I don't write, mostly because I think it takes a lot of work to do poorly and more work to do well, and it's not something that I'm willing to commit to.
But I do play a lot of video games ... and reading that first paragraph, I felt like there were times where gaming was both reading and writing, and that might help to explain why I can play some games for hundreds of hours and others maybe only once or twice at a sitting.
The old-school "classic" games didn't really have a story. You were told to do one or two or four things, and that was it. Rotate the spinner to move your ship along the edge of this board; press the button to shoot; press the superzapper to wipe out everything on the screen. Repeat until quarters are gone. It was fun when that was all we had, but now, I can't play Tempest more than once or twice before I get bored with it. (Partly because I'm not good at it, but that's also true with, say, Joust. I can play it once or twice, and then I'm done.)
The larger games, though, like the Elder Scrolls series (especially Oblivion and Skyrim), capture my attention in two ways. One is the reading aspect: "What's going on in this world? What happened before "I" came along? Who do I know? Why? What else is going on? Who's that? Why do I care?" In a sense, it's like reading a visual story (and of course there are very short stories within each game, and yes, I like to stop and read them).
But the other is a kind of guided writing task. It isn't as though I can create whatever I want (well, perhaps that's not true for Skyrim; with the Creation Kit, it is possible to make significant changes to the game) ... it's more like I'm a little kid, and it's bedtime, and my grumpy uncle is telling me a story, and every now and then I interrupt him.
"So as the brave adventurer traveled north, he came across a broken-down cart, and he saw a jester standing next to the cart."
"I don't care. Don't talk to him. Keep going north."
Grumpy clears his throat. "OK ... um ... finally, the adventurer reached the gates of the city ..."
"Wait. Go around the outside of the city. Sometimes there are fun things to find there. Or people. Or maybe dragons."
You get the idea. My choices affect the narration in some ways, more so in the newer games. Still, there's another way in which I get a small sense of writing, and that's with respect to the way I play my character.
Depending on how the game is set up, there are games where I have a picture of my character and how he or she would respond to things, so when I have a choice, whether it's on the main story line or a side quest, I think about what my character would do, and I try to choose the action that best matches my picture of him or her. (This can be a problem in some games if my picture is not what the programmers intended me to draw.)
So part of the gaming experience for me is finding out how the story goes, and part of it is doing what I can to write my part of the story ... of course at best, it's a rough draft of the novel-in-my-desk-drawer-I'll-finish-one-of-these-days, but I greatly prefer that to games where your character's choices are tightly scripted. (I also have difficulty on subsequent playthroughs writing a character who is significantly different from my first one. I don't want to lay waste to that small village, I don't want to help the scheming noble who'll promise me a position of power, and I don't want to keep that treasured heirloom for myself, not even if there are trophies/achievements/gamerscore for doing so.)
Hmm. Maybe that's why I don't write. (Insert joke about long comments here.) I'm content for the most part with reading, and I'll settle for carefully-guided "writing". (I'm also quite thin-skinned, I'm afraid. I doubt I'd survive publishing my first story.)
]]>Even though here, funding comes from national to state to local (in most cases), decisions at the national level can still bubble down to the local level, so what we get are the state and local leaders who decide that there isn't enough money at their level because they aren't getting as much federal money overall, so things will have to be cut, and whoops! Less money for libraries, sorry. So hours are cut and staff is cut ... and yet state and local cash reserves are building up for some reason.
It is a shame.
]]>I'd wish that Count Chocula would be available in stores again.
I'd wish that Microsoft's Olympic Decathlon would run on my laptop. (There seems to be a problem with Apple emulators and USB joysticks.)
I'd wish that you could buy Brach's jelly beans by color instead of black only or everything together. It seems a shame to buy a full bag when I only like about half of the flavors.
I think wishing for big things is problematic: it requires a lot of hand-waving even if you accept the premise of the wishes themselves and assume that you're the only one who gets wishes, and even then, there's something much less satisfying, I would imagine, about having things magically appear instead of working to make them happen.
Wishing for inconsequential things is similar, I suppose. I would likely be the cause of soaring jelly-bean prices as Brach's is forced to change their production facilities to match my demands.
]]>As you've pointed out before, that kind of project is beyond massive. The public's appetite for even unmanned exploration seems to decrease as the economy does ... I can't imagine multiple governments getting permission during difficult times to divert resources to Green Mars or Moonbase Alpha or whatever. People on a dying Earth might wish they could get to another planet and start over, but it just wouldn't be possible.
]]>Perhaps that's the point, that conditions wouldn't have to deteriorate nearly that far for people to prefer another planet to this one ... but if it's a selective condition similar to today, where some people live in abject poverty and others live in complete luxury, the ones in poverty are not going to be the ones escaping to Mars City, certainly not until well after it's built and they can figure out how to stow away for months on a flight to Mars.
If the outside air becomes unbreathable, if cosmic radiation becomes more than a passing concern, if we find ourselves in a situation where communities of some size must produce everything they need to live on their own ... in a situation like that, there simply won't be available resources to devote to space travel, and if a group of people does manage to squirrel away things to build a colonization program, it would have to be done in total secrecy. People in that environment wouldn't hesitate to put an end to someone else's plans to escape a dying Earth by whatever means would be necessary: if they managed to divert the resources to their own needs, that would be a bonus, but if they simply stopped someone else (most likely one of what would be the 0.5% in that era), that would be fine, too.
]]>To take one as an example: the idea that there would be this incredible bounty out there if only we could terraform Mars. Basically, just think what we could do if we could take a planet with nothing at all that contributes to human life and change it so that everything does. Gosh, how great would that be?
The questions of why we would bother to do that on another planet, or of how we would even manage to do that on another planet when we can't do it here, are not answered. If we could take an inhospitable place and make it sustain life without permanently messing up everything around it, wouldn't it make more sense to do that here on Earth, now, when there are quite a few people who could use improvements in their environment?
It's somewhat like a 30-year-old daydreaming about a day when he'll have a huge house and an awesome car, living the good life; the fact that he's barely making ends meet living in a small, one-bedroom apartment and cycling to work because he can't afford a car and has no money saved up toward one, now, that's not important.
]]>If there is a degree of sentience, then travel isn't as simple as "Let's go thataway", but then you don't have to have crew assigned to check on every aspect of the ship at all times. (This isn't true, I think, with non-sentient ships: no matter how many systems you build into the ship to monitor and possibly repair it, you still have to have people check on the systems.)
]]>On the other hand, I read On the Beach around the same time, and I really liked it ... maybe I just enjoyed any type of horror at all in those days? (I do remember reading some pulpy "horror" as well.)
]]>What I eventually discovered is that a lot of the horror that I read had something of an unhappy ending, and I seem to be more interested in neutral or positive endings these days. (I blame Real Life for this. There are more than enough bad endings.)
Short stories seem to work, though. I still remember some of the old Stephen King stuff - like Matt, both The Mist and The Raft are good ones. I think it's because they're quicker, so I'm not spending hours and hours reading about the plight of the characters, or maybe because the short stories I remember are of the half-a-worm variety.
]]>Good tip from vivtek. I'm sure that if it hasn't happened already, one of the status-pasting games will be about remembering 9/11. If I comment, it'll be on the walls of friends who actually post something they wrote themselves.
]]>From that perspective, I think it would have to be Twilight. (The first Harry Potter book was apparently published in 1997 – hey, I didn't start reading them until the last one was published, of course I had to look up the date – and thus does not qualify.) It strikes me as the sort of book about which someone (or several someones) said "No one's going to read that, it's just sparkly vampires, who cares?" Whether or not that's all it is, a lot of people cared ... perhaps not to the extent that people did/do about Mr. Potter and his young friends, but Meyer definitely attracted a very sizable audience. (It doesn't matter that her vampires aren't "real" vampires, that they don't follow established vampire rules. She seems to have guessed that her audience wouldn't care about that, and she turned out to be correct.)
I read the series. The first one was interesting enough that I wanted to finish the series to find out what happened, but overall it wasn't my cup of tea ... no big deal, because I'm not the target audience. I enjoyed Rowling's books much more, in no small part because I could identify with Harry more than with Bella.
I read Twilight because it was the book we were reading that month for book club; a couple of years later, I read The Hunger Games for the same reason (but also because my best friend strongly recommended the trilogy). I also ended up reading Harry Potter based on her recommendation ... Boneshaker when it was io9's book of the month, back before Gawker made their entire family of sites completely unviewable by anyone with an eye for layout ... and The Help as a book for our book club. They're important in different ways, but I fear that a common thread is that they are reminding the stodgy part of the publishing industry that yes, women can write books that people want to read, and honestly we ought to be past that point by now.
And I think that is what OGH is getting at in 115, that obviously we're not past that point. I can't say that I would have read most of those books if someone whose opinion I trust hadn't basically said "This is good, read this." (My best friend is the one who cajoled me into joining the book club in the first place, so she gets credit for all the books above.) There will always be plenty of books I'd like to read and will never take the opportunity to read, and yet my default behavior, when it's time to pick up another book, is basically "Let's see what's out there that is similar to what I already know I like."
There are several authors I like who have rather large collections of work, so it's easy to default to something of theirs I haven't read ... and they all happen to be white men, so I just end up reading more books from the same group. The thing is, I enjoyed J.K. Rowling and Cherie Priest and Octavia Butler and Suzanne Collins (and before them, Le Guin and McCaffrey); there's obviously more out there like what they've written, it's just a matter of making the effort to look. It isn't so much about making sure that X% of what I read is by someone other than a white man, it's more about making sure that publishers realize that white men can actually enjoy books by people not exactly like them. (Not that I'm speaking for my entire demographic.)
]]>After all, at some point in the past, people must have been thinking "You know, in the future, we'll have some kind of technology that'll record these events, and then there will be proof of what really happened!" And yet we still don't have tamper-proof methods of recording events.
No doubt the same advances that make lifelogging more comprehensive (if you have a smartphone, think about the number of ways you're already recording your life now) will be accompanied by ways to subvert lifelogging: holographic decoys, modified logging devices, distributed logging modification tools (to correct all those logs that show you in place X at time Y) ... we'll still have to have watchdogs to ensure that what is reported is what actually happened, we'll still have to check our records periodically to make sure nothing that we can see has been tampered with, that kind of thing.
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