Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

Gibson Talks About Stuff

BoingBoing just put up a fantastic, pithy, wide-ranging interview with William Gibson. It’s well worth a read. Here he is on the various armageddon scenarios lurking on our horizon:

What do you worry about? I’m talking about loose nukes, global warming, economic meltdown, creeping fascism.

All of the above, and anything else in that general ballpark. As one does. Sometimes I remember that I evidently assumed that Ronald Reagan was probably about as weird as it was going to get; that that all seemed a bit over the top, a grave if semi-comic but blessedly temporary anomaly. That’s scary.

Bayard and Pete Go North

This May, my friends Bayard and Pete embarked on a month-long trip from New Mexico to Alaska. They drove the entire way — Albuquerque to Deadhorse — in a seasoned old RV named Bessie, and, best of all, chronicled the whole journey on their blog: Bayard and Pete Go North!

Here’s their description of the Dalton highway:

We made it, and what a trip it was! The road is this wonderful combination of crazy and magical. The road itself alternates between beautiful and smooth asphalt (very little of this!) to dirt which was rutted, muddy, narrow and seriously rough (a LOT of this!). A good speed for much of the road was 30 mph- but at times it was tough to keep Bessie above 15 mph! It took us 6 days at the wheel to travel it’s 828 miles, round trip. Granted, this was a fairly leisurely pace, but we met a lady working in Coldfoot who had spent a summer ferrying people up and down this road. She’d drive the whole length in a day, sleep 8 hours- and drive the whole thing back again! She seriously earned my respect! Not to mention- she made one fine key lime pie!

Despite it’s roughness the road had this almost intangible quality to it. The road is a thin line that weaves deep in to the wilderness of Alaska. The is literally nothing, zip, zero, nada for a hundred miles at a time. As you are bouncing and wash boarding your way down this road, at some point it hits you how far away from everything you are! We met a fellow who was working at Prudhoe Bay who had driven up there once and had had two blow outs in a row, and only had one spare. He said he ended up camping by the side of the road for a week waiting for a new tire! It is truly the end of the earth out there. But somehow these factors all come together to give the road a real soul. You feel like you are somewhere special. It’s hard to explain it, but we all felt sad when we finally pulled off the Dalton and back on to the smooth surface of state highway 2. The Dalton is road unlike any other, and it was a pleasure to get the opportunity to spend a week getting to know her.

I would never in a million years actually choose to drive 800 miles on a deserted wilderness road in a dodgy RV — I have a very strict avoid-nature-at-all-costs policy — but this actually makes it sound kind of awesome.

Ditto for the whole blog. Well worth a read.

So That’s What Bourgeois Looks Like

I don’t think I ever really understood the word “bourgeois”, as an epithet, until I read this paragraph:

When you realize your home’s look hasn’t evolved much since its post-college phase, you put the Ikea bookshelves on Craigslist, start searching for a contractor who won’t drive you crazy, scrutinize endless tile samples and stop considering Pottery Barn too public a venue to fight with your spouse. Then you prepare the neighbors and pay the county.

Instantly, powerfully nauseating.

Toxic Zealots

I continue to believe that Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry and the other deeply unqualified zealots on the Republican stage right now won’t make it past the primaries — but the damage is already done, just by virtue of their presence (and prominence) in the national dialog. They debase the entire political process, and make it seem like a clownshow that’s not worth paying any attention to.

Which just turns reasonable people away from politics. Which, in turn, strengthens the zealots’ hand.

The Diner on the Edge of Hell

My new story, The Diner on the Edge of Hell, is out in the latest issue of Weird Tales. Happiness!

Here’s an excerpt:

Petrie shrugged and sat back, chewing placidly, and looked around the diner. It was a spotless, perfect stereotype of a diner: bright porcelain tiles, harsh fluorescent lights, a juke box, a pinball machine. A line of pennants hung just below the ceiling, points-down, like a colorful array of stalactites. Booths lined three of the walls in a sort of squared-off U, capped by the long formica bar at the back of the diner. A demon in a kilt stood behind the bar, wiping down its glossy surface. His name was Harold.

“Hey,” called Petrie, and pointed at his empty mug. Harold glanced up, with two of his eyes, and nodded.

There was a flash of color on the other side of the window, and a rift opened up in the molten sky. Janikowski leaned toward the window and watched something pour out of the rift — a long columnar thump of something, like a narrow waterfall — and explode into a roiling particulate cloud when it touched the ground. He squinted through the muck until the cloud resolved itself a swarm of creatures, tiny with distance, making its way toward the diner.

“I thought we were waiting for a girl,” said Petrie.

“We are.”

“Then why am I looking at a horde of demons?” There was a tightness in Petrie’s voice that some people might have mistaken for fear.

Janikowski stood up. “I don’t know.”

“This is a setup.”

“Maybe.” He took a step toward the door, looked back. “You coming?”

“Hell yes I’m coming.” Petrie ducked under the table and came up with his cannon. It was long and smooth and tubular and taller than he was, made out of some kind of milk-white metal, with a muzzle the size of a rabbit hole and some sort of fiendishly complicated mechanism on the butt end. “This is finally getting interesting.”

The GOP BFG

From what I can tell, the new debt ceiling deal isn’t quite the shit sandwich everyone was expecting. The New York Times has a good flowchart outlining its various twist and turns. Here are the good parts:

• Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid are essentially cordoned off from any of the immediate cuts, though Medicare providers aren’t.
• There really aren’t much in the way of cuts in the short term, so if by some miracle the economy pulls out of its nosedive before the end of the year this deal might actually not make things worse — at least not immediately.
• $350 billion of the near-term cuts come from the war budget, which is usually sacrosanct. This is genuinely surprising, and a real win for the Dems.
• We probably haven’t destroyed our own economy.

Yay? I guess the list could have been even shorter, but this is still pretty depressing. 95% awful still qualifies as awful.

Specifically: this bill is all spending cuts. There aren’t any new revenues of any kind. That can has been kicked down the road, to a small congressional committee that’s going to negotiate a super-deal at the end of the year that will be bipartisan and wise and fair and not at all a reprise of the clownshow we’ve endured for the last couple of months, and they shall meet in a cloud city under a huge rainbow with unicorns flying around them scattering pixie dust.

If they don’t come to some sort of agreement, then a set of pre-ordained cuts go into effect automatically — half discretionary spending, half war spending, carving into both sides’ sacred cows. That, plus the threat of allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire entirely (which they should!), will supposedly goad both parties into doing the right thing. Kevin Drum has already enumerated some reasons why it probably won’t.

But really this feels mostly bad to me, for all the obvious reasons: what this economy needs is more revenues, more spending, more infrastructure, and it needs a strong spendthrifty federal government to make all that happen. Obama is telling us that’ll come in December, from the super-duper committee, but, for one thing, that committee is just a distillation of the deadlocked congress as a whole, and there’s no reason to express the GOP will be more reasonable in microcosm; and for another (as Chris Hayes points out) even a committee half-full of democrats won’t produce anything authentically progressive.

So, to summarize: right now our economy is gutshot, curled up on the ground, gasping for breath, and all this agreement manages to do is not put a gun to its head and pull the trigger.

But, worst of all, the GOP now has their very own BFG. Obama can raise the debt ceiling more or less at his discretion til the end of 2012, so theoretically Boehner and his crew of nihilists won’t be able to grab the wheel again and steer the whole country off a cliff for a while. But the fact remains that the GOP now has a new weapon in their arsenal. A really really good one. Paul Krugman makes the argument that all this is just another sign that our system of government has stopped working — or, rather, that it’s being steadily dismantled by bad actors. Under the circumstances, it’s hard to argue with that.

OS X Lion: Mostly Good with Dollops of Weirdly Bad

The bad things about Lion aren’t slightly bad, they’re what-the-hell-are-you-fucking-kidding-me? bad. Really, they don’t even qualify as “bad”: they’re more in the “insane” family. I’m thinking about the arbitrarily reversed scrolling, the banished scrollbars, the hideous faux-leather calendar, the fake-open-book address book. Those last two in particular — in their defiant rejection of the minimalist direction the rest of the OS is taking (not to mention twenty years of UI progress) — feel like rare failures of the Apple hive mind

But the good things are really good, and often great. The baked-in full-screen support, the swipey navigation options, Mission Control, Launchpad — all unqualified wins, in my book. This feels like an operating system designed for laptops, in particular small laptops, and I couldn’t be happier about that.

And then there are all these little surprises that make you smile: the login page that automatically pops up when you join a public network; the auto-correction stuff (though the smile fades quickly in this case; need to figure out how to turn that off); the animations when you bring an app out of fullscreen. I grimaced when Lord Jobs proclaimed his intention to mine iOS for OS X features, but some things actually do seem to translate well.

There are meatier things here (the application autosave/state management stuff is a real gamechanger, I suspect, and probably the first step toward document management that finally transcends the file system), and I look forward to playing with them. But for now I think I’m just going to keep swiping back and forth between applications, grinning like a fool.

What’s Coming

When challenged, apologists for our burgeoning surveillance state generally fall back to the if-you’re-not-doing-anything-wrong-you-have-nothing-to-worry-about argument. That position is wrongheaded for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is that it puts a great deal of faith in the competence and honesty of the snoops.

This latest entry in the Casey Anthony saga highlights failures in both areas:

Assertions by the prosecution that Casey Anthony conducted extensive computer searches on the word “chloroform” were based on inaccurate data, a software designer who testified at the trial said Monday.

The designer, John Bradley, said Ms. Anthony had visited what the prosecution said was a crucial Web site only once, not 84 times, as prosecutors had asserted …

The finding of 84 visits was used repeatedly during the trial to suggest that Ms. Anthony had planned to murder her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee, who was found dead in 2008. Ms. Anthony, who could have faced the death penalty, was acquitted of the killing on July 5.

In a nutshell: the software used to track Anthony’s online movements produced radically bad data, and the prosecutors failed to disclose this after it was brought to their attention.

If You Can’t Beat ‘em, Co-Opt ‘em

Kevin Drum is ruminating on why our politicians have more or less completely ignored the crushing unemployment we’ve been buried under since the economy collapsed, three years ago. Part of the reason, he thinks, is that the people in the media who would normally be banging the drum are now, by and large, part of the moneyed class:

The long-term unemployed don’t vote much, they aren’t organized, and in electoral numbers there aren’t that many of them. All true. But thanks to a political and media class that’s mostly pretty well off, they’re also largely invisible. Writing about them is more like an anthropological exercise than a simple description of your friends and neighbors. And it’s one reason that we’re doing so little to help them.

This reminds me of something I read a while ago, about the advent of the middle class in Europe: the rising bourgeoisie, just now clawing their way out of poverty and oppression, were beginning to question — and rebel against — the small group of wealthy landowners who had for a long time used their power to suppress and exploit everyone else.

Those early plutocrats didn’t fight the new upstarts, exactly. They realized that it would be easier, cheaper, and more effective to just draw them into their camp: if you can’t beat them, co-opt them. So they granted this new class just enough prosperity to make them happy and complacent. They gave them something to lose.

Which worked out well. The new rabblerousers, relatively few in number, learned to just shut up and enjoy the fruits of their capitulation, and the rest of the populace went back to being quietly oppressed and ignored.

We have an actual (though dwindling) middle class now, but you could argue that something similar is happening today. The powerful have discovered that they can’t control the message without controlling the messengers, and the best way to do that is to give them a seat at the table — or at least under the table, where the crumbs are plentiful, and the rest of the world, going about its sullen business beyond the wall of wingtips and sharply pressed trousers, is only just barely visible.

My New Robot

My friend Cathy got me this amazing steampunk robot. It’s made out of castoff bits of metal, and its torso is a giant gauge, and I love it.

Here he is, standing sentinel at my desk, warding off intruders.