And once again we find ourselves talking about Neuromancer.
So, did you give Dollhouse a watch? The St. Whedon-blest Fox show featuring Faith? The one about girls who get personalities shoved in their minds to make them perfect for a job?
Naturally, this sort of technology finds itself being used for prostitution. Which is exactly how it worked in Neuromancer. Bad-assed Molly did a stint as a hooker for a while, but never remembered any of it. A program was put in her head before the session and her brain was wiped afterwards.
Until, of course, the memories started to crop back up, a device we already starting to see in Dollhouse.
This is not an anti-whedon post. This is a pro-gibson post. I mean, did the guy think of everything?
So, it's clear there's some odd stuff happening around Buffalo. A plane drops out of the sky (to which I reacted very emotionally, if I may share. I wore all black the next day.). A man whose job is to fight Middle-Eastern stereotypes post-9/11 beheads his wife. Sick, sick, sick.
But perhaps oddest of all -- I fixed something. I fixed the treadmill. Like with tools and stuff. Granted, I then went on to nearly burn the house down a few times through sheer stupidity, but I really did fix something.
Maybe this all related to the Unitarian... service (?) I went to last week.
I have been led to understand that Cola-cola is the real thing, and indeed that there ain't nothin' like it. How then, are we to take the superbowl commercial entitled "Avatar"?
You know the one. Dude is walking around the city and web-enabled people turn into their online personas. Elves, zombies, pokemen, and space adventurers go about their mundane business all around our protagonist. He finally takes a respite from his odyssey in a seat next to a big bad orc, who, it turns out is the cute girl in real life.
Is this meant to be a "book-by-its-cover" morality tale? After all, the frumpy lady is a 60's spy-movie femme fatale in the digital world. The nattily-dressed business man appears as a blue-skinned beastie. Surely our avatars, the faces which we choose for ourselves, speak much more about who we are than our offline bodies.
At about the half-way point, though, a few ironic vignettes appear in rapid succession. A pasty man in a white short-sleeved oxford shirt (the uniform of a fool in advertising) ignores a woman who struggles to get her stroller up the stairs, but turns into a superhero before our eyes. A spitting image of the Victor dog -- you remember, the one who hears his master's voice on the record-player -- bounces a sad blue ball against the leg of a boy who is apparently engaged in a particularly exciting hand-held video game. A child is dutifully pushed on a swing by a virtual supermom, who is far more interested in texting with her other hand.
So perhaps, then, the fine people at Coca-cola are saying something different. Perhaps our choices of avatar speak more about who we think we are than who we are in truth.
What, then, of our orc? She certainly seems upset when the protagonist reaches for her tasty bottle of Coke -- her green brow furrows and an angry sneer appears on her fanged mouth. Are we to assume that this young woman, who to all appearances seems nice enough in the real world, is in her mind a nasty and brutish agent of evil? Or has this gladsome prince appeared to kiss her back into the form of the princess?
Next time you meet someone, ask them what they use for their avatar. Share a Coke and see what that says about them. You should probably keep your observations to yourself, though -- at least until you exchange email addresses.
I've posted several times now about the natural combination of my two hobbies -- the written word and videogames -- and how I can't seem to separate the two. During my brief but passionate stint in Second Life, I found myself in digital libraries holding digital book-readings. My ardor for the Final Fantasy series reached new heights whenFFIII let me use weighty tomes as weapons. The codex-toting archaeologists in Lego Indy found themselves in heavier rotation than was really necessary. On the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness features Tycho reading at all times, even when shooting evil in its grinning maw, and I just naturally had to unlock his super-weapon.
So, what about Warcraft? Oh yes, gentle reader, I have found a way.
When you're not killing things in Warcraft, you have a profession. That's right, a job in a fantasy world. Where's the fantasy in that, you ask? Well, my profession is Inscription. I make ink and write runes on scraps of paper. These "glyphs" have, unsurprisingly, magic properties, and I sell them for a more-than-tidy profit.
And, as if that wasn't enough, with the right training and some luck, a scribe like myself can make books. Big old grimoires that lend mighty powers to their holders. For example, I now carry around a book that lets my breathe fire. Fire breath! From holding a book! Marvelous.
The trouble is, sometimes my digital adventures creep into my waking life*. It's all I can do to take my bright, modern-feeling home office and redecorating it like this:
It's actually not all that far off, now that I think about it.
*videogames are far more restful for me than sleep. Ask around.
In an act seeping finality, I dropped off the keys to the old place on Lancaster tonight. The era of porching and bulldogs has closed forever. Home ownership seems to consist mainly of catching colds, checking that the doors are locked and buying the wrong thing at The Home Depot.
The move has been... let's call it "delayed". I'm sure that in years to come we will look back on the events of this week fondly, but right now no so much.
Did something last night I haven't done in ten years -- stood under the lights of the stage at the Marie Maday. Fortunately, I remembered to keep the lights in my eyes so as not to be distracted by the highly bored faces in the audience. That and my own actor move, frowning and shaking my head at everything the other characters say, made it a fairly painless experience.
One of the odd things about staged readings is the question of movement. Do you look at the other actors? Nudge, punch, etc?
You’ll forgive me if I start this post with a quotation. Pulled from a recent book by a local writer, it describes his experience in setting up a new business, and I can’t help but find it very telling.
“There are croakers in every country, always boding its ruin. Such a one... said he was sorry for me… for [this] was a sinking place, the people already half-bankrupts, or near being so; all appearances to the contrary, such as new buildings and the rise of rents, being to his certain knowledge fallacious; for they were, in fact, among the things that would soon ruin us.... This man continued to live in this decaying place… refusing for many years to buy a house there, because all was going to destruction; and at last I had the pleasure of seeing him give five times as much for one as he might have bought it for when he first began his croaking.”
Now, allow me to clarify. The source of this abridged passage is founding father Benjamin Franklin’s widely-read autobiography. So when I say “a recent book by a local writer”, I mean “recent” compared to the sack of Troy and “local” compared to Addis Ababa. The city he describes is Philadelphia and the topic is the establishment of his legendary printing house.
All Buffalonians know their share of croakers, and even indulge in the occasional croak themselves. It’s difficult to resist. But the two examples Franklin gives of “appearances to the contrary” – new buildings and higher rents – can undoubtedly be seen here.
Five minutes clicking through BuffaloRising.com will bring up quite a few updates on new builds or conversions. The Federal Courthouse, an old Expo hotel, Rock Harbor, the new Burchfield Penney – feel free to append as many et ceteras as you like. Take a drive down-town and witness cranes actually putting buildings up. Not exactly the image of decay you hear from the croakers.
As for rent increase, I can only offer anecdotal evidence, as I’m sure you can yourself. But consider the following, which I gleaned from an email debate between a croaker and someone with a more realistic perspective:
In May, CNN Money listed Buffalo as the country’s fifth fastest-growing real estate market.
Forbes put us within the top 100 cities in which to get a job in 2008.
Newsweek lists City Honors as the #11 public school in the nation.
Spend an idle hour at buffaloniagara.org and find plenty of similar statistics, all of which certainly seem to be from unbiased third-parties.
Franklin gives plenty of advice in his autobiography, including that when positing an argument one should try to avoid definitive statements, that one should pad one’s statements with tempering “I believes” or “so I understands”. In this case, I will ignore this well-intended advice and state quite definitively that we should put a quick end to all of our self-defeating nonsense lest we end up like the man in Franklin’s parable. It’s not the snow that keeps people away from our fair city, it’s the croakers.
Now tell me this isn't cool. I'm glad we have reached a point as a society where we can search a limitless trove of knowledge before we've even finished a word. Why aren't we all Atlanteans yet?
A slightly-less funereal version of the Aunt Mickey post is my latest WBFO listener commentary, which will be aired on Tuesday AM at 6 and 8:30. Further updates as events warrant.
For some time now, my brothers have been my pathway to true geekiness. For example:
It was my desire to understand their ways that introduced me to Magic: The Gathering, with long-lasting results.
Pete gave me his copy of Record of Lodoss War, which was a first for me in many respects -- first time owning a full TV series, first anime in my collection and the first with subtitles.
It was at Morgan's apartment that I played my first round of 8-man Halo, prompting me to buy the Xbox and leading to a few of the geekiest things I've ever done, including holding a video game tourney as fund-raiser, manning Halo at a bachelor party, and participating in a game-inspired improv show.
It should come as no surprise, then, that when I learned that Pete is currently playing World of Warcraft, I decided to try out the demo. We're not really letter-writers, but we are certainly gamers -- perhaps this will give us a chance to hang out, right?
Well, let me tell you this. PA has it right once again. From what I can tell so far, the game is mainly a steady stream of tasks involving killing X number of Y monsters. Snooze.
Now, I assume that once the tedium of grinding is done and you actually team up with people, some coolness can occur. Except that people are a pain in the ass. So, we'll see.
Here's a snippet from His Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin.
There are croakers in every country, always boding its ruin. Such a one then lived in Philadelphia.... This gentleman, a stranger to me, stopt one day at my door, and asked me if I was the young man who had lately opened a new printing-house. Being answered in the affirmative, he said he was sorry for me, because it was an expensive undertaking, and the expense would be lost; for Philadelphia was a sinking place, the people already half-bankrupts, or near being so; all appearances to the contrary, such as new buildings and the rise of rents, being to his certain knowledge fallacious; for they were, in fact, among the things that would soon ruin us.... Had I known him before I engaged in this business, probably I never should have done it.
This man continued to live in this decaying place, and to declaim in the same strain, refusing for many years to buy a house there, because all was going to destruction; and at last I had the pleasure of seeing him give five times as much for one as he might have bought it for when he first began his croaking.
Stumbled across Wordcount recently, a little app that list words by usage. And yes, I did contact the creator to see if his tool could be used to trend data for use in my continuing offensive against the word "iconic" (sorry Eric), but he replied in the negative. #47267, FYI.
reCAPTCHA is awesome. Take one of the more annoying aspects of modern life and use it for the advancement of mankind's great work.
And once again we find ourselves talking about Neuromancer.
