I am leaving on a jet plane and I do not, in fact, know when I will be back again. Although the area of uncertainty in this case covers one or two days.
There are reasons I don't want to make this a long story. The short version is that my grandmother back on Long Island is entering hospice, and I've been told that now is the time to go see her. So that's what I'm doing--I'll fly overnight and be in New York tomorrow morning. I'll probably be coming back Wednesday but nothing's been purchased yet.
Is that all there is to say? Right now it feels like that's all.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Netflix, stars, treks, observations thereon
Since Netflix came into my house I've become keenly aware that I had been living the life of a savage, eking media one serving at a time out of solid-form magnetic storage devices. I get the feeling that the next generation is going to think of bandwidth like we think of running water: so essential, pervasive, and reliable that it’s easy to forget how recently it became normal. (Not that my bandwidth is that reliable. I’m writing this post in Word while I wait for my webotubes to unclog. But I suspect that I will live to see the datastream made continuous.) Now, I hope never to live in a house without a bookshelf, and probably a DVD collection as well, but I wonder if the first generation to see indoor plumbing didn’t also have its holdouts who never learned to trust pipes enough to move somewhere without a well.
Thanks to Netflix, I have joined some of my friends in watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. I remember watching ST:TNG with my dad when it was on television originally, and never took to another Trek like I did that one. But being the tender age I was, I missed the first few seasons. The opportunity to go back and watch from “Encounter at Farpoint” has been… fascinating.
The episodes of the first season I’ve seen have not been the Trek I remember. Certainly if I didn’t know what it would become, I wouldn’t seek out more episodes. There’s a lot of bad. But, as with Q vis a vis the human race, the pilot shows just enough potential that we’re willing to withhold judgment for a season or two.
The geneses are there of what would become really cool by the end of the series. It lays out the cast of characters that, with a little tweaking (sorry, Tasha) provide a rich range of characters to play with, without resorting to the sort of incompetence and destructive behavior that fueled the drama in, say, Battlestar Galactica. (In some regards, ST:TNG is a procedural, like Law and Order or The West Wing; we come to it to see the crew of the Enterprise do their jobs well.)
All in all, it’s a sort of homo erectus to the original series’ Australopithecus. In time we’ll see the show develop intellectually, and learn to knap Worf’s head into a more functional shape.
But I must say, one thing that really struck me is that in Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future, humans have apparently evolved into a race of insufferable space twits. Couldn’t we have learned anything about diplomacy? Tolerance? Instead, say, when an alien ambassador wants to show Commander William “Babyface” Riker his scrapbook, he just smiles and says, “Oh, scrapbooking. We humans gave up that barbaric practice long ago.”
One thing it really makes me want to do is read Wil Wheaton’s book, Memories of the Future, because looking back on this show can be so darn fun, and I’ve seen him do it with merciless, good-natured verve.
I come back to my newly frustrating internet connection, which has been spotty ever since I moved into Girlfriend's old room. As consequence, I’m not sure when this post will actually go up, but it’s too late for me to keep waiting for it tonight.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
September 11, 2011
The tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks is naturally producing a lot of commentary. I think that's good. While my general rule on this blog has been to avoid commenting on politics, I'm going to relax that today. It's not that I think what I have to say is especially important, but it is what it is, and I'd like to share it.
People like to say things about never forgetting this or that, but forgetting is too easy. We're bombarded with new information all the time, and new versions of old information. Then things happen, and people get old and die. I wish, for example, that I had asked my grandfather questions about World War II. Things that only he remembered are gone now. So I hope that a lot of people record what they remember while they can.
I've never much liked the term "9/11" but that's the one that stuck, perhaps for exactly the same reasons that I dislike it. It's just two numbers, perhaps the most banal and hollow name that could have been produced using the English language. But the event itself was huge and complicated, and I remember the time we spent groping for a name adequate to three separate suicide attacks and everything that happened around them. I think we'd recoil from a name worthy of the events it described, and so we chose the opposite.
I saw a blog argue the other day that the importance of 9/11 as an event is grossly overestimated. I disagree, though it's not really an argument you can have. 3,000 is a huge number and a tiny number. As a number of human lives it only barely defies our ability to conceptualize it, hardly worth mention against crimes and tragedies killing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, thousands of thousands. I've met people now who don't feel very strongly about 9/11 and that's always strange for me but I think I'm beginning to understand them. In terms only of death and destruction it wasn't a national event, and I can't speak to the effects of that anyway--nobody I knew died. But 9/11 really was important as a psychic event, and it either affected you or not. It affected me.
Ten years ago I was sixteen years old, a senior in high school. I lived on Long Island, at the suburbs roughly midway across the gradient from New York's urban sprawl on one side to posh beach houses on the other. My best friend at the time's father commuted to the city and worked in the World Trade Center, and this was nothing special.
And while I'm setting the stage, I want to point out one thing that's too easily forgotten: confusion. It's so easy to forget what it was like not to know something that you learn later. But when people in the future look up 9/11, if they only read the true facts of what happened, they'll practically be reading lies.
September 11, 2001 wasn't the day Al Qaeda launched a terrorist attack. Not until the end, anyway. First, it was the day a plane crashed into one of the Twin Towers.
We found out about this first period, when our teacher got a phone call forwarded through the main office. She had a relative--I don't remember which--in the WTC, and she let us know, since any of us might have also.
I remember on my way to my next class, hearing the radio playing in the janitor's room. Two radio hosts were talking about the crash, and one of them pointed out that it was very foggy over the city. This made sense at the time.
I remember that distinctly but I have no memory of when the second plane hit. The school administration was trying not to say too much, and maybe they never announced it. In my next class there was an announcement made over the loudspeaker that there had been "an explosion" at the World Trade Center. No other details. I still don't understand why they called it an explosion, if they were withholding information to prevent panic. But like every decision made that day, it's easy to criticize. No one knew what to do--the school administration was figuring it out as they went along just like the rest of us.
I took the opportunity to tell the class what I knew. At this point, knowing there had been a plane involved, I had the advantage on everyone else.
At some point before the next class it made its way through the class that there had been a second plane, and there was no question that America was being attacked. I use that phrase unreservedly, even though people tend to look at it as hyperbole now. At that point, though, that was exactly the sense we had.
Next class was Spanish, and the teacher refused to postpone a test we had that day. I respect the decision now (I might even have then). Everyone just wanted to tell everyone else what they had heard, and she probably wanted to know too, which in all honesty I never thought of until just now.
But I did get some information before the test was handed out: New York City was experiencing a full-scale air raid. Bombs were being dropped. Whoever told me that didn't say what country the bombers had come from, and I don't recall asking. I think at that point I accepted that information was going to be incomplete, but I had no reason to doubt what I was hearing.
I realized then that this was a very important day. I took out my school-supplied day planner and wrote underneath that day's homework assignments, "Bombing of New York begins." Because I had no idea when what was starting would end, and I definitely had no idea how hard it would be to ever forget the date.
The rest of the day is a blur until the end. At some point I got set straight about the bombing. In the cafeteria after school someone was collecting money to buy bottled water for rescue workers. I had $20. I bought a pretzel and gave the rest to the guy collecting. He directed onlookers to my example, and I was very proud of myself. I don't remember if the pretzel was any good.
Before my mom came to pick me up someone explained what had really happened: two planes had hit the Twin Towers, and another had hit the Pentagon, the Air Force had shot down a fourth one headed to Washington D.C., and fighters were pursuing a fifth that was headed for Los Angeles.
I'm not sure I knew the towers had fallen until I got home. Once I talked to my parents, who had had access to the news and not the high school grapevine, I became acquainted with the facts, such as were known.
The first estimate of the death toll was over 6,000. In a few days it would shrink by more than half as redundancies were discovered between the different sources, but it took a long time for the real figure to replace that first one in my mind.
I was mad. I was swearing in my head, and that was not at all normal for me. It had been unthinkable--I mean really unthinkable--that someone could attack America on American soil, right in the heart. You do not f*ck with us. I wanted to do something. I wanted to fight someone. Carpet-bombing Afghanistan that very day seemed like a perfectly appropriate response.
I don't think I'm the only one who thought that, and I want to point out that we didn't attack Afghanistan that day. It was more than a month before the military response, and I remember how frustrated some people were. Whatever happened afterward, I have to respect what President Bush did in that month: he waited when the public wanted to attack now, and he projected a confidence that there would be justice. He made a humanitarian case for dismantling the Taliban regime to people who thought they already had good reason to want blood. Looking back, it was a scary time. There could have been rampant vigilantism, race riots, if the President had been more bloodthirsty or more reluctant.
The next couple days at school were devoted to processing what had happened. There was an assembly, but I don't remember much of what was said. I do remember one classroom discussion where one of our Muslim classmates shared that his first reaction to the news had been to think, "God, don't let it be Muslims." I think hearing that was good for us.
One thing I do remember from the assembly was a teacher recounting how he had told some student something my dad had mused to me once or twice: Every generation in history, basically, has had its major war. His had had Vietnam, then Korea and World War 2 before that, World War 1, and so on back... but our generation hadn't yet, and possibly never would. And the teacher admitted he had been wrong.
For almost twenty years, we thought we might make it, though.
People like to say things about never forgetting this or that, but forgetting is too easy. We're bombarded with new information all the time, and new versions of old information. Then things happen, and people get old and die. I wish, for example, that I had asked my grandfather questions about World War II. Things that only he remembered are gone now. So I hope that a lot of people record what they remember while they can.
I've never much liked the term "9/11" but that's the one that stuck, perhaps for exactly the same reasons that I dislike it. It's just two numbers, perhaps the most banal and hollow name that could have been produced using the English language. But the event itself was huge and complicated, and I remember the time we spent groping for a name adequate to three separate suicide attacks and everything that happened around them. I think we'd recoil from a name worthy of the events it described, and so we chose the opposite.
I saw a blog argue the other day that the importance of 9/11 as an event is grossly overestimated. I disagree, though it's not really an argument you can have. 3,000 is a huge number and a tiny number. As a number of human lives it only barely defies our ability to conceptualize it, hardly worth mention against crimes and tragedies killing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, thousands of thousands. I've met people now who don't feel very strongly about 9/11 and that's always strange for me but I think I'm beginning to understand them. In terms only of death and destruction it wasn't a national event, and I can't speak to the effects of that anyway--nobody I knew died. But 9/11 really was important as a psychic event, and it either affected you or not. It affected me.
Ten years ago I was sixteen years old, a senior in high school. I lived on Long Island, at the suburbs roughly midway across the gradient from New York's urban sprawl on one side to posh beach houses on the other. My best friend at the time's father commuted to the city and worked in the World Trade Center, and this was nothing special.
And while I'm setting the stage, I want to point out one thing that's too easily forgotten: confusion. It's so easy to forget what it was like not to know something that you learn later. But when people in the future look up 9/11, if they only read the true facts of what happened, they'll practically be reading lies.
September 11, 2001 wasn't the day Al Qaeda launched a terrorist attack. Not until the end, anyway. First, it was the day a plane crashed into one of the Twin Towers.
We found out about this first period, when our teacher got a phone call forwarded through the main office. She had a relative--I don't remember which--in the WTC, and she let us know, since any of us might have also.
I remember on my way to my next class, hearing the radio playing in the janitor's room. Two radio hosts were talking about the crash, and one of them pointed out that it was very foggy over the city. This made sense at the time.
I remember that distinctly but I have no memory of when the second plane hit. The school administration was trying not to say too much, and maybe they never announced it. In my next class there was an announcement made over the loudspeaker that there had been "an explosion" at the World Trade Center. No other details. I still don't understand why they called it an explosion, if they were withholding information to prevent panic. But like every decision made that day, it's easy to criticize. No one knew what to do--the school administration was figuring it out as they went along just like the rest of us.
I took the opportunity to tell the class what I knew. At this point, knowing there had been a plane involved, I had the advantage on everyone else.
At some point before the next class it made its way through the class that there had been a second plane, and there was no question that America was being attacked. I use that phrase unreservedly, even though people tend to look at it as hyperbole now. At that point, though, that was exactly the sense we had.
Next class was Spanish, and the teacher refused to postpone a test we had that day. I respect the decision now (I might even have then). Everyone just wanted to tell everyone else what they had heard, and she probably wanted to know too, which in all honesty I never thought of until just now.
But I did get some information before the test was handed out: New York City was experiencing a full-scale air raid. Bombs were being dropped. Whoever told me that didn't say what country the bombers had come from, and I don't recall asking. I think at that point I accepted that information was going to be incomplete, but I had no reason to doubt what I was hearing.
I realized then that this was a very important day. I took out my school-supplied day planner and wrote underneath that day's homework assignments, "Bombing of New York begins." Because I had no idea when what was starting would end, and I definitely had no idea how hard it would be to ever forget the date.
The rest of the day is a blur until the end. At some point I got set straight about the bombing. In the cafeteria after school someone was collecting money to buy bottled water for rescue workers. I had $20. I bought a pretzel and gave the rest to the guy collecting. He directed onlookers to my example, and I was very proud of myself. I don't remember if the pretzel was any good.
Before my mom came to pick me up someone explained what had really happened: two planes had hit the Twin Towers, and another had hit the Pentagon, the Air Force had shot down a fourth one headed to Washington D.C., and fighters were pursuing a fifth that was headed for Los Angeles.
I'm not sure I knew the towers had fallen until I got home. Once I talked to my parents, who had had access to the news and not the high school grapevine, I became acquainted with the facts, such as were known.
The first estimate of the death toll was over 6,000. In a few days it would shrink by more than half as redundancies were discovered between the different sources, but it took a long time for the real figure to replace that first one in my mind.
I was mad. I was swearing in my head, and that was not at all normal for me. It had been unthinkable--I mean really unthinkable--that someone could attack America on American soil, right in the heart. You do not f*ck with us. I wanted to do something. I wanted to fight someone. Carpet-bombing Afghanistan that very day seemed like a perfectly appropriate response.
I don't think I'm the only one who thought that, and I want to point out that we didn't attack Afghanistan that day. It was more than a month before the military response, and I remember how frustrated some people were. Whatever happened afterward, I have to respect what President Bush did in that month: he waited when the public wanted to attack now, and he projected a confidence that there would be justice. He made a humanitarian case for dismantling the Taliban regime to people who thought they already had good reason to want blood. Looking back, it was a scary time. There could have been rampant vigilantism, race riots, if the President had been more bloodthirsty or more reluctant.
The next couple days at school were devoted to processing what had happened. There was an assembly, but I don't remember much of what was said. I do remember one classroom discussion where one of our Muslim classmates shared that his first reaction to the news had been to think, "God, don't let it be Muslims." I think hearing that was good for us.
One thing I do remember from the assembly was a teacher recounting how he had told some student something my dad had mused to me once or twice: Every generation in history, basically, has had its major war. His had had Vietnam, then Korea and World War 2 before that, World War 1, and so on back... but our generation hadn't yet, and possibly never would. And the teacher admitted he had been wrong.
For almost twenty years, we thought we might make it, though.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Geeks & Gatherings
It's late for a timely retrospective on PAX 2011, so I'll spare you. It was cool that the convention annexed the Paramount Theater this year, and very convenient, especially compared to Benaroya Hall last year. Otherwise, it was a PAX, and as such a great deal can be left unsaid.
I won't be the first person to notice an emerging "geek" counterculture. It's certainly on display at PAX. What I've noticed recently about people addressing large numbers of geeks is that a great deal of their humor consists of references to shared media experiences from the 80s and 90s. "Humor" might not be the right term. Anyway it seems odd to me. I mean, I don't imagine mainstream public speakers being cheered when they display an awareness of American Idol, or whatever. Or maybe they do. I'll confess to not knowing from first or secondhand experience.
If my writing seems even more off-the-cuff than usual tonight, it might be because I am also talking to Girlfriend in another tab, and chatting with Cleverbot in another. The latter encourages a breezy, somewhat whimsical style.
Anyway, regarding geeks, I have a theory. If geeks (as we currently use the word) have anything in common it is an affinity for obscure pursuits. And all of them (us?) (the relatively well-adjusted ones, anyway) have at one time or another been very happy to discover another person who shares their interests. If certain PAX speakers are to be believed, it can be an epiphanic experience, and one of profound self-validation. At any rate, my theory is that that is what geeks are largely trying to recreate.
I suppose that having an odd hobby isn't that different than being different in other ways. Obviously, realizing you like Magic: The Gathering isn't as hard on a thirteen-year-old as realizing you're gay, say. But I imagine the ritual of mass self-identification is common to subcultures that have been oppressed, to greater or lesser degrees. Geeks just use media as their totems.
And in three paragraphs (and one digression) I have reduced my theory to a fairly banal observation. Oh well.
I'm trying things out, seeing what I can keep up, before I sign a version of my personal contract, which I talked about last post. The good news for you (assuming you are a regular) is that one of the terms of the contract is that I post here at least once a week. But maybe I'll have more to say next time.
Oh, Bryan is in a thing on the internet. I suppose it will appeal primarily to fans of JourneyQuest. If you are not a fan of JourneyQuest, you should go become one, then come back and click that link.
I won't be the first person to notice an emerging "geek" counterculture. It's certainly on display at PAX. What I've noticed recently about people addressing large numbers of geeks is that a great deal of their humor consists of references to shared media experiences from the 80s and 90s. "Humor" might not be the right term. Anyway it seems odd to me. I mean, I don't imagine mainstream public speakers being cheered when they display an awareness of American Idol, or whatever. Or maybe they do. I'll confess to not knowing from first or secondhand experience.
If my writing seems even more off-the-cuff than usual tonight, it might be because I am also talking to Girlfriend in another tab, and chatting with Cleverbot in another. The latter encourages a breezy, somewhat whimsical style.
Anyway, regarding geeks, I have a theory. If geeks (as we currently use the word) have anything in common it is an affinity for obscure pursuits. And all of them (us?) (the relatively well-adjusted ones, anyway) have at one time or another been very happy to discover another person who shares their interests. If certain PAX speakers are to be believed, it can be an epiphanic experience, and one of profound self-validation. At any rate, my theory is that that is what geeks are largely trying to recreate.
I suppose that having an odd hobby isn't that different than being different in other ways. Obviously, realizing you like Magic: The Gathering isn't as hard on a thirteen-year-old as realizing you're gay, say. But I imagine the ritual of mass self-identification is common to subcultures that have been oppressed, to greater or lesser degrees. Geeks just use media as their totems.
And in three paragraphs (and one digression) I have reduced my theory to a fairly banal observation. Oh well.
I'm trying things out, seeing what I can keep up, before I sign a version of my personal contract, which I talked about last post. The good news for you (assuming you are a regular) is that one of the terms of the contract is that I post here at least once a week. But maybe I'll have more to say next time.
Oh, Bryan is in a thing on the internet. I suppose it will appeal primarily to fans of JourneyQuest. If you are not a fan of JourneyQuest, you should go become one, then come back and click that link.
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