things.

2. Drupal sites reek of drupal.

   Most web programing frameworks reek of themesleves, so this doesn’t set Drupal apart, but I think it’s particularly bad in the case of Drupal. What do I mean like reek? Well, it’s that feeling of “oh they’re running drupal/rails/etc,” here that you get 7 seconds after clicking on your first link (if not sooner). While this isn’t a bad thing, and I suspect most users don’t notice this very much, but I think if most independent site runners have sites that seem to work the same, the reader will be left with the impression that the sites are the same. We must think about total experience.

3. The level of programing know-how needed for setup is non-trivial

   While I think Wordpress, which I use a lot and rather like, has gone too far in the other direction,¹ the fact that it’s so much more complicated to get drupal from the box to production, means that people who want to start a site now need to break momentum to do programing (or hire someone.) The truth is that I think the know how needed to really use drupal, is like 10% less than the know how needed to build something in Django. Maybe I’m overplaying it, but not too much.

To be fair, I’ve not used the 6.x series of Drupal, but I think there’s a few broader lessons about creating a product/content and audience, that comes from that nagging dread that drupal seems to create:

• It’s not clear that drupal knows weather it wants to be a web framework or a CMS. Know what you’re trying to do, and be clear about it.
• Different tools for different jobs, rather than one swiss-army knife. It’s good to have related project that are integrated, of course but that doesn’t mean that you need to only have one program for everything in your project.²
• Create low barriers to entry. I didn’t stay with drupal because after a weeks of tinkering with it, I still didn’t like what I was seeing, so First impressions count.

Onward and Upward!

I present you with something I discovered whilst working on my current project at work:

Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution barred from office anyone who had violated their oath to protect the Constitution by serving in the Confederacy. That prohibition included Davis. In 1978, pursuant to authority granted to Congress under the same section of the Amendment, Congress posthumously removed the ban on Davis with a two-thirds vote of each house and President Jimmy Carter signed it. These actions were spearheaded by Congressman Trent Lott of Mississippi. Congress had previously taken similar action on behalf of Robert E. Lee.

From the wikipedia article on Jefferson Davis.

This is absurd. As a gesture, it sends a totally of backward political message--but I think getting hung up the political significance of this specific act of congress in the 70s, there’s something larger at play that I think we need to spend a moment on:

In the 1970s, both houses of Congress and the President (of different parties) passed a law that allowed someone who had beendead* for 89 years to run for office.*

The conclusion?

Trent Lott knew about and was making legal preparations for zombies.

There is no other rational explanation.

Upon further reflection, as the resident of a state who has elected a dead person to federal office, I think I can safely grant my support to any dead candidate seeking office. As long as we can be assured that they stay dead.

In my last post about the latvian dreaming project (rav-link), I explained how to get from the cast on, to the gussets. Given that I’ve finally gotten past this, I have another post in this series for you.

If you’re doing this shoulders the way I am (dropped), with square armholes with underarm gussets, do what I’m doing. If you’re interested in doing something with shaped armholes or a yoke, I can write something up along those lines (and probably will,) but some prodding on your part might be in order. Anyway, here’s how I’m knitting this:

Once your gusset measures three inches, and your sweater is long enough, place all the gusset stitches on a thread/holder of some kind. and cast on 11 stitches for the steak in the following sequence. D L D L L D L L D L D. You’ll keep the dark/background stitches (D) at the begining and end as well as the center 3 stitches in the same color. Alternate the other six stitches in sucessive rows so that the steek looks like:

DL D L LDL L D LD
DD L D LDL D L DD
DL D L LDL L D LD
DD L D LDL D L DD
DL D L LDL L D LD
DD L D LDL D L DD

When you’re done the dark/background stitches on the side will be the stitches that you pick up, and the center dark stitch will be the stitch that you cut. I’ve never had one of these steeks ravel, but if you have a prefered steek, do that, by all means.

Knit for three inches, or to wherever you want the apex of the V neck to start. I knit three inches, but I like deep yokes and high v-necks, so it’s up to you.

Put the center front stitch on a thread/safety pin. Cast on another steek as above. Decrease on either side of the steek on the next and every alternating row until…

Well that’s the question, isn’t it? All the instructions that I’ve seen suggest that v-necks should be 20% of K or 64 stitches around, That works out to 34 stitches across the front, or 16 pairs of decreases.

To check your numbers, know that neck openings should almost always be between 14-16 inches, or 7-8 inches across the front. Do the percentage system, see what it comes out to, and then check, and then get as close to one of those numbers as you can.

Once you decrease your chosen number of stitches (because even I am not bold enough to say, “the right number”), stop decreasing, and knit until the armhole is deep enough. (Armholes should be, I think around 9-10 inches, but check).

I have a few more tricks up my sleeve (ha!) regarding the collar (a weird place for them I know.) Including shoulder straps and round/crew necks. Anyone interested?

If you have questions please do ask! I’ll be in touch, and I’ll get pictures of my progress up… soonish.

Onward and Upward!

In debates between writers who outline voraciously and writers who “just write” and think that outlining kills the energy of a project, I usually come down on the side of the outliners. If I make an outline, even if I don’t hold myself to it closely, I tend to be more focused and run into fewer snags than if I fly by the seat of my pants. Except…

Except that I’m horrible about outlining characters and to a lesser extent settings. I swear if any of my stories were ever performed on stage, it’d be a clear stage except for a background mural vaguely reminiscent of space. And while I tend to have a pretty clear idea of what’s going on in terms of “what happens next” I fly by the seat of my pants every inch of the way in terms of characters.

The good news is that I’m pretty good with character representation and dialogue (that psychology major paying off after all?), so I can fake it well. The bad news is that I don’t often don’t realize that I don’t have a clue what I’m doing until embarrassingly late in the game.

As I was thinking about this last weekend (and forcing myself to write character sketches,) I realized a few things:

1. I suspect that most people who “fly by the seat of their pants” probably do some character development, and that just as I have given myself personal dispensation for not making notes about characters, I think that they probably do the same for making these notes. It’s interesting at any rate. 2. It’s really helpful to make notes about characters to help keep them consistent over the course of a writing project. Duh. 3. My tendency is to make characters too realistic. Characters in stories need to be in great danger, they need to have problems that they can’t think their way out of, and they need to be faced with situations that might radically change the face their world, if not the world itself. The truth is that most of our problems are things we can think our way out of (that would be the downside of the psychology major) and we pass through our lives with only routine levels of danger, and almost all of the situations we experience are alone unlikely to change the world.

Anyway I have some characters to go sketch out…

I got my hair cut last friday and while I was waiting for my turn in the chair, I did a little writing with my ipod touch, which was an experience onto itself.¹ But this is a post about what I wrote, not how I wrote it…

In recognition of my need to work on a new story I began to work on developing a new story. For the past year or so I’ve been working in a much “harder” context than I might otherwise be prone to. No FTL, no aliens, and if we ignore station keeping, no alien worlds, no terraforming, and nothing more than say 500 years in the future. I mean I’m not particularly rigorous from a technical perspective, and while I have a rough grasp of Hohmann Transfer Orbits and Lagrangian points I don’t exactly do the math to check if there’d be a fuel efficient launch window arriving on Mars in “late 2542.”

Also at issue is the experience of my first-highschool-era novel which was very FTL/military/alien worlds/terraforming/etc and as I went back I found all that absurd.

So I figure, I have a fiction blog, I could write something short, play with a world briefly with hyperspace and aliens and what not, and if it sucks, it’d be over soon enough. So I sat down, and began to write some notes for the world and for the character that I want to (re)use.

Guess what?

No FTL. Alien worlds and terraforming, and outlandish technology on the interstellar ships, but no FTL.

It seems that no matter what I do I really want to write stories about isolated populations of people, because that’s where cool things surrounding group identities/histories develop, and if people can hop on a ship and be “home” in a week or two, the creation of new worlds doesn’t provide a cultural situation that is fundamentally unique from our current globalized world.

Sigh.

Thoughts?

Onward and Upward!