On Conferences, and Travel

I just got back from a conference (I was traveling this time last week, which explains why there was no post, not that you care, I’m sure (and, if you do, you aren’t paying attention to the title of the blog—wake up, people!)).  Now, I understand that there are some business folks who attend conferences regularly: salespeople, or marketing reps, or ... well, salespeople, I suppose.  Anyone whose business revolves around networking (in the social sense, not the technical sense) has a very valid reason to travel long distances to hang out with people they don’t really know, I suppose.  Us technogeeks are a slightly different story though.

On the one hand, we more than anyone have a need to stay current with what’s going on in our industry.  The tech world changes at lightning speed, and it’s hard enough to keep up with either hardware or software, much less both.  This is one reason techies are news freaks (see Slashdot) and gossip mongers: it’s not just idle curiosity—sometimes the latest news from Microsoft or Google or Oracle changes our entire job function.  A conference is excellent for that sort of thing.

On the other hand, there are all sorts of logistical issues.  Tech areas can be radically different and radically arcane, so it can be difficult to put together a set of presentations that will have mass appeal.  People at different levels of experience have radically different needs as well, so that complicates matters even further.  Often people chosen to speak are not well known, and often the people who might be well known are not great speakers.

On the other other hand—which turns out to be the biggest hand in this case—technogeeks don’t generally like meeting people.  Hell, most of us got into this business because computers were much easier to talk to than humans.  I’m sure many of my colleagues look at the prospect of being alone in a room full of strangers in roughly the same light that you might look at being alone in a cage full of tigers.  It’s not quite that bad for me, but I freely admit that there’s a fairly long list of things I’d rather do than sit in an uncomfortable airplane seat for six hours (each way) in order to spend four nights in an uncomfortable hotel bed in between long sessions of uncomfortable mingling.  On the scale of introvert to extrovert, I’m a little of both.  I’m very extroverted around people I know; once you get to know me, you’ll probably find that you can’t shut me up.  But I’m not that guy who brazenly walks up to people and introduces himself.  When it comes to hanging out with crowds of strangers—even crowds of people just as geeky as me—I relapse into introversion.

And at the convention I just returned from, I was quite comfortably in the middle of the geek scale.

It’s YAPC::NA, which is the North American version of the “Yet Another Perl Conference,” which trades on the Linux tradition of “yet another"s (such as yacc and YAML), even though it’s more accurate to say that YAPC is the Perl conference, and any other such conferences are “yet another"s themselves.  YAPC::NA is, in fact, the original YAPC, so it really is a bit of a misnomer.

It was quite a good conference for all my whining above, and I’m glad I went.  This was my first time going, even though I’ve been using Perl for many years now (since ‘96, approximately).  Partially my delay has been financial (even though the conference itself is cheap, the airfare and hotel stay can be prohibitive, depending on which city is hosting), and partially just reluctance to wander off and hang out with a bunch of people I don’t know (as previously mentioned).  But this year the company I work for is footing the bill, so most of my excuse is gone.  I was hoping to present a talk, even, but my submission wasn’t accepted.  No worries; that saved me the hassle of standing up in front of a bunch of strangers and pretending I was more interesting than the next guy.

I got to meet many of the Perl luminaries, which is nice.  Among those I actually got a chance to speak to were Matt Trout, Piers Cawley, and Ingy, as well as others I saw from afar, including Stevan Little, and, the progenitor of Perl himself, Larry Wall, who was there with his wife and two of his children.  During Larry’s talk (which opened the conference, naturally enough), he said “I’ve always taught my children that it’s okay to be weird, so of course now I have weird children,” which is definitely something I could relate to.

So I chatted a bit, and learned some things there, and I attended some talks, and learned some things there, and I went to both of the “bad movie night” after-hours gatherings, where I had the pleasure of seeing the MST3K version of It Conquered the World (even though it didn’t) and the live action Aeon Flux with the RiffTrax commentary (which was far more enjoyable than the first time I watched it, when I had to actually listen to the characters speaking).  Overall it wasn’t a bad outing, and I think I got my company’s money’s worth out of it.

I am glad to be home though.  When I travel for business, I often try to arrange to take my family, but it wasn’t economically feasible this time.  You’d think I’d enjoy some time away from the family, and I admit I often think that I will, particularly when they’re all yelling at each other and expecting me to play referee.  I might say to myself, well, at least I have that week off coming up, and I’ll get some peace and quiet for a change.  But then I go off and a funny thing happens: I wish they were there.  As annoying as it is to be packed into a small room with all of them, and as even more annoying as it is to be packed into a small vehicle with them for travel purposes, I generally find that I wish they were around when they aren’t.  I suppose it helps that I don’t think of them as obligations, but more as pals.  I like hanging around with them ... well, most of the time, anyway.  When I’m on my own, I think how nifty it would be if they were there with me, and I could chat with them about all the things going on.  I’ve never actually cared much for being by myself ... in fact, I’ve never lived alone.  (In fact, the last time I counted roommates I’ve had over the years, I got to 30 without even trying very hard, not even including anyone who could be considered “family,” and, if you don’t think your family counts as roommates, you should rethink your perspective.) Now, I did share a hotel room with a coworker (who I can’t say I know well enough yet to call a friend, but I suspect that one day I will), and that definitely made it bearable a lot of the time, but I still missed having the family around.  I’m very comfortable around them.  I’m much more relaxed, and my introverted side is a bit more muted, and I think that helps me open up to people.  Perhaps next year it’ll be possible to bring them along.  I wonder how much different the trip would be with them.

Still, I’m glad I went.  If nothing else, I got to be part of Piers’ human theremin.  (The YAPC videos aren’t up yet, but you can check out the Bobby McFerrin experiment that Piers was cribbing off of.  Admittedly, Piers wasn’t able to add the melodic counterpoint that you see in that video, but then McFerrin didn’t tell me about cool ways to introduce my kids to programming either.)

Curse of the Computer Gods

You know, the hardware gods hate me.

I currently have 7 corrupted hard drives with valuable data on them, two dead laptops and one I’m trying to reinstall to, and any number of other bits and pieces I’m too afraid to throw away.  I’m sort of getting tired of recreating files at this point.

I’ve started saving my data on Dropbox to help alleviate this.  These days, everyone wants you to store your data “in the cloud”; I’m a little leery of that overall, but the nice thing about Dropbox is that it stores your data in the cloud and on your local machines.  All of them, even.  So even if the Dropbox folks disappear tomorrow (which is always a problem with these ventures), I’ll still have multiple copies of it.  That beats my old solution, which was bidirectional sync’ing with Unison.  Which worked okay, but it was a pain in the ass if you made changes to the same file in two different places, and it doesn’t work at all if you can’t get Unison installed on a machine.  Another nice thing about Dropbox is, worse comes to worst, you can always use a browser to get at your stuff.  Of course the downside is that you have to have enough local storage space on every machine to hold all your stuff, but hard disks are cheap.  About the only thing I can’t reasonably put on Dropbox right now is my music.  I’d have to pay for the premium service to fit my 25Gb of MP3’s there, and I’d have to have 25Gb of space lying around on all my machines.  Which is problematic.  On the upside, I can get to my files from my phone, even.  So that’s nice.

Still not sure what to do about the music.  Amazon has a music vault service, but it has limited space, and you have to use their proprietary programs to upload and to download.  Not a very good option.  Google supposedly has a similar option, but too similar to be any better.  There are also streaming options like Subsonic, but the way they work is to stream your music off one server (which must always be available) which you can then access from other servers.  Moderately convenient, but it doesn’t solve the problem of what happens if the hard drive on that server bites the dust.

I also have several external hard drives, including two Passports.  They’re convenient, but I don’t want to have to lug drives around with me everywhere I go, and it still doesn’t solve the problem of what happens when the drive goes belly up.  Or when technology outpaces it: I have another pretty hefty USB hard drive that none of the newer computers I try it on will read.  Sort of like all those Jaz disks I have that I’ll never see the data on again.

And don’t even get me started on the tape drives.

I’m a technology guy.  I’ve been programming professionally for more than half my life; casually for nearly 75% of it.  I’ve built my own machines, installed hardware in everything from laptops to servers, even worked as a hardware technician for a while in my youth.  And I still hate dealing with hardware.  As a programmer, if there’s some piece of software I’m missing, I can always write it.  Now, granted, I may not be willing to write it; there are many classes of programs—hardware drivers, GUI applications, music players, spreadsheets, etc—that I wouldn’t bother wasting my time trying to create.  But I could write them if I wanted to, if I had the will and the gumption and the time.  But if there’s a piece of hardware that I’m missing, I have little choice but to go out and buy it.  And, even if I had a degree in Electrical Engineering and the brains (and will and gumption and time) to put together my own circuit boards, I’d still have to go out and buy the components.  You can create software from nothing.  Hardware requires stuff.  That’s why it frustrates me.

And the stuff is always changing.  I long ago gave up trying to keep track of all the latest technologies.  Many technogeeks (including many of my friends) do so, of course.  It’s like being a car guy and knowing what all the latest engine technologies and all that are coming out.  You can know all that cool stuff if you really want to, but it requires a significant investment of time and effort, and I just don’t have the patience for it.  Besides, I can just ask my friends and cheese off the time and effort they’ve already put into it.

The Internet (and, more recently, the “cloud”) have promised us a new technology life, a life free from the concerns of operating system or CPU.  We’re getting to that point, but we’re not there yet.  I’m looking forward to it, myself; we’re a multi-OS family around here, and, at any given time, there are several Linux machines, Windows machines, and Macs floating around the house.  I mostly like to work on Linux, but I’ll admit that its desktop apps have always lagged behind the Redmond giant.  I despise Windows, but there are some Microsoft products I like: Excel, for instance, pounded the nails in the coffin of Lotus 1-2-3 with both authority and flair.  Word’s always been a bit of a bloated whore, but Excel has always been a slick app, and, while Google Spreadsheets has managed to recreate some of its flash—and even surpassed it in a few small ways—honestly, it still lacks a lot of Excel’s magic.  And, of course, there are still programs that just only work on Windows, although those are growing fewer and fewer with the passing of the years.  Mostly it’s specialty programs, such as the excellent mapping program for one of my favorite hobbies.  So I like to have some Windows machines around.  And, while I’ve never been able to make myself love the Mac the way many have (primarily because it’s not keyboard-friendly enough for me—which is really an understatement: Macs are downright keyboard-hostile), I’ll admit to occasionally envying its ease of hardware use and a few of its programs (I’d love to be able to produce presentations in Keynote, for instance).  So why shouldn’t I be able to have all three operating systems running?  And be able to access the majority of my useful files from any of them?

I think we’ll get there eventually.  For now, I still feel like I spend just as much time configuring computers as I do using them, which pisses me off.  But that’s my curse.  I have offended the gods of hardware, and they do exact their price.  Perhaps I’ll go sacrifice a chicken.  Or a lolcat.  Something.

(In case it wasn’t obvious, I’ve spent most of the day reinstalling my laptop and didn’t really have time for a proper post.  So you got this crap instead.  See title of blog.)

Family Ties

Got some family stuff going on today, so no blog post for you. So sad, I know.

The Diamond Flame

In my very first post I explained why you should not read this blog, but, in case you don’t want to go back and read that, I’ll recap it for you: blogs are full of other people’s crappy opinions, and mine is certainly no different.  But every once in a while I take a break from regaling you with my crappy opinions and write some fiction instead.  If there were a reason to read this blog (and I’m not saying there is), it would have to be for the fiction, assuming that sort of thing appeals to you.

I’ve been blithely rambling on for about 13 “chapters” now (although admittedly they’re mostly arbitrary divisions) without ever once explaining what the thing was supposed to be, so I thought I’d take a moment to do that.  The explanation is a bit late at this point, but perhaps I’ll go back and put a link to this post on each of the chapter parts so people won’t have to wonder what the hell is going on if they stumble into the middle of it.

Spoiler-free short version:  The fiction is basically a novel, called The Diamond Flame, and it’s meant to be the first in a series of books about a boy named Johnny Hellebore.  I won’t go into any details about who he is or what happens to him (that’s the joy of reading, I think), but let me offer a few similar titles so that you can judge if the thing is your cup of tea or not.  In rereading the content (which I do quite often), I would say the book is most similar to novels such as The Talisman or Shadowland, or possibly the (still ongoing) series Abarat, although I’ve heard Barker intended Abarat to be his Eyes of the Dragon, so to speak, which would make that a poorer comparison.  (Note that these three titles are penned by three of what I refer to as the pentagram of my literary idols.)  Specifically, it is designed as adult fiction, and definitely not children’s fare like Harry Potter or Perseus Jackson, although it has some similarities to those series as well.

The longer version would be this.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer.  Since I was very young, I can remember writing stories.  I was actually never very good at telling stories, but I always tried to write them.  Longhand in notebooks, or on my grandmother’s manual typewriter—it didn’t much matter, I just wanted to write.  Once I got a computer, I started using that, and that’s how I write exclusively these days.  I wrote a lot of short stories, some of which are decent, although none of them are really good, and I started at least two novels that I can recall.  But I never published any of my fiction, and I still haven’t.  Now I’m over 40, and I suppose there’s at least an even chance that I never will.  But I also firmly believe in never giving up your dreams, so perhaps someday ...

Then again, maybe this is just my personal mid-life crisis.

There are two primary reasons that I never pursued my dream of becoming a writer.  The first is that I became a programmer.  Now, Stephen King once said (as apparently Somerset Maugham did before him) that you don’t become a writer because you want to; you become a writer because you have to ... because, if you didn’t write down all the stuff trying to burst out of your brain, your head would just explode.  I think that’s true, but perhaps too specific.  A creative outlet is required for a creative person, but it does not necessarily have to be the first thing that you fixate on.  We see this all the time, with singers who take up acting, actors who take up singing, directors who take up painting, ad infinitum.  I’m just a writer who took up programming.  And don’t let anyone ever tell you that programming is all logical and not creative.  That’s bullshit.  Writing a software program is like writing a story in many ways: you start with nothing, and then you create, trying different approaches, experimenting with different techniques, and, in the end, there is something.  Sometimes it’s beautiful.  More often it’s just adequate.  But, either way, it’s yours, and you made it, and you’ll always feel a bit proud of it, even if you know you could have done better.

So my creative urges found an outlet, in an unlikely place.  I actually only took up programming because I was decent at it, and I figured it was a great way to make money while I became a famous writer.  And then I ended up running my own software company for 12 years.  Funny how those things work out.

But probably the more important reason why I never became a writer is that I never had a great idea.  Oh, I had several good ones; just never a great one.  I was always a good writer, if I do say so myself, but pretty writing without decent ideas behind them isn’t very publishable.  In fact, you’re better off if you have good ideas and can’t write worth a damn.  My own idol King was recently criticized for noting that this was true of Stephanie Meyer; I’ll agree with him and go even further and call out another very popular author, Charlaine Harris.  In my opinion, neither Meyer nor Harris writes particularly well, but I’ll freely admit to being jealous of their brilliant ideas.  I only wish I had come up with something as innovative as either of these ladies.  But, alas, I never have.

Until, perhaps, recently.

One day about a year or so ago, I woke up from an unlikely afternoon nap with my younger son to find a picture in my mind: a picture of a teenage boy, dark-haired, slightly ragged-looking, and I knew his name was Johnny Hellebore.  And I became fascinated with this character.  The name alone was classic, in some sense ... a name worthy of a comic book hero, reminiscent of both Johnny Blaze and Daimon Hellstrom.  I had no idea who this boy was, or why he had invaded my light dozing, or—assuming he was a comic book hero—what sort of powers he might have.  But he kept running around my brain, and he soon acquired a companion: Larissa, a little girl who had first appeared in a D&D campaign I ran in the early 90’s.  Then followed a few more half-dreams about Johnny (and occasionally Larissa), and then a few more dreams which weren’t really about those characters at all, but somehow seemed that they might be shoehorned in nonetheless, and then I was writing little scenes and vignettes, completely disconnected, and then ...

And then I started a blog, for some insane reason, and suddenly there was a place to actually put all this stuff I was writing.  Of course, that required making some sort of coherent whole out of it.  So that’s what I set about doing.  Most of the content of this “novel” is really just me writing my way from one scene to another, trying to make them all fit together.  I think I’ve achieved some amount of success with this.  In fact, I suspect—although of course I may be wrong—that this may be the best thing I’ve ever written.

So, if you think this is something you might be interested in, I encourage you to start at the beginning.  Feel free to backtrack occasionally; you may find that I’ve gone back and revised things slightly (mostly for grammar and phrasing, not so much for content).  Each post has a link at the top to the previous entry, and one at the bottom for the next entry, so it should be moderately easy to navigate through it.  And, every now and again, I post a new half a chapter or so.  You can also find other posts like this one—me writing about the process of writing—by searching for the “metafiction” tag.  If you find any of this entertaining, feel free to post a comment.  I know, I know: I keep telling you not to read this blog.  But this novel just may constitute an exception to that.

Happy reading.

Chapter 13 (concluded)

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What is this?

|<<first

There was a sort of trail, and it was mostly solid, although there were patches of muckier bits along it.  The trees were closer together here, and they crowded out the constant light.  In amongst the trees, there still seemed to be watery areas, although the wading birds were nowhere to be seen.  The atmosphere was darker and more oppressive here, and they walked close together.  Even Roger was more quiet than Johnny had come to expect from her.

The hill and the dock were far behind them now, screened from sight by the swampy forest.  The leaves of the trees would rustle alarmingly from time to time, but there was still no sign of the creatures that caused it.  Roger kept a sharp eye on the upper branches.

Suddenly, there was a low burbling sound that Johnny knew by now was a hunting burrikit.  Roger stopped and flung out a hand.  She needn’t have bothered; both Johnny and Larissa had frozen immediately.  Even Bones, normally hyperkinetic no matter what the circumstances, had become a quivering feathered statue.  There was a flash of orange twenty feet over their heads, in the trees to the left of the path, and then a bundle of fur and teeth shot out of the leaves and sailed over them, landing on a low branch that stuck out over the trail.

This was Johnny’s first close-up view of a burrikit.  It had the tufted ears and bushy “sideburns” that he associated with a lynx, but its fur was a bright orange, the color of a creamsicle.  The whiter fur (really an extremely pale shade of orange) under its chin reinforced that color scheme.  The same whitish color was found in rings on its long, arched tail, which looked like it belonged on a completely different animal: a ringtail cat, or a coatimundi.  Its claws were extended: vermilion daggers digging into the branch to maintain its balance.  Sabretooth fangs with an apricot tint stuck over its lower jaw to just below its chin.  Its eyes were the only thing that weren’t some shade of orange: they were a  dangerously glowing greenish-yellow.  The low growling purr that filled the air was chilling; Johnny wondered how had it had ever reminded him of a Disney character.

Roger reacted immediately.  She raised her arms above her head and actually took a step forward.  “G’wan!  Git!” she shouted.

To Johnny’s surprise, Larissa grabbed the sides of her jacket and also threw her arms out, flapping the insides of her coat at the beast.  “Makes you seem bigger than you are,” she said softly.  Johnny shrugged and started waving his arms around as well.  The burrikit leaned back, but didn’t retreat.  Roger kept waving with one hand, but put her other on the hilt of her sword.

Just as it seemed violence was imminent, the cat’s tail flashed once and it disappeared, leaping up into the treetops and shaking the branches wildly with its passage.  Johnny let out a long breath.  “That was lucky ...” he started, but Roger was looking around with concern.

“No,” she said, “something’s not ...”

The air was split by a hideous noise.  It was somewhere between a foghorn and a moose call, with a dash of shrieking baby thrown in for good measure.  The bass vibrated in Johnny’s breastbone, but it cranked rapidly into a register that was so high it was almost painful, then dropped immediately back down.  It made Johnny shiver, and that was just the noise.  When the creature appeared, the unearthly sound paled in comparison.

It was at least seven feet tall, possibly eight.  Its skin was a shiny black, wet with swampwater and draped with bits of greenery, as if it had just sprung up out of the water where it had been lying in wait.  The hide was leathery and pebbled, and Johnny knew Roger’s thin rapier had no chance at all of peircing it.  It was generally humanoid, although it seemed to have no neck—its head was just a mound on top of its shoulders.  Its eyes were balls of green flame, with no whites or pupils, and its open mouth sported metallic fangs that were six inches long.  Its claws were the same, except much longer: probably two feet of flashing bladelike talons.

It strode through the tree trunks onto the path, still emitting that bizarre howl, and chaos erupted.  Bones gave a terrified shriek and shot into the trees.  Roger’s sword was in her hand, and she expertly parried the first swipe of a claw, but still the force of it threw her backwards into the trees on the other side.  Larissa disappeared behind him and off the path to the same side that had spawned the creature.  Suddenly Johnny was alone with it.  He noted clinically that it had no snout; no nose at all, really.  No facial features whatsoever except those eerie green balls of fire for eyes, and a great open maw full of deadly teeth.  Then he turned and ran.

The three of them had now taken off in three different directions, three of the four lines that would form a giant X, with the fourth being the path along which the creature had made its entrance.  It was theoretically random chance that would determine which of them it would chase after.  Johnny knew from the crashing and snapping of tree trunks behind him who had “won.”

He hit a small clearing and stumbled in a shallow pond.  He went down hard, although the ground he hit was soft enough that he didn’t break anything.  There was a tree root under his face and he tasted a bit of blood in his mouth, but he knew it wasn’t serious.  Not nearly as serious as it was about to be, anyway.  He rolled over frantically.  There were tree branches and vines and Spanish moss above him, and the same fading-twilight sky as always, but only for a moment, because suddenly everything turned black as the beast filled his vision.

There was a clang of steel that Johnny thought must be a rapier hitting the thing’s hide; it swatted vaguely behind it, and Johnny heard an “oof” and more crashing into bushes.  A flurry of branches and nuts came flying down at the creature’s head, and there was a parroty squawk of “leave off there!” but it paid no mind to that either.  It lifted one arm up high, and the glossy silvery-black claws flashed in the light.

And then Larissa screamed.

Thinking back on it, Johnny would decide that this was the single strangest sound he had ever heard in his life.  First there was the fact that it was Larissa.  He had never heard Larissa scream, not even that one time when he was sure they were going to get sliced up by a jittering addict too far gone to realize they couldn’t possibly have any money to give him.  Johnny himself had given a little scream when the knife had come lunging at them, before a timely police siren had sent the junkie running, but Larissa had never made a sound.  And secondly, it was a bizarre sort of scream, almost unnatural.  Generally when you heard someone scream, you knew they were scared.  But this, this was ... different.  He couldn’t tell if she was frightened, or angry, or frustrated, or if she was perhaps a superhero employing some sort of sonic power; he had a sudden vision of a young Donald Sutherland raising his arm and emitting an eerie shriek, but he couldn’t place it, because he had never known that in his late night cable surfing he had stumbled across the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The piercing screech echoed across the swamp; the fluttering of panicked birds filled the air.  The beast standing over him roared its strange roar again, as if answering a challenge, then the talons flashed toward Johnny’s face and he instinctively closed his eyes.

The howl of the monster rose in pitch, as if in frustration, and Johnny decided to open his eyes to see why he wasn’t dead yet.  The thing’s arm had become entangled in the vines above them, and Johnny instinctively rolled to his right just as they finally snapped.  The metallic-colored talons embedded themselves into the marshy ground where his head had been.

He was half covered in water and mud now, and the thing was turning towards him again, but suddenly he was very calm.  If he could walk through a solid steel grate, why should he let this beast skewer him where he lay?  He reached for the alien sense inside him and let his body go completely slack.  The claws came down again, and passed directly through his body, but it offered no resistance.  The thing’s arm was now completely through his chest, but he knew it had not pierced him.  He reached up with one arm and put his hand inside the creature’s arm; the monster shuddered and howled, and actually retreated a few steps, taking its arm with it and holding it close to its body as if Johnny had hurt it somehow.  The eyes flashed around the clearing, looking for something, and they lit on a robed figure which had stepped into the open area while Johnny had been distracted.  The monster hesitated, and the figure raised a wooden staff and began to chant.

The words were slippery in Johnny’s ears, no language that he had ever heard before, yet he knew it was ancient; older than Latin, older than Greek.  It was a language that was old when Phoenician and Sanskrit and Sumerian were being spoken.  The words were soft and lyrical, falling over themselves in a waterfall of susurration that Johnny found comforting, but the creature backed away from them, its howl subdued now, its fiery green eyes tracking back and forth in confusion.  Suddenly it turned and crashed away through the trees; Johnny could hear its progress in snapping tree trunks for a few moments, and then there was a loud splash and silence.

Roger appeared in the clearing, nursing a bruised arm and limping slightly.  Larissa was on the opposite side, also stepping forward cautiously.  Bones floated down from the branches to land lightly nearby.  The chanting faded away, and the figure in its pale blue robes strode forward and offered Johnny a hand.  “Thanks,” Johnny said, his voice shaking a bit as the man drew him to his feet.  “I think you may have saved my life there.”

The man smiled.  He was clean-shaven, with sandy brown hair and deep, blue eyes.  “My pleasure.  I could hardly allow you to be eaten by a muck monster on your way to see me, now, could I?”  He must have read confusion in Johnny’s face, for he added: “I am Aidan de Tourneville.  I’ll be your Water Guide.”


>>next>>

What is this?

Another Mother

One of the reasons I couldn’t get a post up last week was that apparently the universe decided to punish me for not saying enough nice things about my mother in my Mother’s Day post.  My mom had to have emergency surgery a week ago for a perforated colon.  How she managed to perforate her colon, neither I, nor she, nor evidently her doctors, seem to know.  But she got it, and she had the surgery, and now she’s doing fine.  But it occurred to me that I might want to take a moment this week to talk a bit about my mother.

Now, I can’t deny that I’ve had a bit of a contentious relationship with my parents, both as a child and as an adult.  But that’s not to say that I don’t love my mother.  (And my father too, although I suppose that’s a topic for another day.)  I’m lucky enough to still have my parents around, in case I need them, but not so close that we can get on each other’s nerves.  In fact, there are a couple thousand miles between me and my parents—2,713, in fact, according to Google maps, by the most direct route.  They’re quite happy continuing to live in the town I grew up in, the same town where I was born.  The same town where they were born, for that matter.  In fact, the three of us were all born in the same hospital, and graduated from the same high school.  You’d think they’d be sick of it by now ... obviously I was, since I moved first 4 hours away, and then later 43 hours away.  But they seem to like it there, and I expect they’ll be there until they die.

Which is hopefully a goodly amount of time in the future, perforated colons notwithstanding.  My mother, for instance, has always been pretty healthy.  She’s a bit overweight, and she’s had a few worrisome skin cancers that she had to have removed, but, really, she’s probably had fewer medical issues than I have, overall.  She was a nurse for many years, so perhaps that has something to do with it, somehow.  She became a nurse because her father wanted a son who would grow up to be a doctor, and I suppose that was as close as she could come, back in those days.  Might she have become a doctor even so?  Well, according to Time Magazine, there were 7,500 female doctors in the U.S. in 1941, and that was 23 years before my mother entered nursing school (at that same hospital where we were all born, in fact).  So perhaps it might have been possible.  But bucking tradition was never my mother’s way.

Tradition, in fact, has always been very important to her.  Christmas in our house was a series of carefully choreographed events, and that’s only one simple example.  She’s got a bit of fear of change, I think, and maybe even a smattering of OCD.  I know it’s always driven her crazy to have a lightswitch in the up position when the light’s off, which can happen in my parents’ house because of multiple switches for the same light.  In fact, there’s one light—in the upstairs hall—that has three switches, and I remember her bedtime dance, up and down the stairs, to make sure all the switches were down, before she could turn in for the evening.  I would tease her about it often.

Perhaps that’s why I have to have all the money in my clip turned the same way, or why I’m constantly realphabetizing my CD’s and DVD’s.

But that’s not what I actually think about when I think what I got from my mother.  She was an intellectual, despite never having attended college.  She had a love for trivia, and for intricacies of grammar, and for literature.  She taught me lists: all the letters of the Greek alphabet, all the books of the Bible, all the bones in the human body, all the Presidents of the United States.  And how to count to ten in Spanish, French, German, and Malay.  And I still remember all of that, except I don’t think I could get the bones in the wrist and ankles right any more, and the Malay is long gone.  I would say the majority of my intellectual curiosity comes from her.

She was also a very open-minded and unprejudiced person.  I love all my family, both parents and all four grandparents, but, of the six of them, only one wasn’t a racist, or a homophobe, or convinced that a women’s place was in the kitchen, and that was my mom.  I can’t call her a liberal, because politically she votes however my father tells her to, which means she’s technically a Republican, but, if I’m a liberal, it’s certainly her fault.  She taught me that a person is a person, regardless of appearance, that all religions have some validity to them, that no sexual act between consenting adults is wrong, that other cultures, no matter how strange they might appear, are just different, not bad.  She taught me, long before I heard Quentin Tarantino say it, that the less a man makes declarative statements, the less apt he is to look foolish in retrospect.  She taught me to think before speaking, a lesson which I have not always followed as well as I should, but a lesson which has informed my actions my whole life.

She taught me how to sing along with the radio and not care who hears it.  She taught me how to smirk, and how to raise one eyebrow, and how to push your glasses up your nose with your middle finger when you’re irked at the person you’re talking to.  She taught me how to make my grandmother’s spaghetti sauce, and she taught me to appreciate bleu cheese on crackers while you’re waiting for it to cook.  She taught me to love animals, and mythology, and Stephen King books.  She taught me to enjoy wandering through cemeteries, and woods, and gardens.  She taught me how to wash my own clothes, and how to make hospital corners on my bed.  She taught me how to read.

There are perhaps some things I wish I could change about my mother.  But so much of who I am comes straight from her; perhaps changing her would’ve meant changing me.  And I’m pretty happy with me, for the most part.  I’d like to think that I’ve taken the best parts of my mother and my father, and left the worst behind.  I’m probably fooling myself a little.  But I do see quite a lot that I’ve inherited from Mom that I’m happy to have, and I hope that I’m leaving those bits to my children as well.  If there are a few warts here and there—hers or mine—well, we are none of us perfect, and that’s okay too.

So thank you, Mom, for all you gave to me and all that I am that comes from you.  I hope that you continue to be around for many years, in your same house in your same town, 2,713 miles away.  Just in case I need you.

Rough Day

So today has pretty well sucked, so I've had no time to try to do a post. Sorry about that. Perhaps next weekend will be a bit better.

The Mother

So today is Mother’s Day.

I should probably take advantage of this opportunity to wax poetic about my own mother.  But I can’t get her to read this blog, so there’s no point in sucking up to her, now, is there?  I do love my mother, of course.  She has many excellent qualities.  But am I heartbroken that she happens to live on one coast of the United States while I live on the other?  No, I wouldn’t say “heartbroken” is the appropriate term ...

There is another mother in my life, of course: she is the mother of my children.  Mother’s Day has always been a bone of contention between us.  She expects me to buy her something, or do something for her.  I keep pointing out that she isn’t my mother.  Somehow she doesn’t seem to see this as a rational argument.  So I keep trying to encourage my children to do something nice for her that I can participate in.  You know, make me look good as an accomplice.  That sort of thing.

Which is not to say that I don’t appreciate her.  She and I have an odd relationship history ... I’ve been told (by more than one person) that I’m one of the few people that “it’s complicated” is actually appropriate for.  But it’s a relationship that’s lasted for nearly 15 years, so obviously something is working.

That something has everything to do with motherhood.  Obviously, I love my children.  They are the most important things in my life, and I wouldn’t have them without their mother.  Which is sort of self-evident.  If that’s all there was to it, I wouldn’t be saying much other than I value my parenting partner for her genes and her reproductive system.

But that’s just the beginning.

As children, we often resent the actions of our parents.  We say to ourselves that we would never act in such a way if we were in their place.  And then, of course, we grow up.  As Allison told us: it’s unavoidable, it just happens ... when you grow up, your heart dies.  Well, perhaps not so melodramatic as all that, but certainly we have a tendency to turn into our parents, whether we like it or not, and often without noticing.  I won’t claim to be immune to that, but I do have a tendency to refuse to believe in “accepted wisdom.” If we’re being generous, we can call me “non-conformist”; a more cynical viewpoint would be that I’m just pig-headed.  You know all those times your parents told you “when you have children of your own, you’ll understand”?  And then you did have children, and you did understand?  Well, I contend that you didn’t actually understand, you just came to accept that that’s the way it’s done.  Your parents did it that way, and it seems like everyone else’s parents did too, and if you know of any parents who didn’t do it that way, you think of them as a bit odd.  Thus, it’s very logical to come around to this way of thinking.  Unless you’re a stubborn bastard, like me.

With the end result that I am now one of those parents you think of as odd.  I’ve obstinately held on to those naive ideals I formulated as a child, when I thought of all sorts of unrealistic ways to treat children, based primarily on how I wished I were treated as a child.  It turns out that most of those ways aren’t as unrealistic as we’ve been led to believe.  These are techniques that can be very effective ... if applied consistently.  Which means that all the people involved in the parenting have to agree.

Now, imagine for a moment, if you will, me: possessed of all these bizarre ideas—ideas which are literally childish, having been developed as a child—on how to raise children.  Treating them like people, being friends with them, having a set of rules you can count on the fingers of both hands, sending them to a school where there are no classes, and more.  What are the chances that I could find a woman who would be willing to go along with even one of these insane ideas, much less all of them?  What are the chances that I could find a woman who would go even further, and bring a few insane ideas of her own to the table?

So when I think about the mother of my children, the primary thing that springs to mind is how lucky I am.  How lucky I am to have found someone who was not only biologically capable of producing the children that I always wanted, but mentally capable of understanding and agreeing with my non-traditional ideas on raising them, and emotionally capable of putting up with my eccentricities and perspectives (well, usually, anyway).  Spiritually capable of both standing up to me and standing by me.  Psychologically capable of raising well-adjusted children.  Educationally capable of teaching our children at home when we can’t find a school that suits our needs.  And geographically inclined to want to move across the country with me.  That’s a whole lot of luck right there.

No, she’s not my mother, but she’s an awesome enough mother that I’m a bit jealous of my children.  When I think of how little they have to complain about—really, the worst they could come up with is that she constantly wants to take pictures of them for her scrapbooks—I’m practically green with envy.  Think about them looking back on their lives one day, remembering that their mom was their teacher and their friend, that she took them to museums and zoos and to the beach, that she planned family vacations for them and fought to get them more Christmas presents, that she let them sleep in her bed with her at any age, that she let them stay up late and didn’t make them eat things they didn’t want to eat, that she taught them to be polite, and independent, and loving, and encouraged them to try new things, and played video games with them, and treated them with respect, and kindness, and so much love that they thought their hearts would burst with it all.

One day my children will write these things for themselves.  Today, I will celebrate her for them.  And thank her for them.  Because this mother is pretty important in my life too.  And for that, I am grateful.

taking the day off ...

I had an awesome outing yesterday with my two boys: we spent nearly 12 hours hanging out with our local gaming group playing various games (primarily Heroscape). It was great fun, and even the 5-year-old was moderately well-behaved. But our gain is your loss, as I don't really have the time today to put together a blog post.

Of course, your loss is no great loss, as I keep telling you. But obviously you're not inclined to listen to me, so let's pretend you're all sad about there not being a blog post this week. To which I shall respond, buck up, little camper! There's always next week.


(And, bonus points to those of you who can place the obscure 80's movie quote.)

Cash for Kids

When my first child was born, I started giving him an allowance.

He was born on a Tuesday, and, the very next Tuesday, I set one dollar aside.  And the next Tuesday, another.  This was not for his future: on the contrary, I’m a firm believer in having kids do those sort of things for themselves.  As far as I’m concerned, if my kids want to go to college, they can pay for it themselves.  This is primarily because I went to college twice: once, for two years, right after high school, and then, three years after that, for three years to finally complete my B.A.  The first time, my parents and grandparents paid for everything, and I got very little out of it.  I screwed around, I dropped half my classes my second semester of freshman year, and I generally didn’t care about my grades.  The second time, I paid for it all myself (well, I took out a lot of student loans, which I’m still paying off), and let me tell you: that time, I took it seriously.  Perhaps it was because I was older, but I think it was mainly because, when it’s your money, you don’t want to waste it.  So I think it’ll be a good experience for my children to do that too.  (Their mother doesn’t agree, but I suppose we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.)

So what was this money for?  This was to be his money.  His personal stash, to be used for whatever he wanted.  The first year of his life, he got a dollar a week.  The next year, two dollars a week, and so on and so forth, until he’s getting eighteen dollars a week until his eighteenth birthday, at which point he’s on his own.  On each birthday, he gets a bonus; my original plan was to give him $100/year, culminating with $1,800 on the final birthday, but happily his mother talked me out of that.  Not particularly practical, unless I was planning to become super-rich at some point, and especially if there were plans for future children (which, as it turned out, there were).  So we backed it off to $25/year—that is, $25 on the first birthday, $50 on the next, and so forth to a maximum of $450.  Any cash gifts from relatives for birthdays, Christmas, etc are just added to the pot.

When my elder son was approximately two years old, we took him to a petting zoo.  He had a great time petting goats, ducks, and various and sundry other animals.  To exit this zoo (as with pretty much any attraction these days), you have to pass through the frightening gauntlet of the gift shop.  By this point, the kid was back in the stroller, having (in his opinion at least) walked under his own power quite enough for one day.  As we rolled along through the shelves of pointless knick-knacks and stuffed animals, he suddenly reached up and grabbed a small purple orangutan.  I tried to take it and put it back on the shelf.  He wouldn’t let it go.  “I think he’s just spent the first of his money,” his mother said.  So he bought it.  I think that stupid purple organutan is still around here somewhere, a living testament to the first lesson in financial responsibility.

And that’s the way it’s gone, for both of our children.  They start when they can barely speak, buying small things, not even truly understanding what they’re doing at first.  Each time, I say, this costs X dollars, and I translate that into time: this costs two weeks’ worth of your salary, or whatever.  At first they just nod: yeah, yeah, whatever I need to say to get me the toy I want.  But it sinks in.  By the time they’re five or so, they’re starting to understand that their money is a finite resource, and, if they spend it too fast, they won’t be able to buy the next exciting thing they want.  As with nearly all my parenting philosophies, there is no waiting until they’re “old enough.” By the time they’re “old enough,” I need the groundwork to be laid and we need to be moving onto the analysis and exploration of larger issues.

Notice that we don’t call it “allowance” any more.  That was what I called it at first, but we switched paradigms somewhere along the line.  Now it’s a “paycheck.” You get paid every week, with an annual bonus, for fulfilling your duties as part of this family.  At first, your only job is to be a kid.  Have fun.  Enjoy life.  What the hey, you’re young and foolish, may as well have a good time with it.  As you get older, you gain more responsibilities: perhaps taking the trash out, or cleaning out the cat’s litter box (after all, that’s your cat, not mine).  These aren’t technically “chores,” although we do refer to them that way sometimes.  These are your work duties; it’s what you’re getting paid for.  Everyone in the family has certain things they have to do, and you’re no exception.

Another thing that’s changed from the early days is that I don’t actually set physical cash aside any more.  Nowadays it’s all electronic: I keep a running total of their income and expenditures on the computer.  This is referred to as the “Daddy bank.” I know roughly how much each one of them has in the Daddy bank at all times, and I can easily get an exact figure upon request.  If one of them wants to buy something when we’re out and about, they don’t have to worry about having actual dollars; they just tell me and I purchase it for them and then subtract that from their balance later.  Basically, I’m their ATM machine.  Technically, they can demand all their cash at any time, but we caution them against making a run on the Daddy bank.  Don’t want their financial institution going belly up, now, do they?

The idea behind all this is simple.  You’re going to buy your kids a bunch of crap they don’t need anyway.  Let’s face it: we’re Americans (or at least I and most of the folks I hang around with are), and we’re consumers, and we’re parents and we love our kids, and we have a burning desire to spoil the crap out of them, so, when they want a toy, we’re gonna buy it.  We’re suckers like that.  With this system, you’re still buying them all the same crap, only now you’re making them think about it.  You’re putting the responsibility for what to buy and when to buy it back on them.  Instead of spoiling them to no gain, you’re forcing them to consider monetary issues and manage their own money.  What you’re setting aside for them is plenty of money for a kid that age, and, if they manage to spend it all anyway, then maybe they really don’t need to buy that whatever-it-is.  Or possibly a loan could be arranged ... we have very reasonable interest rates at the Daddy bank.

My kids don’t have to buy their own clothes, and they don’t have to pay rent, and they don’t have to chip in for groceries.  They don’t have pay for their own presents on holidays, obviously, and books are always a family expense.  They still get plenty of swag for free.  But if they want a new toy, or a new video game, or a new video game console, or a new computer (my elder just bought half a laptop, since his Christmas gift budget would only cover half), that comes out of their bank.  They do have to pay for the presents they give to other family members, starting at a fairly young age.  And if they want to go to McDonald’s or somesuch, they may have to agree to buy dinner for everyone.  How bad do you want a Happy Meal anyway?  Maybe eating in is not such a bad choice.

They’ve both been flat broke, and they’ve both been flush.  Right now the elder has almost $500 in the Daddy bank, while the younger is in the hole and has been for the past month.  They learn generosity, and stinginess.  They spend recklessly and regret it; they hoard and are pleasantly surprised when they can afford big items.  I believe they have a firm grasp on the concept of money already, and it’s only getting better with time.

I honestly believe this is the right thing to do for my children.  Perhaps if I were richer, I’d give them more every week and more every year, or perhaps not ... certainly, if I were poorer, I’d give them less.  But I believe I’d still do it this way.  Because I think this is something that I was lacking as a child: the concept of working for a living, and having a budget for spending money.  In fact, their mother and I are now on the same plan for our hobby expenditures and luxury items such as personal electronics or music downloads.  It’s a convenient way to insure we too live within our means, and it has the added benefit of being a simple rule that we can apply to ourselves just as it applies to them, but it scales for our more expensive tastes.  Now everyone in the family has an account at the Daddy bank ... even Daddy.

What's in a Title?

or, Feminist Manifestos in Swedish Crime Thrillers

I just finished reading the Millenium trilogy for the second time.  When you read things for the first time, you have to put a lot of energy into just understanding what’s going on.  But when you reread, you get to look beyond the basics of the plot, the character development, the setting exploration, and so forth.  That’s when you really get to think about the themes.

Now, I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with “themes” in fiction, which perhaps I’ll explore in a future post.  For now, let’s just just say that, when I’m a writer, I don’t bother trying to put themes in everything I write.  But, when I’m a reader, I can’t resist looking for those themes, even if I’m reading my own work where I know damn well there oughtn’t be any themes, ’cause I didn’t bother putting any in.  This is sort of like how, when you’re driving, you curse those ignorant pedestrians who just blithely step out in front of you, and then, once you get out of the car and start walking, you curse all the moronic motorists who don’t have the good sense to stop when you step off the curb.

So when I read I look for themes, even though as a writer I don’t really believe in them.  And I usually find them.  In the Millenium trilogy, the themes aren’t exactly subtle, but I was struck by how much the original title of the first book would have been more appropos: Men Who Hate Women.

For those who haven’t read these books, I’ll try to keep my comments spoiler-free, since spoilers aren’t necessary for the point I want to make anyway.  (Of course, if you go around clicking links in this post, then you’re on your own.)  Basically, the trilogy consists of three books: The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.  Well, those are the English titles anyway.  It turns out that the original titles in Swedish would translate into something like Men Who Hate Women, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Aircastle that Was Blown Up.  Now, that last one is a bit clumsy (when translated), granted.  It’s apparently because we don’t have a great approximation of the Swedish concept of “aircastle,” although the English expression “building castles in the air” gives us a hint of what it means.  Some Wikipedia editor has suggested that a good translation might be “The Pipe Dream that Blew Up.” Still a bit clumsy, in my opinion.  All in all, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” isn’t a bad choice at all.

But how about “Men Who Hate Women”?  What’s wrong with that one?  Couldn’t be more clear, it seems.  And it has two major advantages over “The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo.”

The first (and less important) is that, if you were to go along with “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” the titles would then somewhat mirror the structure of the trilogy.  Your typical trilogy is really one big story arc that’s just been stretched out across three books.  But the Millenium trilogy is a bit different.  The characters and setting are very consistent across all three books, but, in terms of plot, the first book is really a self-contained story, while the second two books are one big story.  In fact, coming to the end of the second book is somewhat like those cliffhanger season enders of your favorite TV shows.  If you’re prepared enough to have purchased the third book ahead of time, there’s just no way you can put down The Girl Who Played with Fire and not immediately pick up the next installment.  It’s a pretty clever structure, actually.  It means that the first book of the trilogy allows you a gentle introduction to the characters and the world they inhabit, while not having to bother with setting up the important plot points (that’s relegated to the first third of the second book, which is actually somewhat slow going; once that part is over, the remaining book and two-thirds takes off like a shot).  But you wouldn’t want to have a book that does nothing but introduce characters and setting, right?  So Stieg Larsson creates a whole separate plot to keep you engaged.  The first book in the Millenium trilogy reminds me of the old Bill Cosby line: “Now, I told you that story so I could tell you this one.” So, a set of trilogy titles where the last two of the three follow a pattern, making them similar, but the first one doesn’t, making it stand out somewhat, would be very appropriate, all in all.

But the larger reason is that this is really what the book—nay, the whole triology—is about: men who hate women.  Wikipedia tells us that Larsson witnessed a gang rape when he was a teenager, and was thereafter haunted by his inability to go to her aid (or reluctance, if you prefer, but I think a 15-year-old kid should generally be forgiven for not jumping on a gang of violent rapists).  This, opines an unknown Wikipedia editor, “inspired the theme of sexual violence against women in his books.” It’s safe to say that there’s a theme of sexual violence against women in the books, and that’s why Men Who Hate Women is such a perfect title.  But I’ll go farther: it’s not just about men who hate womena, it’s about men who marginalize women, men who condescend to women, men who ignore women.  It’s about men who think women are inferior, and the things they do every day, which range from the banal to the sensationalistic, to put them down.  Nearly every female character in the series, from the major to the minor, faces some level of discrimination from male colleagues: Lisbeth Salander, the series’ true hero (Mikael Blomkvist is really just an author stand-in, in classic Mary Sue fashion), takes the brunt of it, certainly, but look at the others.  Monica Figuerola has to put up with derision from her peers because she’s a tall strong woman.  Miriam Wu is accused by the police of being a dangerous deviant because she’s a lesbian.  Sonja Modig is subject to all sorts of ridiculous prejudice.  And others, such as Harriet Vanger, are in nearly as bad a position as Lisbeth herself.  Even Erika Berger has to suffer through a largely unnecessary subplot, seemingly just so we can learn that even the editor in chief of Millenium is not immune to male condescension.

So it seems to me very clear that there is a strong feminist message in the Millenium trilogy.  (If you want a competing viewpoint, you could check out this blog post; I disagree with many of her conclusions, but she has a major advantage over me in that she is an actual woman.)  Thus, it seems that Men Who Hate Women is not just an appropriate title, but a perfect one.  Why was it changed?

Well, a Publisher’s Weekly article gives some insight into the US publishers’ thinking, but note that they were discussing whether to change it back to Men Who Hate Women; the original change to The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo was made for the UK version.  Not much official insight on why that was done, although there are some apparent comments by the English version translator (although certainly that can be considered non-authoritative on several levels).  The common guess that everyone makes is, “marketing.” After all—so goes the reasoning—who would want to buy a book called “Men Who Hate Women”?  Sounds like a self-help book.

In 1997, J. K. Rowling published the first of the Harry Potter books: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.  If you are American, you may not even realize that that is the proper title of the book; you almost certainly think that the first HP novel is Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.  But what you don’t realize is that Scholastic, who bought the American publishing rights, decided that no self-respecting American kid would buy a book with “Philosopher” in the title.  What is that, some sort of textbook?  No way dude!  American kids, of course, are too stupid to realize what the philosopher’s stone is, or to have any concept of the history of alchemy.  J. K. Rowling has said that she regrets agreeing to this change.  Had she but known she would soon be the world’s richest author, she could have told ’em to go stick it.

For a sillier example, IMDB tells us that the original title of Zombieland was “Another Day in Zombieland,” but the studio was worried people would think it was a sequel.

If you want to know why marketing is destroying our society, you don’t need to listen to me: go ask Craig Ferguson.  But it does seem a shame that marketing has so low an opinion of our intelligence that they pre-pablumize even our book and movie titles for us.  Here’s an author gone and put out a perfectly lovely book, just for us to read, and put a perfectly lovely title on it, which sums up all its themes and aspirations perfectly, but we have to change all that, so people will realize that they want to buy it.  And I don’t want to lay all the blame on the advertising executives.  I think the lawyers bear some responsibility as well: often titles (and many other things about a book or movie) are changed preemptively to avoid legal hassles.  That is, they are changed not because someone has been sued.  They are changed because someone might be sued.  You know, just in case.  Similar to my theory on how political correctness results in self-censorship, here it seems like we don’t really have to worry about people mucking up our entertainment for us because we’re perfectly capable of doing it ourselves.

I do think it’s important to know the proper names of things.  Original names are often lost, but they signify something.  Does not semiotics teach us that all a name is is a signifier?  It’s an arbitrary sign that we hang onto a concept in an attempt to clarify it, to communicate it, to assign meaning to it.  The name of something as given it by its creator is surely more meaningful than a name assigned after the fact by someone attempting to sell that concept to as many people as possible.  Although I suppose you could argue that all advertising is communication, really.  Well, sorta communication.  Demented and sad communication, but communication.  Right?

There are good reasons to change titles.  “The Aircastle that Was Blown Up” definitely needed a change.  But “Men Who Hate Women” was pretty spot on.  I’m a bit sad to have lost it.

"Yeah, but that's not ... politically correct"

I don’t mean to piss you off, with things I might say
But when I try to shut my mouth, they come out anyway.
And if you spoke your mind, you might feel more connected ...
Until you stand politically corrected.

—SR-71, “Politically Correct,” Now You See Inside

I’m not sure why, but I distinctly remember the first time I ever heard the term “politically correct.” I was a freshman in college, just barely 18.  I was not a political creature; I barely understood the difference between “conservative” and “liberal,” and certainly wasn’t perceptive enough to understand that my new roommate was one and I was the other.  When this guy starting saying bad things about people who were “politically correct,” I had to stop him and ask what the hell that even was.

He tried to explain it to me, but, honestly, he wasn’t that much brighter than I was, politically speaking.  All I could get out of him was that it was definitely bad.  It didn’t sound bad, from the way he vaguely described it, but I should take his word for it.  I barely knew this guy, but I knew enough not to do that.

So I looked it up.  And basically what I found was the following definition, which has stuck with me forevermore: “politically correct” means that you agree to refer to people in the way that they refer to themselves.  So, for instance, women don’t generally refer to themselves as bitches and ho’s. So, you know, it’s not polite for you to refer to them that way either.

Such a simple definition.  The great thing about it is, how can you possibly argue against that?  It’s one of those things that seems so obviously a great idea that it sort of boggles your mind when you find out that, in reality, it isn’t.  Sort of like communism, or labor unions, or the free market: it seems like an idea almost too good to be true ... which it is.  Implementation is the sticking point.  The devil is in the details.

Let’s take the term “African American.” This seems basic enough.  Before this term came along, the acceptable term was “black,” so let’s look at it from that point of view.  You know a lot of “black” people, and you call them “black” people.  But then one day you find out that they actually refer to themselves as “African Americans.” So, simple enough: now you refer to them as “African Americans” too.

But there’s a problem here.  Let’s take me as an example.  I’m not black.  But I have (and/or have had in the past) black friends, black rommates, black schoolmates, black teachers, black co-workers, black employees, black sexual partners, and even—depending on how liberal you’re willing to be with the definiton of “in-laws”—black family members.  I have on many occasions been the only white person in the room, at parties, in bars, and at family reunions.  I’ve known black people of every age, every economic status, and all four combinations of gender and sexual preference.  I don’t tell you this to impress you with how open-minded I am.  I merely point it out to give the following statement more weight: I have never heard a single black person who wasn’t on television refer to themselves as “African-American.” All these people I’ve known, many of whom I consider my friends and at least one of whom I consider one of my best friends in the world, refer to themselves as “black.” And so I refer to them as “black” as well.

I could have a similar discussion about gay people I know as well.

So, the question is, am I being politically incorrect if I refer to “black” people or “gay” people?  This is how they refer to themselves—and not just how they refer to themselves among themselves, but how they refer to themselves to me, someone who is not black, or gay, someone who is essentially an outsider, no matter how much I’d like to believe that we’re all comfortable around each other.  So it seems to me that I’m actually fulfilling the rules of political correctness.  Although I confess that I often have a twinge of worry when I use those terms in front of other people.  They, after all, haven’t had the benefit of reading this post.  They don’t know that I have perfectly rational reasons for using the terms.  They, perhaps, think that I use those terms out of ignorance, or, worse: prejudice.  You know what’s really strange?  I am never uncomfortable talking about “black” people to black people.  Only to white people.  I have even, upon rare occasion, let the term “African-American” pass my lips, even though I don’t really believe in it.  (And I’m sure I’ve said “homosexual” rather than “gay” to dozens of straight people.) And then, of course, I feel guilty for saying that, because I feel somehow I’ve compromised my principles.

But mainly I don’t worry about it.  ‘Cause, you know what?  All this boils down to one thing: people getting offended on behalf of other people.  I don’t need to worry about black people being offended by my language: they’re all comfortable with the terms I use (or at least they all have been in my experience).  No, I’m for some insane reason worried about white people getting offended for black people.  What the fuck is that??  How in the hell does that even make sense?  Are we so full of ourselves that we think we can be responsible for other people’s reactions to words?  Do we feel they’re not capable of knowing when to be offended on their own, so we need to step in and do it for them?  ‘Cause let’s think about it rationally for a minute: what’s more likely?  That a black person will be offended because I referred to them as “black,” or that a black person will be offended because you decided they were too stupid to know when to be offended for themselves?  Somehow I don’t think they’re going to appreciate you stepping in and taking care of that for them.

Occasionally you have friends who do that too: get offended on behalf of your other friends.  Has that ever happened to you?  “You know, I don’t think you should have said that in front of her ... I mean, I know you didn’t mean it that way, but I’m sure she was very upset by it.” Except that you’ve spoken to “her,” and she doesn’t seem upset at all.  So now you’re wandering around trying to figure out if your one friend is mad at you but pretending not to be, or your other friend is just a lunatic.  What is this, an episode of Seinfeld?  How about if we all just talk to each other, and let each other know if we’re mad or not, and leave other people out of it.

Because I think there’s something wrong with this attitude.  It’s altruism run rampant.  It’s being so anxious to prove what a good person you are that you need to rush in and demonstrate your sensitivity.  It’s trying to weasel out of admitting that you actually were offended by shifting the offendedness to someone else.  It is, to use a phrase a friend of mine is fond of, intellectually dishonest.

Kurt Anderson, the host of NPR’s Studio 360, once said:

Americans used to be famously plainspoken.  But we’ve gotten into a bad habit in this country of defaulting to euphemism, reflexively replacing any word that somebody might find disagreeable with a word that is sure to upset nobody.

Always resorting to euphemism is a bad habit, a way of infantilizing the culture by artificially sweetening the language.  Euphemisms are lies—maybe white lies, nice lies, polite lies ... but still, not the plain truth.

In other words, the impulse to euphemize amounts to a kind of infectious Orwellian new-speak—censorship lite.  And euphemism becomes so entrenched so quickly we don’t realize our language is being switched on us in a million tiny, everyday ways.

And there’s the real problem: defaulting to euphemism.  Not even watiting to find out if anyone will be offended ... just assuming that of course someone will be, and changing the original words before they’re ever even uttered.  Because there are folks out there fighting to keep other people from censoring you.  But only you can prevent self-censorship.

Perl, Procrastination, and the CPAN

I just uploaded my first CPAN module today.

If you’re a technogeek like myself, that may mean something to you.  If you’re not, you’ll wonder what the hell I’m on about for the remainder of this post, so let me see if I can explain it to you.  (Some of this some of you will undoubtedly know, so please don’t get offended if I overexplain.)

So I’m a computer programmer, right?  And, when you program, you use a certain language: just as we humans speak different languages depending on when and where we’re raised, computers and programmers speak different languages too, and that often has to do with when and where they’re raised.  My first computer was a Commodore 64, and it only spoke BASIC, so I learned BASIC so we could communicate.  And then I learned that BASIC wasn’t the only language it spoke: in fact, BASIC wasn’t even its native tongue.  And all the misunderstandings we were having trying to talk to each other, and the reason it took my poor computer forever to figure out what I was trying to tell it to do was that it actually spoke 6502 Assembly (and, yes, I know the processor was actually a 6510, but the Assembly dialect was the same, that’s the important bit).  So I taught myself that.  This was around high school time.

Later, in between college and college (I took an extended break from college at one point), I ended up getting my first programming job, because one of my neighbors told my new boss that I was a “computer whiz.” She thought this, of course, because she too had a Commodore 64 which spoke BASIC, and her computer and I were on good terms.  My new boss was a salesman, and he had people to talk to computers for him, so he had no idea that being able to talk to one computer doesn’t mean you can talk to all computers, and he hired me.  Now here I was presented with an IBM 8088 PC, and I was told I had to speak to it in a new language: C.

So I taught myself C.  And then, later, I taught myself C++, which is kind of like going from Spansish to Portuguese: many of the words are spelt the same, but it sure doesn’t sound anything like it.  And I loved C++.  I loved the expressiveness of it, its elegance ... writing C++ was like writing a technical paper where you get to use all sorts of really big, impressive sounding words that you typically don’t use because normal human beings have no idea what they mean, but somehow when you’re writing for PhDs none of that matters.  You know, those five-syllable words that express a concept that otherwise would have taken a paragraph to explain.

But the problem is that writing that stuff is tedious.  Writing technical papers can be partially fun, but there’s also lots of boring bits: you have to define all your terms at the beginning, and you have to provide a detailed bibliography at the end, and in the middle there’s footnotes, footnotes, footnotes.  After a while, you wonder if you spend more time writing references than writing text.  In C++, it’s libraries instead of references, but the concept is very much the same.

Then I discovered Perl.  And the thing about Perl is, it was designed by a linguistics student, and linguistics students understand something that most people who write computer languages don’t: humans like to have different ways to say the same thing.  Most computer languages want everything to be very cut and dried, with exactly one way to say everything you can say.  This is convenient if you’re writing a compiler (that is, the computer program which changes a given computer language into the computer’s native tongue), but not so much when you’re a programmer.  In other words, most computer languages were created by translators, not speakers.

Translators hate ambiguity.  They hate connotation vs denotation, and abstract idioms, and subtleties of context, and nuances of conjugation, and all the other things that make it hard to say “this Mandarin phrase means exactly this in Italian”.  But speakers love ambiguity.  In English, I can give you a “gift,” or I can give you a “present.” What’s the difference?  Some people would say nothing.  Some people would find tons of very subtle differences.  If I know you, and I know that you know me, I could conceivably communicate worlds to you with my choice of words that have “identical” meanings.  And, sometimes, you’ll spend weeks worrying over what I meant by choosing this word instead of that one even when I didn’t mean for there to be any difference.  This is just part of the joy of language.

And Perl really gets that.  It’s a language with not only verbs and nouns, but adjectives and adverbs, with indirect objects, even, and, most importantly, with context.  How do you know the difference between “bat” and “bat”?  One’s a small flying mammal and one’s a hunk of wood you hit a baseball with, but how can you tell which one I’m talking about?  They sound the same.  They’re even spelled the same.  But, 99% of the time when I say “bat,” you’re going to know exactly which one I meant.  Because of context.  Perl’s got that, in spades.  In fact, many programmers hate it for that very reason.  Many programmers have fled to computers precisely because they didn’t like having to talk to people, where language was messy and easily misunderstood.  Reproducing that for the computer seems horrific to them.

But I’m an English major; I’m a wannabe writer.  Words and language are everything to me; their subtlety and beauty fascinate me.  So while I may be a technogeek programmer and I may have just as much desire as the next technogeek programmer to have my computer understand what I’m saying in a very precise manner, I also appreciate a computer language with context, a computer language where There’s More Than One Way To Do It (which, as it happens, is one of the unofficial mottos of Perl).

So I loved Perl from the moment I learned of it, but the real reason I switched to it from C++ is because all those footnotes and references and bibliographies that I’d spent ever so much time writing in C++ ... they were all written for me in Perl.  Oh, sure, they might not be written exactly as I’d have done them, but they’re close enough for a quick copy and paste.  If I need to tweak them a bit, I can do that: after all, I have the full text of the references right here.  And there’s a full set of references, formatted any way I can imagine, combined with other sets in any way I can imagine, set out according to as many different style guides as I can imagine.  Remember that in my analogy, “references” are libraries, and, in Perl, libraries almost all come from one place: the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, or CPAN.

But how do they get there?  You can certainly imagine how wonderful writing research papers would be if practically every possible set of references you might need were precompiled for you and put into a giant collection for you to pore through and pick out the one that was perfect for you, but wouldn’t you wonder who had actually put them there?  Sure you would.

To really beat this analogy to death, let’s imagine that you’re a new graduate student.  You’re in the campus library, working on a research paper.  With you is your good friend who’s been a graduate student for years now, so she’s an old hand at writing research papers.  Imagine a conversation like this:

“Man, I don’t mind writing research papers, but doing all these bibliographies and junk is boring.”

“Why don’t you just use the RPRAC?”

“The what-prack??”

“The RPRAC.  You know, the Research Paper Reference Archive Collection.”

“WTF is an RPRAC?”

“It’s the ... look, I’ll just show you.  Here, look at this.”

“Hunh.  This is ... oh, that one’s nice.  Yeah, this is ... wow, I would’ve spent days ... holy crap!  This thing is awesome!!”

“Duh.”

“This’ll save me shitloads of time.  Where does all this stuff come from, anyway?”

“People like us.”

“Henh?  Whatchoo mean, ‘people like us’?”

“I mean, people like us, of course.  Anyone who wants to can add references in there.  Original ones, or ones derived from others in there.  I’ve got a couple in there myself; nothing too exciting, but they’re useful from time to time.”

“But ... well, if anyone can put stuff in, there must be lots of really crappy ones in here ...”

“Oh, sure, some of ’em are.  But not as many as you might think.  Look right there: your name’s on it.  So, if it’s crappy, everyone knows that you put some crap in the collection.  Poof! there goes your reputation.”

“Yeah, but some people won’t care about that.  Some people are just dicks.”

“True.  But most people do care.  And the ones who are dicks wouldn’t take the time and effort to add to the collection anyway.”

“Yeah, that’s another thing: why do people spend the time and effort.  I mean, these people are all graduate students, like us, right?  They’ve all got lives, and other papers to write, and families and shit ... why spend your free time putting crap in a book just so other people can save time?”

“Because some people just like being helpful.  Some people like to know their name’s in the book.  Some people like to show off their stuff in the book when they’re applying for grants, to show how good they are.  Some people just figure, hey, I spent all this time putting this together, seems a shame if other people have to start from scratch.  I think all those reasons come down to one thing, though: pride of ownership.  Here’s something you can point to and say: see, I contributed.  I gave something back.  And this is mine, and I’m proud of the work I did.  And I want everyone to see it.”

“Wow.  Maybe someday I’ll add something to the collection.”

“I’m sure you will.  Someday.”

So, do you see?  That’s what CPAN is to Perl programmers.  And I’ve been a Perl programmer for nearly 15 years, and I have used dozens—nay, hundreds—of CPAN modules to help me write my own programs faster and more easily and more efficiently.  And never once have I taken anything I’ve written and put it on the CPAN.  Until today.

In some ways, this is almost a rite of passage for a Perl programmer.  In many ways, I just now “became a man” in the great Perl tribe.  And, like so many rites of manhood, the first time you do this one is pretty terrifying.  And, after that, it’s no big deal.

I’m pretty sure the reason it took me so long to get something up there was just plain fear.  As I indicated in my imaginary conversation, there is a certain amount of useless crap on CPAN, but not nearly as much as you’d expect.  And part of the reason for that is your name gets forever associated with whatever you upload.  Like any facet of the Internet, whatever you put up there is there forever—even after it disappears from CPAN, it’ll still be on the BackPan.  Any time you apply for a Perl job, they will inevitably want to know what you’ve contributed, if anything.  And your fellow members of the Perl tribe, they shall know you by your CPAN modules.  Any person you meet online in a Perl capacity is going to judge you by what you have on CPAN, and how well written it is, and how well documented it is, and how popular it is, and how many stupid mistakes it contains.  They may not even mean to, really ... but they will.

So it’s definitely not the case that having something—anything—on CPAN is better than having nothing.  Having something stupid could well be worse than nothing, by a long shot.  It’s also not necessarily easy to get something onto CPAN.  Like any system run by volunteers, there are many different ways to do it.  If you want help figuring out how to do it, there are hundreds of guides out there ... and they all give you slightly different approaches.  You have to apply for an account, and you need to format your stuff properly or other people won’t be able to use it, and you may need to register a namespace, and you’re supposed to talk about the name of your module first so that everyone can tell you what a stupid name it is and what a much better one would be (I freely admit I skipped that step).  And then after you submit something, there is a huge network of people who (completely automatically) download your contribution and test it out, on different operating systems, using different versions of Perl, with different configurations, and, if anything doesn’t work right, they post it up on a web page so you (and, of course, everyone else in the world) can see it.  And, assuming you survive all that, there’s a rating system, so someone can still come along and tell you suck.

All in all, it’s rather daunting.

And I think I let my fear of not having it “just right” cripple me.  Supposedly Meg Whitman (former CEO of eBay, one of whose subsidiaries is thoughtful enough to provide my biweekly paycheck) was fond of saying “perfect is the enemy of good enough.” I’m not sure I agree with her 100%—I think often “good enough” is the enemy of “not going to collapse on you when you least expect it”—but in this case she really had me pegged.  As part of my CPAN upload, I have to provide a “Changes” file, which documents all the versions of the module on CPAN.  But, since I was making a big point in my module’s documentation that I’d been using this thing in production code for over 10 years now, I decided that I should provide the change history of my module even before it finally got to CPAN.  That meant scratching around in 2 or 3 different places, digging up historical data, and actually putting dates to all the changes I’d made in the past 10+ years.  And I also figured out the date when I first started the version that exists today, the version that I specfically built from the ground up to be my first CPAN release.  It was August 7th, 2008.

I’ll pause while you check the date of this post and do the math.

Yes, that’s right, it took me almost three years from the point I decided I would create a CPAN module to the point where I actually uploaded the first, neotonous, cautionarily designated as a developer release, version.  That’s just insane.  And, sure, I can make other, perfectly good excuses: I have two beautiful children that I love spending time with, things were going on at work, including the lauch of two major initiatives during that time that I was responsible for leading on the tech side, I was buying my first house, which was certainly something that demanded a lot of attention ... but you know, all that comes down “I didn’t have time,” and the only thing I didn’t have time for was getting things perfect.  Getting things good enough, I could have done months and months ago.

But now it’s done, and I have my first CPAN module.  And, you know: it wasn’t that hard.  Hopefully my next one will take much less time.