Ill Advised Posting

(I thought I wasn't going to talk about this. I guess I was wrong.)

So, the police officer who shot Michael Brown six times, was just doing his job, and almost half of white Americans think race is getting too much attention in the case. People are "playing the race card"? "Lawlessness knows no color"? What?

Even if Brown was shoplifting (which is not all that clear) or jaywalking, the penalty for these crimes is not death in the US, last I checked. The penalty for acting suspicious is also not death, but apparently a woman in the first article believes it is:

“An officer doesn’t have xray vision,” wrote Jennifer Hall, of Robertsville, Missouri. “He can’t tell if you have weapon or not until searched. So you act in a suspicious manner, we know what the consequences are.”

Seriously? If your white son was caught jaywalking and mouthing off, and was shot dead for it, that would be OK? Because we know what the consequences are for acting suspicious, right? Or is it that those people are lawless. Those people are criminals. Those people deserve to be treated with suspicion and executed if they step out of line? And those people just happen to be black?

We all set this fire. We need to own up to that.

Minimum Wage

The title is a reference to the They Might Be Giants song. Really. That's what I was thinking about when I wrote it.

The other day I reblogged this thing on Tumblr about Walmart earnings and the salaries they pay their workers. For the most part my pinko bleeding-heart liberal friends seemed to agree: Walmart makes $27 billion in profit in one year, they could pay their bottom million employees $10,000 a year more and still make a $17 billion profit. This situation and others like it illustrates the crazy imbalance of our economic system, in which a few specialists in e.g. financial markets are paid hundreds or even a thousand times as much as regular workers who do essential jobs.

There was at least one person, however, who took issue with the statistics involved, saying that it didn't seem likely that a million workers, almost half of Walmart's total employees (and they are the biggest single employer in the world, apparently), were scraping by on minimum wage.

Now, the original post isn't actually criticism of Walmart specifically, so much. The second half of the post makes clear that this is about larger issues with the system itself, and Walmart is just a symptom. Whether Walmart only has to pay $10,000 more to a hundred thousand employees or a million doesn't really change the point, at least in my mind. (Wikipedia figures for Walmart also suggest that it might make more sense to use the profits after tax, which is only $16 or $17 billion, depending on what year you're talking about.)

On the other hand, checking Walmart salary information that's publicly available does paint a picture that seems consistent with the original post. I'm just looking at the first page full of results, and there are some reasonable and even well-paid positions. (Want to do well at Walmart? Become a pharmacist!) But the bottom-tier jobs pay $8 or $9 an hour on average. Being generous, that's $18 to $20 thousand a year. The "Careers to explore" links on that page include "Overnight Stocker" at $19k a year, and "Sales Associate" at $18k yearly. That's well below the poverty line for a family of four.

From the results from that page, a little less than half of the jobs on offer from Walmart (2073 of the 4205 positions summarized) are hourly jobs that pay on average about $19 thousand a year. If this is in any way representative of the mix of positions in Walmart's 2 million employee workforce, then yes, roughly a million workers are making poverty-level wages working for a company that made at least $16 billion in profit in the last year, after tax. Even if the results are strongly skewed, we're still talking about hundreds of thousands of workers.

Then there's this article, in which statements from Walmart spokespeople themselves lead one to the conclusion that a bit more than half of Walmart associates make less than $25,000 a year. Statistics are easy to misuse, but whatever way I look at this, it still seems like a lot of people are struggling to get by while a very few reap rewards out of proportion with their contribution to the company, society, or, well, anything. So, to repeat:

You know, this ridiculous idea that a worker on Wall Street who earns tens of millions of dollars a year securitizing imaginary assets or doing high-frequency trading is worth 1,000 times as much as workers who earn tens of thousands of dollars a year educating our children, growing or serving us our food, throwing themselves into harm’s away to protect our life or property, that this difference reflects the true value or intrinsic worth of these jobs is nonsense.

I Said I Wouldn't Explain

That's the best image I could find. Well, no, actually, it's the first image I could find, which makes it the best. Click on the picture to go to the actual page.

That is a Japanese boxed lunch, a bento box. It has a picture (made out of something edible, I suspect) of a cartoon character on it.

Look closely. It is a rabbit, in a ballerina dress and tiara.

This is ありがとウサギ, the "thank you rabbit."

You could be forgiven for thinking it is, well, not exactly the most appealing character ever. You wouldn't be alone. The character was the subject of discussion on 2chan as to just how unappealing she, or it, was. This included the obligatory improved versions.



Much better.

But anyway, why? If you were in Japan, watching TV, any time after the March 11th quake, you know. This is why:

Click here

Immediately after the quake, there were no commercials to speak of. Slowly, the commercials returned, or rather, some commercials returned. The one linked above and a small selection of others from AC, all safe, inoffensive messages about being nice, were the only commercials, repeated sometimes three or four times in a row to fill air time. People actually complained that the "A~ C~" tune at the end was getting on their nerves, and the commercials were changed to remove it. You can find some pretty funny remixes on the tubes (and a lot of really stupid ones) if you look. None of them would make any sense either.

Everybody has seen this commercial, hundreds of times at least, in the last month and a half. It's to the point where seeing something like that almost makes me feel nostalgic, or maybe a bit sick. The idea of eating lunch with that damn rabbit on it is just...

Anyway, now I've explained. And it still doesn't make any sense.

Serenity

Warning, there may be spoilers.

So, Serenity. I haven't had a lot of time to watch TV in the past decade or so, outside a steady diet of Japanese comedy specials, so I never saw Battlestar Galactica until I bought the DVDs, and I never saw Firefly at all.

One of the few good things to come out of my recent two month "business trip" to Kanto, is that I sometimes have the time (and technology) to sit down and watch a film. First was Monsters (evaluation: Good. Pretty. Worth watching.), and Moon (evaluation: Fantastic. What thinking Sci-Fi films should aspire to.) This weekend, it was Serenity.

In short, this is a good film. It's a good film for fans. It's very different from Moon or Monsters, more like a bigger version of a TV show than a film. It was definitely entertaining, packed with action, very fun to watch. No regrets there. Still, this is not a movie that wil really stay with me. It didn't think any deep thoughts. Unlike Moon, I won't be lying awake at night thinking about it (unless it's to puzzle over some of the things I mention later). But, then again, you could say a lot of things about other, lesser movies, using sentences that begin, "Unlike Moon."

There were a few problems. The setting is an almost barely believable backdrop for a space-kung-fu-pirate-western that visits a different earth-like planet or two every week. It's perfect for episodic fiction. Too perfect. There was also the way the hero too conveniently acquires superpowers at climactic moments. The guy was run through with a sword, but he coughs a bit and gets on with business. And hey, it just happens that the favorite Vulcan nerve pinch of the villain doesn't work, because our hero had those nerves moved.

There was the dialogue. I understand that Joss Whedon is loved for his dialogue. I can see why. He does have a talent for it. On the other hand, maybe he should rein in that talent from time to time, or turn it in a different direction, because most of his characters sound like, well, how I imagine he sounds. They're all waiting, all the time, for the chance to launch a snark-missile into the conversation. Yes, it's funny, but it also sounds wrong when it comes out of the mouth of almost every character, in almost every scene. It's not terrible. Like I said, he's good at this. But it did, on balance, work against the film, I think.

One of the few things that I do wonder about the film even now, is how it was supposed to fit in with a TV series. Was it the climactic ending? Overall, it seemed good for that, but I wonder how River Tam fits in there. Was she a super killing machine in the TV series and the rest of the crew just never noticed until the movie? Or was this a prequel, in which case the funny pilot guy who gets impaled in a (largely successful) bid to make us think that maybe the major characters are actually in danger, was actually a minor character instead of an equal to the other, unkillable, crew members.

In spite of these, and another few nits I won't pick here, I still recommend it, at least for SF fans. It's fun, and maybe that's all it intended to be, which isn't so bad after all.

The Story of How Brownie Learned to Play Piano

One day, when Brownie, the elk who looks like a chipmunk with horns, was doing her job in Yellowstone National Park, conducting a nature talk, a little boy said to her, "Did you know you are an elk?" And Brownie had an enormous freak out and made the boy cry, and then she apologized and gave the boy a candy, but she still decided she needed to have a vacation.

So she talked to her supervisor, who was not an elk, and he suggested a trip to New Mexico. "I hear the desert is lovely this time of year," he said.

So Brownie the elk, who looks like a chipmunk with horns, got a Greyhound bus to Albuquerque. The bus driver looked at her when she got on the bus and said, "Did you know you're an elk?" But she just took a deep breath and said, "Yes."

She wandered around the desert, which was lovely that time of year, and took pictures. She met a man in the desert, and his name was Tom. The man's name was Tom, not the desert. Tom said, "I've never seen an elk in the desert in New Mexico before." He offered to show Brownie the special places in the desert where flowers grow, and which are especially lovely this time of year.

Tom took Brownie to special places in the desert, and she took lots of pictures of flowers, and felt very glad she had taken a vacation. She was so happy she thought she wouldn't even have a big freak out if someone asked her if she knew she was an elk.

Now Tom was a pianist in a blues band in Albuquerque, and he was a very good pianist. Brownie went to see Tom playing piano many times, and sometimes she took pictures of that, too. Tom showed her how to play "Chopsticks."

Plink plink plink plink plink plink.
Plink plink plink plink plink plink.
Plink plink plink plink plink plink.
Plink plink plink plink plink plink.

Then her vacation was over. She said goodbye to Tom and the desert and the flowers and took another picture of all of them, and got on the bus to Yellowstone. When she got back she went happily back to her job giving nature talks, and when children and bus drivers asked if she knew she was an elk she would say, in a very friendly way, "Yes, and I can also play piano!"

The End.

Additional Thoughts

I think that last post needed more time in the cooker. I'm too lazy to go back to it now, though.

And I think I need to draw and post more pictures.

Worse than Television

"What have you created and released?" Charlie Stross asks.

Well, as anyone who looks at this probably knows:

• two short novels, with a third on the way
• A few short stories (temporarily unavailable because the Dead Channel is down)
• More than a decade ago, Mingw32 (which has been much improved by the efforts of others since I moved on)

I've sent out a few pictures here and there as well.

On the other hand, I don't believe (at all) that creative people are obligated to give away their work for free. Some of my best friends are authors, or aspiring authors. I've given my work away for free because, while I love to write, I don't have the need or the time and energy to get paid for it, at least for the time being. It would take a lot of work to go pro. There's probably another blog post in that whole topic.

What prompted this, though, aside from a desire to brag (sorry), is piracy.

Specifically, I have this gut feeling that piracy is not the root cause of the crisis in publishing (or the crisis in music). Which is not to say there isn't a crisis, or that copying somebody's work against their will isn't wrong. However, I have the feeling that the industry's problems are coming from elsewhere. One of these places is a general economic downturn. We're all less willing to spend money on stuff.

The other part is a proliferation of distractions, many of them legitimately free. I could easily spend all my time on the internet, on twitter and in web forums, and without infringing on anyone's copyright. I hardly watch TV any more at all. I have DVDs for a series that I bought last year still sitting unwatched. I have deliberately started scheduling reading time for myself so I don't spend all of my time on the net and forget the pleasure of books.

Some of these distractions are even "creative." I might not be writing and drawing at all without the internet. I can spend time editing Wikipedia articles or participating in online discussions. I can spend time looking for references and information related to my next project. This blog itself is a distraction from reading I could be doing to help some professional author make ends meet. It's part of the attraction of the internet, that you can be doing creative, or at least interactive, things with it. It feels so much more fulfilling than vegetating in front of a TV set. And yet, this is, I think, helping to destroy the publishing industry.

What should we do about it? Hell, I don't know. I'm certainly not going to suggest people should step back from the keyboards and leave it to the professionals. There has to be some recognition that doing great work requires dedication and a lot of hard work that should translate into a tangible reward. I worry quite a bit about works of art and literature might not be created because talented people can't make a living producing them. I think eventually a balance will emerge, but I also think it's going to be messy for a while.

Book Review

The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Three

Picked this one up at World Fantasy this year (er, I mean last year), mainly because Tim has a story in it, but it turned out to be a pretty good collection overall.

There's no real theme connecting the stories, except that they could all (sometimes with a little stretching) be called science fiction. There are crossovers into alternate (SF-nal) history, and borderline works of fantasy, but basically it is what it says on the cover: new, and science fiction. Here are some comments on each of the stories, in the order they appear in the book:

"Rescue Mission" - I found this one a little weak, especially as a way to start the book. For most of the story it was a somewhat creepy and weird bit of suspense. At the end it did a switch so that the main character could have some character development and save the day at the same time. The ending seemed a bit pat and hand-wavy, and not all of it even made sense. OK, but not great.

"The Fixation" - Spooky quantum effects create order by shunting entropy into other universes, leading to unexpected, horrible effects. Successful as far as it went, but the idea seemed too easy, somehow, and it lapsed off into a fantasy toward the end. A good effort, but still not great.

"Artifacts" - A "What if this is the way the whole universe works" story. The reader is supposed to be left in awe of the stupendous metaphysics, but it seems trite, somehow unimportant. Stories that hinge on metaphysical systems like this end up being a bit like those times in university (or high school) when you first discovered ideas like, "What if we are all brains in a vat?" The Matrix (which is a film that works, in my opinion) came out ideas like that, and the answer plays a large part in driving the story in that film, but it still comes down to a story, a conflict between characters and forces. This story, unfortunately, stopped after the reveal. "Look! This is how it works!" OK... but so what?

"Necroflux Day" - I was worried at this point. This story starts off with something I don't much like about most modern short fiction: The "Oh my God it's so weird!" description. Look how much odd shit I can put on the page. I am the master of strange. But strange doesn't make a story good. Pointlessly strange details, or just pointless details, distract me. They worry me. I immediately begin to wonder if the author is trotting out this stuff to try and cover for the fact that they don't have anything to say. Luckily, this was not the case. Soon the author found his rhythm, and, although he continued with the weird, it was in service of actual people who were actually interesting and had actual, actually interesting problems. Can you actually believe it?

The fact that part of the story revolves around a completely mundane task (a child writing an essay for school) jarred me out of the rest of the world from time to time. It didn't fit very well. But the story itself hung together nicely and the big reveal, the awful, weird thing that short fiction authors are required to put in their stories and spring on the reader at the end, was used in the service of a character's realistic and involving emotion, rather than just being this big thing that's supposed to be impressive because it's so big and, like, weird. Good story. A. Saved the book for me.

"Providence" - I find Paul Di Filippo's work mildly annoying at the best of times. Maybe that makes me a bad person. Here we have a throw away story around a flimsy artificial premise, and lots of beep beep noises. That's about it. I didn't care about any of the characters or anything they did or saw. About a page in I had determined everything the author wanted me to be surprised and impressed by, and I was not surprised or impressed. They're robots, hooked on records. Woo. Hoo. That is just so amazing and cool. Not.

Back to being worried, but almost halfway through now, and I felt I should go on.

"Carnival Night" - A serviceable little story, basically a crime story but with a few SF-nal trappings and SF required to make the reveal work. Brief and to the point, and reasonably entertaining even if the characters were flat.

"The Assistant" - Again, a reasonably entertaining, small story. The author relies a little too heavily on the hook (What if the office cleaners who empty the trash cans were super high-tech industrial espionage prevention teams!?) and leaves the rest of the story a bit thin, but gets in enough engagement with the characters to make a passing grade.

"Glitch" - Odd, but it worked OK. There was a bit of dragging, here and there, and a bit of that old chestnut (the robot wants to be human), but with a somewhat interesting twist. I'd give it a B.

"One of Our Bastards is Missing" - Alternative history, maybe, or maybe just fantasy, with a bit of a SF twist. The story managed to keep some balance between the weird ideas of pocket dimensions, the somewhat less weird but still alien pseudo-Elizabethan mannerisms, and the slightly two-dimensional but still interesting characters. In the end, an interesting package. A.

"Woodpunk" - A little plodding. This is a message story. The trappings are fairly nice, but we've heard this message before. And even though it's an important message, repeating it doesn't help the story. Not bad, but on the low end.

"Minya's Astral Angels" - Some cute ideas and OK characterization and development carry this story. Solid. Not superb, but solid.

"The Best Monkey" - Started off not really liking this one, but it grew on me, and eventually I found it one of the better stories in the collection. The characters (character, really) clicked after a while, and from there on it was an engaging detective story towards an interesting reveal.

"Long Stay" - An odd little story which has potential and then seems to go plonk right at the end, as if the author had run out of things to say. I did quite like the setup though, especially since I was reading it on a plane.

"A Soul Stitched to Iron" - Tim's story. This story features Jacob Burn, the somewhat abrasive protagonist of Tim's novel Heart of Veridon. It's a solid entry. I can't say I thought it was brilliant, but it was pretty good. It works best in the descriptions of the weird and often chilling entities hiding in the shadows of Tim's invented city. Unfortunately the story itself felt strangely inconsequential. Even though there are big implied effects (death, destruction of families, another eon of sleep, etc. etc.) for other people, nothing really happens to the main character except he watches people (and things) go down, and nudges things along here and there. Still, not bad.

"iThink, therefor I am" - A rather short, silly, and slightly preachy piece. Vaguely amusing, but not one of my favorites.

Looking back over all that, I think I may appear more negative than I mean to be. It's a solid collection of quite readable stories. A few of the stories didn't work for me, but most of them did. None of the stories were absolutely mind-blowing, but maybe that's because I'm just a jaded husk of a man without a spark of wonder left in my soul. Maybe that's it.

It's worth reading.

Straussian

This is a boring, non-art, non-funny post. You may want to skip it.

There is an interesting guest blog over on Boing Boing about Straussian thinking. Which quotes another piece by Robert Locke:

The key Straussian concept is the Straussian text, which is a piece of philosophical writing that is deliberately written so that the average reader will understand it as saying one ("exoteric") thing but the special few for whom it is intended will grasp its real ("esoteric") meaning. The reason for this is that philosophy is dangerous.

And it was this that prompted me to the blog, where I will say my piece into the void so that it may be lost forever and no longer bother me.

This touches one of my most raw nerves. It's an arrogant thing to believe, and if there is one thing that really pisses me off, it's arrogance.

As summarized in that quote, the concept of the Straussian text is based on a few key ideas:

1) People cannot be trusted to think for themselves.

2) You, the initiate, and I, the teacher, are some of the special few people who can grasp the esoteric meanings (and, of course, be trusted to think for ourselves and others).

3) The vast majority of philosophers agree with point 1 (and, of course, me).

More succinctly, "You and I know better than everyone else what is best for them."

Which is poppycock. The only rational basis for a moral system is that people should decide for themselves. They're going to decide things for themselves whether we want them to or not, and if we do not allow them to make those choices, at some point we must discuss how to coerce them, which leads, inevitably, to force. I don't believe that force is never called for, but I do believe it is the last resort, and starting from the basic position that people should not be allowed to think for themselves and act on those thoughts seems entirely backward. You start from a position of complete freedom for all, and only restrict those freedoms where the case can be made that restrictions on freedoms of some are necessary to prevent harm or other damage to the freedoms of others. Otherwise you always end with special pleading for the ruling class, because rulers by definition have more freedom than the ruled. Perhaps my real problem is with kings, and those who would justify them.

I digress. Item 2 on my list is base flattery. The philosophy calls on you to join an exclusive club, which automatically makes it more inviting. One should always be wary of suggestions that you are better or smarter than other people. The people making these suggestions are all too often trying to sell you something you don't need.

3, of course, is arrogance (again). The Straussian text assumes that the authors wanted to hide something in their books, for you, the specially chosen, to extract. There are philosophers who would think so, certainly, but I believe they are at best second-rate. Ideas can be dangerous, to the established social order, to peace of mind, but hiding them does us no great service. Better that ideas see the light of day, to be challenged, and that we may challenge ourselves with them.

Fine if you are ready for the challenge, you say, but what about all those other idiots? Back to point 1 again. The problem with philosophies based on taking away people's choice for their own good (or not), is that you have to decide who gets to do the deciding, and there is no way to do this. All systems of choosing rulers will, at some point, lead to corruption and abuse of power. It is true that people will sometimes make choices that lead to harm for themselves or others, but this is the price we pay and the risk we take for being able to make the same choices ourselves. I would rather have an imperfect but free society than a more efficient dictatorship. (Of course, in current societies I don't get that choice, but I lean towards the one which more closely resembles my ideal.)

Is It Twitter's Fault?

No, not entirely. I do have a twitter account, as most anyone who could be reading this knows. However, the main thing is I have been insanely busy. Insanely. As in, busy in a way that constitutes a serious risk to one's mental health. Yes, busy, kinda. And, as is the norm when one is busy, nothing is getting done, at least, not much that I want to do, and absolutely nothing that would go on a blog.

There is some hope that the glimmer of light up ahead is the end of the tunnel, and not the oncoming train, but you'll have to give me a little more time to find out.