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BLOT: (29 Jul 2010 - 02:22:09 PM)
Lazy Days, Policies and Procedures, Months without Facebook, Inception, etc
Me in 2010, Libraries, Social Sites, Movie Reviews, Huntsville Eateries
Yesterday and today are both Lazy Days™, but I would say in different ways. Yesterday was of that LD-subclass where efficacy of action is measured solely in quantity of accomplishments and neither in quality of accomplishments nor time-density of accomplishments. In other words, rather than thinking of terms of doing five tasks per hour or ten in two or in terms of doing a really good job in one hour or an ok job in half-of-one, you think in terms of "Maybe I can get this one thing done, just one, if I keep at it". This is to say that they aren't automatically un-productive days, but they are approached single-mindedly throughout. Once you check off that "to-do", then you consider the day a success, or at least a non-failure. In the modern work-force, the current multi-tasking lifestyle, this is a barbaric attitude, the kind of thing that third world countries might indulge in. Yesterday, then, I was apparently a third world country. I had one goal in mind, which I will get to, and that was all I could be bothered with. Most of the day is a bust outright, I don't even have memories starting before about 5pm. But there you go.
Today is more lazy in the "I feel kind of productive, but all the tasks I could assign myself are somewhat wasteful or incomplete and have better time-slots elsewhere, so I'll focus on getting rested and relaxing, which is its own productive activity." I'm not even really going to read much, today. Just let my mind take it all in like a great big waterfall of information and I'm sitting over the left, in the spray.
Now, the task of yesterday was something simple but complex: policies and procedures as a public document for the virtual reference desk at the UAH Salmon Library. We have P&P, of course, everyone has P&P, but like many, ours was unwritten. There were a few rules that had to be in place: no sending out copyrighted documents and no exposing patron private data. There were a lot of other rules that were followed but never explicitly stated: we will not give out medical advice, we will not do your homework for you. Even if you consider such rules common sense, like we do, sometimes it is good to have a document in place that you can point out. While I can say, "Look, this is crossing a line with academic integrity," having that outlined out makes it known in a way that can be shared. Considering we still get questions that imply people think they are submitting a query to a Google-like system, letting people know we are actual humans sitting down and taking care of them, but are bound by the rules of an institution, will hopefully makes thing clearer. I know that hard-wrought rules aren't necessarily the answer, a handful of general, straight-forward rules will help the department to move on and grow. In fact, I think one of the bigger problems that libraries face, with new technologies, is they wait around and kind of see how people will take them and use them and then make after-the-fact policies about them. Now that virtual reference is growing steadily, having a stable constitution that can be adapted as the technology adapts is my way of trying to stay ahead of the curve.
So I have no real memory of yesterday until yesternight, right? That's ok. Last night, after Sarah got home, she and I went out to Sitar to eat and then went over to the Monaco to see
Then we went over to Monaco and watched the 6:30pm showing of
And finally, the quit-Facebook-in-song song, below. My friend Becca sent that to me back closer to the time that I quit Facebook and for some reason sat in inbox limbo. It's worth a chuckle and is actually kind of quite clever. It made me think about the questions I get from time to time: "Do you miss Facebook?" "Why don't you have a Facebook page?" "What about the people you can't contact any other way?" In rough order... No, I don't miss Facebook. Yes, I do miss some of the people on Facebook, some of the ease of it, but there is a way that Facebook eats into your free time and your personal interactions that you will not realize until after you stop using it as the crutch. The free time is most apparent. I know few people who actually use Facebook that can go half a day without doubly checking it, and more and more check it hourly. Even if nothing is going on, you start feeling the itch and start adding new friends and new businesses and pages and whatever, and that just increases the noise that you have to spend time sorting through. If you are gone for a few days, you find it impossible to go back and read past things, so its not even like it is helping you keep up with your friends. It is like you are sitting on the rooftop, putting things off so that you can hear your friends shout at you. And the quality does suffer. I know we know this, but I think we forget it or don't worry about it that much. Since leaving Facebook, I have started e-mailing or more directly talking to many of my friends, and it has been far more fulfilling. The number of people I can keep up with has dwindled, for sure, but that's ok. I'm not sure what the phenomenon would be called, but we have reached a point where we are surrounding ourselves with the sort of people that we care so little about that we allow sites like Facebook to be the only way we keep in touch with them. And, the cost of that (outside of the datamining and advertisements) is strangers tend to hijack conversations, we have to shift through filters to get anything, we have to worry about things like unfriendings. No. I don't miss it. My mood has been several degrees higher without it. My friendship with those who kept in touch outside of it has been deeper. It has been good to leave it behind. I'm still waiting for something like an old school Facebook to show up, so I can add a couple of dozen friends (at most) and be done with it. As for the middle question, I do see a problem with the fact that more and more businesses are treated Facebook like their webpage, now. Contests and certain information can only be played with or got at if you add them on Facebook, something I cannot do. Oh well, most of the best writers are luddites, anyhow. I'll take comfort in that.
BLOT: (29 Jul 2010 - 12:37:53 PM)
Why Stewart > Tinsley
I am way late to this game, no doubt, but recently read of Bruce Tinsley (the man behind
Which Tinsley complained about in a series (about four or five) of strips leading up to this dramatic conclusion. Notice that he gives the openly Jewish Jon Stewart a defined hook-nose, and claims he is pedophilic and gay:
The fact that his response to Stewart descended into a personal attack involving the mockery of Jewish stereotypes and what can only be called "fifth grade insults" (i.e. gay, child-raper) rather than, say, an attack on
Keep in mind that there are other [unfunny] strips that put those "jokes" into context, but there were other strips parodied in Stewart's book, including some liberally oriented ones, that Tinsley left out in order to make it look like a personal attack, so I consider that fair game.
BLOT: (27 Jul 2010 - 11:37:34 PM)
John Christopher's Death of Grass [Book]
I suppose all post-apocalyptical novels are based on reductio ad absurdum. It is not about someone dropping a nuclear bomb on someone else, but someone dropping a nuclear bomb and the assumption that the natural reaction will be for everyone else in the world to randomly shoot nukes out at neighbors until a freezing nuclear winter descends. It is not whether a meteor strike can cause damage, but can it cause the world as we know it to cease to exist (including shutting down nuclear reactors and geothermal energy). When you read a post-apoc novel, you buy into the assumption that bad things come in really big packages, sometimes, and that's all the sense it will make.
John Christopher's Death of Grass, originally published in 1956, is no different. It makes three rough logical mistakes, and two of them are essentially the same, a compression of time, while the other plays out like a misjudged characterization of how viruses work. A virus breaks out savagely wipes out rice, causing famine to run rampant in China. The rest of the world chips in for food aid and, eventually, some scientific help to try and stop the virus. Rather than come up with a resistant strain of rice, they instead come up with an anti-viral that wipes out most of the rice-blight. However, the weaker strain that had been held down by the more dominant is immune to the anti-viral and now spreads unchecked, jumping across rice to all forms of grass and grains. As the entire world becomes infected with it, starvation becomes inevitable. While the world can grow non-grass crops, so much of the foodstuffs are based on grains or on the animals that feed off of them that it would take years to recoup the losses and readjust. As society breaks down, John the engineer takes his and a friend's family across the quickly growing violent country-side to his brother's farm. By the time they get there, though, the things required to survive have changed him and his group, possibly irrevocably.
I'll leave the possible virulent mistake aside—I am not sure how a plant virus or blight would spread*—but the compressions of time are more noticeable. We are talking about a couple of years to spread to every major grass and grain field in the world. And once the breakdown begins, we have a genteel man turning into a brutal wasteland feudal warlord in the span of about a week. I can take a man having to shoot someone to survive, but we are things like them slaughtering a farmer's family before they even find out how much food that farmer might have, feel more literary than plausible; especially since they were in that predicament due to not sticking up for themselves in the previous chapter. Imagine going from reasoned man to murderer and bandit in a single night. Christopher plays the whole thing so heavy handed and suddenly, that it is hard to guess his intent with this story. Is he proclaiming that survival takes trump over everything, or is he saying that we can justify all we want but this never makes it right to an outside observer? There is the important irony that the well-off Brits sneered at the "lesser people" in the beginning but become just as bad or worse when it is their time. Still, had this been the breakdown over a month I might have bought it. As it is, it is meant to shock and come off as abrasive, and it excels in that department.
It also excels in being discussable. What starts out as shooting guards that would have kept them in a soon to explode (figuratively and potentially literally) city progresses to them shooting rapists. Progresses to them shooting a farmer just to take food. Progresses to wasteland law and retribution. In many ways, the climactic moment isn't when they finally get to the brother's farm, and the rotten stench of inevitability sets in, but when the family is robbed of all their possessions by a small town's folk. There, you feel frustration seep into your reader bones, and you know, by depriving them of guns and food and equipment, that they have doomed others that the family must take from. You could discuss several of these incidents for time, about the nature of right and wrong, and the sort of people who delight at the idea of living by force versus the sort who assume that the inherent goodness of humanity must see one through.
Unfortunately, the novel is out of print in America, and beaten up used copies can cost you quite a bit. A few libraries have had copies that I have seen (this is how I got it), so give the local catalogs a perusal. If you don't mind ordering through Amazon.co.uk, there was a British version released last year. There is a Kindle page for it, but it has never been actually up for download (or was for only a short period of time). At only 182pp, it's not too hard to read in a couple of sittings (I think I took two) and I would overall recommend looking it up. The book was right at the cusp of Good outside of feeling a bit rushed in the time-scale department and a bit dialed to a eleven as far as the volume of change goes. Had it had one real counterpoint to its whole business, say a running commentary of the brother's more-civilized attempt; then I think it would have felt more solidly Good or even Great.
* Perhaps more noticeablely a mistake is the idea of a resistant but weak strain that can attack other than rice grains. Why wouldn't it have spread previously, since the stronger rice-specific strains would not have been competing with it for the other grasses/grains to begin with?
BLOT: (27 Jul 2010 - 02:39:50 PM)
Overshadowed by the jail-breaking of the iPhone: a good thing about eBooks in the copyright ruling, too
Most everyone I have heard talk about July 23rd statement by the copyright office has focused on the jailbreaking aspects and what it says about the future of the iPhone/iPad. What I have yet to hear much hubbaloo about is something nearer and dearer to my own heart, [the owner can use circumventing technology with...]:
(6) Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book's read-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format.
If you are not in the know, the statement was an update by the US copyright office to include six circumventions that are no longer prohibited. In other words, these are six things you can do to otherwise legally owned media that no longer constitutes illegal circumvention. In the case of ebooks, this is a big deal to me, since one of the big benefits of the medium has been the ability to accommodate special needs readers. As people like the Authors Guild have put pressure to have text-to-speech technology covered by the same rights and restrictions as human narrated audiobooks, it has actually weakened the purpose of ebook technology. By now having it set up where if all ebooks are blocked off (and in my experience, though I may be wrong, publishers have tended to blanket deal this sort of thing) then it is now lawful to use various means to make ebooks work for you, as a product.
Personally, I think this is a good thing, since the only real reason I see for blocking them all off is trying to sell more expensive audiobooks to those who need assistive technology.
BLOT: (26 Jul 2010 - 11:51:42 AM)
The Home Depot is the Gay
According to Poppy Z. Brite's Livejournal, the AFA is boycotting The Home Depot for "pro-gay" activity. I mean, Brite didn't make it up, it's on the AFA's website if you want to search, but I'd rather link to PZB's LJ. And while I'm sure there are those out there who will change over to regular Lowe's people after reading this, I know I have other friends who will go out and by a 2x4 just because The Home Depot is on the way home.
The reason I am posting this? Focused groups like the AFA have wielded greater-than-share of market power for awhile, now; because they organize themselves into loud, gnashing-of-teeth bundles descending from the outer darkness. They pretend to be representative of an even greater silent horde who are unable to speak out against various atrocities, when really, if anyone is silent it is those neutral or positive who just assume day to day support of companies is enough, without embellishment. When companies like THD get targeted, they receive thousands of [the exact same] letters and e-mails (printed or sent out via form) and, strangely, this tactic works, because where is the counter example? If you had twenty customers come in and repeat a three-line speech about how your displays are bad, and no one else mentions them, what do you do? Sometimes, supporting someone's displays is important. Form letters can work both ways, you know. That's all I'm saying. Especially when the most grevious complaint in the action statement is that Home Depot acts like gay people are something that children should be able to hear about.
Plus, eww...no digs for using the phrase "furthering the homosexual agenda". AFA needs some new copy writers before the phrase Gay Mafia leaks out in the next boycott.
BLOT: (25 Jul 2010 - 02:06:27 PM)
Hot swampy hikes, riled up neighbors, and I don't know...other things
I had this feeling that there was something about yesterday worth posting about. Something, I don't know, specifically worth posting about. In retrospect, I have a few general happenings but if something big and beautiful did happen, I do not recall. Yesterday is not a blank, but yet another sleepless night left me feeling drained to start. Then I went hiking. Well, walking. In the woods. Where does walking in the woods end and hiking in the woods begin? Elevations? Rocks? Went down to Hays Nature Preserve about 8am-ish (originally we were going to get down there about 7am-ish) and walked around for a bit. For those who don't know Hays, it is kind of swampish hiking. Not a lot of hills (though there are a couple of small ones), mostly just flat walking beside streams and creaks and swamp pools of water. Some good thick vegetation to keep it cool and lots of insects.
On days where the water is clear, you can see turtles and things like gar under the water. Yesterday, the water was pretty murky and so we didn't get to see much besides lots of insects. Dragonflies, butterflies, mosquitoes. Tons of them. The trees were loud with the sound of chirping. By 9-10am, about the time we were getting ready to leave, it was already getting hot and not many people were showing up. Most that there were there were attached to a boy scout troop who was helping to build some benches. Some of the guys were too young to lift the heavy planks, so I stopped off and helped carry a few boards for them. Good, thick, 6x6s. I'm glad. I like to see people upkeep things like that, especially since Hays doesn't cost anything to enter and, while it doesn't have much to do...does remind me of growing up near the swamp.
By the time we left, the car-thermometer was reading 92 degrees. By the time we got back into Huntsville, that had jumped to 110 (this is road temp, mind you, not necessarily air temp). Thanks to that, we decided to go back home, cancel any and all plans to go out last night, and just sat around for a bit.
Eventually, we had to go and do a few errands around the apartment (take clothes down to wash-room, check mail, etc) and so braved the heat for a bit. By that time, it had reached a "ouch but not SUPER ouch" level and so off I went. Except, on the way back from the mail-box, I got stopped by a neighbor who I have only exchanged a few words with who flagged me down and spent 10-15 minutes talking about getting in a fight with his wife's boss's son. It was bizarre, and one of those things that has happened before. Not precisely like that, but similar cases. What would make someone think that a person, sweating and obviously heading back indoors, would want to wait around outside and hear a "blow by blow" detail of a mostly verbal altercation? It's like the time someone contacted me after reading a book review on my website and was asking about that book because she was writing a paper for an honor's class, and then proceeded to tell me about this boy and how awesome he was and how he never noticed her and so forth. She was like 14, spilling her guts to a stranger online. I actually, that time, got up and walked around to make sure one of my roommates wasn't playing a joke. When I did kiosk work in the mall, about once a week someone would come up and start ranting about something. So far, and knock on wood, it is not so bad here at the library but I imagine it's just a matter of time. I have had one guy talk about his UFO experiences, another talk to me about Jah, and another talk about how he loves it when anime bad guys are so bad-ass that they don't have to be bothered with things. So, three or four times at the desk over a couple of years, not bad. At least no one has told me about burning down his family castle with fairy fire yet and how he has to live with guilt due to it (actually was told to me at Book Gallery).
Today, I'm at work all day. And the A/C was apparently only turned on shortly before opening, which means we have a great big library with 80-90 degree temperature slowly being cooled a non-aggressive air flow system. Good lord. At any rate, it's not so bad. I have a little fan blowing on and it serves double purpose of drowning out some of the incidental sound as I'm looking answers to research questions today.
BLOT: (24 Jul 2010 - 07:37:11 PM)
Book Review and Thoughts: The Millennium Trilogy as Phenomenon, Thriller, and Literature
Excerpt:
How good are they? Well, I was entertained, but I'll spoil it right out and say that the whole thing is essentially a liberal revenge fantasy (as English majors and school drop outs take down the government with all their fancy equipment...sort of). Larsson has a way of repeating certain phrases (you will get tired of the words "iBook" and "Kalle Fucking Blomkvist", I guarantee). Both Blomkvist and Salander as pigheaded, borderline uninteresting characters. You become enamored of their actions, but find little of their soul to dig into (unless reading, again and again, how Salander refuses to talk to police men constitutes a soul). Blomkvist could easily go toe-to-toe with Robert Langdon for the title of most self-satisfied quasi-biographical character, except while Landgon is Brown in an action setting, Blomkvist is Larsson stone-walling government workers while pulling in thick slices of all available skirt in a thirty-mile radius. He gets laid, a lot. And then the story talks about how awesome in bed he is. This happens more than once. Speaking of "more", it made me more than a little annoyed. I've read at least one article that asks if the trilogy is really feminist, since every woman can't help but go to bed with the liberally minded reporter and, with a couple of exceptions, end up taking it hard when he goes into his "I wasn't looking for a relationship" speech (Salander plays a similar game, sometimes, but while Blomkvist beds skirt with something like grace, she beds older men with something like a daddy complex...).
Perhaps most damning to the overall enjoyment, even more so than the repetition as style, is the shape of Larsson's story payout. If you borrow a technique from Vonnegut, and plot a story's pay-out versus the distance into the story, then all three novels form a shape much like a lower-case mu. Starts out in some deep nadir of disinterest, starts to into a storyline, begins to get exciting about 150 pages in, then (after Larsson has ostensibly hooked you) starts to drift back down into a comfortable saddle for a leisurely ride in which a rich parade of bureaucratic details seep out until, around page 400-450, the tension once more mounts and it all boils over to a...hold up, here are another 50 pages in which un-exciting aftermath can be discussed. If the second book avoids that last bit, it is only by ending abruptly mid-thought.
For another time, I can't help but wonder: what if Larsson had been alive long enough for this to develop? Could the books have been retooled to better structure? Could some of the repetition been smoothed out. Could they have dropped a few characters who drift in and then drift out (a boxer character in the second novel comes to mind, introduced and piled on with fanfare, including one of the only extended fight scenes in the trilogy, only to fade out before the climax and absent in the events of the third except as a mention). Could he have been convinced to drop the LOVER boy with a capital L aspect of Blomkvist, or to make Salander a little more viable as a character? Maybe fix some of the goofy aspects of the hacking (they are pinging each other's ICQ address? a hacking tool that uses Internet Explorer effective in a world where everyone seems to use a Mac laptop? about the only good "hacking" was using online, anonymous message boards to leave each other notes). There are some good, if not great novels, buried underneath but they feel rough, unpolished. He was developing into a rich, quasi-political style that would have served him well for future novels but the result, as is, is overstuffed and feels unverified, like the rough strokes of a painting's outline without fine details being finished. C'est la vie.
Written by Doug Bolden
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