“I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.” ~ Roger Zelazny

One of my favorite books of all time is a little-known treat from the late, great Roger Zelazny entitled A Night In the Lonesome October. It was Roger’s last book and for whatever reason, it has touched me on a child-like level of delight ever since the first time I devoured it.

Zelazny possessed a crispness of style that I covet. His prose is tight and streamlined, but every phrase is also sculpted, crafted to employ just the right language to punch fathomless wells of context into tiny packages. He was always easy to read, and yet the concepts and characters possessed such depth that I often found myself lost in re-read after re-read, soaking up details I had missed on previous turns. You could read him as fast as a freeway, but then you’d miss the exits. So you had to spin round and retrace your path and revisit how the language had fooled you with its simplicity.

It’s a rare gift, especially among science fiction greats who tend to beleaguer readers with too much exposition.

Although Roger is most remembered for the Amber series, I find October to be a far more delicious adventure and I’ve introduced it to many friends over the years who have, without exception, taken equal delight in it.

As the book is broken into 32 chapters, each detailing a day in the life of Snuff, a faithful watchdog familiar, who reveals the mysterious events surrounding a very special October month, I’ve decided read, record, and put up each chapter day by day for those who want to listen and enjoy.

The book, alas, is out of print and has been for a few years, but you can still find copies here and there in used bookstores, and I encourage it heartily. There is also a rarer out of print audio book version of Zelazny reading the story himself, which is far superior to the job I will accomplish. However, my goal is simply to share the story and encourage others to explore further for themselves. To that end, I hope to just not mangle the reading too much.

This is my first outing in using Adobe Premiere to put together video. I suck at it — even this meager little attempt to insert a still frame married to an audio track was a trial. Moreover, compression and compromise to keep the file sizes under the necessary limits is a bit of a bear. But who knows, with luck, maybe I’ll hit on a magic combination as the project progresses through the month. I’ve decided to use video posts uploaded to YouTube for no other reason than because it’s easy and I don’t have to worry about which widgets work for which browsers, etc.

A special thanks to Lyndon Heart who will be helping me tweak my nervous little recordings and who is composing and adding brief musical bumpers to the start and end of each chapter. Yay for talented friends!

Please enjoy the story.

“The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure.” ~ Sven Goran Eriksson

Innocently reading over and trying to play catch-up on my tweets now that I’m feeling better and I spot one that makes me do a “oh, you’ve got to be kidding.” Only it wasn’t.

Linden Lab official discussion guidelines. Read the full policies here.

The part that makes me bang my head on the desk?

Second Paragraph of the “No Advertising or Commercial Promotion” Subsection:
We expressly prohibit posts that enable, encourage, or instruct others to leave Second Life, the Xstreet SL marketplace, or any Linden Lab property so that they can sell, buy, or trade on non-Linden Lab websites, virtual worlds, or online services that include the sale or trade of products or services. Included in this prohibition are posts promoting or advertising to buy, sell, or trade outside a Linden Lab property (such as Second Life or the Xstreet SL marketplace), and posts linking to websites that include offers to trade, sell, or purchase outside a Linden Lab property.

(emphasis mine)

Contrast this against:

Opening paragraph:
The Second Life blogs and forums are here for you, the Residents of Second Life, to discuss your ideas, questions, and projects and to share what you’ve learned about Second Life with each other and with us. We believe in an honest and open free exchange of ideas, and in always maintaining a courteous respect for the opinions and positions of others. We believe that promoting a respectful discourse and sharing of ideas leads to a stronger, better informed community.

So, in other words, Linden Lab believes that the honest and open exchange of ideas leads to a stronger, better informed community so long as there is no mention of competing products or suggestions for third party options. How, exactly, under these guidelines, would a person compare and contrast the benefits of the SL Marketplace vs. an alternate marketplace? How could someone offer a suggestion for an improvement based on something a competitor is already doing?

Once you are afraid of being held to the light of your competition, you are conceding that you are inferior. Imagine, for example, if the official WOW forums didn’t permit discussion of how their PVP system matched up against Aion. Those who are secure in their product have no fear of their competitors being discussed. The position should be “yes, go compare as you should — we are confident you’ll return and find our product to be the better option.” THAT is the position of a company confident in their product and the service they are offering their user base.

You can have anti-spam guidelines that don’t include censorship clauses. Hiding behind anti-spam to promote censorship and product isolationism is lazy. Being comfortable enough with this that you choose to use the word “prohibition” in your actual policy staggers my mind.

Years ago I made a comment about Linden Lab and how they always seem to be playing prevent defense before they’ve bothered to score. It looks like that’s gone from an amusing perception to a business philosophy. Will someone please step up, grow a pair, and save these people from themselves?

Hat Tip: Grace

“Courage is fire, and bullying is smoke.” ~ Benjamin Disraeli

I am still sick. On the mend, happily, but I haven’t really be able to log in for a little over a week. Thankfully, my offline IMs are largely full, because what’s there is a lot of fluttering about this person calling that person this thing and this other thing. Having learned the hard way that controversy generates attention and traffic, I understand why this predominates virtual world behavior. True, an ugly part of me understands the popcorn entertainment value of it, but that’s the ugly part of myself and I know she’s wrong.

In face-to-face interaction getting attention by any means has negative consequences. For one thing, you have a limited number of responders. Behaving out of character in most small company situations will generally have an adverse affect effect which only benefits the “all attention is good attention” types. But in cyberspace, you can type whatever you like and, odds are, someone somewhere will eventually agree with you. This creates a validation loop that pushes the borders of good behavior away from the cost/benefit ratio of most social norms. As such, people lose sight of realistic behavior and can degenerate into caricatures. This is where a commitment to common courtesy, an adherence to personal ethics, and the ability to self-critique come in handy.

No one is perfect. We all slip now and then. More important than trying to be perfect, however, is the recognition of the slip. When you begin to validate your own engagement of negative behavior, you’re on the wrong side of the equation.

I have an ongoing debate with one of my closest confidants who maintains there is no way to influence the behavior of others and so negative behavior exhibited by peers, associates, agitants, or nearby strangers is merely to be endured or ignored. I understand the stance; it’s just not how I was raised. In physical world interaction there are cues we give to demonstrate disapproval. Frowns. Distancing body language. Sighs. When overused, these are passive-aggressive monikers, but far more often these are the indicators that signal when someone is behaving outside tribal norms to help them self-check. Yes, there are times when it is necessary, even brave, to buck those norms. However, that courage is meaningless if the iconoclast is unaware of the lines they are crossing.

There is no courage in lambasting weak individuals and playing pile-on atop the corpse of a horse that’s been flogged to death. There is no courage in anonymous assault. There is no courage in personal attack for the sake of personal attack. There is no courage in manifestos. There is no courage in taking pride in ignorance. There is no courage in rudeness for rudeness sake. Those who try to excuse their bad behavior in the name of “courage” are, mostly just insecure, arrogant children attempting to self-validate. As such, those people should be regarded as children and not elevated by others who should, frankly, know better.

Courage is blogging the truth when the country you live in might very well imprison or kill you for it. Courage is standing up to a mob of anger and fear and calling that anger and fear for what it is. With very few exceptions, courage simply isn’t going to be found by blogging about some person who called you a name or who said they didn’t like your lifestyle. I doubt that there is any real courage to be found in playing virtual paper dolls, but if there is, I call dibs. All joking aside, a little perspective goes a long way in this particular case.

There are bullies in the world, to be certain. But a bully has to have power over you that is beyond your control. The kid who pushes you down because he’s bigger and stronger is a bully. The boss who humiliates you because she knows you need your job is a bully. The make-believe person typing on their vanity blog is not a bully unless you allow them to be one. Calling them one means you are doing two things. First, you are declaring they have power over you. Second, you are establishing yourself as vulnerable to them. Exposing your throat to an individual that destroys happily as a manner matter of course is self-defeating and stupid. Calling them a bully does nothing but try to establish that they have power over you; it makes you a victim of your own insecurity. This is especially true when the game turns into “I know you are, but what am I?”

Unlike my friend, I don’t believe in greeting bad behavior with indifference. At the same time, it is not my place to tell anyone else how to behave. What I can do is demonstrate what is acceptable by my understanding of acceptable and give those who choose to see it the opportunity to self-check against that instead of seeking validation in negative behavior. I think that’s all any of us can do.

It’s not sexy and it won’t generate a lot of blog drama rubbernecking, but it’s real and it’s far more respectful in my book than trying to appease egos that don’t need any more petting.

Tolerance is not acceptance. Silence is often difficult but necessary. We all slip, but we also need to recognize the slip and not champion the fall.

Now I’m having juice and crawling back to bed.

“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” ~ Ayn Rand

Anyone who’s clocked time playing Civ will enjoy this:

I haven’t yet been able to get and play Civ 5 although some of the changes look cool. I have mixed feelings about it, mostly stemming from the fact that Civ was the game JTL and I played most.

One of my favorite playing with JTL memories involves Civ 4. I was always chugging for cultural victory while he was bombing everything that dared look twice at his border. Although we generally played as a team, we had a sort of competition to see if I could win with culture faster than he could win by military means. Once, I convinced him to play a game based on culture wins only (no war) and was explaining all the little tricks I employed to edge up culture gains. As anyone knows, this involves lots and lots of spreading religions. He became exasperated with the fail rate on missionaries and began to growl about how if RL missionaries had been so incompetent the world would be a much better place. Then he began loudly berating his computer with exclamations like: “Damn you, Christianity, how can you not spread in Atlanta!” and “I’m telling Buddha on you” and “Get your Hindu ass over there and convert already!” By the time it was all over, I was in giggling fits.

The next day, I got this email, with an attachment:

1. go to http://www.2kgames.com/civ4/downloads.htm and download the v1.61 patch
2. install the patch.
3. start civ, fix all your options (for me at least, it reset my sound and graphics options). you may also want to turn on the new (?) “show city radius” graphics option. it makes it easier to tell what tiles are already used by cities, when you have a settler selected. If you get a flash of a screen which says something like “Your mods are not correctly installed”, don’t panic — I think that’s complaining about the files we modified by replacing rather than using this new override mechanism. we can and should fix that sometime, but it seems to work just fine as-is
4. exit civ
5. go to your “My Documents” folder and make sure you have a “My Games” directory, and inside of that a “Sid Meier’s Civilizcation 4″ directory, and inside of that a “CustomAssets” directory. If not, stop here and call me
6. save the attached file CvGameCoreDLL.dll in that CustomAssets directory
7. optional, but I think you’ll like the small changes: save the attached file CvReligionScreen.py in the CustomAssets\python\screens directory
8. restart civ; marvel at your hopefully all-powerful missionaries and the only slightly-different but oh-so-much-better f7 screen
9. marvel at my awesomeness

After that, missionaries had a 100% conversion rate — a change which I squeed over, but which he said made him feel “dirty in the bad way.” This is a frequent saying that started between he and I and has been part of my personal vernacular ever since.

The f7 screen shows all your civilization’s cities and which religions are at play in each. It mostly lines up so you can peg what a city might be missing at a glance, except that when a city founds a religion, it puts that religion out of order. This was unacceptable. Things have to laid out properly or OCD brains go haywire, as anyone who reads XKCD knows. If I told you the number of things he coded around just to make margins line up…

He never did get around to the Flying Spaghetti Monster patch.

I miss you, still, dear friend.

“Poisons and medicine are oftentimes the same substance given with different intents” ~ Peter Mere Latham

For the last week or so, I’ve been struggling against a late-Summer bug. It started as a minor cold, but then picked up steam and has been knocking me out with fevers and chills for the last few days. One of the odd things about running fevers for me is the fever dreams I get grow wickedly intense. Sometimes they are even so vivid that I have trouble distinguishing if they are memories or simply the work of my dreamspace masquerading as memory. A couple days ago, I had a fever dream snippet that was so clear it felt like it just had to be a memory. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and it sparked the following conversation:

Salome: I need to ask you about something, just to make sure my dreaming mind isn’t faking a memory.
SFSHS: k
Salome: Do you remember when we used to stay up to all hours at your house playing MULE?
SFSHS: yeah
Salome: Do you remember another game, sort of like operating?
SFSHS: like where you have to remove the funny bone without touching the bzzz
Salome: No. This was like a screen and tools to click on and you had to apply anesthetic and make an incision and remove an appendix.
SFSHS: not ringing any bells…was I baked
Salome: I don’t think so.
SFSHS: there’s your first indication it may have been just a dream
Salome: This was back in high school
SFSHS: oh…so we weren’t baked…but it’s not familiar
Salome: This was very vivid and felt totally nostalgic. It was you and me and Jon, and we were pissed because we couldn’t find the manual and the patient kept dying. One of the first times Jon cut without applying anesthetic and the computer let out this blood-curdling scream becase we tried to cut into the patient while he was still awake. The scream woke up your Dad who came out to yell at us to keep it down.
SFSHS: oh shit
Salome: What?
SFSHS: I totally remember that
Salome: SEE!
SFSHS: yeah, I remember that now
Salome: WHAT was the name of the game?
SFSHS: you’ve got to be fucking kidding…I didn’t even remember any of this until twenty seconds ago…and I’m baked
Salome: This is going to make me nuts. I can’t find it. How many late 80s operating games could there have been?
SFSHS: man, I loved mule…did they ever update that? why isn’t there like mule 2010?
Salome: Don’t get me started, I can’t even find a halfway decent emulator for it. I barely remember how to play it, I just remember loving it.
SFSHS: now I REALLY want to play mule…I so hate you
Salome: I REALLY want to know the name of the operation game
SFSHS: hold on
Salome: You can’t Google it — operation and game returns so much crap it’s unbearable, you might as well try and Google the lyrics to Free songs.
SFSHS: fuck that…Jon remembers everything
SFSHS: he says try life and leath
Salome: You called him?
SFSHS: yeah
Salome: WENCH! It’s like 2am!
SFSHS: whatever… google life n death
Salome: Holy hell
SFSHS: find it?
Salome: YES!
SFSHS: he totally remembers us waking up my Dad with the computer screaming too…also he says your crazy and hi
Salome: Tell him I’m sorry you woke him up but now my brain is happy
SFSHS: he is happy your brain is happy
Salome: That dream was so real but I couldn’t find the game and it was making me crazy
SFSHS: fuck that, go find me a way to kick your ass at mule…I WANT IT
Salome: You’re baked, you’ll forget this conversation in half an hour
SFSHS: mule and doritos…I need them…go fetch
Salome: Logging out now and crawling back to bed
SFSHS: noooooooooooooooooooooooo get me mule!!!!
Salome: lurves you

If anyone cares:
SFSHS = Salome’s Friend Since High School
Jon = her cousin (who often played video games and AD&D with us)
MULE’s Wiki Page
Life and Death’s Wiki Page