Category: General

I know I sound just as goofy when I’m talking about wrestling, but how can I resist linking to a review with a line like “this new series works hard to give Mekaneck the purpose he never really attained in the original; the fact that his neck can bend and twist will aid that goal a lot.”

Yes. Twisty necks, the key to all character development.

Ernie the Attorney made an offhand comment about programmers as artists the other day, which got me thinking, although I half suspect it was meant to be tongue in cheek. Still… artists? I’m not sure; I think the various tribes of computer professionals (programmers, system administrators, network administrators) are more akin to court wizards.

We are comfortable and fluent with devices that almost everyone’s forced to interact with every day. It’s a prestigious position; the unwashed are constantly reminded how much they need us. It’s also a set of occupations that until fairly recently has been taught in the medieval style. All the best sysadmins I know learned from other skilled masters. We have no formal apprenticeship system, but the trappings are all there.

When your interaction with the public tends to center around confusion on the part of the public, it’s difficult not to become arrogant. (No, I don’t think I’ve avoided the temptation.) You see this in the traditional attitude towards sales and marketing, so I’ll use them as an example. Few computer geeks respect those departments, even though the average programmer would make a horrendous marketer or salesperson. Not surprising: it’s far more common for a salesperson to come down and ask for help with the network than it is for a network admin to wander up and ask for help with…

Well, with nothing. Sales and marketing isn’t a service organization, so when do we geeks have the chance to see their talents at work? And what you can’t see doesn’t exist. Human nature says so. The perceived power relationship is one-way.

I also suspect that the dot-com boom had some effect here. Out here in the Valley, becoming a marketing professional wasn’t particularly difficult for quite a few years. You can’t really argue that selling gewgaws to dot-coms was a hard sell, after all. So a lot of the sales and marketing folks were, in fact, inept.

Thus, when someone suggests that lawyers might have something to say about the nature of computer programming, the prickles rise. Every day, we deal with the inept and the helpless. It seems wrong that the helpless should dictate how we work, n’est pas? The court wizards dislike being ruled by the will of those less powerful.

I think there’s a term limit on this perception. On the one hand, we’ll inevitably reach a time when nobody personally remembers a time before computers. It’s easier if you grow up with them. Further, and probably before even that time, the interfaces will get easier and more natural. Ask Steve Jobs.

On the other hand, the art of computer programming and the art of system administration will become crafts, and they will become more and more automated. You see it in little flowerings of evolution here and there. Hypercard comes to mind, as an example of a brief explosion of ease of use. I won’t say Hypercard made programming easy, but it did open doors for some. Not all, but some. There will be other Hypercards.

There will also be Hypercards for system administration. The evolution of 1U servers (slim inexpensive rack computers) is an important part of that. As it becomes less important to maintain any one server’s uptime, it requires less skill to maintain the system as a whole. (There’s more to be said on this particular aspect of my topic but I think I’ll save it for another entry.)

Summary? The attitude of many (not all) computer geeks is inevitable given the current place of computers in our society, and can’t be easily changed by argument. Nor need it be. The path to change lies along the road of ease of use, and there are enough forces driving that progress so that I’m not overly worried.

After about a month, there’s a new post over on True Porn Clerk Stories. Apparently some people bring video store clerks food. I never would have thought of that.

The Internet Archive Movie Collection contains a few thousand digitized films from the Prelinger Archives; the latter is a vast collection of ephemeral films. Newsreels, “Our Friend the Bowling Alley,” instructional films, and the like. Check out A is for Atom today.

I will be flying out of the Bay Area, my stuff on a truck somewhere below me, on September 7th.

Tagging this for later use — it’s an implementation of a newish anti-spam concept, designed for qmail but I believe it could be adapted to procmail fairly easily. I want to let it go through a little user testing before I install it, though.

What’s it like, being young and suddenly rich? Hard to imagine, for me at least, particularly if you were poor before. The seminar discussed in that article probably comes four years too late, though; you want to catch the rookies before they hit college, because that’s where the special privileges start.

The techniques the NFL uses to guide these kids are nothing special. Not that different from what you read about in “scared straight” programs. They even bring in a former player and current felon to talk about the hell of prison. What’s interesting to me is the reaction of the rookies. That’s where the sociology is.

Oh, and the advice on women. It reads as abominably sexist, but do I think the NFL is deliberately allowing sexist rhetoric in their training sessions? Or do I think that these guys do get targetted by predatory women?

Turn it around. Do you think rich women get targetted by predatory men?

Weird little view into a very weird little world.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie is called Punch-Drunk Love, and is due to hit theaters in October. As per normal for his films, he’s released little information about it — it’s a romantic comedy starring Adam Sandler and Emily Watson, and that’s about it.

The site linked above now has three trailers, hiding behind the three words of the title. They are the most non-spoiling trailers I’ve ever seen. Cool stuff. Can’t wait.

Warren Ellis said this in his newsletter:

It’s hard to do melody in comics. I’ve been messing around with it for years, trying to duplicate My Bloody Valentine or Pixies effects in comics, and it’s hard, verging on the impossible. I got close to it sometimes in The Authority: there’s a point in an old Dr Feelgood song where Lee Brilleaux yells “Eight bars on the old joanna” and Wilko Johnson’s guitar clangs like a fucking fire alarm for thirty seconds, and I got close to that in the second story arc — just closed my eyes and ran with it and cannibalised poor Hitch. But rhythm is easier. My basic trick is working three balloons or captions a panel, five panels a page. Bang bang bang. Five panels makes the page just slightly asymmetrical, puts a little flourish in there. Drop back to four/four. Nine-panel grid becomes breakbeats, if you cut the text back. Half the toolbox is in Bryan Talbot’s Luther Arkwright. I stole all my pauses from manga. There’s a trick they use, that Scott McCloud explicated best in Understanding Comics — when they pause, they whack at least two of the panel borders out to bleed, so the picture extends off the edges of the page and is no longer contained by gutters or panel flow. It says that, in this panel, time has stopped. Sticks down. Pause. It’s the long second in the back end of my current favourite single, Queen Adreena’s “Pretty Like Drugs,” where the music stops and all you can hear is Kaite Jane Garside saying “Pretty Like Druuuugs” and everything else is frozen around that moment and you stop breathing.

Part one, if you happen to have come over from “…inexplicably fancy trash.” (Oddly, I was just reading some of Patrick Farley’s comics as well.)

So. Grant Morrison has been meditating on identity in his own chaotic way for quite some time now; those of us fortunate enough to have read Flex Mentallo have seen the deepest expression of this. I don’t take Morrison literally when he talks about fiction suits, although I know he may mean it literally. What I find interesting is the result. Whether you think King Mob is walking among us, or whether you think Morrison has deliberately taken on aspects of King Mob, the outcome is the same. Morrison edited his own sense of identity.

Morrison is also well aware of the voudon traditions, with specific reference to the loa: spirits which come and ride the bodies of those who invite them in. (As immortalized in a bad James Bond movie.) The connection there is pretty obvious.

OK, lots of abstruse theory and artsy weirdness and anthropology. Not that relevant to our culture. Except, except. I was browsing the Web the other week, and I bumped into a bunch of multiplicity sites. Pretty interesting stuff; multiple personalities who’ve decided they’re happier remaining multiple. I’m in no position to judge, but the stances these communities take seem awfully sane to me. They accept responsibility for the actions of the body.

As always, the Internet brings together the slim minorities, giving them a voice they might never have had otherwise. You can tell people what you are anonymously. You can find the handful of others who share your issues. I can’t imagine this kind of community growing up without the Internet.

Then, there are the soulbonders. I bumped into that community by way of an irate rant from one of the multiples; she felt that many soulbonders trivialized her very real problems. I can see that — it’s voluntary disassociation, and multiples don’t have any choice. But then (and this is what I was pondering the other day) I remembered Morrison’s fiction suit.

What’s the difference? Why should I take Grant Morrison more seriously than a bunch of fanfic writing teenagers? One answer’s obvious; deeper answers are not.

But again: results.

Soulbonding is a fringe phenomenon. Multiples are still marginalized. The changes in our lives which allow such communities to arise are not. It does not surprise me in the least that many of the multiple personalities I found like to roleplay online. Soulbonders, the same. The Internet is a very disassociative tool; it’s so easy to be whoever you want out there.

What does this mean for us? What does it mean for our children? What would it be like to grow up in a world where shifting online personas is as natural as breathing? I feel identity shift, from time to time, and I came to the Internet as something close to an adult.

It’s not just chatting online, either. My computer desktop has a sort of reality in my mind. It’s a place, because my primate brain doesn’t have a good metaphor for a computer desktop besides “place.” I have huge amounts of control over that space. Consider the thousands of skins I can put over my MP3 player, or the hundreds of themes I can apply to my desktop as a whole. I think that ability is telling something to my hindbrain. Reality is plastic, just like identity.

That doesn’t apply to stuff outside the monitor? Tell these guys.

Part three if I get more inspired. I ought to talk about Timothy Leary’s views on identity editing as well, after all.