blreber.net

My old journal is gmail. I would write a journal post in gmail, then mail it to myself. I don’t know what I had planned to do with it, but I’ve posted a few of them below. They’re pretty random and rough, like everything else here.

Okay, I just finished reading “The Man Who Japed” by Phillip K. Dick. It was not his best book, but explores media and media control, propaganda and totalitarian regimes. The main character, Allen Purcell has an agency which creates “packets” which are apparently treatments or scripts for Tele Media (T M), the televised propaganda arm of “Morec (a portmanteau of Moral Reclamation). He finds himself acting strangely and unexpectedly. One night he “japes” a statue of the great founder of Morec, Major Streiter. He is confused, does not understand why he has vandalized the statue, and seeks help from the the Resort, a kind of mental health facility, where a psychiatrist puts him through a battery of tests to find out if he is a precog of some kind. This occurs as he is simultaneously being asked to accept the position of Director of T M. This causes no small confusion in Mr. Purcell as he seeks to understand his actions in defacing the statue while at the same time accepting the very public position of Director of TM. One of his competitors frames him as a philanderer, and he is publicly disgraced. At this point his superiors ask him to resign, which he refuses to do. He insists that he must be legally removed by the “Committee” which governs Morec. In the intervening week, he manages to put together an outrageous program which indicts Major Streiter, the upright founder of Morec or “active assimilation”, a catch-phrase invented by Purcell for cannibalism. It’s a joke of course, and it gets him into lots of trouble.

In the book there is one scene where a couple of the Committee members whom Purcell has worked most closely with offers him a deal if he will cease his production without airing it. She says something that has been circulated in the papers and media which he had written. What’s interesting is that of all the people, she had began to use his phrase (presumably unwittingly). It makes me wonder about the susceptibility that powerful people have to the influence of media. Do they believe what they read?

Now the issue of media control is a sticky one. Media is far from democratized, although some would argue that the internet has leveled that playing field. Do the powerful read blogs? How much influence does such media have? Surely they read newspapers, but the ability to print a newspaper that is widely read is not one that is easily acquired. So really it seems that while alternative media develops, it develops outside of the realm of influence in which it could ever be viewed by anyone powerful.

K came home a few days ago with a little marketing shill from an upcoming movie. That kinda pisses me off. No, it really pisses me off. It’s kind of a little pamphlet with educational facts about penguins. That’s real nice. I just wonder how it fits into the curriculum. I’m clearly not very articulate about this kind of thing, but what bothers me is that it’s teaching the kids to be consumers. Go see the movie. It’s about penguins. How nice. But it’s not about penguins. It’s about consuming the dreck of popular culture; watching the stories that belong to other people. That’s what bothers me. It’s about who controls the stories that the kids are consuming. It’s mass marketed, toys are made for happy meals, pseudo-educational pamphlets are published with the movie’s main characters all over it. Who authorizes this stuff? How does it end up in the classroom?

I keep telling myself that I should just relax about it and be cool. But then I tell myself that stuff like this really matters. Stuff like this REALLY MATTERS. Kids are little media sponges, little future consumers, and marketeers know it. They’re creating future consumers, trying to teach them to be loyal to their brand.

I’ve gotta go to bed.

(idea: what about a non-profit which published educational material matching corporate stuff? Hmmm.)

Had very strange dreams last night.

On one, I was shopping at bizzaro Frys, with all kinds of weird stuff
going on inside. I went out to find my car, but it was gone. I went in
to call the police but they weren’t helpful. I went outside to the
parking lot to see if I could find it. There was a long ramp that ran
under the Fry’s that I went down. There were cars parked along both sides
of the ramp. At the bottom, a very strang scene was revealed. there were
cars with razor sharp ribbons rotating about them, like tracked vehicles,
except the tracks were sharp and thin as razors, undulating like snakes
about the entire cars. And the cabins inside the razors were all shining,
bare stainless steel, fine and glittering, elegant and thin. Like
precision medical instruments. And the drivers, all stainless steel
themselves, walking skeletons, with shimmering auras, like they were
surrounded by clouds of persistant glitter. Their teeth were pointed,
sharp, and their heads were pointed and shone like jewels, and their eyes
were dark sockets, dully glowing. I knew, as one does in dreams that they
did not like people, and that they were the souls of the cars. The razor
conveyances were the cars that they had designed. Cars that the souls of
a car would design, all precision, and speed, without regard for flesh or
human tolerances. But they were not all denuded skeletons, there were
many of them with a kind of flesh over their steel bones; one of them was
a tall, thin woman, brunette. It was clear that she was not
well-maintained, she wsa shabby, but not too unkempt, more like a heroin
addict who is recovering. You can tell their body has been abused, but
that she had gained a new care for it. I immediately knew that it wsa my
1991 Geo Metro. 3 cylinders, 2 doors. The car took a licking and kept on
ticking. I rarely maintained it, but yet it always ran. She saw me, and
introduced herself. Her name wsa Rosie. She was friendly, and told me
that although I had never maintained her well, yet she forgave me, and
wanted to see me safely through. That’s pretty much it for now… I need
to make some kind of story out of this.

Had a dream last night that I thought would make a great story. Or I
thought of a great story as I was falling asleep last night. Didn’t
write it down. it’s gone now. Oh well.

Just read an article on Metafilter about how teaching cursive is on
the way out. Hmmph. I’ve got mixed feelings about that one. Writing
is essentially drawing, and there is probably something
developmentally important about learning that hand-eye coordination.
That’s just a gut feeling. Can’t substantiate it, but I think it’s
probably pretty important to learn how to draw, and to write nicely.

On the other hand, what is the utility of writing cursive? I like how
people differentiate between “writing” and “printing.” As in: Please
write, do not print your name on the dotted line. Okay, whatever.
The speed argument goes out the window when you bring touch typing
into the picture. I am able to capture thoughts and ideas far faster
with typing. That’s just me. Problem is when I’m not at a computer,
which isn’t very often anymore.

Some of the commenters on the mefi page were talking about how their
teachers hassled them about their cursive.

Well, that made me think
about the Christmas scramble in Mr. Montoya’s class. I had read an
ancient copy of “Robin Hood” the old Howard Pyle version, and looked
all the “quoth”s and “deigned”s and other archaic, delicious words up
in the dictionary. A sixth grader, using a dictionary. I actually
had quite a nice relationship with the dictionary, which I’ll have to
write about later.

So, I did a book-report about Robin Hood. Another kid in my class,
Heath, did a book-report about Robin Hood too, but he had read the
Disney version or some more modern, dumbed-down-for-the-kiddies
version. So his book report talked about what a good archer RH was,
and Maid Marian, etc. He laughed at my book report when I told him
that he had a sword, too, not just a bow, and that his ability with
the bow wasn’t really that much of a focus of the book.

Later that year, on the day before the Christmas break, we were doing
all the time-wasting, lets-get-this-over-with-so-the-teachers-can-start-their-drinking-party. We were doing a Christmas scramble. You
know: how many words can you make out of the word Christmas? I got
more than anyone else. The one word that no one else had: hart.
Well, everyone knows that a hart is a mature male deer. It’s
important in Robin Hood, because young Robin would never have become
an outlaw if he had never shot the king’s hart in Sherwood forest, then killed the forester; it
was the poaching that started the chain of events that got him outlawed to begin with. I felt pretty
good about myself for knowing that word. It was a good word. Mr. Montoya told me it wasn’t
in fact a word, but hart was spelled heart. Duh, I knew how to spell heart. I tried to explain,
but wasn’t able to for some reason (teachers are good at ignoring kids at times). So for all these years, I’ve been
kind of steamed about that. Hart is a word, and it’s not a
misspelling of heart. Take that Mr. Montoya.

In the window outside the kitchen, there is a rather extensive daddy
longleg’s web. In the evening, the light above the sink brings
plenty of flying critters to the window where they dash their brains
out against the glass, trying to reach the warm light. I wonder if
the spiders knew this when they decided to put a web there. Dis they
assay a group of possible sites, making mental notes about the
environment, carefully noting the wind, lighting patterns, habits of
large mammals (like the feral cats that roam freely in the back yard,
much to my chagrin). I can imagine, in my minds eye, a spider, with a
clipboard, check-marking boxes as he stood on the windowsill. “Light at
night, check, warm, check. Dry, check. Looks like a good spot. Come
on kids, this is our new home.” Dad and mom weave a nice, random web,
and start catching things.

Anyway, I saw a daddy-longlegs(d-ll) through the window clasping a
green lacewing. Their wings aren’t really that lacy, but they are
very green. And they stink if you happen to smash one and their
stench stays on your hand after a few washings. Big d-ll was gently
clasping it, feeding somehow. Or maybe he was just pumping his venom
into it, I don’t know. In any case it wasn’t wrapped up, it was just
freshly caught.

A few days ago, in the same place, I saw a d-ll wrapping something in
spidersilk. It spent hours wrapping it, every time I came back, it was
still wrapping it.

So last night, I watched the spider with its fresh-caught prey,
carefully moving its legs about it, clasping the lacewing to it,
abdomen moving ever so slightly. I wonder how a spider feels when it
has caught a lacewing. Or a fly. Any dinner really, of large size.
How does it feel to be the predator that has just made a kill,
entrapped unwary prey, chased down a young animal? I know I’m
anthropomorphizing too much here, but I wonder… For a spider it
probably feels like a spider, there isn’t anything to feel, but
hunger, maybe, and satisfaction. So I suppose it would feel
satisfied. I imagine that a human predator would feel differently,
could imagine the hunt, would feel aroused at the possibility of the
hunt and the fight and the kill. But what of the spider? No
anticipation for the kill? No hope for the fight? No relish for the
struggle?

(Journal entry made 10/5/6. The original entry doesn’t merit space here.)

I saw Kurt Vonnegut today. At the stoplight on 44th St. and Indian
School in a green Ford Explorer with the window down. He wasn’t
smoking though, I though Vonnegut was a constant smoker. And his hair
didn’t look like it was very curly, like it always does in the
pictures. He didn’t look down on me in my short Geo Metro. My
windows were down, too. I could have spoken to Kurt Vonnegut. I
could have said “Hey Kurt, thanks,” or “Kurt, you’re looking mighty
healthy! I hope you’ve got lots of time left on this messed up
planet. By the way, I’m thinking of changing my middle name to
daffodil. Your stories have given me hope.” “You know, Kurt, I saw
Kilgore Trout up on Camelback, not 3 weeks ago. I bought a picture
from him of Phoenix, 2506 AD. It was pretty good, though I suspect
that there probably won’t be a Phoenix in 2506.” I didn’t say
anything. The light turned green, he drove off in his big green Ford
Explorer. Then I figured it probably wasn’t Kurt Vonnegut anyway. He
wouldn’t drive a Ford Explorer, would he? Would he even drive?

Here’s the third installment of fiction. Apologies for typos or spelling mistakes. I’ve barely proof-read part 2 yet. I wanted to get it up as soon as I possibly could today. The stories that appear here are not generally well-written or edited. They are always works in progress, some are rougher than others, but all of them are rough. There are a few inconsistancies that need to be reconciled: Ingaros’s ignorance of how much time has passed but later, he’s got a built in clock. Needs some work, I know.

Prince Ingaros plunged down the hole he had smashed through the floor. He crashed to the dark stone below, feeling something crash onto him from above. He thought for an instant the a piece of the floor had fallen off when he had passed through, but then it moaned. One of the security men who had been trying to restrain him had gone through with him. The Prince carefully extricated himself from under the man, trying to move him as little as possible. Thirty feet above, faces peered down the hole.

“I’ve got a man down here,” he called up, “get a stretcher and some ropes, quick!”

A minute passed before ropes rolled down the hole, followed by a couple of men and a stretcher.

Over the I-comm, he heard Bardo, the King’s chief of security, calling for the prince to come up from the hole. The line was staticy through the thick rock beneath the palace.

“Prince Ingaros, we need you up here, now! You are ignoring your duty to Pingaree by this reckless action.”

“Bardo, you know I can’t be harmed, you needn’t worry.”

The men were streaming down now, armed with matte firearms. A sulphur smell permeated the tunnel as they descended; their ammunition reeked of rotten eggs. The injured guard was hoisted up on the stretcher, still moaning. As he was beginning to ascend, Ingaros snatched the flashlight hanging from the man’s belt. He bounded down the dark hole, hands grasping air behind him.

—-

He sprinted down the tunnel, which sloped downward and became damp. The bare rock became slippery in places and he stumbled when he lost his footing several times, but rose again unharmed. He toggled the light to its lowest power setting to preserve its life. The blue pearl gave him strength, and his enhanced muscles did not tire. He ran like the wind for hours and hours. The tunnel began to slope upward again.

Ingaros had lost all track of time and distance. He knew that behind him the security teams were slowly plodding along, and he knew that he had but a small window of opportunity in which to catch the terrorists, if he was already not too late. He ran on.

The tunnel began to branch. He guessed at the directions, and hoped he chose right.

—-

The flashlight died. It was a tactical flashlight, designed to put out bright light for a few hours max. Ingaros estimated that he had been running for 6 hours. He calculated that he had covered 100 miles through the tunnels, at a full sprint. He was more than human. His sprint became a sightless, stumbling crawl, as he felt his way along the tunnel wall, not wanting to miss a branching that might take him where he wanted to go.

—-

He was hungry and thirsty. It was dark, and silent. His scraping progress sounded deafening to him in the utter quiet of the subterranean warrens. He knew that he could have punched his own hole, dug a hole straight up to the surface again if he wanted, but he wanted something else more. It would have felt good to tear away the very rock, up to the sun (was it day? It must have been late evening now, or perhaps morning?).

He stopped and listened. Hands against the cool rock of the tunnel, he wondered. He knew the rocks spoke, had heard of the seismic activity that they constantly underwent from pressures below, and beneath. He knew that he could never hear the slow, infinitely ponderous voices of the rocks and stones. The nomes could hear it. He had heard that sometimes, they sat for centuries in darkened caves surrounded by their hidden caches of gold and gems, listening. What did the earth say, did it groan in pain, did it sing with pleasure? Did it whisper? Did it cry?

There were nomes who said the earth cried out under the weight of the people and their industry. Cities sprouted in the barrens, and humans thrived. And reproduced, and grew and expanded and built more cities. Some nomes said the earth would crack under the weight of the humans, and sunlight would flood into their caverns and reveal their gold.

As Ingaros drifted to sleep, hands against the rock wall, he thought he could hear, just for the barest instant, a deep, epochal cry.

—-

He did not realize he had fallen asleep, and jumped to his feet, crashing his head into the stone of the tunnel roof above him. He was, of course, unhurt, shattered rock falling round his feet. He walked on, feeling the tunnel on both sides suddenly widen. He held one hand against the corner of the opening of the tunnel he had emerged from, reaching out into the chamber that he had entered. His fingertips met nothing. It was a large chamber. He said “Hello”, and listened to the sound roll through the room. A very large chamber.

“Hello,” said a high voice.

Ingaros started, as white light flooded the chamber. His hands flew to sheild his eyes, and the lights were gone.

“Nomes can see in the dark, you know,” said the voice. It was a woman’s voice, but not feminine. Stony. Gritty. Sharp sand on the bottom of a cave lake.

“Yes, I know,” said Ingaros, “so can humans, with the proper modifications.” He was not one of those human, of course. The king had been wary of “techy fads,” which he considered most mods. Yet he had allowed Ingaros a basic skull set. Image storage, comms. A basic hud. The king had always said that he didn’t want his son’s neurons tampered with so he could be trendy. He remembered the king’s room. He had been careful not to record any images while there. Mere memory was sufficient to record that nightmare scene. But when the lights had flashed, he had snapped a quick image and recorded it. A vast cavern, wider than he could see. Cutting through the cavern, a chasm, perhaps a river flowed at the bottom, but it could not be heard.

“Haha, yes. The Prince is fond of his modifications isn’t he?” Stones being poured from a tumbler onto gravel. He listened carefully to the voice, recording it so he could give it to security for analysis later. It was coming from the other side of the cavern. Across the chasm.

“I am unmodified. Apart from my comm implants.” It was not entirely true, with his basic image package, he was studying the image of the cavern. He could not see the speaker in the image. It was always possible she was speaking from a remote location. He image analysis showed that the chasm was 48.3 feet directly in front of him. He could leap that far; he had before, but never from a standing start. The image didn’t include the ground in front of him, so he couldn’t just calculate the distance to the chasm’s edge and divide by the length of his stride. The ground might have been uneven, or rocky.

“Is that so? Perhaps King Aree has not been completely honest with you.” At the mention of his father’s name, Ingaros felt a wave of anger and sorrow. The darkness had been a comfort and [something that makes you forget? not soporific, that’s something that makes you sleep]. The recent horrors had receeded behind dark curtains. The curtains parted, and opened upon the grisly tableau. On his knees, he crawled forward, feeling in front of him for the edge of the chasm.

“What do you know about my father? Murderer. Don’t speak to me about my father. To you he was a political figure. He was my father. He was a man.” Tears welled up in his eyes. If she was in the room, she would be able to see him approaching. If she wasn’t she surely had a camera to observe his reactions.

“Why do you make such an assumption? I am no murderer. I know nothing of explosives.” He felt the chasm’s edge, a sharp corner plunging down. He stood, carefully placing his toes at the brink of the depth, flexing his knees, rocking his hips back then forward.

“How do you know about explosives? How did you know who I am, and that I would be here?” He visualized the chasm stretching before him, and down. He knew that he could not be harmed, but if he fell, it would take time to retrace his steps to continue his hunt.

“Ah, excellent questions. You are perceptive. And you are correct: I am not innocent, but I am not a murderer. That is not to say that I have no knowledge of why you are here, or that I did not have foreknowledge of his death.” He swung his arms back, coiled up and sprang forward into the darkness.

“What are you doing? You don’t think you can-” the speaker gasped. Ingaros flew through a shallow arc over the chasm, holding his breath as the cool cave air rushed in his ears. Crashing into the rock on the opposite side of the cavern, he rolled over the rough floor, sliding to a stop against something hard. His landing echoed throughout the cavern, slithering stones, fractured rock resounding.

And footfalls, rushing. Echoing. He could not tell what direction they came from.

“Ask Dr. Liverspot about the Three Pearls,” she said, voice ragged with exertion and fear. The sound of running faded away.

Ingaros sat on the rock of the cavern floor, disoriented by the echoing maddness that surrounded him. He hadn’t a chance of catching the Nome. The cavern must have had hundreds of exits. He had lost her.

He sat in the darkness, legs crossed, back against a stalagmite or large stone. He listened to nothing, trying let the dark pull the curtains across that scene again.

—-

He wasn’t sure if he had his eyes open or closed. In cave-dark, there is no difference. There is simply no light. Eyes open or closed makes no difference. You can feel when your hand is held in front of your face, but you cannot see it. You can feel your breath on your hand, maybe you can hear the sound of your breathing reflecting from yor hand. But the sense you relied upon has gone, and you are a new creature. A disconnected thing without wholeness, a hand that feels, ears that hear. Disjointed bits without a unifying principle. Your brain tries to make new connections to compensate for the loss.

He thought about the strange conversation. He thought about his mother and his father. He thought that he would be the next king. He thought that it was his responsiblity to return. He meant to get up and try to retrace his steps. He dozed, and meditated and wept in the darkness, silently so his sobs wouldn’t echo through the cavern, magnified and repeated a thousand fold.

At some point his I-comm came back online, and he heard calls for him, reports from the searchers across the network. He didn’t respond.

He didn’t remember if he heard them first, or saw a tiny pinprick of light. But they found him, a unit of security guards searching throught the tunnels for him. He got to his feet, jumped the chasm by the light they had brought with them. He asked them to shine their lights through the cavern, while he looked half-heartedly for signs of the nome who had spoken to, and told them to continue their search.

He numbly followed the trail of markings, electronics and lights the searchers had left behind them back to the hole in his parent’s bedroom floor.

Okay, so I got this crazy idea recently. Some time ago I read an
article about using one big text file for everything (see here,
here and here). I thought it was interesting, but not really that useful for me. More than a year later, I was working on a story at home, and occasionally at work. Then some changes that I had made at home didn’t get into the @ work version, and the other way round. Soon, I had two different stories going.

It took me a while to find the previous links, which I had read 16 or 18 months previous (I should have delicious’d them!). The first link to 43folders recommends using vim, which I had used with moderate success. The last link’s author uses emacs. I had attempted to use emacs before, but had been confused by it, so quickly gave up in favor of vim. But Matt’s commenter’s recommended using emacs with Planner Mode, which sounded interesting. So I downloaded emacs for windows and immediately I liked it. I liked the “modelessness” that it comes with, where vim takes a little getting used to when getting started. You can’t just start typing in vim, you’ll get all kinds of weird stuff happening.

I managed to figure out how to edit a _emacs file, got Planner and Remember to work, imported all the stories I was working on into one giant life file. I also started to keep a journal in the life file. Then I started adding tags in pointy brackets around stuff to make incremental searching easier. I have a section with entries, a section with , a section with etc.

Pretty good.

But I was still worried about keeping the file synchronized at both locations. So I found a host where I could get ssh access, and
uploaded the files there. I wondered if I could use some kind of version control system, and somehow stumbled upon darcs. I couldn’t get it to work. I couldn’t figure out how to install the darcs files on the remote server, and didn’t want to screw up the hosting company’s server with other people’s accounts. But reading the emacs documentation, I discovered that it will work with RCS, which the server already has installed. One C-x v v later, and I had my life file under version control. I’ll confess that I don’t fully understand the intricacies of version control, but I’m not sure that I have to. I’m only using one file under RCS at the moment, and I’m the only person editing it, so there shouldn’t be problems.

Already I’ve reverted to an earlier version, when I was playing around with Rmail, a email reader for emacs. I typed M-x rmail into the minibuffer and found my file altered in ugly ways. Rmail formatted it to BABYL format, so there were all kinds of weird markup in the file. I reverted to the previous version and got rid of the nasty junk. Then I discovered M-x unrmail, which probably would have fixed the problem anyway. I also learned that C-x u (undo) doesn’t work for every change you make to the file.

So — emacs, along with an RCS version control system is doing the job for me.

Oh, and I upgraded to Ubuntu 6.06 LTS from Windows 2000 Pro. So I spend less time playing games. I have everything on Ubuntu that I need, but I haven’t tried to edit photos in gimp yet, so we’ll have to see how that goes. Everything works on emacs, though. All the little programs that should work with it, do, and I don’t have to find any windows binaries to get things to play with the emacs. It’s nice.

Here are my del.icio.us links w/ emacs tags.

I mentioned something today about my online writing journal to M. M
is the receptionist at my place of work. She asked me who reads it,
“is it for family, or what?”

“No, it’s not for my family.” I meant that wasn’t for my extended family like the wiki I set up for them.

“Then who reads it?”

“Nobody reads it except for me.”

“Then why do you write it?”

I may not have written the exchange exactly as it happened, but that
was the gist of it. And it’s a good question. As far as I know, not
a single soul has read this stuff besides my wife. And she hasn’t
even read it all; she fell asleep when she was reading “The Last
Prince of Pingaree” post a few days ago. Hopefully it wasn’t because
it was boring, though I suspect it may have been. In any case, I
guess I haven’t defined my audience terribly well. I’m not selling
something here, and I’m not a marketer, so I’m not too worried about a
market. I write because I’m a writer.

I write because I want to tell
these stories, because I want to become better at telling these
stories. I also write because I’m worried about who owns the stories
that my children hear. I write to prove to myself that I am a writer.
And to be honest, I post it online so others can read it too.
Hopefully someone, somewhere will get some kind of entertainment out
of it. They can even keep the stories and make them their own. If no
one ever reads a single one of these words, I’m pretty much okay with
that. I would not consider this experiment a failure by any means,
and would continue to be a writer.

I am worried about leaving a legacy for my kids. I don’t want them to
remember me as some working stiff who never provided very well. I
want them to remember me as a working stiff with a dream, who worked
for both his employer and his dream, and didn’t provide very well. As
you can see, I’ve got some insecurities about what I’m giving my
children, but I’m working to give them something special.