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a coupout blog post

This is a copout post for this week's Iron Blogger. It's a copout post because I just spent twelve hours in the print shop, and I should really go to bed. Rest assured that I will shortly have a post up telling you all about it — just, not tonight, and not in time for the 6 AM Iron Blogger deadline.

Now I'm going to go try to get some of the ink out from under my fingernails. Argh.

deconstruction and metafiction

The head of the MIT program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Thomas Levenson, has a masterful takedown of a recent op-ed by Emily Ruppel claiming that poetry classes at MIT have been cut for budget reasons. Short version: they're not, and in fact another professor, who's here on a two-year fellowship, has been brought on to teach one of the poetry classes offered. The Advanced Poetry Workshop, which Ms. Ruppel wanted to take, isn't being offered this year, but two other advanced-level poetry classes are. (It looks like this term's advanced-level poetry class is Digital Poetry with Ed Barrett[0], which almost makes me wish I was an undergrad again, but which apparently Emily Ruppel doesn't consider "the remedy for our dumbness".)

The point of me mentioning this, though, is — I really love that, at MIT, the head of the staid and respectable Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies will say things like:

As an aside: I was troubled by the implication in this opinion piece that writing for digital media is somehow as a category less valuable than more traditional forms of expression. It seems to me that the exploration of the artistic possibilities that emerge from technological innovation cuts right to the heart of the mission for a writing program at MIT.

♥!

Digital Poetry may not be everyone's cup of tea, I'll grant, but its offering is not tantamount to the death of the arts at MIT, either. The world feels a little topsy-turvy when the department chair understands this fact and at least one of his students seems unclear on it, but I like this topsy-turvy world, and I'm happy to live here!

If you'll excuse me for a moment: Oh, poor baby, MIT doesn't offer the class you want, so you have to take classes at Harvard. Which MIT will happily let you do, at no extra cost. My, your problems are first-world. My heart bleeds for you. I mean, Harvard. Really. Such a slight program in the arts, don't you think? Nobody else will give you the time of day for having gone through it.

And, to be serious for a moment, let's be clear — the classes you want to take sound like interesting classes to me. I'm not trying to perpetuate the stupid engineering-vs-the-arts thing, because, as classes like "Digital Poetry" show, it's not an all-or-nothing thing, and pure forms of either art or engineering are awesome too. Would it be great if MIT offered more traditional arts classes to go with Digital Poetry? Sure! Is Digital Poetry a travesty? Heck no.

So MIT's humanities department has a different focus than you'd like. Point the first, you're here for graduate school — did you not research this and realize this going in? This should not be coming as a surprise to you. It's pretty evident from the web site and everything, seeing as there are all those classes with "Digital" in the name at which you turn up your nose. Point the second, oh no, Harvard is your backup plan. How terrible.

Unrelatedly, I found Cat Valente on the joy of deconstruction and metafiction amusing — nothing people who eat and breathe this stuff will find groundbreaking, but a sentiment I agree with expressed in an engaging fashion.

In part:

As a post-postmodern grrl, I dig it when everyone knows they're in a constructed narrative–because solid portions of life exist in constructed narratives and it's a tangled, broken wheel of: we read and view narratives from earliest memory and those narratives reflect real life but we also construct our lives to fit the narratives we ingested before we understood them so life reflects narrative and it all goes around and around and we are always living some story or other.

Cat on the Resident Evil movie: "OH MY GOD WHO ARE THESE ALIENS, NO, NOT THE MONSTERS, THE PEOPLE WHO CAN'T CALL A ZOMBIE AT 500 YARDS."

Footnotes:
[0]: Ed Barrett was awesome when I had him for Interactive and Non-Linear Fiction. Any current MIT students reading this: if you're looking for a mad writing-meets-technology class to take, Ed's are awesome.[1]
[1]: Saying this of course shows my true colors here, which I have not been attempting to hide. But, in case it wasn't obvious: I'm a big, sloppy fan of MIT's humanities programs, I concentrated in literature (as MIT understands it) as an undergrad, and it was awesome, and I learned a lot, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

december asimov’s

This being a capsule review of the December 2010 issue of Asimov's. It's an issue without a novella, so I had more to read than usual. 🙂

  • "Plus or Minus", by James Patrick Kelly (novelette) — Another "coming of age in space" story, and one with some odd and uncomfortable sexual politics that didn't otherwise grab my attention, so I didn't finish it.
  • "Libertarian Russia", by Michael Swanwick (short story) — Michael Swanwick is a writer I've enjoyed in other contexts (the head librarian at the library I worked at in high school gave me a copy of his Vacuum Flowers the library was getting rid of as something she thought I would like, and I did), so I was hoping to enjoy this story. Unfortunately it's a very transparent morality play about the limitations of libertarian philosophy, and while I even agree with Mr. Swanwick on a number of points, morality plays are not what I want out of my fiction, so I was disappointed. Post-apocalyptic Russia wasn't even a well-enough drawn place that I could appreciate the setting despite the dismal plot, and that seems like a setting that should have potential. I'm bored stiff of post-apocalypses — especially misogynistic ones, which they all are almost without exception, and this is not one of those exceptions.
  • "Sins of the Father", by Sara Genge (short story) — An interesting and unusual take on mer-people — what happens when global warming causes sea levels to rise catastrophically? — and a story sensitive to its characters and their place in the world. The story has an awkward and to my mind unnecessary infodump towards its end — I'd already figured out what was going on in the world, how the story was SFnal, from hints earlier on, and I didn't need or want it explained to me, but that hardly mars the otherwise excellent story. I consistently like Ms. Genge's work, so I'm glad to see that Asimov's continues to run it, and I look forward to seeing her name on the cover of future issues.
  • "Freia in the Sunlight", by Gregory Norman Bossert (short story) — An interesting and at times beautiful story about AI told from the perspective of a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) straining towards full consciousness. One of the better depictions of nascent consciousness I've read.
  • "Variations", by Ian Werkheiser (short story) — The son of a famous musician helps a startup recreate his father's performances. The science strikes me as a bit unlikely, but the transformation undergone by the main character is well drawn and the ending has a beauty to it that I can't find the words to articulate well.
  • "Excellence", by Robert Reed (short story) — A man's doppelgänger AI (built from his template) becomes successful. The man sells him. Hilarity ensues. It had a bit of discussion about what makes someone successful, but didn't otherwise grab me much.
  • "The Prize Beyond Gold", by Ian Creasey (short story) — In a world where genetic engineering of the human body is common and sports records among baseline humans get closer and closer to asymptotic best performance, one man has a shot to break a 70-year-old record and win… "The Prize Beyond Gold"! (You really need to read that sentence with Stentorian Movie Trailer Voice in your head. Go ahead, I'll wait.) This story would in fact film well, I think (two great tastes — science fiction and sports! Gattaca meets Chariots of Fire!) Unfortunately most of the story is an infodumpy conversation between the main character and a genengineered woman who's asking him to join her clade once he breaks the record, as a bit of a pie in the face of people who would use him as a symbol of how the "standard model" still has something worthwhile to it, so it's a bit heavy on side of telling instead of showing and loses something for that. Not that that would stop any film adaptations, which could proceed from just the idea and the title. However the film adaptations would almost certainly lose the ambiguity of the ending, which was a plus in favor of the story. Six of one…
  • "Uncle E", by Carol Emshwiller (short story) — A bit of a modern Boxcar Children, with a mysterious stranger, the titular uncle, who tries to help the orphaned children find a new home. Not much more than cute, but cute. (And a story about children in which the mysterious strange man isn't seriously dangerous to them! That's a positive.)
  • "Warfriends", by Tom Purdom (novelette) — The sequel to an Ace Double story from forty years ago, and it reads appropriately. Two intelligent species on a jungle planet, a (in my mind's eye) tiger-like species that dwells on the forest floor, and a more ape-like species that dwells in the trees, attempt to work together to defeat a common enemy. Some interesting bits of worldbuilding, some interesting bits of character development, but not enough of the latter to make me really satisfied.

I'm reminded by my description of "Freia in the Sunlight" that I read Ted Chiang's novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects last weekend, and it's probably the best depiction of nascent consciousness I've read. The story follows two employees of an early next-generation virtual pet "digient" startup (these are rather smarter than mere pets, even in the beginning) who adopt several of the digients after the company closes and raise them as their children to adulthood, and the trials and tribulations they face along the way. (What do you do when the company behind the software platform your child is running on shuts its doors and turns its servers off?) It's in many ways a story about the bittersweetness of being a parent and watching your children grow up, and the characters, both human and digital, and their relationships, are all well-depicted. I read Ted Chiang's stories more for their ideas than for their characters, and even in Lifecycle the characterization is spare (but obviously effective), so I was surprised to discover how much I cared about the characters in it when the story was over. Highly recommended.

(I'd also like to point out to other fans of Chiang's work that the Small Beer Press trade paper reprint of his collection Stories of Your Life: and Others, which I cannot recommend highly enough, is now out, so you no longer need to pay $50+ for a used copy of the hardcover.)

There was also a minor tempest in a teapot recently in the science fiction community over steampunk and its merits or lack thereof, which was mostly notable to me in that someone linked offhandedly to Phil and Kaia Foglio's Girl Genius comic (available to read in its entirety for free on the web!), which I've been meaning to read for some time, and it hooked me in a whoops-where-did-the-time-go kind of way. It's gaslamp fantasy, and make no mistake about it — there's not much challenging of aristocracy or depiction of the plight of the lower classes here — but it's genuninely fun, and it's the first thing I've read in a very long time where I got to the end and wanted to go back to the beginning immediately and reread it, because I wanted to keep living in that world. It's good, honest escapism, and I found it refreshing. Escapism has been lacking in my life of late, and I needed some. (And I'll note that the tendency to talk like a spark, with lots of exclamation marks and cackling, is catching, so if I seem a bit more wild-haired and wild-eyed than usual, now you know why. 😉

So that's what I've been reading. What have you been reading?

a blast(-off) from the past

When I was a freshman in high school, circa 2000, and thought I wanted to be a computer animator, I spent a long time playing around with POV-Ray. I was also, of course, obsessed with science fiction (this being contemporaneous with the middle school space game I mentioned some time back). This is the movie I made.

It was rendered and assembled on a 667MHz Pentium III with 128MB of RAM running Windows 98SE.

Remember what I said about 128MB of RAM? The final video, compressed using whatever random free codec I had to hand, was 70MB. Hello, swap city! I don’t remember how long it took me to render the whole thing — I’m guessing about eight hours or so, because I remember leaving my computer on overnight a lot to process test runs. For the graphics nerds in the audience, there are no meshes used in this video; everything is constructive solid geometry (CSG). For everybody else, that means that it’s the result of me painstakingly assembling the unions, intersections, and differences of solids in various configurations and conformations. Taught me a lot about set theory, though I didn’t realize it at the time. 🙂

I believe the only bitmap texture is the lights on the space station — everything else is procedural textures, since my computer wasn’t up to rendering bitmap textures at a resolution high enough I found it acceptable, fast enough for me to iterate the video as much as I needed to. (Inexperienced computer animator == lots of mistakes.) This being POV-Ray, everything was also hand-coded in a text description language — no modeling software to use to compose my objects visually. (I’d played around some with a 30-day LightWave trial, but obviously I couldn’t afford the $400 price tag.)

I was devastated to discover that POV-Ray uses the file creation time as its random seed, so when I copied the file to back it up, this being before I discovered version control, the wonderful planet texture at the beginning changed completely — I literally can’t render this movie any more. (I believe I’ve also lost the files.) This copy was saved off a CD I burned to take into school to show my art teacher. But I had compressed it with whatever codec was available to me, which was not an off-the-shelf codec like MPEG, so it’s been a while since I’ve been able to watch it, much less do anything with it. Thankfully modern Macs appear to ship with whatever it is by default and will happily transcode it to MPEG4 for me.

At the time, the only music I listened to was classical music, and I loved Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries” and had hit on it as something suitably majestic to accompany the video. (I was obviously heavily influenced by the opening titles from the two Star Trek series which were then airing or had just recently aired, Voyager and I think most especially Deep Space Nine.) I must have played the video together with “Ride” at some point the old-fashioned way, by pressing play simultaneously on the video and my Wal-Mart CD player, but I don’t think I really had the capability much to adjust the timings to make everything sync up, so I was surprised and pleased when I sat down today to finally assemble them that they worked together as well as they do.

The state of video-editing software has improved a lot in ten years. Ten years ago I was also constrained by my budget ($0); I spent a long time looking for free video editing software and didn’t find anything that worked. Today I put the above together in an hour in iMovie (free with the purchase of a $1K+ Mac), time mostly spent fiddling with the timings and trying to futz the ending of the Valkyries clip in Audacity so it sounds like it ends “naturally” (in reality there’s a whole ‘nother section to go). I wasn’t entirely successful, but I got close enough and didn’t want to spend too much time on it. It’s just a little SFnal tweak to the music right at the end, right?

Heck, ten years ago I was still listening to “Ride of the Valkyries” on CD. We’ve come a long ways, in a lot of ways.

international travel tips

As promised in my last post on this topic, here are some of the tips I picked up for traveling internationally. (You may feel free to read this as “mistakes Kevin made, so you can avoid them,” because that’s mostly accurate.) Without further ado…

  • If you are planning on using your US GSM phone internationally, you should unlock your phone before you leave the States. When in Iceland, I was pleased to discover that my provider, T-Mobile, will provide you with the unlock code for your phone if you just ask. The catch: you need to call T-Mobile. On your phone. You know, the one that doesn’t work in this country. Because it’s locked. Catch-22! I ended up finding a café with free WiFi and using Skype to call T-Mobile and get them to send me the unlock code, which worked, but I don’t recommend it. (Call center agent: “Is there a number I can call you back on?” Me: “…”)
  • VoIP software has been a huge lifesaver for me a couple times when my phone has been dead or otherwise out of commission, so you should find one you like, have it installed on your travel computer, and have credits on it as an Nth-level backup. You should also probably have it installed on your phone for use on WiFi, if your phone supports it. I’ve been happy with Skype. I’ve also had decent luck with Gizmo5, but since they got bought by Google they’ve been in the standard Google post-acquisition signup-freeze hell for going on a year now.
  • While in Iceland, I bought a Vodafone SIM for my phone which I believed would provide me with 3G data, but I could only get voice and SMS to work. I’m not quite sure what was wrong, and I’d be curious to hear other people’s experiences with getting data or not while traveling.
  • An aside: Why do you want to purchase a local SIM or a local prepaid phone while traveling? Because your cell phone provider will charge you frankly outrageous prices for international roaming voice and data. Like, $500 bill outrageous. I expect that this will change eventually, as soon as one of the providers gives it up in an attempt to get an edge on the others (cf. the ridiculous overage charges cell phone providers were charging in the early days of their mainstream popularity), but for the moment we’re stuck with it.
  • I was pretty happy to put all my purchases on my credit card when I was in Iceland. The card I had at the time charged a 1% currency conversion fee, which was totally worth it. It meant I could avoid carrying a ton of cash, and it also made it really easy for me to see how much I spent. Since I’m really new to this “vacation” thing, I’m still calibrating my sense of how expensive it will be. (Obviously having some cash for emergencies and places that don’t take credit is still a good idea.)
  • I didn’t tell my bank I was traveling, and I didn’t have any problem with my bank getting confused because my card was suddenly being used in Iceland. My friend with BoA cards did have trouble, and had to pull a similar trick with Skype to unfreeze them — their fraud protection seems a bit hypervigilant. I used the same card for purchases as I had booked my flights with, which may have helped — looking at my statements, some metadata about where and when I was traveling seems to have passed between the airline and my bank. I can’t find confirmation of this online, but it seems like the kind of clever thing the credit card companies might implement. (You talking to a human agent to tell them you’re leaving the country is expensive for them.)

So that’s what I learned about traveling internationally. What are your tips?