I think this post-mortem is going to span a couple of posts. I could be wrong, but we'll see. I'll write them as they come to mind. This is the first, a personal-performance post-mortem.

---

One of the key aspects to any campaign of any sort in a democratic republic is the building of large-scale popular support for any side of any cause. One of the problems with the mainstream media is a continuing and callous disregard for the truth, substituting in its place a laughable expression of "balance," where any two sides of any argument are equally valid, or, in the political media, the stuffing of any reality into the same small set of basic stories the media have been telling about politics in the US for the last 30-plus years. Another is in the control by major news organisations by a rather limited set of individuals and groups who contribute so much to the political class.

The web has been touted as a necessarily replacement, or, at least, provoker of reform. And that potential is actual; it's had a real effect, though not nearly as much of one as one might have hoped as yet. Reporters - particularly the stars - are getting a lot more direct and confrontational reaction, with bloggers and the like taking apart the bullshit in their stories in ways they've not been seeing in some time - at least since the major consolidations happened. They don't like it, but so far, they don't dislike it enough - or rather are not affected by it enough - to change how they behave. C.f. the entire illegal domestic propaganda scandal, to this day as far as I know completely not covered by the television media, still by far the single largest source of news for Americans. And that made the New York Times, the embodiment of establishment print media. It's shameful, but they've successfully ignored the story to death.

There are a couple of ways the interactive, internet-based medium of blogging can create actual effect. One can build up a large direct audience (c.f. Greenwald, Sullivan, Redstate, Balloon Juice, and so on), or one can get by on a smaller core readership if you can establish your messages as memes - maybe only so many people read you, but they pick up the message, and repeat it, carrying on to others. Then at least some percentage of those people must act.

This is what I was referring to when I mentioned earlier, immediately after the FISA failure, that I do not matter. I'm quite capable of laying out the data, explaining it, and putting dots together to form a conclusion. I have a depressingly good track record at this, if I might take a moment to compliment myself. But being right is completely irrelevant in this type of situation if you can't prompt others to act with you, or, better, prompt others to prompt still other people to do so.

I have quite solidly demonstrated that I am incapable of doing either. Yes, in the 90s, I had some success with a very small, very tightly focused mailing list that you couldn't get on if you didn't promise to pass the data along to organisations which could act on it. I was able to help shape a local media message with some of this data, and I was able to provide information to groups of of people already set up to be actors on these topics. But that was, for the most part, a collection of already-active groups who simply didn't have the intelligence-gathering capabilities I had. I've been unable to replicate that success, or build either of the two new types.

First, I've been entirely incapable of building a readership large enough to matter. Or rather, I should say, I haven't been attractive enough on these topics to build one. I've stayed at or under 350 unique hits per page now for two years, with surprisingly little fluctuation. I don't know what percentage of those viewers actually read these things, or just skim, or are just here for the flower pictures, or economics, or whatever. And a tiny, tiny percentage - I'd say somewhere on the order of 3-5% - actually take action. (This is in terms of what I really know, what people have told me, and such.) This could be a higher number, invisibly to me.

I've similarly failed to present information in such a way that causes that information to be spread online, which for these purposes is where it matters. (Talking about this with friends over beer is nice, but doesn't really advance the meme much, as it certainly dies there.) As far as I can tell, only 1-2% or so of the people reading these writings ever pass them on to anyone else; links back in my friendslist are exceedingly rare, and I don't see the readership growth I would see if this were going on substantially more frequently than I realise. In short, it's simply not happening enough to matter.

I'm more than willing to take a substantial portion of the blame here, in that I can present the data as much as I want, but I clearly have no idea how to push the psychological buttons necessary to provoke the right kinds of reaction. This doesn't surprise me, for reasons I won't get into here; suffice to say that I'm well aware of this problem.

I had, on the other hand, hoped that the facts of the matter, presented reasonably clearly and well-sourced, would be enough to convince others to act on their own. Clearly, for most people, this hasn't been the case. I can think of several possible reasons for this:

1. People think I'm making things up, panicky, or simply overreacting. I know this is true in the case of some readers. I have a long history of providing links back to my sources; I can't make up the minds of other people for them. I explain myself as best I can, but I can't overcome resistance to data in peoples' minds.
2. People in my readership understand and actively support what's going on. I again know this is true for at least some of my readers.
3. People in my readership understand what's going on, oppose it, but feel any action they could individually take is pointless. This is self-defeating, particularly since if all they do is act on their own, it's pretty much true. That's where the meme thing comes in. But I don't know what I can do about it, since, demonstrably, I am not capable of triggering relay of the data.
4. People in my readership understand what's going on, oppose it in theory, but will not be prompted to act until they feel they, themselves, are personally threatened. This is also something I know to be true for at least some portion of my readership. As I consider actions, rather than statements, the most important measure of someone's position (c.f. my distaste for the Democratic Party as an organisation), I personally interpret this as most people being basically okay with the situation as it stands. It may not be the preferred state, but it's a reasonable state.

I'm sure there are others, and I imagine some of these other reasons will be mentioned in comments. But these are the ones which I either know outright to be true, or which seem highly plausible.

In summary, the key takeaway points for me personally are:

1. I have been unable to provoke significant action with the methodology which best suits my talents.
2. I have similarly been unable to provoke propagation of data with that methodology.
3. The actions I am protesting themselves, even when well-documented, are not sufficiently important to the overwhelming majority of my readership to provoke either of these reactions.

My time spent working on these issues has not, I suppose, been completely wasted; if nothing else, I can look back at it and know that I did everything I personally could. However, I unfortunately do not see any way that I can actually fix any of these situations. I'd be a disaster at attempting to be a political leader; my largely rationalist forms of argument are nearly useless outside of geekdom and I despise the pick-your-tribe-to-pick-your-truth bullshit model of most political campaigns. Essentially, I really just don't have anywhere to go here. Or, to stay on theme, I have no forward-moving action items in this section.

I saw Tiffany last night! I went with kaitiana and my friend Annie, and it was super fun.

The eight-year-old in me is thrilled, although the twenty-eight year old found the nightclub super tedious and was disappointed that for $20 I had to stand around for three hours before Tiffany took the stage, and pay $4 for a bottle of water. I am a grouchy old lady! I wish she'd gone on before 1 a.m.!

The crowd at the nightclub was -- despite the girls grinding on each other to dance mixes of "Stand Back" and "Send Me An Angel" and "Beat It" -- overwhelmingly hetero. Which I found surprising. Maybe Debbie Gibson brings out the fags and Tiffany brings out all the girls who were six years old when her first album dropped?

The remix of "Beat It" that the DJ played really reminded me of the Fall Out Boy cover.



On one hand, I feel like "Beat It" did not need to be covered. On the other hand, I really dig Fall Out Boy, and I really dig their cover! (I also like this acoustic version they did at a radio station.)

(Plus, it is really clear that these dudes think the song is awesome and just wanted to fool around with it, like, thirteen-year-olds playing blink-182 songs really badly on cheap guitars they got for their birthdays.)




In other news, news that has nothing to do with me, Jo is still running a contest giving away free books, and reannon is looking for your reaction to The Dark Knight.

john kerry coming off his flight, out through security. with his guitar (?!)

mrs. massachusetts and mrs. virgin islands, sitting at the gate for their flight to vegas, wearing their banners and fixing their makeup.

read a cool article in National Geo about near-Earth asteroids and comets and their potential to hit the planet (besides the minor, tiny stuff that hits us every day). the article was mostly about the folks who sit around mapping and tracking the tons of objects in space and figuring out their trajectories and all that stuff, and other people figuring out ways to deflect or destroy an incoming asteroid should it happen. it's mind-boggling just how much shit is out there, and at first i thought, how have we not been smashed by one of these things yet? but then once you think about it, in the past we have been hit by big meteors, like when the dinosaurs got wiped out, and numerous other smaller ones that while not planet-shakers are still pretty big and leave huge craters. the rest of the article was about a 900-foot asteroid called Apophis (the greek name for the egyptian snake god of evil, Apep!!!!!) that caused a scare in 2004 that i don't remember, and which is supposed to pass by us at 21,000 miles away in 2029; which is really close considering how far apart everything is in space. then after that, it'll pass us again in 2036. on the 2029 trip, there is a speculated 1 in 45,000 chance Apophis will pass through a certain area of space that will cause Earth's gravity to change its trajectory and put it on a collision course with us when it returns in 2036, so if that happens we'll have 7 years to come up with a plan. so i got all excited about this; half of me would like Apophis to be stopped, humanity lives on, everyone's maybe scared straight, etc., then the other half of me wants this thing to come in and SMASH US. come on, right on Rochester!!!! but then i was deflated by reading Apophis's cool wikipedia page, where it says that should the asteroid hit us in 2036, that while highly destructive, it is unlikely that any lasting environmental damage will be sustained. ....oh. well, we'll see in 2036! ;)

finished drawing Wet Moon 4 on Friday. now i'm scanning, then comes greytones and lettering. it's not over yet!!!

( one in a hundred million streets. )

Do not casually dis Barry Manilow on the intertubes after recently watching Hellboy II unless you're prepared to have the "Can't Smile Without You" earworm from hell. Just sayin'.

daspatrick's band The Popular Monsters are playing a show at The Mix in Georgetown (in south Seattle) on August 27^th at 8pm. They also have a CD and a very cool T-shirt. You should go.

Originally published at blind rabbits. Please leave any comments there.

A new blind rabbit has been posted.

Originally published at kris dresen draws. Please leave any comments there.

davidlevine and kateyule safely seen off on the road home, after a very nice breakfast at Wild Wheat with scarlettina, and after a small expotition up the hill to Taste of Europe/Valley Harvest. Everyone was suitably impressed with the wide variety of weird and unfamiliar Eastern European groceries, and there were the usual pauses were everyone stood gazing up at some brightly-colored box or jar while trying to sound out the Cyrillic. I don't know how the owners of Taste of Europe feel about our treating their store as a tourist destination to take out-of-towners to, especially since there's always a lot of excited fannish exclaiming up and down the aisles as new discoveries are made, but I'm hoping the purchasing of products assuages any sting there might be.

I'm not fully convinced that our house really is big enough for a Clarion party, but, still and all, last night seems to have gone off quite well. Everyone seemed to have a good time and we -- inevitably -- wound up with more alcohol at the end than at the beginning. But don't let anyone kid you; a mid-season Clarion Party is Much Bigger than a winter-season Vanguard. I was constantly worrying about the insufficient seating, but everyone seemed quite content to squeeze into the kitchen doorway. And so we have discovered a weird new metric of party success: when you're finding that the shortest distance between the kitchen and the living room is by way of the side yard, you've got a successful party on your hands.

Man, am I tired though. But the upside of a Friday party is, once it's over, you still have the whole weekend to recover. So that's me, trundling down the hill to get flowers at the farmers' market...

I've posted about this before, but maybe they actually have this working at range now. We'll see in 2009 in India, at least. These guys have been promising cars based on this compressed-air engine in the two-year timeframe for over a decade, but this is the first time I've seen a one-year timeframe announcement for actual production of a vehicle, even in test quantities.

The stack of bills for this week includes two related to the gall bladder surgery. One is for $8000.00 from the surgeon, with a note saying "if you have insurance we will help you file" and a space on the back for giving them my insurance information. They should already have it, but I have filled it in again and sent the paper back, trying not to fret. The other is for $322.00 for something to do with the ER, and labeled "previous balance". I thought I remembered writing a check for that already. A quick look online showed that they cashed the check on July 3. This bill is dated July 10. That one is going back with a polite note saying that it was paid with check thus-and-such, from account whosis, cashed July 3, and not adding "so stop wasting my time and stamps."

I'm leaving a note on the threshold;
I'm hoping you'll read it someday.
It's filled with the stories that I never told,
The things that I never could say.

I'm leaving a note with instructions
That tell you just where I'll be found.
And I'm certain the clues and deductions
Will help you to run me to ground.

        I'll be the coney and I'll be the hare
        And the hind with the hide all of gold;
        I'll be the swan and the maiden so fair,
        And the princess that you'll never hold.
        I'll be the donkeyskin dancing girl spinning
        And howling her dreams to the sky.
        We won't have an end and we'll have no beginning,
        And we'll kiss the way noblemen lie...

( I'm leaving a note by your window... )

Polaris isnlt exactly a role-playing game -- it's more a negotiated storytelling game. Normally, it's the game of tragically doomed prettyboys at the North Pole. (More accurately, knights fighting to defend society from the encroachment of the demons of summer, ultimately doomed to either die or betray their people.)

For this session, we were instead in a science fiction setting, eventually defined as a posthuman society, living in Dyson Spheres, and fighting against an incursion from dark matter beings from another dimension, absorbing the galaxy into a black hole.

This exchange probably best sums up the way things went:

"I'll take over all the AIs, replacing their minds with my own."

"But only if the enemy (who had provided some of the tools needed) end up with a back door into your mind."

"You ask far too much."

"OK. How about: but only if, during the takeover, life support fails throughout civilization, kiling 95% of the biological population."

"Sounds good."

After a fantastic day of hanging out with Merav, Will, Sean, Meredith, and Jon, it's now the very last day of my very wonderful trip. We're slowly detangling my possessions from the rest of the household, and performing the exciting alchemy of trying to pack everything I have into my insufficiently spacious suitcase. It'll fit, because we are golden gods of packing, but still, this part is always exciting.

In the past week, I have eaten a lot of Indian food, met The Agent, met The Editor, met The Publisher, and signed my contracts for the Toby Daye books. For details on most of these things, you should probably watch seanan_mcguire, as I'm not going to cross-post most of the trip report. (Also, you may have noticed that there's been less and less book and writing news here. There's a reason for that.) I have also spent a lot of time with people I love dearly, seen Journey to the Center of the Earth, acquired a lot of reading material, and experienced a Manhattan heat wave, which is the best reminder ever that I live on the West Coast for a reason.

It's a little after noon. We'll leave for the airport a little after five, and I'll be on my flight a little bit before eight. By Pacific midnight, I'll be back in California, safely cradled in the loving arms of Chris and his little white car. Chris will hopefully remember that my arms stay a lot more loving when there's DDP, especially after I've just finished a multi-hour caffeine-free flight. Virgin America provides power outlets in coach, so -- if I can stay awake -- I'm planning to get some more work done on Toby. I feel like I've been incredibly unproductive this week. I know this to be untrue. That doesn't prevent the twitching that always comes when I finish a seven-day period with fewer than fifty pages of text.

Yes, I'm sad.

So anyway, that's the situation; that's the story; that's the placement of all things placeable. Perhaps tomorrow, everything will be different, but today, this is what is. And I'm okay with it. Hope you're all having a wonderful weekend.

Obama is off to Iraq and Afghanistan, and both he and McCain are talking as though this is a crucial way for him to learn what's going on.

For tolerably obvious logistical reasons, almost all the information presidents get has to be reading (and, one hopes, thinking) and listening to people who come to where the president is. If they can't mostly learn without being on site, we have a problem. (A chorus repeats the last bit.)

Not only that, but much of what a president sees on a visit is going to be dressed up.

Note that there are legitimate reasons for presidents to travel-- negotiation makes sense, and so does showing that they care. But is there any evidence that they actually find facts?

Today, we see program two of Pilobolus at the matinee, wander around the Meatpacking District, and then go to see program three again at 8. Modified rapture, because we were not thrilled with the Basil Twist puppet collaboration piece in program three; but we will enjoy ourselves, and we have close orchestra seats for "Day Two," this time on the right side of the stage. We're also taking notes, so that we can remember which pieces we really love. (As much as "Day Two" is on my mattering map, "Megawatt" is moving up there as well, and if we could have done so, I'd have suggested seeing the latter a second time this year.)

I've spent a lot of this week putting together information, with synchronicity playing a major role: people asking me a question, someone else being available to talk with who has another interpretation of the information and more data, the phrasing of a message clearly connecting it to other data, all going on in multiple areas of my life. As a result, much of yesterday was devoted to relaxing and moving around data, both in my head and on paper: index cards and Post-It notes spread across my desk in many colors, some duplicated (music seems to cut across everything). Then conversation with Soren and friends in the evening, and learning that the final sale of the Den of Smoked Meat and Whisk(e)y has apparently gone through, so this may be the last weekend of it as our local hangout, before it gets gutted and turned into something else.

Also, in synchronicity, there has been a lot of music that I've gotten to know through the piano bars showing up on bar iPods and jukeboxes lately. Last night opened with "A New Day (I Feel Fine)" and "Caroline No," and just continued in that vein for a while, adding a touch of wistfulness to my waiting for Soren to arrive.

Tomorrow, if all goes well, I shall devote a few hours to learning how to use the scanner we bought, while Soren may or may not hack the camera, so there may be scandalous pictures from my youth appearing in this LiveJournal shortly.

nellorat has just posted three phrases from our household idiolect ("beowulfs", "making an offering", and the immortal "thanking the pig"), which reminded me that I'd been meaning to resume posting such terms myself. And in honor of the occasion--Readercon--the obvious candidate is "boosk".

However, I see I've already posted a definition in a post outside of this series:

Years ago, Kathryn Cramer saw a yard-sale sign which proudly proclaimed the sale of "Toys--Furniture--Boosk". She decided that once "books" reach a certain critical mass, they transform into masses of "boosk".

Specifically, I would say that "books" reach the point of being "boosk" when they stop being "something you can read" and become "something you have to design your furniture scheme around". Boosk can be obstacles, boosk can be furniture, boosk can be decorations ("boosk do furnish a room!", as Athnony Pwoell declared)--but while a book contains entertainment, or information, or escape, boosk are only a burden.

This week's Studio 360 has Howard Gardner (the multiple intelligences guy) and Sarah Brown (who does an amazing range of accents and personas). She talked about how, as a kid in school in the days before cell phones, she'd imitate the voices of her friends' parents to get them excuses for getting out of school.

And I remembered that when I was a kid, I'd forge my mother's signature (and once or twice, someone else's mother's) for school stuff, and how meticulous I was about getting it right. These days, I'm a pretty good calligrapher.

So I'm wondering....what deceptions are you meticulous about, and does that show talents which have or could pay off in other parts of your life?

If you want to comment anonymously, that's fine.

Sleep is good. I feel so much better this morning than I did yesterday.

The guys are at Readercon; I wish I could be there, but I must work. By temperament, I don't like being alone, but this time seems not so horrible. The rats are getting even more attention from me.

Many of the families I know, with kids or not, have many terms of their own, sometimes coming from funny incidents. For a while, I've thought about sharing some of our family language & asking you guys if you feel like sharing yours.

1. "thank the pig": This is our euphemism for masturbation.

Not that we particularly feel masturbation needs a euphemism, but this one seems weird yet friendly & appropriate. It comes from a very odd scene in Babe: Pig in the City, in which a queue of animals each almost ritually takes some food, is told "Thanks the pig!" and says to Babe, "Thank you, pig." womzilla and I, who saw the film, were just captivated by the phrase & figured all along it had to have some place in our life.

2. "Did you buy Beowulfs?": Or just a reference to wanting beowulfs, chocolate beowulfs, any mention of beowulfs as food.

This comes from my birth family. During one diet, all of us wrote up, on a page on the refrigerator door, what we ate and its caloric content. My oldest sister, who could copy my mother's handwriting almost perfectly, wrote in my mother's column, "1 beowulf 500 calories." My mother (very mentally sharp then!) actually wondered what a beowulf was, when she'd eaten it, and why she'd given in to something with so many calories.

Now, supergee buys the grocery, and we always keep a pad of grocery lists up, each of us writing what we need or run out of. Perhaps it was the coincidence of writing up food on a list on a refrigerator door, but one day I wrote "2 beowulfs," spreading the joke to a new household. Alas, the supermarket never has beowulfs. They are always out. Can you believe it? Even sugar-free beowulfs, chocolate beowulfs--any kind! Even when one of us had heard it was beowulf season, or that beowulfs were on sale!

3. "make an offering" or "an offering to the gods": In full, "make an offering to the garbage gods," that is putting the garbage out in the can or the cans by the curb.

supergee says he started this as a complaint, actually, because the gods--capricious as so many gods are--do, alas, sometimes reject our offering, and sometimes it is indeed a big relief if the gods find our offering right & good. I just thought it was fun, a way to make an everyday task sound a little more glamorous or important.

What terms have you guys developed, and what are the stories behind them?

HEALTH: I'm past the "OMG physical movement!" euphoria for now, and it's best to just treat treading as something I have to do every day, which it is. However, my fasting bg is coming down for the first time since I stabilized with the Januvia added (c. 140 down to c. 120), which is really cool. I'm up to 20 minutes on good days, 15 minutes on less enthusiastic days such as yesterday.

Mood: sociable over morning coffee

Some directors talk very well about their work. Others don't - there are directors who make really good movies but sound like jerks or morons when they're interviewed. And some sound great in interviews but make terrible movies, too. The evidence available to me so far suggests that Zack Snyder is one of those who makes better movies than explanations.[1]

I strongly recommend a policy of ignoring interviews with him, in favor of looking at the work itself.

Footnotes:

1. This may well be longer than the body of the post...

300 may be too weird a film to sensibly discuss in this context, so I'll take Dawn of the Dead instead. There's an argument about whether it does justice to a particular satirical thread in the original, and I'm not having that argument, either. I just want to point at all the things Snyder's version does right. It's not just the fantastically good title sequence, fantastically good though it is. It's a whole lot of things: the pacing of the opening and all the ways Ana brushes up against the emerging crisis without realizing it, the real tragedy in Frank's final moments and the argument about what to do with him when he dies, the horror around Luda's pregnancy, the handling of Andy and his gun shop isolation, the bathroom scene and what Kenneth will and won't forgive Andre for or deal with on his behalf...a whole lot that could have been fluffy and trivial but wasn't.

Many of these do come from having a good script. And a good editor. And good cinematographers and lighting riggers and a lot of other people. But then that's precisely what direction is about on a big project: getting good folks and getting them to work together productively. And we have evidence that whether or not he can talk usefully about it later, Snyder can in fact do this.

Old Geezer, for those who don't know, is the handle of a fellow posting on RPG Net who was part of the original D&D scene, running and playing with Gygax, Arneson, and the gang. He's good fun, and full of stories, and every so often one makes me think, "Now there's an important point." Happened again tonight.

The question was, how did the half-elf come into being as a character option? The answer, it turns out, is that OG likes playing exotic characters and pestered Gygax until he gave in and let OG do this one. Thought I to myself, you know, a gaming environment is working well when it's possible to do that. So much so that I'll go out on a limb: One of the hallmarks of good games is that they make it easy to add options nobody thought of at press time, and one of the hallmarks of good gaming is that the play environment accommodates a lot of exotic variations smoothly.

Some games (like early D&D) do this by being so bog simple that there's just not much to do to add a class or race. Some games, like Vampire's bloodlines, build in rules for customization. Some games, like Champions, have a built-in meta-system that can accommodate anything with a description mutually satisfactory to the folks involved, even if it takes sometimes a lot of finesse to get to that outcome. A good game needs, therefore, innate simplicity or provision for plugging in new options or something else that can serve the function. The problem only comes when the system claims completeness and tucks away options for revision out of purchasers' gaze.

The social side is similar. There should be some open space in which unusual options can arise and be treated as unusual but not as environment-breaking. Lots of ways to do that, from blank spots on the map to the assumption that transmitted lines of power do have an expected rate of mutation and deformation. And it helps if the participants recognize that there's already nothing so unusual as a player character anyway. Maybe something's so rare that there's only one in a million of it - three hundred of them can be somewhere in the modern US, and since there are only three or five or however many PCs anyway, why not fold it in?

(This isn't to deny the usefulness, fun, and desirability of thematic and other restrictions on PCs. It's just to say that a common argument, "but they're so rare', doesn't actually apply most of the time, and that happy players are often better company than ones settling for second or third best.)

That's my take on it, anyway. If I ever do up my Mellow Gaming Manifesto, this'll be part of it.

DUDE!

Did you manage to secure passes to the San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC if you're nasty) this year? I sure hope so, 'cause the whole stinking thing is completely sold out this time around. "Even SUNDAY, Aaron?" Yes, mysterious voice rattling around my skull, even Sunday.

Craziness!

Anyway, if you'll be braving the teeming hordes next week and want to say hello, I'll be at the SLG booth behind a big stack of freshly minted SR Vol. 1 SECOND PRINTINGS (hey, it's a big deal to me) at the following times:


THURSDAY, July 24: 2:00 - 3:30

FRIDAY, July 25: 2:00 - 3:00

SATURDAY, July 26: 2:00 - 3:00

SUNDAY, July 27 (BIRFDAY!): 11:00 - 12:00


Come to my table and I will give you this single unit of cardboard:





...FREE OF CHARGE. I might even make a nice little picture on the back, if you want.

Hope to see you there and not forget your name for the millionth time. (Early-onset Alzheimer's is no laughing matter, kids!)

Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter!