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Monday, March 22, 2004 |
Job of the week: Dept of Homeland Security Entertainment Liason.
This has to be one of the more interesting "help wanted" ads to surface
of late -- Entertainment Liaison for the US Department of Homeland
Security. Up to $136K:
The Entertainment Liaison Office supports the Office of
Public Affairs by influencing how the Department of Homeland Security
is portrayed in mass entertainment media. It helps to ensure accurate
portrayal of the department's mission, policies, and activities, while
proactively working to help the American public better identify DHS
functions.
Link
(via pho list) [Boing Boing] 
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Elfy-Welfies, War Bores, Decadent Vamps and Licensed Crap. (Today's post is on science fiction, rather than games--I beg your indulgence.)
When
I was a young science fiction fan, lo these many years ago, I was of
the opinion that calling science fiction a "genre" was something of a
misnomer. Other genres tend to have shared tropes, predictable story
arcs, and common themes. While SF has some shared tropes, it was so
diverse that it was at least as variable as, say, literary fiction. It
was hard to call a category that included both Arthur C. Clarke and
Jack Vance, both Michael Moorcock and Isaac Asimov, both Cordwainer
Smith and Roger Zelazny, a "genre" in the same sense as the Romance or
the Western.
This is no longer the case. Entering a bookstore
and examining the science fiction shelves, you can instantly categorize
most of what is on the shelves into one of several subgenres of science
fiction. That's true of other genres, as well; in mystery, you have
cosies and hard-boiled. In romance, you have Regencies and fab dads and
god knows what all--there seem to be dozens of well-known subgenres
(that, not being a romance fan, I can't all name).
It's time we
established names for the obvious sub-categories of the field. I'm
going to propose three--all I've heard on other lips, but none has
become widely known in the field. I think its time they did.
First
of all, we have the elfy-welfies (a term I first heard from Darrell
Schweitzer). These are multi-volume heroic quest fantasies, whether or
not they contain literal elves. They constitute perhaps a quarter of
what's on the shelves. The Lord of the Rings is, of course, the
ur-elfy-welfy, the original quill from which all this crap derives.
Which does, of course, point up the fact that not all of it is crap;
it's perfectly possible to write well within a sub-genre such as the
elfy-welfy as, for example, George R.R. Martin is doing today. But the
simple fact is that we don't need more elfy-welfies. I've read enough
of them. They are jejune. I have no desire to read more.
Second,
we have the war bores, a term I heard from John Boardman. A more polite
term is military science fiction. These are stories that feature lots
of combat, generally of the land rather than space variety, generally
(but not invariably) with a right-wing viewpoint, and generally (but
not invariably) somewhat hard-boiled in tone. I can't point to any
single ur-war bore, but Jerry Pournelle and H. Beam Piper are certainly
the originals in the field. War bores seem to constitute about a
quarter of what's on the shelves. Mind you, when I was a young science
fiction reader, I quite liked work of this kind; I was, after all, a
wargamer. But by know, I've read enough of them. They are jejune. We
don't need any more of these.
Then, we have the Decadent Vamps.
These generally, but not invariably, involve vampires, but always
involve darkness, angst-filled people, and a high degree of eroticism,
whether implicit or explicit. Anne Rice is the maven here, of course,
but she has many imitators, some of them best-selling writers in their
own right. You can't even call this "horror," any more, as there is
scant effort in this subcategory to scare or horrify the reader;
rather, the intent is more to tittilate and imply that a really cool
life is possible for you, too, if you wear a lot of black and makeup
and fuck around a great deal. This stuff also takes up perhaps a
quarter of the shelves. Mind you, I loved Interview with the Vampire,
back when, but I've read enough of this stuff. It is dull. I do not
need to read any more.
And finally, of course, we have the
category that is best named "licensed crap." This stuff is, thankfully,
shelved seperately from everything else, so you can easily skip over
it. It's stuff like D&D novels, Trek novels, World of Darkness
novels, and so on. There's probably some good writing buried in there,
but really, who can be bothered? It constitutes the rest of the science
fiction section.
Categories such as the cosy, the Regency, the
elfy-welfy, the war bore, and the licensed crap exist for readers who
do not want to be challenged. They like sinking into the warm
familiarity of something they know they like. Even though no elfy-welfy
says "A new elfy-welfy!" on the cover, the signifiers of its packaging
clearly indicate to readers what the volume is. There's a lush
illustration of heroic people in pseudo-medeival garb striking vaguely
heroic poses, and there are quotes from other writers of elfy-welfies
saying how great this one is. Readers of the category can readily
distinguish them from, say, war bores, and the readerships of the two
subcategories overlap very little.
The problem is, of course, that I do
want to be challenged. I want to be challenged with interesting ideas,
distinctive writing styles, unconventional ways of looking at things,
and transportation to a world very different from our own. I don't want
to sink into the familiar, I want to be surprised and shaken up.
As
a young science fiction reader, I would typically walk away from the
science fiction section with a half dozen books to read. Today, I find
it hard to find one. Part of that may be that I'm simply more
discriminating; I have less time to waste, these days, and less
inclined to take a flyer on something that might possibly be
interesting. But I think the main reason is the evolving
sub-genrefication of the field.
There's not much that can be
done about this, of course; so long as people want to read
elfy-welfies, they will be published, and will constitute a large
sub-category of the field. But perhaps it can't hurt to start applying
gently degrading terms to these subcategories, to draw attention to the
fact that they are not entirely part of what used to be termed "the
literature of ideas," and thereby suggest to their readers that it
might not hurt to experiment with something else. [Games * Design * Art * Culture]
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Do we really use just 10 percent of our brains?. No. It's a myth. Psychologist and neuroscientist Barry L. Beyerstein puts the (gray) matter to rest at Scientific American.com:
"With the aid of instruments such as EEGs, magnetoencephalographs, PET scanners and functional MRI machines, researchers have succeeded in localizing a vast number of psychological functions to specific centers and systems in the brain. With nonhuman animals, and occasionally with human patients undergoing neurological treatment, recording probes can even be inserted into the brain itself. Despite this detailed reconnaissance, no quiet areas awaiting new assignments have emerged." Link
[Boing Boing]
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New Technorati beta. Technorati has launched a new public beta with a bunch of really exciting features, including:
# Lots of UI fixes and tweaks. We listened hard to all of you who told us that our UI needed a lot of work. I hope that this is a step in the right direction. We tried to do what we could to humanize the language as well - using words like "conversations" and "references" and "sources" to help better describe what Technorati does, for example. I'm sure there's a long way to go, and lots more improvements we can make. Help us.
# Keyword Search beyond just RSS. We improved our post detection capabilities, going beyond what pure RSS gives you - so that you can search the entire post, not just the summaries often found in RSS feeds.
Link [Boing Boing]
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Microsoft isn't changing its bad behavior, Dan Gillmor says. Dan Gillmor, in his San Jose Mercury News column today: Microsoft change? Don't hold your breath.
Disclaimer: I'm not an executive at Microsoft. And I didn't play a
part in anything Dan wrote about today. But, I think that Dan only
presented one part of the story today.
Note that earlier this week, Microsoft, for the first time that I
remember seeing, apologized in an official forum (the Minnesota trial)
for our anti-competitive behavior: "The conduct involved competition
that went over the line," said Microsoft's lawyer, David Tulchin,
according to an Associated Press account. You can read more in the Seattle PI's Microsoft weblog about that.
There are many examples that Microsoft is changing (and note that Gillmor didn't mention even one of these).
For one, Microsoft's execs are now compensated on customer satisfaction scores.
Guess what, getting sued for being a jerk, er, anti-competitive, does
hurt customer satisfaction (I've seen those numbers and we study them
quite closely). Why? Customers want great technology without strategy
taxes applied. And, they want to be seen as supporting a winning team,
not one that gets where they are through legal or other tactics that
don't have anything to do with making a better product.
That's a major change and just happened about a year ago. It takes a
while for such a change to translate into different behavior, though.
Note that the EU is going after us for behavior that was decided on
before the compensation policy changed.
The second change is that now we have a corporate mission and values policy. That came online about a year ago. And, clearly it's aimed at getting us to change how we work with the market.
Third change is employee-produced, non-censored, weblogs. How
many of those existed two years ago? One that I remember. Today? 400.
As more of our employees engage with customers online, we're going to
change toward a company that does more and more things in a
customer-centric way and less of a company that relies on stuff that
customers don't care about or don't want. Why is that? Because if you
take a position online that isn't something that the community wants,
they'll beat you up for it. For instance, I'm sure that Jeremy Allison
will tell me everytime we do something that's anti-competitive (he is a
frequent commenter here, and testified against Microsoft at the EU).
It's hard not to hear that feedback, even if you don't want to hear it.
Fourth change is the marketplace itself punishing Microsoft.
Our stock price is down from where it was when I joined Microsoft 11
months ago. Linux and Apple are showing us that if we don't change our
products to be more customer focused (marketing talk for "better"), the
customers will go elsewhere.
Fifth change is how employees are compensated. We used to be
given stock options. Having options puts a lot of pressure on you to
get the stock price to go up. Why? Well, because you're rewarded if it
does! Hey, we're human. If I'm rewarded for doing something, I'm more
likely to do it again. When I joined Microsoft, the stock was at 26.10.
Right now it's less than that. So, in the old system, I don't get any
reward. The new system gives out straight stock. So, I care a lot less
if the price goes up (yeah, I still do care, but I don't care nearly as
much -- in the old system I wouldn't get a dime, in the new system I'd
get quite a bit). Again, that policy was just put into place, so
changes are slowly happening.
One ironic thing, Dan implies that having competitors is a good
thing. Dan, do you really agree with that? If so, why do you work for
Knight Ridder (the corporate owner of the San Jose Mercury News)? After
all, Knight Ridder has put their competitors out of business in many of
the markets it serves (including in San Jose, where the Mercury News is
Silicon Valley's only daily newspaper of note).
Sixth thing: freedom to speak. Don't assume that just cause I
work at Microsoft that I can't tell my employer off (Dan, have you ever
tried telling your employer off in public? Why not?) Remember, I'm one
of the only webloggers who's gone on record telling Bill Gates that he
should voluntarily split up Microsoft (I said that before I was a
Microsoft employee, and now that I'm inside Microsoft I'm still taking
that stance -- one nice thing about Microsoft is a diversity of points
of view are allowed and encouraged here). And, just two years ago I was
arguing voiciferously with Microsoft employees about doing nasty stuff
against users. Remember SmartTags in IE? Do a Google search on that one
and see just how anti-Microsoft I was.
One last thing: corporations exist to serve their investors. I'm an investor in Microsoft and right now I'm not happy.
My stock price has gone down. Apple's has gone up. Most other tech
companies' stock has gone up. If you owned a market index, for say,
NASDAQ, over the past 12 months, you would have made money, but
Microsoft's stock has gone down.
So, is the market rewarding us for our behavior? No. Is Microsoft
going to change because of that? Well, I'm betting my stock shares on
it!
Personally, as I interview various people throughout the company, I
see that we're focusing on making our customers lives better. Just talk
to Kam, who's team is working on the next UI. Or Bill, who's team is
working on new fonts and new ClearType technology. Or the XPSP2 team,
which is making XP a ton more secure. There are hundreds of such
examples of things we've done recently to make our customer's lives
better.
It's those things that make me proud to work at Microsoft and, yes,
I see a ton of examples that Microsoft is changing internally and
becoming a better company too. But, yes, we have a long long way to go. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]
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More Robolympics photos. Boingboing reader matthew bennett says:
Here's some pictures on my photoblog from Robolympics yesterday and
today! I competed with a mini sumo, that got taken out. I'm also a
mentor on the Boilermakers robotics team
(
link
to earlier BoingBoing post). You know, the SF innercity school that
still needs money to go to Atlanta for the finals! As of Sunday
morning, our blog has raised over $2200 in donations! Thanks, Boing
Boing!
Link to photos [Boing Boing]
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© Copyright 2004 William J. Maya.
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