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walking west

Saturday, September 2, 2000

I was away when this was first doing the rounds, but if it's new to me it might be new to you: 405 The Movie. Yowsa!

Another excellent web movie: George Lucas in Love.

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Friday, September 1, 2000

'Dot-Commers Go Home!'... this piece from Wired sums up the attitude I've observed in my brief time in the Bay so far. I saw a few ads on craigslist with the 'no dot-commers' injunction, and have seen letters in the papers saying the Bay area would be a whole lot better without all these new immigrants.

It's a little unfair to single out immigrants: a lot of the migrants to the Bay are American, and someone from Austin or Minneapolis or even LA who comes here has as much impact on rents as someone from Bombay or Canberra. But then, anti-immigrant sentiments are nothing new.

It's also a little unfair to condemn the 'gold rush' mentality, when this whole town was built on one—a real one, 150 years ago, when the gold came in yellow lumps and not as shares in companies that may not exist next week.

And it's a little unfair to suggest, as some do, that it's okay for a prospective roommate to be an artist or writer but not a dot-commer. You can be a bit of both, you know. (But oh, I forgot: web design isn't art.)

Every aging hippy fondly recalls the Summer of Love and the high times down at the Haight, when San Francisco was the place to be, but now that some of those 'selfish' and 'apathetic' Gen-Xers and Nintendo Kids are building their own virtual summer, they'd rather they did it someplace else.

As a potential immigrant who may end up at a dot-com (who knows?), it's hard not to take it all personally. When rents are already sky-high (US$900 for a month for the single room I'm in, and I was lucky to get it), they're hardly going to get better if selfish money-grabbers like me keep coming.

Except that most of the money I can (or might) grab here will go straight into a landlord's pocket; I doubt my standard of living will be better than it was in Australia; in some ways it will be worse. That's not why I'm coming. San Francisco is why I'm coming. This is a beautiful and exciting town at any time, and for anyone involved in IT and the Web it's particularly exciting at this time. This is Web Ground Zero, where the explosion is happening as we speak.

That's the thing about gold rushes. You can come for the gold—or you can come for the rush.

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Haven't quite managed to finish a lengthy, more serious follow-up to my flippant piece on Seybold, below. Watch this space.

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Well, I'm safely ensconced in San Francisco with some new flatmates. (What's the American term for flatmates? Not roommates, surely; apartmates?) It's a nice place they've got here, uphill from the Glen Park BART station. Scenic views of SF hills and valleys, and a quiet area—except that when I was walking back downhill after checking the place out a week or so ago, a couple of joyriders went screaming uphill past me in a red convertible, ignoring stop signs and, it seemed, gravity.

One of the people here works in the IT industry, and gave me a free pass to the Seybold conference. That's the one where Steve Jobs delivered a keynote a few days ago, which I was sorry to miss; it's always fun to get a glimpse of Famous People (and then pretend it's really not such a big deal; he's just this guy, you know?). By the looks of it, his presentation boiled down to: Apple is doing just great; we have this really cool G4 cube now, where the DVDs rise up like toast, and if you hold your hand over the vent it even feels like a toaster; we also have new mice suspiciously like Microsoft Intellimice, and have brought back the old keyboards we should have kept all along; and OS X will be in beta four months after everyone lost interest.

My free pass wasn't good for the presentations, though; only for the exhibitors' halls. But they had plenty to keep me busy. To wit:

  • 2 t-shirts;
  • 2 superballs, one with a shock-operated LED embedded in it;
  • 2 LED badges;
  • a large number of regular badges (pick of the bunch were from Alien Skin);
  • a similarly large number of pens and demo CDs;
  • lots of candy;
  • a foam frisbee;
  • a surprisingly small number of stickers; and
  • about ten pounds of glossy coated-paper pamphlets and brochures in a rope-handled bag, which caused the circulation in my fingers to get gangrene-inducingly low.

Oh yeah, and some of the stalls were okay.

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Wednesday, August 30, 2000

While contemplating the best way to go about writing the travel tale of Madagascar that I plan to start, oh, any day now, it occurred to me that Blogger is the perfect tool for writing drafts of books while you're on the road. Back-up is automatic, because posts are stored on their server and in your FTP area; and all posts are date-stamped, which helps you keep track of older versions of your draft. Plus you can keep it as private or public as you wish, so you don't have to reveal it to the world until you're ready.

Using the teams option, it would also be ideal for writing a collaborative novel. In fact, someone's probably doing that right now... but I sure can't face ploughing through 45 pages of the Blogger directory to find them.

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Wheee!

Thanks, Biz.

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When I get my ringtail-lemur full-length body-suit with poseable tail, I'll want to make sure it comes with the manual. (Link provided by Owen, who's clearly a better logger than I.) My favorite sections:

Working With Latex:

According to Triggur, do NOT f*** with chemicals without REALLY knowing what you're doing!!

Can you copyright/trademark a fursuit?

[No answer here; they're obviously feeling complacent. When someone invents a method of digitising and file-sharing fursuits, they'll be sorry.]

Why do people not talk while in costume?

Believe it or not, it's usually a question of legality. The institution or organization a character represents CAN be held liable for anything a character says.

[Such as, 'Do NOT f*** with chemicals without REALLY knowing what you're doing!' 'Mommm, Triggur said "f***"!' 'F*** off, kid, or I'll whack you with my poseable tail.']

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It's tough being a pedestrian in suburban California. It takes half an hour to walk to a mall that's three minutes away by car. Or twenty minutes to get to the nearest bus-stop. I wouldn't mind getting out in the fresh air so much—after all, it's exercise—except that the air ain't so fresh. Even on the sunniest of days a brown haze fills up the valley and/or the lungs. A delightful cough has ensued, which is embarrassing. I'm usually pretty softly spoken, but now my quiet sentences are punctuated by giant echoing hacking noises every now and then. But I di- COUGH cough coughhhh... -gress.

The upside of being a pedestrian is that you see things you'd otherwise miss, and the resonances can be strange indeed. I went out yesterday after posting (below) about Jean's reflections on seeing The Day After, and what should I see but a putt-putt golf course. Which brought it all flooding back. I first saw that movie on holiday with my family on the Gold Coast (Queensland, Australia), a few hours after we'd played a few rounds of putt-putt golf. So now I'll forever associate The Day After, and perhaps even nuclear war itself... with putt-putt. And vice-versa. Hit the ball into the windmill, and watch a mushroom cloud of death envelope us all.

That's the thing about resonances. The stranger the juxtaposition, the more likely you are to remember it.

(I think I'd better go easy on the word 'juxtaposition'—that's twice in one week.)

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Tuesday, August 29, 2000

I never cared much for the Disney universe as a kid, but there was one honorable exception: Donald Duck. And not because of anything Walt Disney did with the character, but because of Carl Barks, who died on Friday (news via Boing Boing). It was Barks who created Scrooge McDuck and Gladstone Gander, not Disney; and it was Barks who wrote and drew such brilliant, complex, exciting and funny stories as 'The Pixilated Parrot' and 'Luck of the North'. One of the greats of 20th-century comics, and yet he was mystified that anyone thought so, once saying that he was 'astonished by the number of people who'd read my work and liked it'.

Damn. First Sparky, now Barks. Soon all of my childhood heroes will be ghosts.

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Yep, that's about the size of it.

(I know, a link to a weblog post. It's the beginning of the end. It's because I'm reading too many of them at the moment... my list of blogs on the left is in a constant state of churn as I try to trim a few to cut down my reading, only to add new ones that I've found or re-found... damn, this stuff is addictive.)

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The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit.

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Harlan Ellison at the AV Club (via MeFi):

Everybody always wants something new, new, new--and that's what's killing life for writers. This dementia for "new" is ridiculous. It turns everybody into a back number.

I've developed as curmudgeonly a manner as it is possible to wear, and I wear it like a badge of honor. It keeps a lot of the more egregious fools away from me.

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A reader (okay, so it's an old friend of mine; well, we all know that only three people besides the author ever read weblogs) has written in with the following:

When are you going to go stark raving rabies mad? Frankly, I'm getting rather tired of waiting for it to happen. Get a move on, man. Go mad now! Turn into a freakin' loony who thinks he's "Super Lemur Man".

Readers (the other two of you) will be pleased to hear that since the average incubation time for rabies is 30 to 50 days, and since I was chomped by a lemur on July the 13th (47 days ago), the chances of my going rabies mad are increasingly remote. But never fear! There's still a chance of a burst of cerebral malaria, which can take up to a year to incubate; and who knows what other fell diseases I may have contracted? The ringtail-lemur full-length body-suit with poseable tail is on order as I speak.

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Monday, August 28, 2000

Gadzooks! Scott McCloud interviewed [props to Sore Eyes]. And while you're at it, why not rush along to his new (old) venture, Zot! Online?

Speaking of online comics, Sinfest is a feast for the eyes, brought to you by Tatsuya Ishida, 'President, CEO, Revolutionary, but also just a boy asking for your love'. And if you haven't been reading Bob the Angry Flower, you haven't lived. (You're also not Owen, from whom I snagged the link—and the Sinfest one, come to think of it. Oops.)

When you're done with those, try Big Panda, a no-frills directory of superior comics fare.

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Despite my comments below about the sometimes malign impact of Photoshop, I love it, and miss it. When the urge to redesign is frustrated by lack of insanely-powerful graphics software, 'tis a terrible site to behold.

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I went along to SFMOMA on Friday to see its Magritte exhibition before it ends on 5 September. I was lucky enough to see a similar show eight years ago in London, so between those two I've probably seen about ten or twenty percent of his one thousand paintings. A reasonable sample.

The paintings were great, of course, but I was bemused by the tone of the accompanying explanatory notes. To suggest that Magritte was unique and that we'll never see his like again is a little over-the-top. Delvaux and de Chirico captured a similar mood in their work at the time, and in some respects bettered it (though don't get me wrong, I love ol' René). And as for nowadays, just look around: everyone's a Magritte.

Every two-bit advertiser armed with Photoshop has used surrealistic juxtaposition in otherwise realistic images. After all, it's so easy: once you've played around with Photoshop, you see how easy it is, and you see its hand everywhere. How many photo-real flying pigs have you seen advertising the unbelievableness of the amazingly cheap and super-spectacular Product X? The only thing that's unbelievable is that they figure we'll still be impressed by a photo-real flying pig. It's the Vivaldi's Four Seasons or Enya's Watermark of the print world: beloved by advertisers, and similarly flogged to death by them.

This surfeit of Photoshopped images inevitably lessens the impact of much of Magritte's work today; we find nothing surreal in surrealistic juxtaposition any more. But not all of his work relied on man-with-apple-over-face or woman-with-fish's-upper-body juxtapositions to achieve their impact. My favorite painting in the show was divided into four panels, comic-like, with a man reading a paper in a drawing-room in the first, and the same drawing room shown empty in the last three. Strictly speaking, this wasn't a surrealistic image at all, but it was certainly intriguing.

Photoshop has a lot to answer for. It's dealt a severe blow to hand-drawn cartooning in the magazine industry; now that any art director can whip up a vaguely-amusing caricature by bending Clinton's face with a filter or two, who needs a cartoonist? Black-and-white art hangs on in newspapers, but how long will that last? Already, cartoonists are expected to work in color more often than in black and white, and while the results are often good, something is also lost in the process, just as in the switch from black-and-white to color film. Unlike movie-makers, cartoonists can't just load in a different type of film to achieve a different result: coloring cartoons, whether by hand or by Photoshop, takes extra time and effort on the part of the cartoonist. And like movie-makers, cartoonists working in color must deal with new problems of color scheme and composition.

The hope is that over time these transitional pains will work themselves out, and artists of all kinds will find new ways to surprise us with the digital manipulation of photographic or drawn images. Many already are, of course. Eventually, the simpler Photoshop tricks will seem hopelessly passé, and perhaps even advertisers will try to use the program a bit more subtly. Maybe then Magritte will seem fresh again.

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Last week's San Francisco Bay Guardian (local freebie paper) had an inspiring lead story about a company that cleans where others fear to bleach. A shame that the online version doesn't include the print version's photos of the cleaners in their white bodysuits and air-masks. (Not such a shame that neither included photos of the cleaners at work.) There's definitely a movie in this: the goriest real-life horror film ever.

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Sunday, August 27, 2000

The major drawback of this whole "stay in SF two weeks longer to get a decent room" business: I miss Jane.

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Old West