Entries from March 2004 ↓

There was this woman at Starbucks the other day. She was pretty, about my age, short brown hair, black skirt, flats. Sitting at a table near the windows at the front of the store. She hadn’t ordered a drink, I noticed, a flagrant violation of the implicit Code of Starbucks Etiquette, which requires you to purchase at least one beverage if you are to use precious table resources. So I knew immediately that something was amiss.

She was waiting for someone. Every time I looked up from my work, she seemed more agitated, irritated, angry. She kept glancing out the window, looking at her watch, checking her phone. At one point she buried her head in her hands. This was no normal waiting pattern. She was seriously disturbed about something.

And then, ten minutes later, this guy came in. I looked up just in time to see him drop a large sheaf of papers on the woman’s table and get in the drink line. She immediately drew the papers to her and started going through them, staring hard at each page, furrowing her brow, moving her lips as she read.

What was odd about the whole transaction was that neither of them looked at the other, or spoke, or in any way acknowledged each other’s presence. He might as well have deposited the papers on an unoccupied table. She might as well have been examining a pile of documents that just magically appeared in front of her.

Eventually, the guy wandered back, drink in hand, and sat down, and looked out the window while the woman finished reading. She took out a pen and started to sign. As she got done with each page, she’d pass it across the table, still without looking at him, and he’d sign, without looking at her. Occasionally, one of them would move their lips, and then, after a short pause, the other would do the same. This may have been a conversation. It was hard to tell.

And then the papers were signed, and they were standing and leaving. I watched them walk out the door, two stridently unattached people moving in roughly the same direction.

I think that what I witnessed was the last stages of a divorce. It could have been anything, I suppose, but that mix of familiarity and frosty neglect made me think of a close relationship gone catastrophically wrong. And I thought: So that’s what it looks like. Whenever I think of a marriage failing, I think of screaming, accusations, tears, recriminations, thrown dishes, emotional anguish, just an epic meltdown. And that seems right, actually, it seems good. If something as huge and important as a marriage dies, it ought to die spectacularly, like a planet exploding, like a star going supernova. Not like this. Not in desultory silence, in a Starbucks, on a rainy Saturday afternoon.

The goldinium rays of Solinium filtered falteringly in through the dirty stained-glass windows of the High Hall of Skullengard. Lord Gropnaw the All-Powerful sat resplendently upon his throne and looked gazingly down at the assembled throngs. He had ever been a handsome man, a perfect specimen of maleness, and many a minstrel had composed paeans to his manly beauty; and yet today he seemed more handsome than ever, and his manliness was as a beacon to all members of his sex. But Lord Gropnaw spared nary a moment upon the contemplation of these trifles: his thick, manful eyebrows, his sturdy, chiseled face, his strong (but also kind and understanding and friendly and occasionally ruthless but only when the occasion demanded it) eagle glare had lured hundreds of beautiful women to his shores, only to founder miserably upon the shoals of his celibacy. For Lord Gropnaw cared only for the well-being of the World of Oerth, and could not bear the thought of wasting any of his prodigious energy in the pursuit of the fleshy pleasures that were daily offered to him.

“People of Oerth,” he boomed now, in his deepest voice, a thick, rich basso profundo, “today I have done our Land a great service: I have rid it of the most dangerous danger to walk its verdant fields; the most vile and despicable man ever born to woman; the most horrible, twisted, evil, nasty and ruthless creature that creation has every produced. Do you know the name of this scourge?”

“Gronk,” whispered the throngs. “Gronk,” they chanted. “Gronk Gronk Gronk Gronk Gronk!”

“The battle was epic, and interminable, and attenuated, and it lasted for a very long time, ” said Lord Gropnaw, “and my enemy used every vile trick in his arsenal of vile tricks; and – in truth – there were moments when I despaired of defeating him.” He paused, dramatically, and gazed into the worshipful faces of his people. “But defeat him I did!” The crowds erupted in a great, full-throated cheer. “I cast the vileness from the halls of Skullengard, and from the shores of the Oerth. You are free!”

“Free!” they screamed.

“Free to serve me, and do my bidding, and bow to my every whim!”

“Your every whim!” they screamed.

“Free to die in my wars, and till my fields, and build my chateaux, and give me not less than 75 percent of your yearly incomes, and clean my boots, and fetch my laundry! Free!”

“Free!” they said, and erupted into a wild cheer.

Lord Gropnaw looked on, and a manly, but restrained, smile settled into his ruddy features. He had saved the world – again – and yet he felt no pride, or triumph. Only a deep, abiding satisfaction.

I was eating a peach when the bomb blew up behind our building. It was a huge explosion, the loudest I’d heard in five years of civil war, and it knocked my senses so profoundly askew that the fear mushrooming in my mind didn’t quite know where to go, or how to reach me.

So I wasn’t afraid, exactly, because I wasn’t really thinking; the secondary warzone nervous system that forms between pure reflex and conscious thought was already kicking in, pushing me to my feet and toward the door. Get away, it said. Go somewhere that isn’t here. But I stopped and looked back and saw the remains of my peach had slipped off the plate and spilled onto the table. It was very important that I not leave it on the table like that. I don’t know why. So I went back, quickly, and pushed it onto the plate, and turned to run, and it slipped off again, so I turned back and slid it back on, but in my haste pushed it too far, and it fell off the other side, so I went back a third time, and finally I got it right, and I could leave.

A black cloud was rising behind our building. Sirens were already wailing. I made it to the living room and found the rest of my family, my mom and my dad and my brother, and we all went downstairs, five flights to the garage cum bomb shelter and stood there with all the other families, waiting it out. We’d been down there before, several times. I remember once we arrived to find a jeep from one of the militias parked just inside the entrance. It had some kind of long lethal cannon mounted on the back. A few of the men tried to convince the soldiers to leave. You’re making us a target, they said. There are children. But the soldiers refused. It was dangerous out there.

Or maybe we didn’t go down to the garage, maybe we just hid in the stairwell, or huddled in the living room. I don’t remember, really, they all sort of merge together, all the crises and cataclysms. I remember sitting and listening to the sound of falling glass for hours, bits of shattered windows coming back to earth like rain.

We found out later that the bomb had exploded in a bar. I don’t know how bad the damage was, or how many people were killed. I don’t think it even occurred to me to want to know. It was just a bomb, like all the other bombs. Except this one was closer, and louder, and it made the sky rain glass.

It has been pointed out to me that my recent post on geek boot camps was nasty, brutish, uncouth, and profane. I took this as a compliment, of course. It was also mentioned, however, that it was wincingly homophobic, and a little too savage to be funny. This I wasn’t too happy about.

So I apologize if I offended anyone. I wasn’t trying to be homophobic, just drill-seargent-y. My extensive research into the topic (basically, multiple viewings of the first half of Full Metal Jacket, about fifteen years ago) seemed to indicate that I was on the right track; but robbed of context, I realize that the whole thing might have just seemed mean.

I will try to refrain from similar nastiness in the future.

I made the mistake, six months ago, of ditching my staid, stolid boring wireless phone service with Verizon for one of the sexy/flashy phones offered by AT&T Wireless. This phone is a thing of beauty, a marvel: it has a 65K color display, a built-in camera, bluetooth, a calendar app, a cool icon-based UI, SMS, GSM, GPRS, PMS, FBI, and CIA. I can synch it with my computer (wirelessly) to download addresses and calendar entries. And it’s tiny, nearly invisible to the naked eye, and fits nicely in my pocket. It’s great. The only thing I can’t do with it is call people on the telephone.

Not very often, anyway. I quickly discovered that I couldn’t use it in my office, where I spend half my days, or inside any building, really, where “building” is “any enclosed or semi-enclosed area not resting directly on top of a cell tower.” And the signal, when it decides to make an appearance, is terrible, turns everyone’s voice into a tinny squeak sounding from the bottom of a well. Oh, and if I venture outside of my home area to make a call (where “home area” is “anyplace within a five-foot radius of the AT&T Wireless Store”), then I get charged roaming fees.

But it’s not really the phone’s fault, it’s AT&T’s. Their service is one of the worst in the country. I didn’t, unfortunately, discover this until it was too late, and I’d locked myself into a one year contract with them. This means two things: one, I was charged a criminally large termination fee when I cancelled; and two, my sexy/flashy phone is now useless.

It’s useless because AT&T cripples their phones by “locking” them, which essentially prevents them from being used by any other service. This is especially outrageous for GSM phones, because they use the same protocol as most of the rest of the world does; so instead of being able to take my phone to Bolivia or Turkmenistan or France or whatever and signing it up for a service there, I’m going to have to be content with feeding it to my dog.

But this kind of fascist cell phone chicanery doesn’t stop with AT&T. The entire industry is complicit in this abuse, for the simple reason that they can be: they control the network, they sell the phones. They benefit from the confusing alphabet soup of different standards that keep their consumers in the dark and allow them to present their behavior as totally cool, Just The Way It Is. But the extent of this outrage isn’t completely apparent until you compare it with the internet.

Conceptually, internet and wireless phone networks are the same thing: communication media that ferry data from one client to another. In practice, the differences couldn’t be more stark: the internet was built on top of an open protocol (TCP/IP) that, very early on, became the defacto standard; and — more importantly — no one owns it. There is no Central Authority regulating the internet, dictating who can use it and how. You decide how you access it. You decide how you want to use it, and what you want to use it for.

Imagine if phone companies had come up with the Internet: we’d be buying Verizon access points, or AT&T access points, or Cingular access points that we’d hook up to the side of our computers to get them on the net. These access points would control where we stored our email, what pages we could see, what programs we could download. They’d be unable to communicate with the other networks. And, if we decided that we wanted to switch services, we’d have to ditch them and buy brand new ones, and lose all of the email and games and pages we’d stored on the old ones.

The internet, as it is today, is a victory for open standards and open source, and a legitimization of the two pillars of the hacker ethic: distrusting centralized authority, and letting all information be free. So when giant companies like Microsoft, faced with challenges from open source operating systems, development languages, and protocols try to tell you that their proprietary, suffocating, monopolistic approach to the world is the right way to go, consider the source. The closed source.

Clay has written an achingly beautiful entry about an achingly difficult loss. Read it here.

If you’ve ever taken a fiction writing class, anywhere on the planet, you’ve been told that the most important thing you can do in your work is show, not tell. It’s a perfect 10 on the hackneyed writing advice scale, more popular than the ever-popular “write what you know”, and beats “minimize adverbs” and “avoid cliches” by a country mile. It’s such an omnipresent mantra that it’s become something of a cliche itself, a tired old redundancy that engenders much sighing and rolling of eyes. Well, obviously you show, not tell. How could you do otherwise? It’s like telling someone to breathe through their nose, not their ass.

But for all that, I never really got it. I mean, I understood the concept. It’s better to have Daphne sobbing and looking in the mirror at a broken woman with raccoon mascara eyes than to just come out and say that she’s sad because she got dumped by the mime; better to have Alfred tattoo his girlfriend’s name on his scrotum than just say that his love for her is a little creepy and dangerous. But I never really understood how much better a story could be if you just let your audience figure stuff out.

Well, I think I do now. And I have a movie to thank for it.

The movie is Lost In Translation. You’ve probably heard of it. It got nominated for a bunch of Oscars, including best actor and best director, and won for best screenplay. I won’t say it deserved best director over The Return of the King (that would get me disbarred permanently from the League of Pointy Hats), but it should have definitely won everything else.

It’s a small, quiet movie. A couple of reviews have likened it to a short story on screen, which sounds about right to me. It focuses on the lives of two unhappy, unimportant, self-absorbed people who meet in a hotel in Tokyo. There are no explicitly stated (or even strongly implied) implications to their unhappiness, no obvious messages in their epiphanies (if they have any). But it’s the quiet understatement of this movie, for me, that propels it out of the realm of a minor personality piece into a larger story about youth and age and the unassuageable longing that both have for one another.

It does all this by focusing very tightly on its characters — an older, cynical, dispirited actor, and a young woman, adrift and just graduated from college — who fall into something that might be love. We’re not sure, because they’re not sure. Their are no pronouncements here, no facile, expository conversations, not much to go on at all except the way they look at each other sometimes, the distance between them as they share a cigarette, the uncomfortable silences during lunch at a sushi restaurant. Lost in Translation manages the enviable trick of telling us nothing at all about what’s going on here, without being cryptic or coy or irritating about it. We see the surface of things, and have to guess at what’s happening underneath. This inevitably requires us to inject ourselves into these people’s lives, drawing on our own experiences to understand theirs, and that requires at least some measure of empathy. And once you’ve got your audience empathizing with your characters, you’ve got them hooked.

It got me hooked, anyway. I’m not sure I fully understand everything the movie wanted to tell me, because it resisted the urge to tell me anything; but I’m still thinking about the stuff it showed me, and probably will be for a long time.

So it turns out that the military is thinking about starting a selective service program for people with “special skills,” noncombat abilities that may come in handy in the event of war. One of the skill sets they’re looking for is — get this — computers.

This led me to wonder how the army would go about training a bunch of computer geek recruits. It might look something like this:

Drill Instructor: Ok, maggots! I want to see some real god damn code today! All I’ve gotten out of you grunts for the past three god damn weeks is text versions of hangman, YACC Fortran parsers, and pissant little loops that calculate Pi to the twenty-five-thousandth digit. Do you think the Corps cares what the twenty-five-thousandth digit of Pi is?

Martinez: Sir! That digit is 8, sir!

DI: God damn it, Martinez, that wasn’t my question! I don’t give a flying rancid pustulating ratfuck what the twenty-five-thousandth digit of Pi is, and neither does any self-respecting man who’s ever seen a woman naked! Have you ever seen a naked woman, Martinez? Do you know what a woman is?

Martinez: Sir! Yes sir! I have an extensive library of Pamela Anderson images …

DI: I’m not talking about pictures, you shit-caked scum-soaked pencil-neck geek! I’m talking about real live women! Flesh and blood! Do you even understand the concept of a three dimensional woman who exists outside of your monitor?

Martinez: Sir! Yes sir!

DI: No you do not, Martinez! You wouldn’t know a woman if she ripped off your clothes and climbed onto your tiny little dick! Which will never happen, Martinez! Do you understand? Never!

Martinez: Sir, yes sir!

DI: Private Martinez, can you tell me what a fibonacci sequence is?

Martinez: Sir! A fibonacci sequence is the product of all the positive integers from 1 to a given number, sir!

DI: That is incorrect, Private Martinez! Were you born with your head up your ass, or did you put it in there yourself?

Martinez: Sir! I was not born with my head up my ass, sir!

DI: So you put it there yourself. And why is that, private? Were you looking for your dick?

Martinez: Sir! No sir!

DI: Well, if you’re still haven’t found it, recruit, I suggest you check Private Sommer’s ass. Maybe you left it there last time you faggots went out on patrol together.

Martinez: Sir! I have never placed my dick in Private Sommer’s ass, sir!

DI: That is none of my affair, Private Martinez! If you and Private Sommers wish to defile one another in the eyes of man and God, that is your sick, disgusting, perverted business! I will not ask you about it, and you will not tell me about it! Private Sommers! Define fibonacci sequence!

Sommers: Sir! A fibonacci sequence is a sequence of numbers in which each successive number is equal to the sum of the two preceding numbers, sir!

DI: Very good, Private! I’m happy to see that you haven’t been spending all your time jacking off to naked pictures of Private Martinez! Now write me a recursive method that creates a fibonacci sequence up to the number 514,229. And I mean a recursive method! I don’t want to see any pissant while loops in your code, do you hear me? If I see any while loops, for loops, do loops, or fucking fruit loops in your code I will personally feed you your motherboard. Is that clear, Private Sommers?

Sommers: Sir, yes, sir! What language should I use, sir?

DI: What language do you think, you dumb grunt? How many times did that two-bit whore you call your mama drop you, anyway?

Sommers: Twice, sir! That I know of, sir!

DI: I find that hard to believe, Private. Unless she was dropping you from a third story window. You will use Ada, the language of the Marine Corps, the one true language, the language consecrated for use in all Corps systems by God. When God created the universe, he used Ada to program the dispersal pattern of the matter that spread away from the infinitely dense pinprick that once comprised all of creation! When He made earth, he used Ada to model the oceans, the land, the sun, the moon, and the sky! When He created man, he used Ada to design our bodies and our brains! Except for you, Sommers! He used BASIC on you, a really early interpreted version of BASIC that didn’t even have the concept of functions. That is why you are so slow and feeble and worthless! Can you tell me what BASIC stands for, private?

Sommers: Sir, Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instructional Code, sir!

DI: That is incorrect, recruit! It stands for Braindead Asshole Shithead Inbred Cocksucker! Which, not coincidentally, describes you perfectly, Private Sommers! During your time with me you will eat, drink, shit, and breathe Ada. Is that clear? And I’m not talking about that overengineered butt-ugly bleeding sore they call Ada 95, either. You will code in Ada 83!

Sommers: Sir! Ada 83 is not an object-oriented language, sir! It is object-based, and largely functional! Won’t that make it more difficult to model real-world situations, sir?

DI: Object oriented languages are for cowardly pussies, Private Sommers! Cowardly pussy programmers too afraid to code down at the level of the machine, who need pussy abstractions to hold their hands and lead them away from the bits and the bytes and the registers and the memory arrays of the one truth path! I will not tolerate such abstractions in this unit! Is that clear?

Sommers: Sir, yes sir!

DI: Good! Now all of you pussies drop and give me 2⁸!

If I had access to a time machine, I know exactly what I’d do with it. I’d travel forward in time until I found the oldest possible version of myself, a future me with just a couple of minutes left to live — sitting bent and alone at my window in a nursing home, or laid out in a hospital bed in the last stages of a terminal disease, or hanging upsidedown and broken in a wrecked car — and I’d ask myself: what do you miss most?

Because the problem with being forced to travel through time on a rail, at a single, constant speed, is not that you can’t go back ten minutes and unsay that thing you just said to your boss, or go forward ten years and check out how things might turn out before you ask your girlfriend to marry you. It’s that you can’t know how good you have it now.

Life is the small things that happen between the stuff you think is important. And it’s hard to recognize those things for what they are, or realize how much you’ll miss them when they’re gone. I’m talking about the way the wind feels against your face when you’re running flat-out, or the tingle that shimmers up your scalp when your lover touches the back of your neck, or the breeze your dog makes wagging his tail when you walk in the house, or the sound of the world waking up at dawn in autumn, or the way your father looks at you when you’ve done something to make him proud. All the little things that barely register at the time, but leave holes large and small when they’re gone.

So if I do manage to catch up with myself just before the end, I’ll pull up a chair and ask: “What do you miss most?” And, if the terminal me has enough life in him left to talk, I’ll listen, and I’ll remember. And when I make it back to the present, I’ll try to notice those things, for a change, and appreciate them for what they are, and revel in everything I have, for as long as I can.

I discovered some new arcade games this weekend. In fact, I discovered lots and lots of new arcade games this weekend. Exactly twice as many as there were before, to be precise.

It started with QBert. I’ve recently been playing a tiny, stripped-down version of this ancient game on my mobile phone. QBert is an orange avocado-shaped creature with a trumpet snout, two stubby little legs and no arms. He jumps around one side of a step pyramid, changing the color of each little square plateau he lands on it. When he’s changed them all, he gets to move on to another pyramid. His quest is hampered by various baddies who jump around after him: little red spheres, ghostly mauve squiggles, a coiled purple snake. Contact with any of these malefactors kills Q*Bert instantly, as does jumping off the edges of the pyramid.

I was looking over my wife’s shoulder as she played the other day, and noticed something odd. Over and over again, her guy would pause at the top step of the pyramid, look down its sloped expanse, turn around, and jump off the edge. For a while, I just assumed that she was just really bad at QBert. But no. It turns out that she was playing a completely different game than I was. She called it Suicide QBert.

Suicide Q*Bert is a simple variant of the original concept, wherein our little orange avatar looks upon the life stretching out before him — the endless leaping from square to square, the numbing sameness of his lonely existence, the constant fear of falling prey to brightly-color geometric shapes that hate him and want to kill him for no particular reason — and decides that it’s just not worth the effort. He turns, says a quick prayer to his orange avocado god, closes his eyes, and jumps to his death. Three times. Game over.

Your role, as the player, is to assist Suicide QBert in his quest for oblivion. In some ways, it’s not a very difficult job. As in real life, it’s far easier to die than it is to stay alive; and if you find the prospect of jumping repeatedly into the void tiresome, you can just maneuver QBert into the path of one of the ubiquitous bad guys bounding around the side of this pyramid. Suicide Q*Bert doesn’t care how he dies, as long as he dies quickly.

I’ve played many suicide games since Q*Bert. Suicide Pac Man eschews the pointless gobbling of tasteless yellow dots and just wocka wocka wockas over to the nearest ghost and surrenders itself to a quick, ectoplasmic demise. Suicide Mario stares up through the girders toward Donkey Kong and his captive princess, waiting to be flattened by barrels or consumed by bouncing fireballs. Suicide Defender turns its back on the phalanx of evil spaceships speeding toward its position, and waits patiently for the barrage of laser fire that will shatter it into a million tiny pieces of falling light.

Playing these suicide variants isn’t fun, in the usual sense of the word. In fact, it’s emotionally draining, killing your electronic stand-ins over and over and over again, like some pitiless, serial executioner. It’s one thing to be simply inept, incapable of helping them to avoid whatever terrible death stalks them in their strange, electronic worlds; it’s quite enough to engineer that death with cold, calculated precision.

But, on the other hand, the games are quick — I’ve gotten it to where I can finish a hundred games of Suicide Q*Bert in under thirty seconds — and they do give you some small feeling of accomplishment. You’re an arcade Kevorkian, helping these little half-sentient smears of color escape the pointless world into which they’ve been thrust. You’re an angel of mercy, a grim savior, a friend. Every death you hasten is a pointless life unendured. That’s got to count for something.