Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Seema has been spotted in Boston, mainly shopping at CVS and Buck-a-Book, and travelling by antique el and elevator. Speaking of which, I was sad to hear that the last stretch of el (that is, the elevated Green Line tracks between North Station and Lechmere) is coming down and being replaced by a tunnel sometime this year or next. I suppose if they’re burying the rat’s nest of highways out there in the Big Dig, the el would stick out like a sore thumb afterwards.

I’ve always found the North Station/Science Park area an asphalt wasteland so I can’t really complain, but then again the el is cute and harmless and it seems a shame to tear it down. Maybe it’s blocking some bigwig’s view of the Zakim Bridge.

Another truism from Worlds of Wonder is that the hero is also the problem. The conflict in a story is generated by the hero’s refusal to adapt; once the hero transmutes himself (in sci-fi often literally), the story is over except for the last bit of kick-boxing. Gerrold gives Luke Skywalker as an example of the transmuted hero (farmer boy to Jedi knight). Neo in the original Matrix would be a more up-to-date version.

I almost bought that chapter of the book, I admit, until I asked myself whether all stories were really that way. I’d say not. Some heroes never change - the stock characters of the pulps come immediately to mind. Some heroes change in a way that does not affect the plot; for example, Frodo finds he can’t go home again, though there had been no moment of decision at which he broke with his hobbit past. In some stories the point is that the hero remained faithful to what he was before, rather than breaking under external pressure - for example, Faramir or Howard Roark.

Overall, I’d say Worlds of Wonder is a good source of writing exercises and truisms, but next time, I’m reading The Art of Fiction.

Transit joke of the day: Fly the Honest Skies from the rec.humor.funny newsgroup

Regarding yesterday’s Breda follies, Liz says, You know, I cannot make heads or tails of that post. Liz lives in Australia, where (one assumes) it is the natural behavior of trains to travel on the left-hand side of the tracks. Not so here! (Somebody please tell the MBTA.)

I’ve decided to devote a new entry to Liz’s pointed questions. Real Bostonians may wish to move on now to, say, Bad Transit or the Green Line forum at Railroad.net, in order to see the T discussed with the proper level of obscurity, sarcasm, jargon and expletives. (Real Bostonians are the ones who give directions according to places that no longer exist, such as the Star Market on Comm Ave in Allston, the Arborway stop on the E line, or the entire A line.)

Liz asks, Is there a Boston Public Transport for Dummies book out there?
While there is a Boston for Dummies which can help you locate the tourist hotspots, a full understanding of the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, abbreviated T) can be achieved only through immersion and the purchase of the indispensible Arrow Metro Boston Transit Map.

Liz also asks, What is a Breda train, and how is it different from your average electric train?
More than five long, tragic years ago, the MBTA decided to buy 100 new trolleys from Breda of Italy to run on the Green Line. These trains are variously known as Breda trains, type 8 trains, or just the new Green Line trains. They have low floors to meet the insane requirements of the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). You can see a nice photo of one here.

A caterpillar roll, by the way, is a sushi roll in the shape of a caterpillar, with avocado slices for fuzz, octopus suckers for eyes, and little orange antennae.

And what the heck is wrong with Boston trains, anyway?

For the past five long, tragic years, the MBTA has been trying to put the Breda trains into service on the Green Line. The early history of Breda follies has been recorded by Jonathan Belcher and Scott Moore. Over the years, both snow (didn’t anyone think to tell the Italians that it snows here?) and derailments have kept the Breda trains out of service. Every spring they show their shiny faces, derail themselves spectacularly, and go back to the garage. Extensive work was done on the tracks to make the city fit the train, instead of sending out to that nice Japanese company Kinki Sharyo (I’m not making it up) for trains that work, and still the Breda trains won’t run on the tracks.

Yes, the Bredas still derail, but the MBTA is running them this summer anyway. It’s relatively difficult to get news about Breda problems unless you’re on the train when an incident happens. The Metro did report the Hynes derailment; I was surprised to read about it because usually only those T incidents ending in death or dismemberment make the news. (A hint to the population of the South Shore: the wooden ties with long steel rods laid across them are train tracks, not pedestrian walkways or parking lots.)

If you think all this sound ludicrous, like a story of patronage and graft out of old Sicily or some third-world country instead of the day-to-day business of the oldest and fourth-largest public transit system in the US, then let me tell you about the Big Dig…

Memory has scarcely dimmed of the Breda train derailment at the Hynes stop on the Green Line a week ago, during which busses ran between Kenmore and Copley all evening, and especially unlucky riders like yours truly got to ride into Kenmore the British way - that is, running inbound on the outbound track. After an experience like that, you assume you’re safe from the new trains for a while.

A while is approximately one week. This morning I waited, and waited, and waited some more for a train. When one finally came, it was a whopper. It was four cars long and looked like a huge caterpillar roll coming up over the hill, with shiny Breda-train headlights for eyes. The first two cars were a Breda train, and the second two were a real train, the kind that stays on the tracks and goes faster than five miles an hour.

Four cars is two times too long for a train, and the illusion that the Breda train (which under normal circumstances can barely pull its own weight without derailing) was actually towing the real train was quite odd. It pulled up to my stop and the next one simultaneously and then disconnected itself in the middle. The rear end rolled back to my stop and let us all on.

Then the truth came out - as she was grumbling about the useless Breda trains that ought to be taken out of service and sent back to Europe, the driver admitted to having pushed the Breda train over the hill to my stop and was not sanguine about our chances of getting past it, now that it was occupying the stop in front of us.

In the end, the Breda train did manage to turn around and switch to the outbound track. Whether it made any farther progress there, either outbound or Brit-style, is beyond me.

That ought to be the end of the story, but, ironically, farther along the line there was a woman on one of those little personal power-scooters which seem to have replaced wheelchairs among the handicapped jet-set. (The irony, for those of you playing the home ADA game, is that the dysfunctional Breda trains were meant to be handicapped-accessible.) So, after a year of walking around the clunky metal wheelchair lifts on extremely narrow T street platforms, I got to see one in action. I would have been more excited about it if I hadn’t already been nearly half an hour late due to the aforementioned Breda follies.

Those lifts aren’t powered, so a T guy had to crank the woman and scooter up to floor level with a push-pedal. She would have been better off riding her scooter downtown, especially since the train onto which she was so laboriously loaded was rerouted at Park Street station and everyone had to get off. Park Street, by the way, is still a disaster area with large chunks of the inbound platform boarded up. The ground level is being raised to almost, but not quite, meet the floors of the Breda trains.

Of course, a Breda train would have to make it all the way to Park Street for the floors to not-quite-meet and for this perpetual construction to qualify as anything more than just another Boston boondoggle. I’m not holding my breath (except when passing through Hynes or going inbound on the outbound track at Kenmore).

I made a style picker for the new site. The idea is to allow the user to choose the font face, font size, text alignment, paragraph indents, page width, and background and text colors for story pages. It’s also useful for previewing fonts and font sizes - I found only one other DHTML viewer with more choices, and it crashed my browser.

Once the preferences are chosen they could be saved in cookies, but that could get to be a lot of cookies. Even more preferences will need to be handled eventually, so I’m leaning towards a database of user preferences. Only the username would need to be saved in a cookie, and that would also spare users the need to configure each new browser and to have javascript enabled.

The style picker is self-contained, so you can see all the css and javascript just by viewing the source. I didn’t type all that - it’s produced by PHP, and you can view the PHP source as well. It’s much easier to add new fonts and colors to the PHP version.

Note that the fonts lean heavily towards OS X system fonts, since those are the ones I had at hand. If a font isn’t available on your system, the associated link will display in your default font. The font classification is not official; particularly, Comic Sans MS isn’t necessarily a fantasy font, but I didn’t want in under sans-serif with the serious, readable fonts.

I put in a selection of color choices, but what the page really needs is a nice tool like the Tigra color picker or Matt Kruse’s color picker. That will require a form on a freestanding preferences page, without the demo text and with a bit more explanation.

For now, it’s just a toy.

A while back I blogged about the annoying saying that ideas are a dime a dozen. I had an attack of ideas today and remembered that entry. If I sat down for a month and meditated, I could have a career’s worth of ideas, but ideas are infinitely compressible - I could fit that month-long collection into one book if I disguised them properly.

If you set it up properly, you don’t even have to disguise the surplus ideas. I’ve been reading volume two of the Otherland books (they’re not a series, the author claims, but a 3,000 page novel published piecewise), which have one of those structures that allow infinite variation. Multiple universe stories (with a real multiplicity of universes, rather than one universe) also allow idea-packing. You can never have too many ideas at hand.

Manifold: Origin by Stephen Baxter involves the Fermi paradox - if the universe is so big and so old and life evolves spontaneously, then where are all the aliens? Space ought to be as overpopulated as India by now.

I didn’t say that the novel addresses the Fermi paradox; it rather takes it as given that man is depressingly alone in the universe, then connects those lonely Homo sapiens across the quantum multiverse. We’re alone in all those universes, but we’re not always the same. Sometimes we’re furry geniuses, and other times we’re still swinging with the apes.

The variety of primates is interesting, although every one of them, from the apes to the humans to the hyperintelligent denizens of a moonless Earth, seems more animal than angel. My concern for the endangered heroes was not what it could have been, had they been more sympathetic characters.

I hear the previous volumes, Manifold: Time and Manifold: Space, were better. I may give one of them a shot.

Undersea City is a juvenile by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson that proves I’m still in my used-pulp phase. Like “Manifold”, “Undersea” is a title theme that unifies this moldy old volume with the lost works Undersea Quest and Undersea Fleet.

“Juvenile,” for your information, is a trade term for what I suppose is now called young adult fiction. As far as I’ve ever been able to tell, children’s books are books starring children, and their reading level is the age of the hero. The hero of Undersea City, whose name I’ve already forgotten, finds himself in special cadet training at an earthquake-prone undersea city. Of course, a series of earthquakes begins and our hero finds friends and relations acting suspiciously. There’s a cadet snob, a gruff superior officer, and a city council who refuse to evacuate before the Big Underwater One hits the city. It all works out in the end.

Great literature it’s not. The only interesting part of the story for me was the authors’ dated insistence that computers were not up to the task of predicting earthquakes. Instead, cadets with a few weeks’ training checked the seismograph readings and did their calculations by hand, and almost always agreed on where, when, and what force the quake would be. It was never quite clear what they’re doing that a computer couldn’t, in theory, reproduce, even back in 1958 when the book was written.

I suppose that’s a danger of the genre. Fantasy keeps, but hard sci-fi goes bad.

Cool site of the day: A favicon gallery

I just can’t keep up with fandom. I know there’s a Homecoming scandal out there somewhere, but all I found was one comment in Rocky’s LiveJournal. I’m two hundred posts behind on ASC again, and my Khanfics are languishing while I work on the Wrong Novel. Given a choice, I tend to play with CSS rather than catch up on my blog backlog.

It’s not that I don’t care; it’s that there are too many of you.

I was surfing for pleasure and profit today and after slogging through tons of free anime graphics sites, I came across some cool tile sites: This cool Japanese site has all sorts of images. Squidfingers’ pattern collection led me to the Tile Machine (requires Shockwave).

I’m still in the slow process of moving to the new host. The blog will probably be the last to go.

I know, I should have been blogging, or filking, or writing Khanfic, or moving to the new host, or doing that DTD section I promised to get to, or finishing the two original stories I meant to finish last weekend, but instead I worked on The Wrong Novel. I have a new subplot involving a misunderstanding and a murder.

That’s it - no interesting new blog entry, just a messy murder.