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walking west

Saturday, September 9, 2000

Greg Knauss's call to legal arms pretty much captures the reasons why I took my last job:

Until the people who claim to care about the future of the Internet can put down their keyboards, put on suits and learn to fight like attorneys, then all this revolutionary new freedom is moot.

The trouble is, he's right. You have to put down the keyboard. And the people who care about the future of the Internet won't want to do that for long. I have no easy answer to this dilemma; I'm still figuring it out for myself.

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That crazy Mr T has gone and taken over my weblog, man! And he done a helluva good job, too. I pity the fool who says otherwise. Now stop jibba jabbrin' and start liftin'!!! (Helluva props to Captain BA Baracus Cursor for da link.)

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Damn. 'Some Of The Corpses Are Amusing' has kicked the bucket before I could download the lost Python album and the Blackadder pilot. And I missed seeing the 'Out of the Trees' script completely. Of course, the presence of these treasures is probably why the site is gone, but it's a shame nonetheless. The web is the ideal home for this sort of stuff, and the sad rump of the SOTCAA Forum is a poor substitute. (News and links via James.)

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Friday, September 8, 2000

Finally saw X-Men. And it's good. One of the better comics-to-movie adaptations, which I say on the basis of absolutely no experience, having never been an X-Men comics reader. But it felt right. Some genuine shocks and thrills, good special effects, good characters, and it sounded great in THX. And one of the most begging-for-a-sequel-est endings in recorded filmic motion picture history.

Afterwards I went along to another SF Fringe show: 'Jack the Ripper Slept Here' by Theatre Au Naturel, a two-person show starring Eve Smyth and Andy Peterson—'not naked French people', their flyer assures us, but instead two San Franciscans. A little slow at the start, this built into a pleasantly absurd comedy set in the 'Transcontinental Sewer System' and combining optical physics, stewardesses with inflatable breasts, a man raised by underworld creatures, and juggling. It's the only show I have ever seen (or, I can safely say, will ever see) where the audience got to be both the Swedish Nobel Prize judging panel and a pack of questioning rats and alligators.

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An excellent history and perspective on weblogs. Saves the rest of us the hard work of writing it. (Via Metafilter.)

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Don't you hate it when you make a huge (and unsuccessful) effort to get to the last cinema in the city that's showing a particular movie, only to find out subsequently that it wasn't the last one? Here is a picture of me.

Curse you, SF Bay Guardian movie listings page.

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Don't you hate it when you make a huge effort to get to the last cinema in the city that's showing a particular movie, one right on the outskirts, only to find that they stopped showing it yesterday? Like when you plan to see X-Men at the last place that's listed in the paper as showing it, and at around four o'clock you ring the cinema's advertised number to confirm it's still on, only to hear their fax machine screeching down your phone, so you shrug and walk all the way downhill to BART, catch the train to Colma, walk for half an hour to the Metro Center mall, walk around for ten further minutes looking for the cinemas, get to the United Artists Theatres (sic) with one minute to spare, look at the list of movies that are showing—and it isn't there, even though it had been advertised for 5 p.m.?

That stuff's always happening to me. Well, some of the time. Well, today. In fact I think that's the first time. But it happened. To me. Effort. Movie. Gone. Hate.

So I went along to two shows at the San Francisco Fringe Festival in the evening instead—the Kiwi Stand-Up Experience and the Original Action Pack. Head over to Funny Ha Ha to see my reviews, if you like (or read a mirrored copy here).

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Thursday, September 7, 2000

My roommates have left for a three-week trip to Japan and Bali. So I'm Home Alone. Just slap me in a blond wig and call me Macauley.

The weather here has been beautiful, but I've spent too long staring at the screen; I'm trying to get some job apps out there, so that I don't run out of time. A month left, and then... (makes vague indeterminate hand-waving gestures).

But I had my first job interview yesterday. I'll tell you about it in a few days.

I did get out to Berkeley on Saturday, and wandered around Rasputin's and Amoeba (CD stores). Peach-colored clouds drifting overhead at sunset. Peach-colored 18-year-olds wandering around going 'yeah, we're at college, woo!' Yep, it's all pretty glorious for the first few weeks of the school year. (I think I'll stop there before I start to remember what it's like after those first few weeks.)

Hooray. One cinema in San Francisco is still showing X-Men, at 5.00 today. I'll have to go and see what all the fuss is about. I haven't been to a movie since Jane and I saw Jackie Chan's Crime Story in Fianarantsoa, played on a video-projector and dubbed into French. (It wasn't hard to follow, even with an incomprehensible soundtrack. The most interesting moment was when the Malagasy audience gasped at the sight of a Hong Kong police HQ full of people working at computers.)

And now for something completely different.

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Random thoughts:

Yesterday morning I saw an old moustachioed guy pushing around a shopping cart piled high with his belongings. Sadly, not remarkable in a city with 14,000 homeless. What was remarkable was his huge metallic Viking helmet. Like he'd just returned from a hard day's raping and pillaging at Safeway.

The 'Sony Theatres' at the Metreon: why are these 'theatres' and not 'theaters'? Now really, isn't it hard enough for us foreigners to remember to spell everything the US way, with -or instead of -our and -ow instead of -ough and -er instead of -re, without having you guys just going 'oh, theatre, theater, whatever, man'? Where's your Webstre's Dictionary, Sony?

Similarities between San Francisco and Antananarivo, Madagascar:

  • People are always stopping you on the street and asking for money;
  • Both cities harbor bubonic plague;
  • Both have a lot of hills;
  • That's about all, really.

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Monday, September 4, 2000

Now that Owen has planted this thought in my mind, how can I ever read the Daily Report the same way again?

Back when I was a prolific daily contributor to a certain music mailing list, where my thoughts would wander far from the topic at hand and develop into long reflections on music per se (which one day I'll find a way to house somewhere on this site), someone once commented that I wasn't actually a person, I was an AI program. This then became a running joke—not that I minded; I loved it. I guess that's the sign that you've made it in an online community: when they start calling you HAL.

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Finally finished that piece I was writing: E-Books and E-Bucks, the latest noise at Grinding Noises. (Which is painfully in need of a redesign: it was only ever slapped together in the first place. Plus I've now strayed from its original purpose of being a collection of humorous pieces on IT... this new one is entirely serious. Oh yes.)

Anyone with venture capital like to help me set up an e-book business along the lines of the database model I describe? I reckon we could catch all the big guns sleeping.

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Sunday, September 3, 2000

Speaking of Reinventing Comics, there's another interview with Scott McCloud over at the Onion's AV Club. It gives a good taste of the book's 'manifesto' section. I enjoyed the book a lot: a worthy successor and complement to Understanding Comics. It kept making me want to get drawing again, and start producing virtual comics—so the book is having the desired effect on this cartoonist, at least.

It also overlapped in places with the piece I'd started to write on e-books. So I'd better just finish that, too, and get it out there, before all the ideas seem hopelessly old-hat and I can't be bothered.

Tangentially, this makes me think of another book I've been reading: David Morgan's Monty Python Speaks, a good collection of recent interviews with the Pythons knitted together into an overview of their career. One interviewee says how hard it was for the Pythons during the filming of Holy Grail to keep reminding themselves that the stuff they'd watched over and over again in rushes was still actually funny; the jokes would seem old to them, even though they were new to everyone else.

It's like that with ideas, I find. If I don't commit them to paper (or screen) at the right time, they start to seem old-hat, because I've carried them around in my head for too long. Or: if I see even one other person (like Scott McCloud) writing something even vaguely similar to what I was about to write, then half the time I'll cede that intellectual ground to them and figure it's not worth repeating the point. Which is a little crazy, because it might be a good point, and there might only be a few people making it; I can't assume that everyone else will be familiar with the same sources that I am.

I know where it comes from, though: all those years of being a Ph.D. student, with that Damocles sword of 'original contribution to knowledge' hanging over my head. If it's not original, it's not good enough. But that's crazy, too: how are we going to encourage the spread of important ideas if everything we say has to be original? By quoting endlessly, I suppose, which is what most academics do. It establishes a map of who thought what first, which is important enough, but it sure makes for a convoluted style of writing (which, ha ha, is what most academics have).

Still, there is one advantage in mentally cutting short the urge to write about every idea you have on the grounds that half of them aren't entirely 'original' : it saves you from having to do an awful lot of extra work. And writing ideas down in a coherent fashion sure takes a lot of work. (One of the pluses of weblogs is that they give perfect licence to write ideas down in an incoherent fashion. Then it feels less like work.)

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The folks over at Invisible City have started up a discussion on copyright (another one? yep) and invited others to join in. I did [mirrored here]. You, on the other hand, may have a healthier respect for large threatening-looking boxes marked 'Pandora's, Do Not Open'.

All of which is delaying, yet again, my attempt to finish the not-entirely-unrelated piece I started writing a few days ago... as has reading the not-entirely-unrelated (and excellent) Reinventing Comics yesterday...

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Old West