Contest of the day: Die J/C Die Yet Again
Three new Stargate drabbles are up on the Stargate fic page. Most notable is How Doth Kinsey Hate Thee? - the drabble I phoned in.
I’m overdue for a newsletter issue, so if you’re on the updates list this news and more will be coming to a mailbox near you.
I am sad to report that two of my housepets have perished in the hazardous snaptraps I use to feed them. A word to wise fieldmice with the ambition to become housemice: if the beef jerky in the cupboard that usually holds glasses and bakeware seems too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.
In An Oozing Of Gray Sludge, Fred explains why people don’t read newspapers anymore. Journalists just aren’t that good at it, Fred claims of his fellows, as their mediocre output shows. Blogs are better, free, and free.
If Fred is right, and as a non-newspaper reader I suspect that he is, then journalism is just another entry on the list of professions which have taken on the tinge of mediocrity. The publc sector is the worst culprit, of course - no one likes DMV workers. Public school teachers have a bad rep, at least in big cities like this one where people move out of the city limits for the express purpose of finding better public schools. Tech support, whether phoned in from India or provided by your company’s local IT staff, is a good example of a private sector profession whose practitioners are frequently accused of incompetence.
I have an explanation for the growth of the mediocrity sector: brain drain caused by the growth of the non-mediocre sectors. There are too many other professions available to the sorts of smart people who once became teachers or journalists. Not only are there proprotionally more doctors, lawyers, and professors than our society previously required, but there are whole new professions: aerospace engineering, biopharmaceuticals, computer programming, etc.
You can always do something else - no one has to teach or report to earn a living. Because good teaching and journalism require both skills native to the profession and also knowledge of the field, the (potential) good teachers and journalists will always have the option of going into a particular field rather than teaching it or reporting on it. Some don’t, but the brain drain means than many do, lowering the overall quality of the profession. There is, generally speaking, more money in the field than in teaching or reporting on it. Likewise for IT - if you’re good at tech support, economic forces will push you to become a programmer.
So there’s a downside to having a big brain sector - not enough brains to go around. Combine it with a decaying industrial base and the complete disappearance of the agricultural sector, and you get a culture of inappropriate career placement - or in other words, mediocrity.
Link of the day: Pixelpalooza winners
It’s a toasty 66° here in Boston, down from the 80’s earlier in the day. I helped Veronica install Panther on her iMac tonight - which is to say, I helped her sit around and watch Panther install itself without any problems. The hardest part of the job was turning off BrickHouse in favor of the built-in 10.3 firewall. Convincing her to use cool 10.3 software like QuickSilver, PithHelmet, and NetNewsWire wasn’t easy, either, and I forgot all about the latest version of Konfabulator (1.6).
Veronica seems to have no interest in a life of DivX crime, which is just as well since her old iMac probably isn’t speedy enough for optimal movie viewing. Her cable modem was also dropping down almost to dialup speed - not good when you have lots of updates to download.
Over the past year of heavy SG drabble activity, I did manage to write a handful of Trek filks and drabbles which were eligible in the 2003 ASC Awards. The results came out tonight.
I really ought to be embarrassed that I placed in ENT but not in VOY. Somehow retirement is making it all fuzzy now. Anyway, here’s my very short list of placements:
ENT General Drabbles #2 The Full Shell by Jemima TOS Filks/Poem #1 I Will Revive by Jemima MIS Crossover #3 The Other Side of the Gate by Jemima Pereira MIS Filk/Poem/Drabble #1 I Fought the Borg by Jemima #3 The Sound of Borgness by Jemima
Both the MIS filks are actually VOY filks, but because I was the entire VOY filk category I had to be combined with MIS so that someone else could get an award. The embarrassing ENT drabble is part of the Empty Shell series listed in full on the MIS page. “I Will Revive” is one of three Khan filks I wrote during my Khan phase, and “The Other Side of the Gate” is a humorous Stargate crossover.
Now with HSV!
The 4096 color wheel has been updated to version 2.0. I changed the algorithm and the image, mainly for the purpose of adding greys. See the new SV (saturation and value) square to the right of the wheel. It’s easier to click around than to explain, but I am attempting to explain HSV on the about the color wheel page.
Also included at no extra cost is the French version and the php script for making the wheel and alpha-transparent SV square. It would be way too much work to create the SV square for each hue, so instead I simulated it using greyscale colors and alpha transparency. I thought it was a very cute trick myself.
Many thanks to Jerie for being my IE/Win tester. You Windows users would still be suffering under IE’s execrable PNG support if it weren’t for her valiant efforts. As it is, IE 5.0 is a wash - you won’t get the nice SV square if you’re living that far in the past. Mac/IE is weird yet basically functional, as usual, but take my advice: get a real browser.
I’ve been working on the color wheel again. This time, I’m going for an HSL- style wheel, instead of the funky lobes in the current version. So I’ve been trying to figure out the difference between HSL and HSV, with a side of HSB. (Is HSB the same as HSL, or is a new beastie?)
For a taste of the intuitive HSL approach, check out The DHTML Color Calculator. It’s lots of fun to sweep around the wheel with the >> buttons.
I spotted this lovely link on rasfc: Maybe You Can’t: Overcoming Failure and the Myth of Success by Chuck Charleston. [It’s actually a parody, not a real book.] Here’s a quote:
Whatever it is you dreamed to be or to do, it wasn’t meant for you. The sooner you get that through your head, the sooner you will learn to embrace what life has left to give you.
On the other hand, you could waste your precious time on this sullied orb taking guitar lessons or writing novels no one will read. Do you really want to be that pathetic guy in the book store talking about his unpublishable manuscript or the local politician who keeps losing elections?
There are certainly aspiring writers out there who are wasting their time and that of their put-upon writing groups. It’s sad when someone has scads of determination and not a shred of talent to back it up. Usually, though, I think that a little failure puts people off - the average mediocrities won’t devote their lives to something that affords them no gratification. The crazy guy in the book store is exactly that - a crazy guy.
If you enjoy, say, writing fan fiction, then you don’t need determination. On the other hand, it’s rather difficult to throw your entire life away over a dream you’ll never achieve, if only because bills need paying, dinner needs cooking, and so forth and so on. Most dreams are both part-time affairs and reasonably entertaining - I don’t think they require a cure from a travelling pessimist charging $50 a ticket.
Superior link of the day: Khaaaaan!
I knew I was asking for it when I picked up Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes. Usually I run screaming the other way at Niven’s name, but I thought this one was new and thus possibly up to the higher standards of characterization and believability that the genre has acquired since the alleged Golden Age. Instead, Dream Park turned out to be a reprint. The only reason imaginable for this piece of fluff to still be in print is also the only thing that keeps the umpteen indistinguishable characters limping along in a plot better suited to a crime thriller than a sci-fi novel - the Park itself.
Dream Park is the Disneyland of role-playing games. I suffered through it because I’ve been toying with a similar story idea and I needed to know what had been done. Let me say, not much. The park covers a significant area which is remodeled for each game - this time, with imported Brazilian fauna. The characters go in armed, but their weapons have holographic blades so as not to hurt any papier-mache monsters or actors playing the orcs; the computer records the virtual hits. This is where my disbelief blew out its suspension - how do you swing a holographic sword? This isn’t Star Wars with its solid lightsabers; presumably there is no way for one weapon to hit another weapon or a person - no experience of the padded broadsword thunking into the padded shield the way the real SCA does it. The basic physics of momentum have been overlooked.
Fantasy it ain’t, but if you want a mildly interesting tale of industrial espionage without any baggage of believable characterization involved, then give it a shot. Dream Park has two sequels - not many, considering the potential for milking the concept dry. Judging from the Amazon reviews they’re even worse than the original, if that’s possible.
After all that, Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold was a relief. LMB can be counted on for good characterization and a plot that rolls along, and I was drawn in to this novel. It took a while for the pseudo-Spanish titles (Royina, etc.) to stop annoying me, and I didn’t remember enough of The Curse of Chalion to know whether I should know anything about Ista or not. As always, LMB manages to fill in the series details smoothly.
I didn’t mind so much when I discovered that The Curse of Chalion was all about Miles, renamed Cazaril for the occasion. I was more disturbed to find that Ista was Ekaterin in disguise (right down to the oh’s), and not at all relieved when she morphed into Cordelia halfway through the novel. It rather undermines the fantasy background to have your characters acting so much like your space-opera characters would - and so I return to my old complaint that Chalion isn’t enough of a fantasy.
The world is stolen medieval Spain (others call it Renaissance, though there’s nothing being reborn here besides demons); the castles are nice, but I don’t really get the feeling of a medieval world, real or imagined. Chalion isn’t nearly as solid in its execution as Barrayar. The quintitarian theology is interesting, but religion supplants magic - cutting off yet another fantasy angle. Paladin does have some demon-wrought magic (a subplot that makes the novel for me) but then the gods get involved again with their dii ex machina and I’m left feeling that they are more real than the world of Chalion itself.
It occured to me that maybe this supernatural thriller/fantasy crossover counted as one of those genre-crossing works of which true literature is made (according to John Gardner). If so, I really need to get that suspension of disbelief repaired, because I’m dragging an axle here.
You Know You’re Too Fannish When: you throw a Klingon wedding (link thanks to KC)
Seema’s been pestering people for episode-based haiku. The following is probably not what she meant. “Resurrection” is Stargate episode 719 (see the newly updated episode list), but this haiku fits far too many seventh-season eps.
“Where’s Colonel O’Neill?”
Sam makes another excuse -
We’re Jackless again.