Election Thoughts

So I've been slacking off about posting to the blog, but I wasn't alone -- Websnark's Eric Burns-White hadn't posted much either (as in anything) in three months leading up to the election, so I figured I was in good company.

Then Burns-White posted a retrospective based on his reaction to the historic Obama election, and it again reminded me of how similar we are.

On the morning of November 4, 1992, I walked out of the front door of my apartment and into a bright, sunshiny Yuma morning, feeling better than I had in years. After three terms of Republican executive rule, dating back to my earliest political memories, a Democrat was finally going to be occupying the White House again, and I knew, just knew things were going to work. That's not to say the Republicans didn't do everything in their power to try to throw the train off the track, but by the time Bill Clinton's second term was over, the United States had helped stop ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia without losing even a single American combat death, had turned a seemingly intractable budget deficit into a projected budget surplus, and had successfully prosecuted America's enemies both foreign (those who executed the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center) and domestic (the Oklahoma City bomber and his associate).

I was certain that Al Gore would beat George W Bush in 2000, and still believe it was Bush's political connections to the Supreme Court that ultimately won him the election. I also was confident that John Kerry would defeat Bush after his disastrous first term, where Bush basically ran on the platform, 'sure, we screwed up, but if you give us another chance we'll do better'. Well, we didn't do better, as the housing crisis, the credit crisis, the War in Iraq, etc., all seem to demonstrate.

Now, finally, a Democrat is back in the White House, and not just any Democrat but one of historic proportions -- Obama is the first African-American (or 'minority' of any stripe) to occupy the White House in American history. Yet on the morning of November 5, I did not feel the same sense of overwhelming relief and confidence I felt in 1992.

One reason, pretty clearly, is my own age -- sixteen years ago I still had a pretty sizable share of my idealism, and while it's not all gone, experience, particularly when it comes to the political game played at the highest levels in this country, has shown me that idealism doesn't really count for all that much. You can't wish yourself out of a recession or clap your way home from an ill-conceived war.

But there are two other concrete reasons why Obama's election doesn't fill me with the same sense of optimism and expectation that Clinton's did:

1. The state of the country and the world is different and worse as Obama prepares to take office than it was when Clinton took office.

Though Bill Clinton won the 1992 presidential campaign on the strength of his advisor James Carville's now-famous, 'It's the economy, stupid', the primary economic indicators weren't nearly as sour as they are today -- in 1992, the country was accepted to be in a recession, but there wasn't any indication that the recession was going to end in disaster. Largely, the recession was seen as the natural aftereffects of Reagan's profligate economic policies of the 1980s coming home to roost.

In 2008, many economic indicators are as bad as they've been since the Great Depression, and though some economists still staunchly insist that the country isn't even in a recession, others wonder if this will prove to be the start of a new Great Depression -- certainly, the billions (and soon to be trillions) of dollars both Democrats and Republicans are agreeing to throw down the maw of the economic crisis suggests that folks in-the-know are desperate to do something, anything to at least slow down the tide of economic meltdown.

In 1992, the US was part of a UN-sanctioned peacekeeping force that entered Somalia in December (as much as conservatives like to blame Clinton for Somalia, the entire set-up was Bush Sr's baby), but no other U.S. troops were in an active combat zone or stationed in a location where they'd be likely to be directly in harm's way. Most of the troops committed as part of the UN mission to Somalia had come home by May of 2003, leaving only a few 'advisors' to assist in the operation.

In 2008, U.S. troops are directly in harm's way on two fronts: in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Some are reluctant to say we should withdraw from Iraq for fear of leaving it in the same state that Reagan left Lebanon after his withdrawal of U.S. troops following the infamous barracks bombing (though given Iraq's far greater resources, it's unlikely that Iraq's neighbors would simply sit back and watch it descend into 'failed state' status -- they'd run in to grab the oil for themselves). Others are reluctant to withdraw from Afghanistan since, after all, that's where the masterminds of the 9/11 terror attack still hide from justice. Both conflicts are expensive in terms of troops and resources, and both conflicts are engagments that the U.S. has, as a result of the Bush Doctrine, basically chosen to prosecute alone -- withdrawing U.S. troops from either front, to any appreciable degree, would be tantamount to removing all pretense of interest in prosecuting action on that front.

In 1992, the conservative movement was united behind little more than vague memories of Reagan's 'Morning in America' campaign ads from 1984 and a somewhat outdated jingoism that most moderates rejected. By 1994, conservatism had effectively re-invented itself as the small-government ideology first popularized by William F. Buckley, Jr., and made use of both overtly political (Newt Gingrich) and quasi-political (Rush Limbaugh) figures to organize this renaissance. By the late '90s, the resurgent conservative movement had even made common cause with the evangelical wing of the Republican party, and that alliance allowed for the undoing of the Clinton years.

In 2008, the figures that transformed conservatism are still around, but they're just shadows of their former selves: Gingrich doesn't even hold public office anymore, Limbaugh's show has been in a ratings decline since early 2005, and the once-powerful Fox News Channel has become a collection of whiners and irrelevant talking-heads whose great contribution to political debate is the screaming of Bill O'Reilly. As the philosophical conservatives have declined in influence, the evangelicals have risen, and now Obama faces an opposition that doesn't just believe that his policies are wrong-headed and non-sensical; they actually think Obama's views are anti-religious and blasphemous. Sarah Palin is currently the figurehead for this nihilistic wing of the political right, but just as Gingrich gave way to DeLay, Palin will be replaced by someone at least superficially more competent, and it'll be this person who becomes the greatest enemy liberal democracy has in the 21st century.

I'm only comforted somewhat by a variant of the old saw about women and success -- you've got to be twice as good as a man to get half the credit, but luckily that's not too difficult -- and realize that Obama wouldn't be in this position if he wasn't highly competent. He'll also have smart allies to draw on if he knows where to look -- Minnesota's own Keith Ellison would be an outstanding resource, for one. Still, Obama's road is going to be significantly harder than Clinton's was, so it's harder to get excited about how he'll walk it.

2. For all the talk of how historic Obama's election is, and how it signifies a 'post-racial' America, prejudice is still alive and well, and it could destroy everything progressives are trying to build.

There was a lot of gnashing of teeth over the so-called 'Bradley effect', where voters would tell pollsters they were going to support Obama and then be unable to actually vote for him once they were alone in the voting booth with their prejudices. Though that specific effect didn't seem to materialize, it would be wrong to claim that prejudice thus played no role in the 2008 elections.

For starters, take a gander at the three extremely prejudicial anti-gay propositions that were passed by state voters, including in California, where Obama won by twenty points with 59% of the popular vote. In effect, a sizable number of California voters decided that they could live with a black president, but not with gay men and lesbian women married.

The point of racism isn't race, per se, but prejudice -- prejudice based on skin color or national origin. While it certainly seems true that there's less prejudice against blacks today than there was decades ago, that doesn't mean there's less prejudice overall: those who feel prejudice simply seem to have changed the targets of their prejudice is all. (And before we completely write off racial prejudice, let's at least admit that, had Obama run his real campaign the way Chris Rock ran his fictional campaign in the 2003 movie 'Head of State', he absolutely would not have won.)

And of course, the great power of prejudice is that it can drive small numbers, or even just one person, to do something that changes the world, for good or ill. Sixteen men crashed four airplanes and nearly destroyed the American way of life in the process, just as an example. And presidents providing as much hope as Obama have been killed by those whose prejudices wouldn't let them rest. I'm convinced that there will be at least one attempt on Obama's life during his first term as president; I simply pray that the attempts fail, or the first African-American president to be assassinated might presage an even more precipitous fall from American ideals than we've seen over the past eight years.

So let me be clear -- I'm not at all disappointed or unhappy that Obama was elected. Heck, I voted for him. But based on my older eyes and the knowledge that the world isn't as ready for Obama, in more ways than one, than it was for Clinton, I can't find myself feeling the same sense of giddy optimism that I did back in 1992.

And maybe that'll be for the best. After all, idealism doesn't pay the bills, and there are a lot of bills for America to pay right now.

My D&D Character

Yes, yes, I know -- I've heard the jokes and am fully aware that few things are more boring than hearing someone talk about his D&D character. Nevertheless, I want to tell you about my D&D character, because I think it says something about what many people look for in a role-playing experience.

My character is an elf wizard named Rennal Maiavar. His backstory is somewhat signficant -- as an apprentice wizard, he was psychically contacted by an evil race of beings thought imprisoned by previous generations, and though he did not wish to do their bidding, it is also true that he did not possess great reserves of willpower. The evil beings, once in command of young Rennal, chose to use him more for entertainment than for the furtherance of any evil plot, and forced him to kill his father. "Maiavar", the elven for 'father-killer', was a name forced upon him by the elders of the city, who then exiled him from their presence. Rennal's claims that he was controlled by the evil race were dismissed, as everyone knew the race was locked safely away.

Of course, within a human generation, the evil race had found a way to escape and placed Rennal's homeland under siege -- a siege that was lifted only thanks to the intervention of some of the most powerful heroes in the land. Rennal's warning was either forgotten or ignored.

In D&D, most elves are Chaotic Good -- they seek both good and freedom in near equal measure. Rennal's experiences, however, turned him Chaotic Neutral; hostile to authority, resentful of restriction, and suspicious of the claims of those who assert that they know what 'good' is. He's also unpredictable, also a trait that fits with his chosen alignment - on more than one occasion, he's demonstrated that he's not entirely careful about making certain that all friendly combatants are outside the area of effect of one of his fireball spells, for example.

Rennal is untrusted and seen by some in the party as untrustworthy -- and he's a total blast to play. Not because he disrupts the party -- our group has been playing together for quite a long time and is a lot more tolerant of this kind of character than most newer groups might be -- but for two reasons:

1. He is many things that I would like to be, and imagine that I would be if not for the compromises I have to make to 'reality. I work in customer service, so I don't always have the ability to tell a difficult customer that they're full of crap, or tell a co-worker that they're far more clueless than they think they are. Rennal can say these things, and mean them, and saying those things allows me to vent them in a way that I find very healthy, spiritually.

2. Rennal represents a philosophy -- and given his intelligence, one that's frequently proven right.

A bit more explanation on point #2.

The party was exploring the Fortress of the Yuan-Ti (evil snake-men, for those unfamiliar with the D&D milieu), when the party encountered a bronze dragon who attacked us. Normally this kind of thing would be seen as odd, since bronze dragons are generally good-aligned and thus aren't usually inclined to attack largely good-aligned adventuring parties, but the paladin and the lawful-good monk/fighter in the party wasted no time in heading after the dragon, intent on taking down its hit points as quickly as possible.

Though he had no real reason to do so, Rennal noted that the dragon's behavior seemed odd, and so decided to try something -- specifically, casting dispel magic on the dragon. One of the magical effects Rennal successfully dispelled was the enchantment that allowed the 'bad guys' to control the dragon's actions. The dragon immediately turned on his captors and made what would have been a tough fight into a rout in our party's favor.

After the battle, it was discovered that the dragon, normally Chaotic Good, had been driven to Chaotic Neutral by a life lived as a captive in the fortress, being tortured and tormented by his inhuman captors. At first glance, you might think this would make the dragon (whom the party named 'Bob') and Rennal fast companions, also considering that it was Rennal who specifically freed the dragon from the compulsion controlling his behavior.

Rennal's response, however, was simply, "That's just the way life is." He developed no special bond with the dragon, nor the dragon with him. Though the 'lawful good' members of the party attempted to bond with the dragon, every attempt they made to 'help' seemed only to push the dragon farther into introspection and distrust -- they tried to heal his wounds (the same wounds they'd inflicted on him when they thought he was out to kill them), to convince him to stay behind and serve as guardian to the eventually cleaned-out fortress (when his only memories of the place were of pain and isolation), and to eventually arrange to meet with others of his own kind (when those others either didn't know or didn't care about his fate).

Rennal also attempted to free a captive yuan-ti in exchange for information, reasoning that, although the enemy of my enemy isn't necessarily my friend, she'll still likely find a way to put a monkey-wrench in our mutual enemy's plans. The party resisted this move, preferring instead to re-equip a captive paladin (whom the party didn't realize had fallen due to her treatment by the yuan-ti), who then used her borrowed equipment to murder all of the nearby villagers that the party thought they'd saved from the yuan-ti menace.

This is not to say that Rennal never makes mistakes -- he showed a fellow wizard the magical creation halls in the fortress that allowed one even without the proper training to be able to craft magical items, who then memorized the location and seemed interested in using that location for his own purposes -- but his errors are errors of personal judgement (as is his character), not mistakes in assuming that the world abides by the rules of his personal moral code.

In short, he's a wonderfully flawed character who nevertheless tends to be much more like the kind of person I'd like to be, and taking an evening every so often to inhabit his skin is among the most therapeutic and entertaining experiences I can think of.

This, I think, is one reason why people play RPGs, or watch movies, or read books. There's an 'escapist' tendency toward these things, sure, but they're not just trying to experience life from the standpoint of idealized versions of themselves -- instead, they're hoping to see the world through the eyes of characters they can view as more interesting than themselves, both in terms of what they can do, as well as in terms of how they go about doing what they do.

Of course, since people find very different things 'interesting', this still leaves a great deal of room for variety in the fantasy/SF/movie/book/etc. realm. I think the urge, though, is much more common that most producers of such material anticipate.

GenCon - End of Day Three

The D&D Minis Community Draft is a much-anticipated event, one where players from all over North America (and sometimes Europe) gather to engage in the hobby they all enjoy. In addition, the tradition of providing one's own prizes for the Community Draft has led to some very cool prizes being offered for those who do well (including an amazing 3-D representation of a popular tournament map in this year's prize pool). Lastly, since it's not a DCI-sanctioned event, it's one of the few minis events that employees of Wizards of the Coast can participate in, and they choose to do so quite frequently -- this year I personally saw both Rob Heinsoo (the lead designer of D&D fourth edition as well as the head muckety-muck of D&D minis design and development) and Peter Lee (the newest member of D&D/DDM R&D) participating, and have seen other WotC employees (and not all design employees, sometimes marketing folks too) participating in past events. And, for the second Community Draft in a row, I came in dead last. I wasn't quite as disappointed this time as I was at XP, largely because I had more fun -- the guys around me were having a good time, and we were all yukking it up since we weren't playing under any pressure to grab one of the 'elite' prizes. It would have been even better if I hadn't been paired with a local (Matt McMillen) in the final round, not that I regretted playing him, but simply because it's sometimes frustrating to realize you travelled 1200 miles to sit across the table from someone you see at every major local tournement, too. After the Community Draft, we went back to the hotel and crashed. The next morning, we got up, packed, checked out, and drove home, and by 10pm I was safe in my own apartment again, once again standing on the precipice of real life. Except that now I have a Flash T-shirt I can wear underneath my shirt and tie...

GenCon - Day Three

It's amazing how time can get away from you around here. Day Two continued with the World of Warcraft miniatures premiere -- one of many being run this weekend. What I was unaware of when I accepted the ticket from my friend was that, in order to get the ticket in the first place and even have a chance to go to a premiere tournament, you had to play in a demo, which I hadn't. Thus, while everybody else got their minis and seemed to have some idea what was going on, I was utterly clueless, and it showed in my play and in my warband selection as I ended up 0-3 before dropping. I ended up giving the minis back to Bill, as he'd provided the entry for the tournament. Also, one of the problems in letting time get away from you is that sometimes you discover you can't reconstruct what you did. For instance, I know the WoW minis event was over before 6pm, at which time I went to grab dinner with Chip, one of my travelling companions. Later, a bit before midnight, a number of us went to do True Dungeon. (Capsule review: it was still very cool, even if our party this year felt less successful than the party the previous year -- had any of the monsters managed to hit us, and I mean hit us at all, as the highest roll I remember on a monster die was a '5' and the only damage I recall was from a no-roll-required magic missile.) After stumbling back to the hotel by 2:30, I struggled back to consciousness at about 7:30 to fly off to the Day Three events. First up: 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons. And yes, I've discovered that 4th edition is really Dungeons & Dragons. We're playing the initial adventure in the new Living Forgotten Realms RPGA campaign, and we're entering the underground ruins of Zhentil Keep (the 'new' Zhentil Keep was apparently built over the ruins of the old). We defeat a few shadow-creatures and rummage through a pile of treasure where the party discovers a magical staff of fire with an interesting fire-related power. Well, it just so happens that my wizard character has taken staff implement mastery and has some fire spells, so I grab the staff, and I then spend the next 30 minutes bouncing in my chair over all the cool things I can do with this staff. That's Dungeons & Dragons, no matter how else you want to slice it. Another trip through the dealer room (only costing me $50 this time, since I skipped the really pricey areas), and then off to dinner. Later tonight is the DDM Community Draft, a traditional event organized by players, for players. More on that later.

GenCon - Day Two

Day Two begins with breakfast, as all good days should. Unfortunately, unless you bring breakfast with you, it's not always easy to find breakfast at a convention. I had been stopping at Crawford's Bakery, just down the block from the Methodist Tower Hotel where we're staying, and picking up doughnuts and juice for breakfast, which makes a nice start. Unfortunately, with the early end last night, we're trying to get an early start today, so we're off for the convention hall before Crawford's opens. Karma continues to pull in my favor, however, and I stumble across a Starbucks selling ham-egg-and-cheese croissant sandwiches that are surprisingly good for sitting under a heat lamp. I get one of the last three on the table and head back to eat. Morning is Delve, Delve, Delve -- the D&D Delve is a quick, combat-oriented version of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game where you try to complete three encounters in 45 minutes or less. It's not as easy as it sounds, because the new 4th edition rules make each enemy monster tougher to compensate for the fact that player characters are somewhat more resilient and have more options in their attacks than earlier editions of the game. Also, playing the Delve earns you prize tokens that you can then trade in for prizes. The big prize, for fifty tokens, is a T-shirt based on the 'gnome and tiefling' 4th edition preview video, but I'll happily settle for a 15-point RPGA compaign card that gives my character a bonus ability, since I'll be playing in an RPGA event tomorrow morning. After Delving, I settled back into the minis area and discovered that the woman I'd taught the game to yesterday was back and playing League, so whatever assholery I'd perpetrated on her the day before hadn't taken. She even let me take a picture of her corset! Then I discovered that I had a raffle ticket for the World of Warcraft Miniatures Premiere Sealed event, so I hustled off to a completely different part of the convention hall to register. The event officially starts in about two minutes, but I've learned from my experience in this neck of the woods that such things never actually launch when they say they will. Nonetheless, I'm going to wrap up this update quickly to get back in the game.

GenCon - Day One (continued)

The evening brought a number of interesting things: - A couple of friends who came to GenCon were participating in the first of the 'last chance' championship qualifiers for D&D Minis, where the top four participants get invites to play in the championship tournament on Saturday. One finished eighth, the other fifth. - A friendly, attractive woman responded to my flirtateous comment about her hair color (red, which I LOVE, btw) by sitting down in front of me and asking, 'Can you teach me how to play this game?' Holy crap! What untapped source of karma did I suddenly open up like a fire hose? Unfortunately, though I tried to give her an entertaining intro to DDM, I think I ended up kicking her ass and driving her from the minis hall; I haven't seen her again. - We ended up leaving the con early, as our long road trip on Wednesday caught up with us. We headed to a nearby sandwich and pizza shop for dinner. The city of Indianapolis has not shown its best side to us on this trip. Granted, part of the reason is that we're staying in one of the 'bad' sections of town, but we haven't yet experienced a 'good' section of town, even the area around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. When we got out of our cars to go into the restaurant, two very aggressive drunks/panhandlers latched onto us and didn't leave, even after we went into the restaurant, until Vic bought them sandwiches. (The store proprietors ended up giving us a free sandwich, perhaps as a 'thank-you'; I thought that was cool, and the sandwiches were really good.) Day One ended with my roommate and I camped out in the room watching Olympic women's beach volleyball and drifting off to sleep. Day Two is about to begin, and the end of the day promises True Dungeon adventure, so a wildly gushing post tomorrow morning is already penciled onto the agenda.

GenCon - Day One

There are two theories when it comes to going to a big gaming convention like GenCon: 1. Go as hard as you can, doing as much as you can, until you drop from sheer exhaustion. 2. Pace yourself, getting in the stuff you want to do, but leaving time for spontaneous discovery and occasional fallow periods during the con. Theory one tends to be practiced by younger con-goers who have the stamina for such a marathon sprint; it also helps to have a good idea of what you're already planning to do, because you can schedule yourself to within an inch of your life. Theory two is the one I currently subscribe to, not just because of advancing age, but also because this year I didn't have a firm idea of exactly what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to do different things, and though there were a few events I knew I wanted to repeat from last year (True Dungeon, the D&D Minis Community Draft), for the most part I wanted to do things I hadn't done before. So far, I've hobnobbed with a bunch of old friends and acquaintances, showed a friendly and attractive woman the basics of D&D Minis, and spent nearly $100 on the show floor buying dice and novelty T-shirts; in other words, I'm doing what almost everybody else is doing, and loving it. We'll see what the evening brings.

Gen Con - Day Zero

I'm at GenCon for the next four days (or what the GenCon marketing folks call 'the best four days in gaming'), and am looking forward to a few different events (that I'll hopefully be able to chronicle here). As it stands, though, the first day of any convention is the travel day, or Day Zero. Each travel day has its own stories and frustrations, and this one was no different. It started well before the actual travel day, when our plans from last year fell apart because Senior decided he couldn't afford to go to GenCon this year. Victor picked up the ball and ran with it, and four of us decided we'd travel cross-country in a rented Lincoln Town Car from Minneapolis to Indianapolis. Then a good friend, who we'll call Bill, asked if he could ride out with us, and we agreed. Victor's wife frequently gets motion sickness on long car trips, so we'd agreed to let her sit in the front seat. Unfortunately, this meant we had three reasonably good-sized men (or more accurately, two good-sized men and one huge one) squeezed into the back seat together. After a few hours, it was clear that we weren't ever going to be comfortable, and Vic's wife, bless her heart, agreed to move into the back seat to help us all out. In order to try to keep her from getting nauseated, we occasionally broke out a deck of 'Would You Rather' cards and asked each other questions. (The game developers will be glad to know that the car was frequently filled with raucous laughter during these sessions.) We arrived in Indy without further incident after about a 12-hour drive, checked into our traditional hotel, and crashed. Today is day one -- more updates as events warrant.

Cue The Maniacal Laughter!

Noted a couple of pieces of news this week that really got my sense of humor going.

First, newly installed Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer noted in an internal memo to MS employees that the company was launching a plan to improve customers' end-to-end experience with MS Windows. Apparently, this plan has two prongs:

1. Communicate with hardware vendors to provide a more consistent hardware basis for Windows installations, in theory reducing the headaches users have experienced when installing or upgrading to Windows Vista on their existing PC hardware.

2. Launching a series of advertisements directly challenging the perception of Vista as kludgy and troublesome.

To which my response is this:

BWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

For starters, Ballmer clearly likes his spin; in his memo, he talks about how "we outsell Apple 30-to-1", but that's only true if you consider the world-wide market, and if you assume every machine not sold with MacOS comes with Windows pre-installed. According to IT News, who gets their info from IDC, Apple has a bit over 3% of the global market for personal computers. Of course, Apple has about 8% of the US market and growing according to the same source, so...yeah.

The more significant point, however, is that if Ballmer is hoping to duplicate Apple's tight hardware control -- after all, the same company making MacOS is making the computers that run it -- he's got a long way to go, and a lot of corporate partners to offend. It'll likely be easy for the big-name manufacturers to follow any directives from MS, given that their current offerings seem to work pretty well with Vista as it is. However, the biggest PC makers -- HP, Dell, Acer, Lenovo (maker of the ThinkPad now that IBM has gotten out of the business), and Toshiba -- account for just over half of the world market for PCs and servers. The rest of the market is crawling with bargain-basement manufacturers that throw together whatever hardware they can get their hands on cheaply and throw Windows on top. None of these guys individually is all that large, but if MS's directive to standardize hardware sends even half of them out of business (because they can't make their margins using stardardized hardware), that's a potential loss of as much as 20% of the global market. MS is betting that HP, Dell, and the like can fill in to pick up the slack, but my guess is that Apple is just hoping for an opportunity like that to push its own desktops, laptops, and servers into a larger share of the global market.

Which, of course, assumes that such a directive is actually enforceable. After all, similar strong-arm tactics performed by MS, including requirements on how to present the OS, what programs could and could not be pre-installed, etc., have been investigated all over the world and found to be anti-competitive. And though MS's legal problems at home have declined somewhat during the Bush years, all indications are that a far less friendly administration may end up taking over the White House starting in 2009, so any renewal of MS's old-fashioned monopolistic practices may do way more harm than good, in both the short and long runs.

Let's also not forget that MS is looking to bring those smaller, cheaper manufacturers into line at precisely the same moment that some PC market observers are predicting that a slowing global economy will make those manufacturers more attractive to consumers, as price becomes a bigger selling point than brand.

On the whole, point one looks to be impossible to achieve, and likely to cause a whole lot of damage in the process of making it work. (Not entirely unlike installing some Windows applications, but I digress...)

Point two, on the other hand, is ludicrous. The best explanation as to why comes from Mac site "", which points out that phase one of the ad campaign is basically complete misdirection. Windows Vista has a poor reputation among PC folks for a number of reasons: installation on legacy hardware is difficult, driver support for non-standard hardware is spotty, memory requirements are obnoxious, security enhancements are annoying and largely ineffective. To combat this 'negative perception' of Vista in the market, MS is presenting a series of ads featuring people who dislike Vista who are shown a new OS by MS called 'Mojave' -- once the observers express their interest in the new OS, they're told, hey, it's just Vista! It's better than you think, isn't it?

Such an ad campaign may make the Windows fanboys happy, but I doubt it'll actually make much of an impact on MS's bottom line. Why? It's the central message. Compare:

- Apple's 'Genius' ads of the late 90's had a central message of 'we design our computers for the smartest, most creative people in history. Is that you?'

- Apple's 'I'm a Mac/I'm a PC' ads have a central message of 'Macs are fun, hip, and simple to use; PCs are cantankerous and spend a lot of time complaining'

Meanwhile:

- MS's 'Vista is the new Folger's' ad has a central message of 'Hey! Vista doesn't suck as much as you think it does!'

Granted, Bare Bones Software gets a lot of mileage out of 'it doesn't suck' as a marketing blurb for their flagship product, BBEdit, but they have two advantages over MS:

1. They're marketing to a small portion of users who need a product that's reliable, functional, and stays out of their way, not to a mass-market audience looking for a replacment for Microsoft Word, and

2. their product doesn't actually suck.

So that news was worth a few laughs. Then I see word of a speech given by Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the company that distributes Ubuntu Linux in which Shuttleworth calls for open-source Linux developers to focus on the Linux UI, asking "Can we not only emulate, but blow right by Apple?"

BWAAAHAHAHAHAHAAA!! *THUNK*

Sorry, lost consciousness for a second there.

The simple answer to Shuttleworth's question is 'No'. The more complete answer requires you to understand two things:

1. Linux developers, for the most part, are not interested in the UI.

This is not to say that Linux developers are all knuckle-dragging atavists who long for the return of the days of Big Iron, but rather, in recognizing that if those developers were interested in doing UI work rather than 'productive' work on things like drivers and applications, they'd already be developing for other platforms. They might not be Mac developers, but the Mac is far from the only OS known for great OS support -- there are still active Amiga developer groups out there, for instance.

The best Linux UIs available are basically cleaner versions of the Windows 2000 user interface, which as far as I can tell is about all the farther most Linux developers care to work on the UI. Guys who are passionate about UI programming? They get hired by Apple. Which leads into the next point:

2. Apple is actually still out there and likely isn't planning to stop running any time soon.

Let me illustrate this point by way of analogy: Say you're planning to run a race against a friend -- a marathon, perhaps. On the day of the race, you decide to walk the first 10 miles at a leisurely pace while your friend runs at a competent marathoner's pace. By the time you finish your 10 miles, your friend is far ahead of you. You're not going to catch him by the end of the race. Even if the race were to be extended forever, you're not going to catch him unless you're actually a faster, more conditioned runner than he is and can maintain a faster pace until you pass him.

Did I mention that the guys who are really passionate about UI programming tend to get hired by Apple?

It's always nice when the tech news provide you with unexpected humor.

On A Woman's Mind

I know a woman with a plan. While her parents are out of town on a family trip, she's going to invite her boyfriend over, spend a good long time getting comfortable, and finally have sex. I personally don't have a problem with this plan.

First, she's nineteen, which means she's old enough to make her own decision about when and with whom she's going to have sex.

Second, she's smart, which means her plan is going to include protection and making sure that things are only going to go as fast as she wants them to go. She's already taken enough time to be certain that her boyfriend is the guy she thinks he is.

Lastly, because when it came time for me to lose my virginity years ago, I ended up doing it much the same way she's planning to. In fact, thinking about the plan has sent me down memory lane for much of the day today.

Begin at the beginning:

Christmas, 1991. A friend from high school (lets call him James) comes back home from southwest Arizona, where he's gone to live with his biological father and finish a college degree. He brings with him a videotape of the school's fall theatrical production, 'The Foreigner'. In high school, James had always worked behind the scenes, and had intended to do so in this show as well, but when the actor playing the lead broke his leg two weeks before opening night, James was pressed into service as the understudy.

The thing that astonished me was how good James was in the role. Granted, the lead in 'The Foreigner', like the lead in Christopher Durang's 'The Actor's Nightmare', can be played by actors who aren't bravura performers or even all that experienced; as long as the actor can use his own bewilderment and confusion for the role, it'll work and work well. Still, James was notably good in the role, and was surrounded by other good performers. Something was happening in that little town in the desert, and I decided I wanted to be a part of it. I asked James if he needed a roommate, wrapped up what few plans I had brewing in Minneapolis, and boarded a Greyhound bus for Yuma.

On February 7, I got off the bus, and met her. Let's call her Stephanie.

James was involved in the rehearsals for the college's spring production, back behind the scenes of Neil Simon's 'Brighton Beach Memoirs'. Because he couldn't leave rehearsal to pick me up, he sent Stephanie to do it, despite her having laryngitis -- her first words to me were a croaked-out 'Are you Dave?' while I was on the phone telling my mother I'd arrived in the desert in safety.

Though I expressly refused to give Stephanie a Valentine's gift a week later (having only known her a week, despite James's urging), we did end up spending a fair amount of time together; not only were we all involved in the college theater program -- Stephanie had taken me straight to the college theater to see James, and I ended up spending the evening 'on book'; providing the actors with their cues if they forgot during rehearsal -- but James was dating Stephanie's best friend.

Stephanie was tremendously good to me, and for me. She helped me find a job, working for her father at one of the two Pizza Hut franchise stores he managed in town. She eventually helped me find places to live after I alienated my first Yuma land-lady. And, one day while her family was out of town visiting the Grand Canyon (as I remember it), she invited me over, we went swimming, and she eventually led me into her room where we...

Or rather, she did. I was too nervous, even with the extremely obvious set-up, to perform well and I ended up not officially 'consummating' the evening, though I did my best to make her feel good. Apparently it worked, because she made the same plans a second time, this time when another friend and her husband left town to spend a few days with in-laws.

It's kind of odd, looking back and thinking about Stephanie now -- I might have even married her, had it not been for James. At the end of the 1993 school year, James was announcing to anyone who'd listen that he'd been accepted to a workshop for technicians seeking to work in television, and was very excited for the opportunity. Then, near the end of summer, he sent a postcard to his now ex-girlfriend from St. Louis, Missouri, explaining that he hadn't really gotten into a workshop; instead, he'd decided to follow another woman to St. Louis to be with her.

Stephanie, who'd always carried a torch for James, became convinced I'd do the same to her. So, when I returned to Yuma after Christmas break in January of 1994, Stephanie had begun dating another guy; a guy who, in many ways, was just like me. They eventually got married, but I've lost touch with them both and am not sure how they've done over the years -- the last time I saw Stephanie was, ironically, in a theater, when I went to Tucson to audition for the BFA program at the University of Arizona in the spring of 1996.

I'll always have bittersweet memories of her, and I'll never be able to listen to Mannheim Steamroller's 'Fresh Aire IV' without thinking of the day we spent in her friend's apartment, finally consummating our more-than-friendship, as she'd planned.

And every so often, I have a day where I deeply miss being the most important thing on a woman's mind.

An Apple Observation

I've been an Apple customer, in one way or another, for nearly half my life now; I purchased my first Macintosh in 1989, and most of the computer gear I have in my apartment is Apple-branded. Because of my experiences, I have to say I don't really 'get' Apple-hate; it seems to me that people who dismiss Apple products as overpriced and overhyped and that deride the Apple culture as elitist and marketing-driven are missing the point.

Here's what I mean.

Folks that know me won't be surprised that I jumped into line late yesterday to pick up a new 3G iPhone. While in line, and awaiting my turn with the one-on-one who'd sell me my new phone, I noticed something:

- A cute girl wearing an Apple T-shirt and smiling at you is attractive.

- A cute girl wearing an Apple T-shirt and offering to let you play a game on her new iPhone is irresistible.

That's why Apple kicks ass.

WALL-E

Saw the Disney/Pixar animated film WALL-E over the weekend and was blown away -- the first twenty minutes (and a good portion of the last twenty) will have you wondering if you should have brought your small children with you, that's how grown-up the movie is about its theme.

It's great, though -- it's already vaulted to the top of the list of my favorite Pixar films (and the short that precedes the movie is already among my favorite Pixar shorts as well -- watch for the Jay Ward credit!)

So go! See it! (I'll certainly see it again, at least once more.)

Well, dang, that explains everything!

The Dating Persona Test says you are...

The Last Man on Earth Random Brutal Sex Dreamer (RBSD) FACT: The apocalypse has come. All are dead. You never should've asked her out. Shit, rejected again. You are The Last Man on Earth. Sorry, but most women would rather see the human species wither to an end—and therefore deny the most fundamental instinct that living creatures have—than sleep with you. We've learned the following: you don't think things through. You're haphazard. You're dangerous. You're somewhat inexperienced. It's totally obvious that you're a horny bugger, as well. Everybody knows that and steers clear. To top things off, when you do find your way into a relationship, you tend to be a dick somewhere down the line and fuck it all up. There's a small, but negligible, chance we're wrong. In any case, your friends find your shit hilarious. There's nothing cooler than a dude reducing himself to human rubble. Your exact male opposite: The Gentleman Deliberate Gentle Love Master Always avoid: The Sonnet (DGLD) Consider: Half-Cocked (RBSD), The Nymph (DBSD)

Link: The Online Dating Persona Test | OkCupid - dating services | Dating My profile name: : Pauper063

City of Heroes and the Cookie Monster Economy

One of the things I've been doing while not posting to this blog is playing City of Heroes, a superhero MMOG. As part of that process, I'll occasionally visit the official message boards hosted by the game company.

While there, one of my guilty pleasures is trolling the Market board, looking over the kinds of posts people put there. The regulars in that forum...well, they seem to get along with one another, but they're just odd folks to me. The biggest reason I find them odd is that they seem to think that the 'economy' in City of Heroes is an analog of a real-world economy, and thus that they're understanding of that economy makes them smart, savvy people.

I can't say I agree. To explain why, a bit of a primer on the City of Heroes 'economy'.

City of Heroes models the world of superheroes and superhero comic books. The developers of the game nail a number of the tropes and traditions of the superhero world. One way they did this, when the game was new, was in their model of the game's 'currency'; instead of money, superheroes gained Influence when they successfully defeated bad guys, completed missions, and occasionally did other things in-game. There were other commodities that heroes could acquire by doing missions -- bad guys occasionally 'dropped' Inspirations and Enhancements that could be used to increase a hero's effectiveness, but these drops were random to some degree. (For Inspirations, the drop rate was largely random. For Enhancements, the level of the Enhancement was determined by the level of the defeated opponent, while the type of Enhancement was largely random. There's also an Origin factor that is partially controllable -- each hero has a particular Origin and certain types of opponents dropped Enhancements usable by particular Origins -- more on this later.) The use of Influence in-game was largely to balance out the random chance in the game; if you needed more damage Inspirations than you were getting as random drops, you could visit an in-game trainer and trade Influence for them. Likewise, if you had a Mutant Origin and were running missions against the Circle of Thorns, a cabal of evil wizards who tend to drop Magic Origin Enhancements, you could go to a 'store' and 'sell' the dropped Enhancements for Influence, then use that Influence to 'buy' the Mutant Enhancements you could actually use.

Influence, thus, was an in-game currency; however, the existence of a currency is not sufficient to establish an economy, and nobody I know of really considered early City of Heroes as having an economic system.

This changed with the release of 'Issue 6', where the developers introduced two new features side-by-side:

A crafting system: In addition to dropping Inspirations and Enhancements, defeated foes would now sometimes also (or instead) drop Salvage and Recipes. Salvage is basically the ingredients used in Recipes to create things in-game. The most common thing created in-game is Crafted Enhancements, which aren't restricted by Origin the way 'normal' Enhancements are, though it's also possible to craft costume pieces, temporary powers, and other things.

An auction house/consignment system: Rather than create a series of NPC vendors where players could purchase Salvage and Recipes (as players can still do with 'normal' Enhancements), the developers provided an 'auction house' where players can put the Salvage and Recipes (and even Enhancements and Inspirations) they don't want up for sale, allowing other players to bid on those items.

As Influence was already the in-game currency, Influence became the medium of exchange used to negotiate these consignment bids -- the more popular an item, the more Influence people were willing to bid for it and thus the more 'valuable' that item is.

There's nothing particularly wrong with this system; characters have a limited number of 'slots' in the Consignment House that can be used either to place bids on desired items, post items for sale, or simply act as extra storage for items that won't fit in the character's personal or base inventories. If you want an item, you can see what other winning bids for those items are and you can choose to bid that amount (or larger) if you want the item right away, or you can bid lower if you would rather take the time and try to get the item for a lower Influence cost.

Then the Market People moved in.

The Market People really enjoy playing the market in City of Heroes. They like trying to predict the bounces in bidding in the Consignment House system, buying low and selling high. They like being able to get more Influence out of other players then they otherwise would get by selling their items to in-game vendors. None of this is, in itself, a bad thing.

But then they post about it...

They'll post about the first time they sold an Enhancement for 100 million Influence, as if they were posting about defeating one of the game's signature villains, and they'll get congratulatory messages just as if they'd accomplished that far more significant milestone. They'll alternate posts where they try to explain how their activities in the market don't hurt or even help casual players with posts where they decry casual players as lazy and stupid for not following the principles of market 'domination'. And they love, absolutely LOVE, presenting themselves as experts, or at least teachers of concepts in real-world economics and how they apply to City of Heroes.

In short, they're more than a little bit creepy, especially with their insistence that they are smart people who understand 'real economies'. I'd feel a bit less concerned if City of Heroes actually had a real economy, then I could at least allow them their belief and simply say my own is different. The problem is that City of Heroes isn't a real economy -- it's a Cookie Monster Economy.

I have Timothy Burke of Terra Nova to thank for the analogy:

Recently, I happened to catch a segment of Sesame Street that my daughter was watching. In it, Cookie Monster was trying to hire a human assistant to help him sell six cookies. Cookie Monster explained helpfully, “Cookie Monster sell cookies in order to have money to buy cookies”.

Cookie Monster, of course, sells cookies because cookies are the only thing in the world he values. But the City of Heroes Market People sell Enhancements, primarily, in order to...buy Enhancements? Yep, that's pretty much it in a nutshell. (The presence of Salvage and Recipes could be seen as making the City of Heroes market a bit more complex, but the Salvage and Recipes, while they have a certain value, only have value to the degree they're used to make Enhancements -- so it's as if the Cookie Monster, realizing that selling cookies to make money to buy cookies seems a bit silly, decided instead to sell cookies to buy flour, eggs, and sugar to make cookies...to sell to make money to buy cookies. It's a wonderfully circular analogy that perfectly matches the actual City of Heroes economy.)

Of course, there is another option -- that, instead of using their humongous amounts of Influence to buy pricey Enhancements, the Market People are instead simply using their Influence totals as a score pad to measure how well they're playing their version of the game. Ultimately, that is a valid goal to set for oneself in a game environment -- only problem is, how many people do you know in the real world who measure their value (and thus other peoples' value) as people by the size of their bank accounts? Do you really enjoy spending time with those people? Or do you find that their strange interpretation of economics, in which everything has a monetary value if one just decides to do the math, makes them...well, creepy?

In one final attempt to understand these Market People, I decided to try to emulate them -- to play the game they seem to be enjoying so much and try to find out why they enjoy it. I created a character, adventured around until I was high enough level to have a reasonable number of slots in the Consignment House (level 7), and then began following their guides to economic mastery.

First, I began by performing what real-world economists and traders would refer to as arbitrage: I bid on and purchased 'stacks' of Salvage (you can buy up to 10 items of a particular type at one time in a single 'stack') from the Consignment House, took them across the street to an NPC who acts as a 'store', and sold the Salvage for Influence. This is a perfect example of arbitrage, since the two 'markets' are entirely disconnected; the 'store' pays a fixed amount for salvage of a particular rarity, while the Consignment House prices are set by sellers when they enter the amount they're willing to accept in payment for the item they're putting up for sale. I very quickly found that I was able to purchase half a dozen different Uncommon Salvage items (including Sapphires, Chaos Theorems, and Psionic Threat Reports) for 10 Influence each; I'd grab a stack of 10, take them over to the 'store', and sell them to the vendor for 1000 Influence each.

To borrow Market People Speak for a moment, this works because casual players are either stupid (they don't realize that there are places to sell their salvage where they'd receive far more than 10 Influence for each piece) or lazy (they know of the 'stores', but don't want to take the time to run to the stores when they're already at the Consignment House trying to sell other items), or both.

At times I could sell Salvage this way as quickly as I could run between the Consignment House and the vendor; by the time I returned to 'Wentworth's' (the name of the Consignment House in-game), there'd be another stack or two waiting for me to grab and sell. At other times, I'd have to wait a while, but in those cases I'd log out of that 'toon', play a different character, then log back in after three or four hours and sell the stacks that accumulated while I was gone.

Once I got up to about 250,000 Influence, I decided to try my first 'flip'. 'Flipping', in the game, is the term for purchasing an item at a low price and then selling it for a higher price. The Market People like to describe this in terms of cyclical pricing and the principle of supply and demand: when there is a lot of supply on the market, sellers price their items lower to be able to make the sale rather than have the item sit in the Wentworth's inventory slot unsold. As these cheaply-priced items leave the market as the number of buyers grows, only the higher-priced items are left, and thus when demand exceeds supply, price goes up.

Having seen the market in action, I can say that there are items in the game that do follow this cyclical pattern. However, for about 90% of the items in the game, this cyclical pricing behavior means absolutely nothing, and in fact if you graphed the price over time for those items you wouldn't find a cyclical, sine-wave plot, but rather a random scatter-plot. The reason is that, for about 90% of the items in game (but a significantly smaller percentage of the top-level items in-game), there are significant periods of time when those items have no buyers and no sellers -- nobody has an item up for bid, and nobody has a bid in trying to grab an item when it finally appears. In these situations, an item can sell for just about any price. There's a history of what the last five items of that type sold for, along with the dates on which the sales took place, and sellers do appear to allow that history to guide them when posting the minimum acceptable bid for their own items on the Consignment House. However, sellers are also required to pay a fee in Influence equal to 5% of the amount they wish to use as their minimum acceptable bid, so if a player gets a 'drop' of an item that normally sells for 5 million Influence, but only has enough Influence to pay the fee for a 300,000 Influence minimum bid, in many situations the player will post the item for that minimum bid and hope for the best -- the buyer can't actually see the seller's minimum bid, just the history, and it's possible that a buyer will simply post the history price and not bother to check to see if the item may have been posted at a lower price to save posting fees.

Again, if I may borrow Market People Speak, this is because sometimes buyers and sellers are lazy; if you don't have enough Influence to pay the fee for the minimum price you want, you're supposed to hold onto the item and grind out the Influence required to make the fee payment. Alternately, a Market Person will explain that this is because buyers and sellers are stupid; a competent market player will always have some amount of 'liquid Influence' they can use to make these kinds of fee payments, and a competent market player will always start bidding incrementally up from an extremely low bid until he reaches the level he's comfortable with, just in case such a bargain is there to be had.

By searching specifically for auctions with no buyers or sellers, I was able to fairly quickly turn my 250K Influence into 3 million Influence by posting a lowball bid, winning that bid from a poster who posted a lower-than history bid, then re-posting the item for slightly higher than the highest history bid. Every point of that Influence was 'earned', if such a word can be used to describe what I was doing, by taking advantage of inefficiencies in the Consignment House market system -- Michael Lewis would have been proud of me.

Once I had my 3 million 'seed money', the rest was easy: identify a top-level Enhancement with a cyclical price structure. My first such item was an Enhancement that moved between 2 million and 8 million in price depending on circumstances. Post a bid for just over 2 million, but not so much that I couldn't pay the fee for my eventual seller's minimum bid. Buy the item. Post the item back to the market with a minimum bid of 8 million or just below. Sell the item.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

At this point, I simply lost interest in the entire process. The Market People had led me to believe that this was a challenging part of the game -- one poster described the consignment system as 'market PvP', or the equivalent of player-versus-player combat. But all I was doing was the traditional 'buy low, sell high' that traders have been doing since the dawn of time, and identifying the places to do that in the consignment market wasn't anywhere near as challenging as the Market People had led me to believe. I didn't feel smart or hard-working playing the market; I just felt bored.

What made the situation even worse was that I was buying and selling items I'd likely never use. The most Influence is available to be made dealing in high-level items, and to use a high-level Enhancement you have to yourself be a high-level character. But my marketer is level 7, and it takes a long time to go from level 7 to level 50 when you generally only play a few hours on the weekend (and have nearly a dozen different characters to choose from on any given day). I could check my marketing in about ten to fifteen minutes after I got home from work during the week; by the time I got to the weekend, I wanted to do something, anything else other than mess around on the market. Even more ironic is that most of the Influence I've 'earned' would likely be wasted if I did try to play the character in the traditional way; while I could completely trick myself out with level 10 crafted Enhancements -- the lowest level crafted enhancement in the game, and the only crafted Enhancements a level 7 character can equip -- the level 10 crafted Enhancements also have the lowest bonuses among crafted Enhancements (the bonuses increase as the level goes up), and the crafted Enhancements, unlike the 'dropped' Enhancements, can't be 'combined' to become more effective as the character gains levels. In effect, I'd have to choose at what level to throw out nearly all of my existing Enhancements and replace them with new Enhancements, and while there are ways to do that without completely losing all the value in your existing Enhancements, there's no way to do it and preserve all of the value in your existing Enhancements, meaning some amount of my 'hard earned' Influence would be spiraling down the toilet every time I wanted to upgrade.

And sure, I could just get back on the treadmill and grind out a few tens of millions of Influence all over again, but why? I'd already demonstrated that I don't find that fun.

The Market People are welcome to play their game and enjoy it. I just feel the need to respond when they try to tell me how much fun I'm missing by not playing their game -- because I've tried it, and I'm not missing anything.

Wow, this thing's still out here?

Guess I'm going to have to try using it again. In the meantime, let me just post a cheesy link, and hopefully one that LOLcat fans who are also into medieval history will appreciate: I CAN HATH CHEEZBURGER?

Arrival

Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.

- Dr. Manhattan, from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's graphic novel, Watchmen

Aaron Gleeman is very pleased with himself right now, as well he should be.

I see that comment is going to require some additional explanation.

Once upon a time, Aaron Gleeman was a young man who loved to write. He loved to write so much that he did two things, not entirely unrelated: entered the University of Minnesota to study journalism, and started a blog writing, at least at first, largely about baseball. For a 19-year old kid he was pretty observant about baseball, and very well-written, and though I didn't discover his blog immediately, I did find it early enough to be a fairly regular reader. The one thing that Gleeman did better than almost anybody else in the Twins blogging world, even better than Twins ur-blogger John Bonnes, was write regularly; he could crank out piece after piece, almost machine-like. And he kept it up, year after year.

As with anyone else in life, Gleeman had his struggles and successes; unlike many people, his struggles and successes were largely compartmentalized - when it came to school, particularly advancing in his chosen major or cracking the staff of the college paper, Gleeman struggled, but when it came to being online, Gleeman succeeded, at first being invited to contribute to a growing online baseball community, and eventually taking a role in shaping that community himself by co-founding The Hardball Times. To my mind, Gleeman wasn't among the top-shelf of Twins bloggers; he didn't have the insight and depth of Bonnes or the sheer whimsy of Anne Ursu (um...I mean, Bat-Girl), but he was consistent and he was prolific, and for those reasons he forged a positive reputation for himself in the community.

When I started writing my own pseudo-baseball blog in 2005 under the rubric of John Bonnes's Twins Territory, I did what most folks starting out and looking for a kick-start often do; I mentioned a more popular person in my field as often as possible. In webcomics, this turns into a tendency to reference or make fun of Penny Arcade, one of, if not the most popular webcomic on the 'net. (Heck, even the creators of Penny Arcade did the same, poking fun at the then-most-popular geek comic, User Friendly, even going so far as to publish a comic of the cast of User Friendly decked out in fetish gear. Nice!) So the victim of my self-aggrandizement was Gleeman, whose blog even then was far more popular than mine ever was or would be. At the time, I presumed that Gleeman, based on his experience on the web and his journalism studies, would understand this; that there was no real malice or hard feelings involved, but that I needed some focus until I found my own voice and got my feet under me.

In retrospect, that didn't work out too well.

Gleeman remains the only Twins blogger I've ever met in person, at a community-assembled Blogger Night that coincided with a promotion from local educational charity Admission Possible. I introduced myself to Gleeman in the third inning, and in retrospect it's a good thing I went with friends, as the only times Gleeman and I communicated seemed to be when Gleeman had something cynical to say about then-second baseman Luis Rivas. At the time, I put it down as an attempt to be humorous, as I'd taken to defending Rivas repeatedly in the TT version of Contrarian Bias.

It wasn't until much later, in the comments section of Gleeman's own blog (which changed from Aaron's Baseball Blog to AaronGleeman.com), that I got the impression that what I thought had been good-natured ribbing wasn't really good natured, as Gleeman blasted me in the comments section of his own blog. So I guess we were never really friends, or even compadres.

Of course, Gleeman is doing a lot better now. He's parlayed his dependability into a number of paying gigs, the most current of which is writing for the newly revamped NBCSports.com. He's so pleased with the deal that he spent an entire post basically recapping how lucky he's been, and how great it is to be him over this past year. Which is cool - any time someone finds success, that's a good thing, and expecially when that success is to some degree deserved.

But...

Set the Wayback Machine to 1996. The Internet was just beginning to create instant millionaires, and a good friend of mine had found what he expected would be his opportunity to become one. An entrepreneur in Texas had decided that what the Internet really needed was a giant shopping mall - so she had hired a number of folks, including my friend, to build the Internet Mall of America. Never heard of it? Wondering why there's no link to it? That's because it doesn't exist.

Just before my friend went down to Houston to earn what he imagined would be his internet millions, he and I had what would be the most venomous argument of our friendship; he was upset that I didn't seem happy for him that he was about to make his fortune, while I was astonished that he actually thought this pipe dream that he was chasing was going to pan out. I was disappointed in him, not excited, and he didn't get why. Later, when he finally came back from Houston, not a millionaire, he actually ended up thanking me, saying that the conversation had stuck in his mind, and ended up being one of the most important bits of insight he'd ever gotten, though he didn't care for it at the time. He also came back to a six-figure job, and was now a property-owner in Houston as well; by realizing that his dream wasn't the end of the road, he did turn the experience to his advantage, which only showed how smart he really was.

Which takes me back to Aaron Gleeman.

Right now, Aaron Gleeman is on top of the world. He's finally attained the 'life in writing' he always wanted, and is making more money at age 24 than probably about 90% or more of his peers. Of course he believes he's a success. And to a point, he's right - looking at the income and output of guys like Bill Simmons, (or even one of Gleeman's frequent targets, Jim Souhan), you realize that it doesn't actually take a whole lot of talent to be a success in the world of sports writing. Sadly, however, that kind of success is also almost ridiculously ephemeral, as can be demonstrated by Gleeman's own story - it wouldn't surprise me in the least if, in 2008, some 19 year old kid with dreams of being a professional sports writer starts up a blog, builds an audience, and ends up, in five years time, taking over for one Aaron Gleeman in the hearts and minds of the fickle sporting public.

Nothing ends, Aaron. Nothing ever ends. Except perhaps ephemeral fame.

Best of luck to you.

The One About Keith Ellison

It was interesting to read the various reactions to incoming U.S. Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN) announcing that he would take his oath of office on the Koran. Interesting, because even a number of responses in favor of Ellison's announcement seemed to have very little understanding of the background behind the whole brouhaha.

You see, I voted for Keith Ellison in the 2006 general election, even though I didn't vote for him in the primary election.

In March of 2006, long-time Representative Martin Olaf Sabo announced that he would not seek re-election as the represenative of the Minnesota Fifth Congressional District. Upon his announcement, a flurry of vaguely-to-fairly well-known politicos, at least by Minnesota standards, announced they would seek the nomination to replace Sabo as the district's representative. Two things you should know about Minnesota politics:

1. The city of Minneapolis, which is wholly contained within the Fifth Congressional District, is considered one of the most liberal cities in America. Its previous mayor was a black woman, Sharon Sayles Belton, while its current mayor, R.T. Rybak, is a former liberal activist. The Minneapolis City Council seats no Republicans, and three members of the Green Party. Based on this tradition, it was reasonable for a politician to assume that if he or she managed to win the party nomination for the seat, he or she would not only be the favorite to win the seat, but to be able to hold the seat as long as he or she chooses to - Sabo himself had been the district's representative since 1978 and had never faced serious opposition.

2. The Democratic Party, as a 'brand name', does not exist in Minnesota per se; rather, a union of the state's Democratic Party with the Depression-era Farmer-Labor Party during World War II created what is known in the state as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, usually shortened to "DFL" by locals. Though with the transition of agriculture from a family to a corporate concern, 'farmer' issues are often addressed by state Republicans as well as Democrats, and though the political power of unions is declining in Minnesota just as it is in other parts of the United States, the simple history of the DFL has kept it a more left-leaning and progressive party than the national Democratic Party, especially in the past ten to fifteen years. (This should surprise no one who is a student of American political history; after all, Robert LaFollette's Progressive Party was born in neighboring Wisconsin at about the same time as the Farmor-Labor Party came into existence in Minnesota.)

During the spring of 2006, most folks I spoke with seemed to prefer former state Senator Ember Reichgott Junge over Ellison for the DFL nomination; meanwhile, Sabo himself backed his former House Chief of Staff Mike Erlandson for the nomination. Ellison seemed mired in discussions about unpaid parking tickets and other supposed flaws. This wouldn't last. Ellison campaigned hard in grass-roots style, motivated supporters, and went to the convention with a solid bloc of support; he parlayed that support into the DFL nomination, on the fourth ballot. Nevertheless, Minnesota does not automatically award its party slots in the general election to winners of the party caucuses - Ellison would have to defend his nomination in a primary election, and both Reichgott Junge and Erlandson remained in the race to contend against him.

Meanwhile, the Republicans had nominated former U of M Business School professor and entrepreneur Alan Fine for the seat, without opposition. While the DFLers squabbled during the primary, Fine maintained a position above the fray, with a very high-minded and tolerant tone that won plenty of attention from moderate voters. Even the allegedly liberal Minneapolis Star-Tribune complimented Fine for his pre-primary carriage (the linked story appears to be unavailable now, unfortunately). Even though Ellison was considered advantaged by the party nomination, most observers expected either Erlandson or Reichgott Junge to emerge from the primary as the DFL's official candidate.

Ellison, still working hard, beat them both, by sizable margins - he captured over 40% of the primary vote in a tough three-way race. And it was at this point that Alan Fine, apparently having set himself up as a moderate in the event of a contest against Erlandson or Reichgott Junge, abandoned his moderation and went on the attack. Despite attacks on Ellison's 'character' having had no effect on his popularity in the primary election, Fine apparently followed some political handler's script and pit-bulled his way out of the race. By the time the election was held, Fine ended up polling almost identically to Independence Party candidate Tammy Lee, far behind Ellison's 56% of the vote.

I hadn't voted for Ellison in the primary, though this was largely because I really didn't feel I knew him very well - though he'd been serving as the representative for District 58B, comprising much of the city of Minneapolis, in the Minnesota State House since 2002, I'd been unaware of his positions or achievements, because they hadn't made headlines. In addition, I thought similarly to what Independence Party candidate Tammy Lee eventually said during the campaign itself; that it seemed a sizable portion of Ellison's candidacy was novelty-driven, giving Minnesotans the chance to elect the first-ever Muslim to national political office.

During the course of the general election campaign, I got to know Ellison a bit better - not personally, but at least by proxy. I watched one televised debate and attended another, and was stunned in particular at the degree to which Fine's candidacy appeared to boil down to arguments that he simply wasn't Ellison. Nevertheless, every one of Fine's attacks was dutifully repeated as 'news' in the local media; even Lee's comment above was magnified into an accusation that Ellison was simply a 'novelty candidate', which was not at all what Lee was suggesting. Only the local alt-weekly, the City Pages maintained some degree of objectivity surrounding Ellison's record, thanks largely to the work of local writer Britt Robson; even then, Robson's essays were frequently attacked in letters-to-the-editor by conservatives for being 'too pro-Ellison'. Through it all, Ellison stayed above the fray (though clearly it wasn't always easy for him) and refused to descend to cheap-shots and a campaign of tit-for-tat attacks. Meanwhile, Ellison continued to work the political 'ground game', especially among the immigrant Somali community; this combination of factors helped him to his easy Election Day victory.

I learned two things from watching Ellison's campaign in 2006:

1. Ellison himself is smart, disciplined, and extremely tough. He also is not afraid or uninterested in doing the kind of political scut-work that seldom gets headlines, but does result in good public policy. He's going to be a great representative for me and the other folks in his district.

2. Much of what passes for political news coverage these days, even among local news providers, is nearly indistinguishable from sports coverage; stories about Fine's attacks on Ellison were carried with the same breathlessness as the sniping between former teammates Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal, while discussions about the race itself focused far less on the candidates' positions on issues and much more on the horse-race aspects of the political race, as if voters had no other interest than watching the scoreboard and wondering who would eventually be crowned 'champion'. (Granted, this isn't an original insight on my part, but until this election, I had no idea how far local news had gone down this trail, as national political coverage has done long since.)

Ellison, as I mentioned, is smart. So he had to be aware that his announcement that he was going to take his oath of office on the Koran was going to draw fire. And predictably enough, it did, from two different sources:

- Conservative writer Dennis Prager, wrote a now infamous essay entitled America, Not Keith Ellison, decides what book a congressman takes his oath on.

- Representative Virgil Goode (R - VA) sent a letter to his constituents in response to the Prager article apparently attacking Ellison for simply being Muslim; his letter contained the equally infamous phrase, "..if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran."

In addition, in the midst of the fray, Ellison was invited onto conservative radio host Glenn Beck's show and asked, point-blank, "What I feel like saying is, 'Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies'," and in which Beck also asked Ellison if he thought Goode was a bigot.

I don't blame any of these guys for thinking they'd be able to get a rise out of Ellison for their attacks; after all, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, when he was staring out, never seemed to hear a criticism he wasn't willing to go off against. Again, though, this simply shows that all these guys are responding, not to Ellison himself, but to their own prejudices and pre-conceptions of what Ellison is and what he supposedly represents.

Ellison's responses, unsurprising to anyone who actually watched him during the 2006 election, were uniformly calm, intelligent, and understandable; his interview with Wolf Blitzer pretty much covers the entire spectrum of his critics, and Ellison deflects those critics with polish and aplomb.

And of course, when Ellison spoke before a group of Muslims at a convention of two different Muslim organizations, he put the whole thing into perspective:

Muslims, you're up to bat right now. . . How do you know that you were not brought right here to this place to learn how to make this world better? How do you know that Allah, sallalahu aleyhi wasallam, did not bring you here so that you could understand how to teach people what tolerance was, what justice was? ... How do you know that you're not here to teach this country?

We had faith in Allah, and we patiently endured this adversity. And facing adversity bravely and with patience in the faith in Allah is an Islamic value. . . . That's what it means to be a Muslim.

I am damned glad I voted for Keith Ellison as my representative in Congress.

Brain...not...helping!

Romantic comedies are a strange animal.

For starters, they're inherently unrealistic, in that they have to end with the main characters in love, with obstacles overcome, and all signs pointing toward 'happily ever after'. That's what makes them popular stories. Yet the sign of a good romantic comedy is the degree to which, other than the basic tropes of the genre, the story manages to maintain a sense of verisimilitude. We have to believe the main characters are real people before we can accept that they've fallen into a wonderland where their personal crises will be overcome with a simple push from the rolling boulder of 'love conquers all'.

They also tend to deconstruct their own premise, which is that the two main characters are somehow 'made for each other'; that the characters very seldom if ever know each other prior to their first meeting actually suggests that any two people that meet could become lovers, even True Lovers, and thus it's not so much that the story teaches you that, if you persevere, you'll find that One Person Meant For You, but rather than anyone you meet could prove to be that One True Person - in other words, anybody can fall in love with anybody.

Part of the reason I'm thinking about this subject is that I've just come from seeing The Vacation; though the selling point was one friend suggesting that any time you get to see Cameron Diaz in a motion picture is a decent way to pass the time, within the first ten minutes of the film I found myself leaning in to another friend and whispering that Kate Winslet is now my favorite actress, period.

Winslet's character has an amazing monologue at the start of the movie on the topic of love, and I wish I could remember it and quote it here, because the part about unrequited love is absolutely spot-on.

The other reason I'm thinking about this subject is that I've got that old friend from a previous post on the brain - still. Yes, I know I said in that post that I was cutting her out of my life forever, and I didn't mean to lie, exactly. It's just not that easy (unless you've watched a series of old movies with heroines with 'gumption', but I digress...)

The good news is that, while I still think about her multiple times per day, those thoughts are no longer accompanied by a crippling desire to contact her and let her know that's what I'm thinking about. In fact, I've moved on from pathetic hanger-on-her-every-memory into full-fledged Martin Briley mode. (The song, man, listen to the song - it should be obvious in a heartbeat, at least if you lived through the 1980s.)

There were a couple of things that reminded me of her yesterday, though not in a good way; one of them was this Order of the Stick online comic. In my defense, I met her at an 'adult' chat site, and she's never been shy about projecting a persona of smoldering sensuality - one of her favorite pastimes was putting sexual double-entendres in her Yahoo Messenger away messages. In her defense, she tried to make it clear that she was not the same as her online persona, and was frequently irritated at the number of men who assumed, just because she would freely and easily talk about sex, that she was therefore also free and easy. There's really no need to document the other thing; it was much along the same lines, though with respect to her politics rather than her sexuality.

Here's where these two threads tie back together: in a romantic comedy, the two people having a problem are either the main characters, who will find a way past the problem to win their happily-ever-after moment, or they are one main character and a pre-existing relationship character, which is meant to serve as the reminder of how crappy the main character's romantic life was before the other main character entered her life

Well, you don't need me to tell you that real life doesn't work by the rules of the romantic comedy genre, so that's not the issue. The problem is that there isn't a genre for what happens when two people meet, become friends, and then one person subsequently falls over the unspoken line of friendship into something more complicated, then bolts and refuses to discuss the topic while trying desperately to purge the transgression from his mind. Probably because it wouldn't make for a very salable Hollywood story, for starters. So as much as Kate Winslet kicked ass in "The Vacation", and as much as I felt I identified with her character's situation and motivations, I really can't use anything that happened to her character to help myself in my current situation.

So what do I do? Good damned question.

It probably won't surprise you to learn that this isn't the first time I've had this kind of unrequited and silent crush on someone, and the good news is that those previous occurrences did, eventually, dissipate simply through the passage of time. Time, it seems, really does heal all wounds. The typical time-to-heal, however, runs about fifteen years from crushing emotional pain to occasional fleeting and completely emotionless recollection.

Two months down, one hundred and seventy-eight to go.

Welcome to the Bandwagon

When I was young, and I mean pre-teen young here, I was a rabid sports fan. The best way I can think of to convince you of this is to tell you a story:

It's around Christmas-time 1980, and I'm too sick to travel to the extended family gathering. Instead, I stay home, wrapped up in a blanket and with soup handy and watch the Minnesota Vikings take on the Cleveland Browns. The Vikings were 8-6 at the time, and needed to win at least one of their final two games to clinch a playoff spot. Since the second of the two games was in Houston against the then-strong Oilers, one of the best defensive teams in the NFL that year and featuring All-Pro running back Earl Campbell on offense, it didn't seem likely the club would get the win if they had to rely on that one game, so the home game against Cleveland was considered key. The Browns, however, scored late to take a 23-21 lead in what looked like a game-clincher. Vikings start near their own 20 yard line.

Folks who watched the game and have solid memories can tell you that the first play from scrimmage was a pass from "Two Minute" Tommy Kramer over the middle to tight end Joe Senser, who immediately flipped the ball back to trailing running back Ted Brown in a perfect hook-and-ladder play, then went to ground at his defender's knees to take him out of the play. The Browns were in a prevent defense, though, and Senser's defender was not the last man between Brown and the end zone, so Brown scurried out of bounds near midfield to stop the clock with only a few seconds left.

Most folks who are long-time Viking fans can recall the next play: a hail-mary pass from Kramer toward the end-zone, tipped up into the air by a Cleveland defender, then caught by receiver Ahmad Rashad one-handed while falling backward into the end zone for the game-winning touchdown.

Granted, those are both memorable plays, so I wouldn't have had to be a rabid fan in order to have remembered them over 25 years after the fact. The part of the story that counts, though, is that the telephone rang within moments of the play's end. It was my mother. The first words out of her mouth were a question: "Is the house still standing?" She knew I was a crazy-mad sports fan to the point where even being sick to the point of vomiting wouldn't stop me from whooping and hollering at the playoff-clinching win.

(Of course, the Vikings lost their first playoff game that year to the Super-Bowl bound Philadelphia Eagles, and I had to look that one up to verify who the Vikings had even played. So much for the mojo from the last-second win, and the memories that it kindled. Though keep this in mind, because it will become relevant later.)

It goes without saying that these days I'm not nearly as rabid a fan as I was back then. The best way to convince you of that is to report my performance in fantasy football the past three years: seventh out of eight teams, ninth out of ten teams, and eighth out of ten teams. So, no, I haven't kept up my NFL fandom. I can't even use the 'stadium argument', as I do for my loss of fandom for the Twins. I suppose I could try to spin the whole thing as a maturation process - there's a reason women tend to avoid guys who talk about sports a great deal, unless they actually are professional athletes, and sometimes not even then. Unfortunately, that argument fails when I explain that, instead of being a sports fan, I play with little plastic men in a game store on the weekends. Real adult, huh?

But that's how I figured out I'm not all that big on sports anymore. I tried putting together a last-second gathering of my fellow minis-players for this past weekend, though only one other person showed up. Of all the reasons I heard for not attending, the oddest to my ears was that there was a chance that rookie Tarvaris Jackson might start the Vikings game against the Lions.

Now I understand the reasoning behind this thinking: one of the Holy Grails of sports fandom is to be able to say, once a player has achieved 'greatness' and is about to be enshrined in the appropriate Hall of Fame that, "I saw his first-ever start!" Such a comment generally scores major points in sports fandom circles. Of course, if you go back and look, most first-ever starts by Hall-of-Fame football quarterbacks weren't all that impressive, not to mention the argument that Tarvaris Jackson probably isn't going to end up in the Hall of Fame anyway, but to a 'true sports fan', those things don't really matter.

So by realizing this, I realize I'm no longer a 'true sports fan'.

'True sports fans', by the way, have a word for folks who barely follow the local team unless they're winning: bandwagon fans. They live in blissful ignorance of the depth of suck the local team sinks to from time-to-time, until they recover enough to compete for the post-season, at which point a bunch of bandwagon fans come out of the woodwork to cheer the club on. This irritates 'true sports fans' to no end; in their eyes, if you weren't around to cheer on Scott Stahoviak in 1997, you have no business calling yourself a Twins fan in 2006.

Now granted, back when I was a rabid sports fan, I rooted for some pretty poor clubs; the Vikings were still good, at the tail end of their Super Bowl years, though by 1984 they'd sunk into the cyclopean depths of the NFL under the tutelage of former Marine Les Steckel. The Twins, meanwhile, were notoriously bad in those same years, during which time owner Cal Griffith simply refused to spend major money on these new-fangled free agents. The 1982 Twins opened their new ballpark, the Metrodome, by promptly losing 100 games.

Nevertheless, 'true fans' will argue that there's good reason to follow a team when it's bad; only then do you find the players to root for that become heroes when the team gets good again. Take the 1982 Twins as an example: five men who were regulars on that roster were still regulars five years later when the Twins won the World Series (though interestingly, Kirby Puckett was not among them). Nevertheless, just because sometimes a team can develop young players into playoff performers, that doesn't mean they do so all the time. As a counterexample, take the 1997 Twins, mentioned above for the performance of Scott Stahoviak. Only one regular on that team, pitcher Brad Radke, was still playing for the club in 2006, and Radke in 2006 was a broken-down veteran trying to reach the end of the season so that he could retire.

In other words, most if not all of the players you're rooting for when the team sucks won't be around when the team gets good, so why waste effort rooting for them? Ah, but that's bandwagon fan thinking, not 'true fan' thinking.

Meanwhile, 'true fans' wonder how the Twins come-from-behind finish in 2006 will impact their fan following in 2007. Well, given that the Twins were humiliatingly swept out of the playoffs in the opening round, I can say that, if the club stumbles coming out of the gate in 2007, most folks will likely stay away in droves, just as they've done over the past couple of years for the local NBA franchise, once just two games from the NBA finals, and only now looking as though they might escape the draft lottery for the first time in two years. Again, the 'true fans' will hem and haw, and wonder how it can be that more people don't recognize the talent and dedication of the local sports teams. Why don't more people care?

I used to, until it finally sunk in that sports teams don't exist to make me happy; they win games in the regular season and then lose them in the playoffs, they trade popular players to bring in 'proven winners', and they simply can't overcome the statistical reality that, in a 28-to-30 team league, it's difficult for a team to win consistently, and nearly impossible for them to win it all consistently.

So now, my butt is firmly planted on the bandwagon. I've got other things to do.

Stories About Stories

National Novel Writing Month is over, and I have...well, not a novel. I doubt I even have much of a short story. I spent all of three evenings actually writing, then after about 5000 words, completely lost motivation and interest in continuing.

So that didn't exactly work out.

One thing that did happen, though, over the past month is that I read someone else's story - specifically Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations", a story that's been bandied about as one of the classics in science fiction short-storydom. It's part of a Baen Books anthology, The World Turned Upside Down, in which the editors chose stories that had profoundly affected them as teenagers and 'turned them on' to SF.

The book had managed to get Eric Burns of Websnark excited, so I figured I should check it out, and when I saw it for sale on the shelf at the downtown Borders, I picked it up and glanced through the table of contents.

The editors of the anthology, based on their picks, were almost certainly a generation older than me. I recognized a few writers, but no stories from my own late childhood and adolescence, none of the tales that had 'turned me on' to SF way back when.

That's probably worth an aside, to be honest.

When I was young, I ended up skipping second grade. After a few years of being advanced, it came time to 'graduate' on to junior high, yet I was still just ten years old, and would turn eleven over the summer. My mother met with the head guidance councilor for the school, who recommended that I repeat sixth grade, as I wouldn't be physically mature enough to keep up with my classmates. Mom agreed - they technically asked me, too, but I was too young to really understand the decision I was making - and I repeated sixth grade. For the most part, it was one of the worst years of my life.

Except for the library.

I'd already sat through all the lessons a year before, so the administrators knew enough not to try to keep my interest by doing all the same work again. They thought that giving me an 'independent study' packet of material might keep me busy, but I burned through that with ease - testing showed that I was already reading at a high school level, so no work that they thought was appropriate for an eleven-year old was going to keep my busy for any significant amount of time. At some point, it was simply accepted that, since I wasn't a behavior problem, and I needed some degree of stimulation, that I'd be given extended access to the school library.

That became the one saving grace of that repeated sixth-grade year. And if you think that the selection of fiction in an elementary school library might be somewhat lacking, keep in mind that this was the late 1970s in suburban Minneapolis - not a hotbed of reactionary or fundamentalist thought.

The two stories that rocked my world, and got me hooked on SF ever since, were Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" (the time-travel story that literally gave us the phrase 'butterfly effect'), and Philip K. Dick's "Second Variety". As I grew older, I discovered other SF writers: Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, and more. But Bradbury and Dick remained - and still remain - my favorite short story writers. If I were putting together a book like "The World Turned Upside Down", Dick and Bradbury would be in it, and those two stories in particular, if I could swing it.

Neither Dick nor Bradbury made Baen's book, though. Dick's absence is understandable - most of the stories in Baen's book were originally published in the '40s and '50s, and though Dick started his writing career in the early '50s, he didn't really become known until the tumultuous 1960s. Bradbury's absense is harder to explain by timing - collections of Bradbury's work were published throughout the late '40s and '50s, including his most famous short stories. In Bradbury's case (and in Dick's as well, I suppose) a bigger factor has to be that he wasn't really a 'hard SF' writer in the sense that an Arthur Clarke or, to a lesser degree, a Robert Heinlein was - nor was either man very sentimental about the military. Military SF is among the most common entrants in Baen's catalog of works, and one of the editors in particular, David Drake, is known for his 'hard' militaristic SF, much in the Heinlein mode.

Glancing through the table of contents, I recognzied many of the authors - it would be odd if any fan of SF couldn't recognize at least half the authors listed - but only two stories grabbed my attention enough to convince me to read them as soon as possible after purchasing the book: Gordon R. Dickson's "St Dragon and the George", and Godwin's tale.

I'd read of Godwin's tale as a story of harsh necessity and reality, one of those stories that wakes you up to the understanding that the universe is a lot harsher than human beings generally suspect. I'm a subscriber to that belief myself, so I was eager to find out just how Godwin had managed to capture that nugget of philosophy in his story.

At the risk of ruining "The Cold Equations" for those of you who haven't read it, the plot, such as it is, is simple. In the far future, an emergency shuttle is headed to a frontier planet, delivering needed medicine so that a group of terraformers won't perish of disease brought on by natural disaster. The pilot of the shuttle finds a stowaway, but rather than the dangerous criminal he expects to find, it turns out that the stowaway is simply a young girl who overheard that the shuttle was on its way to the very planet where her brother is serving as a terraformer, and had a sudden larking urge to tag along in order to see him. The shuttle, it turns out, has only enough fuel to land the pilot and his cargo - the girl is an unexpected additional mass, and 'the cold equations' of physics won't allow the shuttle to arrive safely with her aboard. If she stays, she, the pilot, and the terraformers will die; instead, the pilot carries out his duty and convinces the girl to enter the shuttle's airlock to be left to her death in space.

I was very grateful for the comments of editor Eric Flint:

What aggravates me about "The Cold Equations" is that the blasted plot makes no sense. The powerful impact of the story - and it is powerful, no question about it - is based entirely on a premise which I find completely implausible: to wit, that a spacecraft carrying critical supplies would be designed with no safety margin at all.

Oh, pfui. They don't make tricycles without a hefty safety margin. And I'm quite sure that if you traveled back in time and interviewed Ugh the Neanderthal, he'd explain to you that his wooden club is plenty thick enough to survive any impact he can foresee. He made damn sure of that before he ventured out of his cave. He may have a sloping forehead, but he's not an idiot.

In fact, it's more than just the premise - the plot itself is filled with such railroading. The ship that launches the shuttle is the only ship close enough to deliver the supplies in time. Thers's a second team of terraformers on the planet, but even they are too far away to reach the doomed group in time. The girl's brother is in the second group, stationed on a different part of the planet, but when the shuttle calls so that the girl can speak to her brother for what is to be the last time, he's not there - he's not only out in a helicopter, but coincidentally, the radio in the helicopter isn't working. It's basically an intricately worked-out plot in which a girl is required to be killed because she decided, on the spur of the moment, to violate a law.

And I thought Heinlein had tendencies toward fascism in his stories...

There is one thing that Godwin captures well in his tale, and this is likely what makes it considered a 'great story' - he captures the sense that nobody involved in this nightmare scenario wants to be considered responsible or be the one required to make the actual decision to kill the girl. The buck gets passed as much as it is humanly possible until everyone involved can simply point to the 'cold equations', shrug their shoulders, and wash their hands of the whole affair:

"I can go alone or I can take seven others with me -- is that the way it is?"

"That's the way it is."

"And nobody wants me to have to die?"

"Nobody."

"Then maybe -- Are you sure nothing can be done about it? Wouldn't people help me if they could?"

"Everyone would like to help you, but there is nothing anyone can do. I did the only thing I could when I called the Stardust."

This is a story where everyone involved is very, very sorry, but all responsibility is ultimately pushed off onto the laws of physics - the 'cold equations' of the title.

The story is wrong - the tale hits you because it's a human tragedy, not merely the operation of unfeeling, unthinking physical laws. They designed the shuttles this way, then passed laws to ensure that the pilots could operate them as guilt-free as possible, and nobody anywhere along the line thought to ask if maybe they could just carry a bit more decelerant, just in case.

I can see thinking that this is a significant story in SF, no question. But I'm going to borrow a phrase from Pete VonderHarr and say, if you actually enjoy this story, then you are a syphilitic Fascist.

My own NaNoWriMo project is fairly dark, in a 'rocks fall, everyone dies' kind of way. If I ever do manage to pick it up and finish it, I'll make danged sure that I don't try to excuse human tragedy by invoking the laws of physics.

Thanks, Eric Flint.

Good day for the Cat Party

Image transferred from Nodwick.com. Go! Buy something!