Further Reading

There is a certain worldview that takes the stance that people are nothing more than densely compressed living murals of random information, agents of contiguous hypermemetic data transfer created, sustained, and ultimately destroyed by the flow of particulate knowledge around and through us. Every observable interaction is in reality an extension of the intangible, Rutherfordian elastic collision of information. This with the caveat that the currency of exchange in this scenario can be arbitrarily introduced or removed from system at specific "endpoints," namely: people.

Umm... bullshit.

However, it is an idea that deserves some degree of consideration. Here is a phenomenally self-indulgent litany of what I consider to be my biggest influences. Did I say self-indulgent already? I did. Good, then there won't be any surprises.

Six things that make me, me (that you can go experience for yourself!):

Penny-Arcade: What can I say? I'm a sucker for dick-jokes. In recent years though, it's been Tycho's newsfeed that I draw amusement from, with the comic serving almost as a beautifully illustrated afterthought. I don't play video games very often and when I do they're usually several years out of vogue, but Penny-Arcade exists within a larger pop-culture framework than the subset they lampoon, and as a web generation business model these guys are one of the most cited success stories. Jerry's propensity for weaving candid, intelligent, and often hilarious observations with the aforementioned juvenile humor is nothing short of amazing, and whenever my own flowery verbosity trends toward the absurd, that's me wanting to be more like Penny-Arcade.

Roald Dahl: It was through the suggestion of a friend (Thanks Drew!) that I reconnected with my favorite childhood author in adulthood, adding his autobiographical works and his more mature themed writing to my personal library. Dahl had a way of handing me puzzle-piece syllogisms one brilliant concept at a time. Their resultant construction suggested that children were in fact superior to adults in many respects; our eyes were open to the world's hidden magic and our inherent morality wasn't plagued with compromise. I had naively assumed he only worked well within those strictures, but as it turns out the man knew a thing or two about telling a story, period. Dahl treats readers- children or not- as inherently intelligent, and the end of "The Giraffe, The Pelly, And Me" almost makes me cry every time I read it.

Firesign Theater- The term "Stream of Consciousness" gets thrown around quite a bit in literature, in film, in comics and in theater, but these Proctor and Bergman radio plays I randomly discovered in High School (thanks Dad!) push the boundaries of the term well beyond anything I've ever encountered, and push the boundaries of comedy in the process. Complex, intelligent, and blissfully absurd, each subsequent listening revealed another layer of hidden brilliance (and complete mastery of every aspect of aural presentation.) What Monty Python was for most people The Firesign Theater was for me. I'm also a fan of their writing style, tightly woven, carefully scripted non-sequitur comedy written and delivered so as to seem completely improvised.

A Thurber Carnival- This one is also my Dad's fault. When I was six I went with him to rehearsals for "A Thurber Carnival," and I fell in love with both the theater and Thurber's brand of reality-muted absurdism. My mom had just bought me "Where The Sidewalk Ends" and Thurber was the other side of the coin. A Thurber Carnival opens as a sort of Proto-Laugh-In, and artfully dances across a series of very mature themes leaving an alternating series of punch-lines and "wait, what?" moments in its wake.

Terry Pratchett- I came to Terry Pratchett late, not picking up Good Omens until High School and not getting into Discworld until after college. Still, no single author has influenced my writing style more than Pratchett. He is the world's single most gifted living author. If Firesign is the nonpareil of joke-density in radio, Pratchett's writing should be likened to a neutron star. The Discworld is replete in its splendor as a model of imperfection, seamlessly transitioning between the fantastic and the familiar. I like a lot of authors' works; I love Terry Pratchett's.

Free Enterprise- On the opposite end of the same scale as Terry Pratchett, Free Enterprise is Mark Altman and Robert Meyer-Burnett's geek comedy I happened across in college, and it's dialogue insinuated itself into every facet of my daily speech. Think of it as Swingers meets The Big Bang Theory (obviously I'm perfectly positioned in the center of that Venn Diagram.) The cumulative effect of this film on my life is virtually incalculable- and I could do an entire article on what the 90's snapshot in the film says about the vagaries of geek culture. Actually, that's not a bad idea.

Let there be light.

I've quoted Larry Niven before, specifically with regard to his commentary on collaborative world building, and more specifically, the introduction to his short story "Flare Time" in the N-Space compendium (page 342 for those of you playing at home,) where he says you must have a dictator among the group in order to really get anything done. (That's the whole book, by the way, for those of you who can stand to read things on screens I highly recommend it.)

As the duly appointed dictator of FPL continuity, I've managed over 20,000 words on the subject, and run damage control on various egos (including my own,) but the project still feels like it has yet to GO anywhere. Admittedly I was a bit sidetracked by Nimbia, which is my own little tribute to Terry Pratchett, but I even put that on hold just to try and get people submitting. I've never been plagued by a dearth of ideas, and I could easily fill in every minute detail myself, but then it isn't a shared world anymore and we're all just playing in Ivan's sandbox. I already invented a highly suspect form of social government, balkanized the Soviet metahuman contingent, and built a self-aware computer with a fondness for dogs. What else do you people want from me?

There are other noteworthy concerns in crafting the environs for a shared experience, including several places where the world we inhabit doesn't live up to it's potential. Penny Arcade's Jerry Holkins has been forthcoming with the following bit of hilarity:

Like other atheists, I can see some of the rookie mistakes in the "world building" God has done, by which I mean Jehovah, with his cryptozoological fascinations, underutilized themes, flat protagonists, and the prevalence of barbarism - but my own work is rife with genuine concerns. When I have my way, I gin up a world where life is a doomed accident, a planet whose crust is nothing more than a prison for an inconceivable evil, while a floating city of half-angels wages a genetic pogrom to scour mortality from their race. If anything, I've managed to create a scenario where leprosy actually sounds pretty good.

Of course I've come across the opposite problem, not wanting to stifle creativity once the character submission engine comes online, I've possibly made things too easy for Khazanians and their ilk, although any system in place to maintain the Superheroic status quo necessarily tips Khazan's needle toward "Top 10." The problem is, in spite of my insistence that superpowers are by no means ubiquitous, the creator itself requires the expenditure of Ability Points, meaning one has to be both willful and creative if one wants to craft an ordinary person.

In any case it looks like it'll be year's end at least before the system architecture is in the beta stages of testing, so I've got at least another month to populate this world before I start having to deny characters based on the fact that they're misrepresenting the Arcanus Obliques or whatever.

Needless to say, when Khazan is finished, we will have built THIS city on fundamentally more than Rock and Roll.

Nano Yesno?

Never had the stomach to try and tackle nanowrimo, but the current Shallow Guild thing, along with Daniel's encouragement and my newfound tendency to experiment with caffeine and alcohol is allowing me to at least entertain the possibility.

Copy House

This is not a Starbucks, but if you’ve been to a Starbucks you can imagine where I am right now. Earth tone leather chairs, a frescoed Billie Holliday on the wall and brushed metal polygons smartly backing the tracklit menu. It’s a local California chain, and locals prefer it over the identical Starbucks- an absurd notion predicated on the supposition that things taste better if people in Iowa haven’t heard of them. The soundtrack isn’t the first thing you notice, but sit here long enough and it becomes the predominant aspect of the atmosphere. It’s not saccharine to the point of being nauseating, but it has a very filtered quality; Singer-songwriters spinning up-tempo acoustic soul, but never really saying anything of substance. There’s also Sinatra for the sake of Sinatra, because- even after all this time- there is something that feels hip about mouthing the words to “Fly Me to the Moon.” I’m not unimpressed, but I do wonder when WiFi Hotspots that serve Blended Ice Mochas and Scones became an American institution. I’ve been in the other kind of coffee shop, the originals that birthed these comfortable cookie-cutter curios. My favorite was in upstate Michigan… it isn’t a chain. They played obnoxiously avant-garde World Music, the place smelled like dreadlocks and espresso, and they sold homemade vegan soup. A coffee bar with the balls to be a coffee bar. Sitting in one, thinking about the other, it is easy to imagine the word “chains” taking on a more concrete meaning. So says the guy who just finished his Brazilian Berry Smoothie. So sue me. I’m thirsty, and Michigan is very far away.

Every Reverie

I had a dream again. Here goes.

I'm a child. It is the morning, my sister and I have crawled into bed with our parents, (which was very common before we started school,) and we are watching a news report on a new movie being made in Hollywood. The movie is based on a book written by Linda Blair, documenting the fearsome supernatural phenomena she encountered while shooting The Exorcist. This supposed autobiography was called "Then Falls the Veil," which is an apparent reference to The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. (What the hell? That's pretty out there, even for my subconscious.) Then Falls the Veil was apparently popular in the mid 1970's until Blair admitted she fabricated many of the events described therein, but a small subset of the population remained convinced the stories were true. My sister pulled an old autographed copy off the shelf as we were watching the segment, and my dad had the first chapter memorized word for word. As we watched clips from the new movie, I began to experience the events in the book, I was sitting in bed with a lap full of candy which turned into snakes and lizards and spiders. I was terrified but my dad told me I couldn't move because this was all being filmed for use in the movie. I cried as I reached down and grabbed a wiggling lizard by its tail and ate it. It tasted like a mix of lizard and gummi worm. Linda Blair became angry and turned off the TV.

Maybe by the time I'm fifty I'll have enough of these for a book.