It's done now. But, all things considered, I spent about sixty hours crunching sixty thousand words into what seems for the moment to be a decently formatted book.

Then there's the new problem. Hang on; I'll see if I can show you....

Oh.

Thrilled though I might be to learn that I can be trusted to price an EBook at two hundred bucks [at the current rate of inflation, that might make some sense in a few years], I'm at least equally unthrilled to be told that I can't list this thing for free. Or, really, for $0.00. It's the same thing for the enduser, though you'd still have to go into amazon.com and at least oneclick the thing before pulling it down to your Kindle [or a Windoze emulator, at least], therefore tracking the number of people doing that for me.

But that's okay; being nice and trusting, I EMail digitalrights@amazon.com:

Apparently, there’s no way on my end to set the price of a Kindle title to $0.00. I’ve got a title ready to go, intended to be free, serving as something of an advert for the next nine books in the series.
I guess I’ll go ahead and release it at $0.99 for now. Will it be possible to change the price to $0.00 after the fact?

And I wait for about twenty-four hours. Then I get this:

Hello,

Thank you for your recent inquiry regarding a price promotion for your title(s). Please note that you may change the list price for your ebook directly from your account. However, we are unable to provide an additional pricing discount at this time. If you have any further questions, please write to us at digitalrights@amazon.com.

Best regards,

Adam

http://www.amazon.com

Oh.

I've EMailed back already, with this:

There's no way to set the price to zero? I've seen hundreds of titles priced at $0.00 in the last couple days. How's that being done?

...though I'm already expecting another twenty-four hours to go by before I get a response again mentioning title(s). Because actually reading an EMail, containing a phrase like I’ve got a title ready to go, is a job for CyberHazMat, or something.

Oh: supposing any confusion remains outside amazon.com, let's go into amazon.com for a second....

So, yeah: I've got additional questions. I've already asked one of them. Others include Really? and Seriously? and What in east hell is wrong with your brain.

Meanwhile, I've got this more significant problem. Because the book I'm trying to set to $0.00 is LK0. For those who still remember that one. Ten years ago, I had it up for free download in PDF. It's the prequel, written in 2000, to the rest of the S97S, written in 1990 through 1999. The book itself admits that it's free, because it's kinda additional to everything else. And now I've got amazon.com telling me that, instead, it's at least ninety-nine cents.

That's great for something like iTunes, if you want a single .mp3 and can't figure out BitTorrent. But it's not how I wanted to play this. And, of course, there's really no releasing the thing for the Kindle on my own: everything's got to go through their little store.

This is functionally the same shit Reznor's been running into with the iPhone, except that my issue's less about content and more about trying to make something concurrently free but defensibly copyrighted.

I do of course get that amazon.com make 65% of whatever price kindling goes for. Which is funny, in a way: that's more than they usually make [in the beginning, they were holding out for 55% of the coverprice on real books; they've since dropped that to 40% to compete with real stores], and, also funny, the 35% left over after their 65% is more than I usually make. Which is the moderately cool thing about the Kindle, I suppose: if it's all the same to the enduser, there's no middleman involved; I write it; I code it; I upload it; it's a dollar; I get thirty-five cents; they get sixty-five cents; everyone kinda wins.

Except that there are already books up there for zilch. Not just the ones in the screenshot; also hundreds of badlyformatted publicdomain things. You can get bibles and Frankenstein and whatever O Henry shit for zilch, which is great. And you can get stuff written last year [by now, there might be stuff written this year] for free, because, somehow, magically, they're being listed for $0.00, despite that impossibility.

There is the one thing I hadn't factored, going into this a few days ago. I've got the emulator thing, and was mostly curious about the edges of possibility in formatting. So I grabbed a few books for zero dollars each and looked through them. One standing out, both for formatting and for actual content, was Mark Henry's [presumably no relation to O Henry] Battle of the Network Zombies. I'd actually heard of that one already; though, even now that I've got it open an AltTab away, I haven't read the whole thing yet—I've been retrocoding a book into kindling, instead. What counts, and might make a difference to all this, is that I got it a few days ago for $0.00; today, it looks like this:

I'm not sure what to make of that. It was released, presumably at $0.00, on 1st March 2010; I grabbed it for free on 4th March 2010; now, on 11th March 2010, it's $9.60, down from twelve bucks.

So I can't rule out the chance that it's just twelve bucks, currently down to $9.60, formerly down to $0.00. Though that would be weird, if only because, based on the contract amazon.com have set up for this, Mark gets $4.20 regardless what sale amazon.com run on a book; thousands or millions downloaded this thing for free which, if it was supposed to be twelve bucks, would have made him four bucks a copy which amazon.com would have had to come up with outside the more normal rules of commerce.

Also, there are still those PD books. I have doubts that people are listing those at 99¢ through $200 and making 35% while amazon.com get zilch. Even if I do still smirk at the reports of amazon.org from the first ten years or so in business before they got near breaking even, let alone going into the black; I suppose it's possible, based on history.

I dunno. No response from my latest EMail yet. I guess, for now, we can just speculate about all this.

Or I could just ask Mark, since we're all hooked up at twitter.com. More likely, I'll put off that level of research until amazon.com can count to one without hitting me with words like title(s). Never reply to me without reading exactly what I wrote; you could end up at gotards.com.

More later....

Okay. So, I'm chopping kindling here. Not the wooden kind [well: hopefully], but the kind of textbased stuff endemic to novels. Which is oddly ironic. It's like this....

Two things I'm good at, regardless the final product: writing novels, and writing hypertext. Mutually exclusive though those technically are. Until now. Now, there's the Kindle, which looks to the reader something like a novel and looks to me, the writer, more like hypertext. So that should be okay. Except that I'm just about literally in the middle of retrocoding a book [started with a short one—about sixty thousand words] into hypertext, so the Kindle'll be okay with it. Technically, all you need to know is that retrocoding a novel really, really sucks.

Again: I'm kinda hoping the novel itself isn't terribly wooden, in the shatnereque sense; feedback to date has been okay, so it might not be a problem.

What is a problem is that even the newer Kindles [and you can't fully dismiss the K1, which to date more people are using] seriously lack some logic. I've mentioned this before, regarding implanted images: you can't really do them correctly, with class="alignright" or something...yet. What I'm also noticing is that you can't control much of anything beyond italics and boldfaces and underlines and superscripts, and a couple of fontsizes. BLOCKQUOTE and CODE kinda work, but only at the mercy of the Kindle's proclivities toward processing them.

The Kindle's been out for a couple years; there are two and a half generational versions of the thing; it's still technically nowhere near ready, at least for me.

Granted: if this were only forty or fifty years ago, the Kindle would rock; back then, a given novel was stamped out with a substandard form of Times New Roman; the better publishers could handle italics and underlines, but there was that one font, and it was always that one size. I guess I'm just spoiled by the advances in printed books since the sixties. So, technically, it's my fault; that doesn't improve my mood much.

The good news, if any, is that, from now on, things should be easierish. If I were writing books directly for the Kindle, it would actually take less time than writing them for mainstream publication [already anticipating the day on which that becomes a nonsequitur (Kindle used to be submainstream?)], simply because, over the last fifteen years or so, I've become used to thinking in hypertext; I've actually been known to be typing into Word and, instead of hitting Control-I, I'll bang out <I> as a sorta procedural macrofunction of commonality. Of course, that could be because a percentage of the last fifteen years have ignored Windoze and its functions; a couple versions ago, the Wintel version of LightWave, at least, dropped U in favour of Control-Z for undoing an action, which I still forget half the time. I don't know how redundant that is, by the way; I'm pretty sure NewTek still make a Mac version of LightWave, but I'm not positive at the moment; and Amiga and DecAlpha and SGI are all kinda dead these days.

So, I'm chopping kindling. That was the point here.

I'm really kinda hoping to have this one done today. Which is meaningless. I think I can have fixed what I know needs to be fixed today, and upload the file to playtest it at amazon.com; it's the results of the playtesting, and what might be required to get it truly ready, that I'm not yet sure about. Depending what might go wrong, it might take longer to get this thing up there; depending what might go wrong, I can't even guess what it might take to fix it after all.

Really funny is that I'm not getting paid for this. At all.

The book I'm working on is 97D [which 'I' didn't technically write], which I released initially as a PDF in 2000, for free; it's Episode Zero of the S97S, and was always meant to be something of a free advert thing for the rest of the saga. I'm not yet sure how you list something in the Kindle Store for $0.00, but that's my intention for this thing.

Then, as I get the other nine books chopped into Kindling, I'll throw those up there for profit. It's essentially drugpushing: LK0's free; the rest of the saga will cost whatever times nine—probably about ninety bucks. Which at least is better than the $360ish the hardcovers would cost, or the halfofthatish for the trade paperbacks. The standard play seems to be to set Kindling at ten bucks per title, and let amazon.com decide whether to run sales cutting that down to six or seven bucks on occasion. Which I suppose is fair, a pennydreadful at Safeway currently going for US&8.99 for newsprint pulp.

Okay. I'm now entirely killing time here instead of working on the .html; also, I'm kinda reaching over and playing the synth onehanded a bit, and randomly. A, D; E, F; A, D, E, F, A#, A, F, D, A, G#...A. The PinkPanther theme is weird.

Also: also, I'm outta soda; so I made tea; and now I'm outta that. At least I can make more, by going away from here to get more water.

D, C, A, G, F, D, G# G G# G G# G G# G, F D C D....

D A D!

More later....

Just ran into this in my inbox:

Dear Colorado-based Amazon Associate:
We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to inform you that the Colorado government recently enacted a law to impose sales tax regulations on online retailers. The regulations are burdensome and no other state has similar rules. The new regulations do not require online retailers to collect sales tax. Instead, they are clearly intended to increase the compliance burden to a point where online retailers will be induced to "voluntarily" collect Colorado sales tax -- a course we won't take.

We and many others strongly opposed this legislation, known as HB 10-1193, but it was enacted anyway. Regrettably, as a result of the new law, we have decided to stop advertising through Associates based in Colorado. We plan to continue to sell to Colorado residents, however, and will advertise through other channels, including through Associates based in other states.

There is a right way for Colorado to pursue its revenue goals, but this new law is a wrong way. As we repeatedly communicated to Colorado legislators, including those who sponsored and supported the new law, we are not opposed to collecting sales tax within a constitutionally-permissible system applied even-handedly. The US Supreme Court has defined what would be constitutional, and if Colorado would repeal the current law or follow the constitutional approach to collection, we would welcome the opportunity to reinstate Colorado-based Associates.

You may express your views of Colorado's new law to members of the General Assembly and to Governor Ritter, who signed the bill.

Your Associates account has been closed as of March 8, 2010, and we will no longer pay advertising fees for customers you refer to Amazon.com after that date. Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned prior to March 8, 2010, will be processed and paid in accordance with our regular payment schedule. Based on your account closure date of March 8, any final payments will be paid by May 31, 2010.

We have enjoyed working with you and other Colorado-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program, and wish you all the best in your future.

Best Regards,

The Amazon Associates Team

The bill itself: HB 10-1193.

The only reason I'm bothering to write this out when I could be packing is that I personally don't rely too heavily on amazon.com, at least in this regard. Though I'm still kinda mentally plotting out what would fit in which boxes, wondering how this'll trickle down to things I do rely on.

If the bill makes no sense—well, in fact the bill does make no sense. It could make sense; but, instead, democrats apparently wrote it. But the simple tl;dr version is that a company external to the state, selling more than ten thousand bucks in stuff through people in the state, gets hit with sales taxes. Meaning, if I'm reading this correctly [I'm pretty sure I am; I'm less certain that it's written correctly], that a company in California sells stuff to people in New York, through links provided by a guy in Colorado, and Colorado lays claims to sales taxes on things which never actually enter the state. It seems that amazon.com are reading it the same way.

To add a layer of weirdness, my server's physically in California, which should be relevant but isn't. So, to change a couple of variables: a business in Seattle sells stuff to people in Manhattan through a website most physically present in San Francisco because a guy who's been known to stop for lunch in Denver made that possible, slurping sales tax down into DenverMetro. Colorado pretty much being DenverMetro, and little else. There used to be Boulder but, following their politics, we inferred that they offended us, and outlawed them.

What I'm not yet sure about is how companies I actually do rely upon are gonna react to this. Technically, one of those is still amazon.com; but, as mentioned in their release, this isn't [yet] doing anything to prevent guys writing books in Colorado from being allowed to make any money. Can't wait to see how they intend to prevent that, provided any of these imbeciles remain in office that long.

Actually, I've seen some intentions already. There's actually a proposal, if not really a bill, to start taxing sedentary funds. Meaning in the extreme that, if you've got loose change lurking in your sofa, you'd be required annually to find it and count it up and remit a percentage of it, guaranteeing that, eventually, no one would have any cash sitting around, and we could all go back to just trying to get new cash, or whatever remained of it after literal income tax had been imposed, but before additional and purely unconstitutional taxes started eroding away anything lurking in sofas and bankaccounts.

More good news. Another bill [I think it's still only a bill...on Soviet Hill] has been written to tax the hell outta things like sugared soda. Evidently crafted by the same plebeians who sneaked chewingtobacco into the smokingban to prevent secondhand smoke [stop chewing so fast], it would expand beyond Coke into CokeZero, since, though zero kilocalories, it contains aspartame as a sweetener, thusly not lending to the obesity epidemic I have yet to see actual evidence of, and applied to me, since I'm 6'5" and 135lbs and therefore representative of Americans who can't remember to stop eating too much, the required new fatass clothes serving not as a hint.

Something's gone wrong when the Powers Wot Suck have got me seriously considering moving to less communistic a country. Like China, where you can still smoke.

All that's later, of course. For now, the big deal is just that amazon.com have locked down the Associates Account I'd honestly kinda forgotten I even had after around 1998. But that's kinda the apotheosis, innit: we're just removing liberties you little people forgot you ever had; it's not like we're going after things you use every day....

Oh well. At least it's 2010. That's an electionyear, right? Good. @GovRitter: You're fired.

More later....

And there was much lawling. Which I infer to mean that a chatroom of people saw a string of largish words and tittered in confusion. Which sadly is bestcase; more likely, 'lol' has become a pavlovian reaction in text to things observed. I recently caught someone defining LOL as something of a backronym for I Am Done Talking Now. Typo for IADTN though that would be, I could see that being the case.

Supposing that the tittering was just code for IADTN or YBWFM [Your Big Words Frighten Me], maybe I should kinda expound on my little treatise, possibly through the clever use of a Dark Helmet quote:

Evil will always triumph, because Good is dumb.

Lawl.

And yet, to a real extent, that's sorta my point. As a basic word, evil is quantifiably meaningless. Want another spurious quote?

It is neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.

The nature of evil is by that very nature subjective. It's evil relative to goodness, which is equally meaningless. Distilled to application, evil is any act, otherwise identical to an act of goodness, in which the observer doesn't get to win. Make sense so far? Lawyers, for example, are evil. Why? Because they were nefarious enough to read the preexisting laws even before You the Good [and probably the Dumb] broke them, then used that preeminent knowledge to fuck you up. Are there examples of nonevil lawyers? In theory, there are: they're the ones identical to the evil lawyers, but they're working for you, fucking up the other guy; of course, they turn out to be evil lawyers in the end, when you get your bill, and don't get to reneg after the fact now that you've decided that the agreedupon fee wasn't fair.

Want another example, which tends to assure me that everyone I hear from is an idiot? Bonuses. This is becoming old news, but I'm still waiting for anyone else to catch the obvious; that not apparently happening, here it is.

Prior to the bailouts [let's suppose that, as of this writing, the bailouts are a matter of history, with no sequels to come], companies doomed to bailouts had structured by contract bonuses for various highly ranking employees. We know that, right? Aside from everything else, Whatever, Inc. had structured things so that certain employees would receive $X in addition to their salaries of $N for having done Y. Kinda like if you're working at PizzaSlut, making $7.25 per hour to deliver pizzas within a radius and your shiftmanager's cool enough to offer you an extra five from petty cash [PizzaSlut don't to my knowledge have such a slushfund, though I've heard of managers kinda creating one against corporate policies] if you'll run a pie to a place five miles beyond the perimeter of your delivery zone. Just change some numbers, and the same principles apply to bonuses of six to eight figures in addition to comparable salaries.

Now there's a bailout. Now being later; the bailout being external and additional to the contract. To ignore what actually happened for a moment, let's shift this back to PizzaSlut: you've delivered a pizza to some guy halfway across town [if this makes no sense, pretend you're in Denver, where delivery zones can end well before the metro area truly ends, making it politically impossible to order a pizza to a house halfway up a mountain in Evergreen; that's how this sort of thing can happen], possibly got a tip from the guy actually ordering the thing, and come back down the mountain to PizzaSlut, wherein you expect that five bucks in addition to the twelve cents per minute you were getting for being on the clock at all. So, bad news: while you were out, PizzaSlut were bought by your government in a bailout; if you get the five bucks now, We the People will see how evil you are, since We the People are suddenly paying for it.

So, who's the evil one? You, for expecting to get what you'd contracted to receive? Anyone but you would say so, at least if the numbers were right.

The primary difference, once you move up to AIG Executive Numbers, is that the bonus structure is numbers reportedly inconceivable to stupid people. I get that all the time, often even from people I'd otherwise consider reasonably intelligent. Ever heard that the age of the planet, being four and a half billion years old, is a number beyond people's ability to understand? Bullshit. I understand it perfectly. This website—the literal domain name itself—costs ten bucks a year to renew [the server costs somewhat more; more on that in a bit], where a given somethingorother—a corporation somewhere valued at $45billion—would take me four and a half billion years to save up for, at the precise rate at which I'm spending money to renew gremlin.net every year. And I want you to know that I'd be doing that, if I didn't care so damned much about you little people visiting this site.

An evil bonus is characterised in part by the source. If You the Taxpayer, paying the taxes, end up paying the bonus, it's a little evil. Even if that bonus were just the five bucks going to a guy breaking about even through petrol lost driving halfway up a mountain. Secondarily, that the amount of the taxpaid bonus is roughly enough to buy a mountain makes it additionally evil through its needlessness. Which is of course an oddly soviet philosophy: that anything not needed to survive—an XBox, say—is by definition gratuitous and evil.

That being subjective, it's irrelevant that I disagree. But then, I'd have to: I've got an XBox.

So. To the extent that I acknowledge [brag] that I'm evil, that being a subjective term relative to dumb goodness and good dumbness and dikigorosophobic lawyerslamming, it's in part because I tend to look beyond emotionally motivated thinkaboutitism to see only the contractual facts defining a circumstance. To that end, a guy making an extra five bucks to deliver a pizza to a guy making an extra five million for marginally doing his job, and the guy marginally doing his job to the exclusion of keeping his whole company working well enough to remain capitalistic, are in about the same situation: guy does X to make $Y in addition to $N, and the world keeps turning.

Why's it matter? It technically doesn't: I already get it, and no amount of overexplanation will hammer it into the heads of the thinkaboutitastic twerps whimpering that these guys got bonuses exceeding each twerp's potential lifetime salary down in the Pizza Delivery Industrial Complex. Still, it seems like it kinda has to be said, if only to provide something for the few people who also get it with something to nod at and go yeah, really while kinda smirking; we who get it don't to my knowledge actually lawl.

Elements of this little example do of course matter to everyone; elements of anything can matter to everyone, despite the arcane insignificance of the primary subject. In this case, one element is, as you'd never guess, Terry Schiavo. Stick with me for a minute; then you'll understand. Probably.

A few years ago, President Junior, misunderstanding the more basic elements of the American Constitution, thought it would be okay to issue a bill of attainder against Terry Schiavo's husband and proxy, prohibiting him alone from acting in a capacity legally available to anyone else. There's a reason this is illegal, as precedented by a history to date of overturning laws requiring Rosa Parks to give up her seat to a white guy through [hello from the future] laws prohibiting gay guys from marrying each other. Due process mandates that all people enjoy the same, inalienable rights until or unless one of those people is convicted properly of a crime and sentenced in part to lose those rights—which incidentally I find a little reprehensible, but this isn't about that.

Why's it matter? Because, President Junior out of office, President Barry just into office, the new guy proposed slamming the guys having got those bonuses, and only those guys, with taxes on those bonuses of around ninety percent. Remember that, by this point, it was the next fiscal year and, inasmuch as it might have been possible to have already spent their bonuses of $Y, they'd be getting taxed $0.9Y the next year whether they still had $0.9Y or not. That sort of thing disturbs me. A lot.

Had they already spent the money? Who knows; who cares; the principle remains: a bill of attainder [to be fair, I don't know that this ever wound up happening; it's possible that I haven't heard about it since because someone with a basic knowledge of the constitution got hold of Barry and told him to shut the hell up] against individuals following laws other people following the same laws aren't breaking is illegal, and for a good reason. Are those individuals evil for knowing more about the laws and by extension making more money than the good little dumb people? Sure; why not. Are they criminals? Not by definition.

To the degree that any of that matters, of course, it's only in abstract matters of fact. Either or both remain irrelevant to the thinkaboutitastic who'd side with Schiavo because their emotions tell them that it's stupid to keep a lifeform in a vegetative state on lifesupport against her former will; the equal yet opposite emotions of the wingnuts to the other extreme side of America's civil coldwar, caring not about laws developed for Schiavo alone, might care quite a lot about laws developed to punish corporate executives alone. Personally, I'm just creeped to know that the laws, reasonably static though they are, can be applied differently to anyone however accidentally changing his standing, and overnight. Which I guess makes me evil, since I focus on what I can read in advance, and not on what I can come up with if I think about it, and/or listen for what someone means in contrast to what someone says.

To be honest, I don't really see how that makes me evil. Except that it's not actually stupid and therefore, according to Dark Helmet, it's not good; it's thusly evil. I guess I can live with that.

On that subject, I've got something going on right now over at...I guess I'm not naming names today; call it a gesture of moderately less evil will. But I administrate a website for these people playing NPO. As children playing NPO, they want a website. They think. Also, they've got a loose hierarchy of managers and treasurers and...whatever it is they've got thrown nominally together; not exactly the point, at least yet. Also, because it's in style to say so, they've got transparency betwixt their managerial echelon and the serfier hirelings beneath them; not the point just yet either, except that it amuses me, however externally.

So they want a website. Of course, being an NPO, they have no money. Being evil, I shouldn't be talking to them at all. But, for whatever whimsical reason, I decide it's okay, knowing some of these people personally, and being the only guy any of them knows known to be capable of administrating a website displaying more functionality than an uploaded bitmap. We're okay so far.

So I get them a domain. That's to say that, if it weren't cloaked in WHOIS, and I told you what it was, you could look it up and see me [technically Wasted] as its owner. Largely irrelevant in general, though the NPO, lack of money notwithstanding, are striving to advertise the domain; I'm okay with that.

I [technically Wasted, meaning in this case mostly Hunter] design a site for the domain. Really cool little thing employing a CMS at the mainsite and a boardsystem beneath that, not unlike the technical format here at gremlin.net. Of course, they've got no money, so the whole thing, which would cost anyone else several thousand bucks to have us do, is functionally free. Which is okay, since we worked out those terms in advance.

It's done and, apart from administration [no one can really work out the alarmingly simple methods of keeping things working as designed], I could now walk away.

I didn't walk away. But the PR Manager did. That's the guy who commissioned and approved the site's layout. To this day, and to my knowledge, he maintains that the site we'd written to his proclivities was really cool. Just sayin.

He being gone, the rest of the NPO start wondering why a site they didn't pay for, which the missing PR guy alone ever liked, is still in place. Which kinda seems like an idiotic question; except that I kinda have to concede that the site the missing PR guy wanted, though cool, was a bit convoluted. We could talk about replacing it.

The thing about that though is that I'm kinda what grownups call busy. Not all that busy; I'm still spending about twenty hours a day on the XBox. But, videogames being more fun than writing CMSware, I'm functionally busy anyway. So, you read that right: to me, playing DeadRising is vastly more important than rewriting a blogueshell; who among you is willing to throw the first wireless controller....

So here's the setlist going into this, following the PR guy's departure. Their boardsystem is clogged by spambots. So's mine; it happens. And there are ways to deal with that, none of them perfect. One's to shut down registry; that being the simplest, if the worst, it's what I did first. Of course, that's unacceptable because they want people who aren't bots to come in and post new threads, building up a community optimally devoid of bots. So I propose setting up an accesscode system, externally giving real people a code required by the system during the registry process; that being something of an effort, and the code being an element of something they're selling [if not for profit] to people they're trusting to not give the code to botmakers, I glance at the nonprofit they're making per month—on average a couple hundred bucks—and arbitrate that I can maintain this thing for fifty of that, which is a nominal bit of cash with which I can kinda dent the monthly operational costs of the server itself.

That may technically have been my first mistake: the foolish utilisation of nouns. To this day [and how's it different from any other], they're convinced that the fifty bucks a month is entirely about the servercosts; that that's what I'm applying it to is technically irrelevant to the deal. But it's out there, so I'll acknowledge it.

The boardsystem patched up to prevent bots from getting in, in exchange for a monthly amount equal to either a fraction of my serverside operational costs, or a couple hours at the cinema with a couple tickets and a couple cheeseburgers, or [evil alert] twenty minutes of my time as applied to writing websites for $150 per hour: that settles that.

But we still need a new website thing. And, unable to afford $150 per hour, the thirty-odd hours wasted writing that out is approximately free. To that end, I mention, in advance, before reasonably explicit approval, that, once the new blogueware is done, the site in general will include, but be not limited to, little adverts here and there from which I'll make a bit of cost per impression. And there's much rejoice, and a bit of lawling.

For a couple of months.

Here are the facts to date on all that.

January 2010: They give me fifty bucks, in cash, onsite, like in the deal. Life is good.

February 2010: They don't give me fifty bucks in cash. They want a record of this for whatever nonprofitorganised purposes. Fair enough: I set them up a Feb2010 bill through PayPal.com. It remains unpaid to date, apparently because they want the receipt in advance.

March 2010: No fifty bucks in any form for this month yet. Since I got the fifty in January at the end of the month, that's not immediately shocking, despite my doubts that they intend to give it to me at all.

Yesterdayish 2010 [I've slept once since this happened]: I start hearing, untransparently, through private messages on their boardsystem, which I get because I'm still reloading it routinely to the exclusion of XBoxing zombies to death, that the management are unthrilled that the highest bidder throwing me money per impression to advertise on their site is displaying 'animated popups for teabagger party sites' [nevermind that the adverts can't by their nature pop anything up; see more next week on When Luddites Attack] in some egregious burst of netisised anarchocapitalism, and they're not okay with that.

Oh.

Granting that the advert system allows animated adverts by default [I found out later that the 'teabagger party animated popups' were in fact jpegs], I spent—somewhat ironically—twenty minutes [marketvalue: fifty bucks I'll never get] teaching the system to stop serving animated adverts to their site; problem reportedly solved.

Sorta.

First: the problem I'm solving is that, since I'd never technically mentioned in advance that the adverts I'd mentioned in advance could potentially be animated, the potential presence of animated adverts kinda fucked with the spirit of the deal. Evil or not, I can acknowledge that, conceding the point. However foolishly.

Second: the problem I'm solving isn't a suggestion, question, or observation; it's a fucking ultimatum in which I kill the animated popups inherent in jpegs, or they stop paying me the fifty bucks a month I get for botkilling within the site I didn't charge them $150*thirtysomething [not charging them, I didn't really time it; call it thirty-five hours, and therefore $5,250] to build. So, that I wasted twenty minutes locking out what I'm being told are animated jpegs was in theory the lesser of two stupidities; it got it over with. Dealwise.

Didn't help much. See because the transparenciless private messages from the one guy deigning to represent the whole NPO escalate, now telling me that, no, they want all the adverts off their site, or else they won't give me the money they already didn't give me.

Le'me move over here for a second; c'mon, follow along; that's better. Now that we're over here in Fucking Reality, let's talk about something irrelevant, but moderately important. I'm not getting enough off the adverts on their site to give a financial damn. If I were getting the fifty per month for botkilling, which I'm not, it wouldn't produce a financial damn. This isn't about the money; this is about expecting people, however good and dumb, to stick to a fucking contract. Evil though that is. Let's go back into the NPO, wherein we have luddites LARPing as grownups....

Remember how I foolishly mentioned a couple of nouns once? That thing where I mentioned I could just get fifty bucks a month for the botkilling thing, that amount being however coincidentally equal to some fraction of my own monthly costs? Guess which nouns are being remembered.

This is gonna matter extremely to some of you. You know who you are. You're those people with sites lurking on my server, with whom I've got similar little deals. Being less evil than I technically should be, I'm not charging everyone the same server rent; I acknowledge that. I'm mostly operating on glorified donations. Sure I can set you up a few gigs of space; I can throw together a freeware CMS to spare you the living hell of dealing instead with MySpace.com; if you wanna kick me a few bucks a month to help offset my costs, I won't hate you for it. That sort of thing.

What I'm hearing now, without transparency, privately from a guy trying to represent this whole NPO, is that he wants all my records. That's precisely the total number of pennies I'm paying per month to operate the server, along with the number of pennies I'm getting from each and every one of you who also throw me some number of pennies, presumably along with names and contact information, so he can work out whether I'm scamming the NPO with this round number of fifty bucks never contractually related to anything more than the damned botkilling effort.

I told him No, being an Evil Fucking Hero of the People.

This all being yesterdayish, it remains unresolved to date. If only technically. I've already worked things out, personally. That goes like this:

Given the choice between renegotiating a contract already being broken on their end or getting more not paid, I'll stick to getting more not paid. Also, I'll point that domain I still own to their forgotten MySpace.com profile; it's up to date for something like 2008; I'm sure it's fine, the animated adverts throughout notwithstanding; Tom's a good guy, not evil at all, and will certainly remove MySpace.com's adverts from their little blogue with nary a thought.

Which of course is why I'm mentioning all this here. Again, a percentage of the people in this little NPO are externally friends of mine. And, if and when I send their site to MySpace.com, the transparency they rely on being mythical, they'll have no clue what just happened, but for this anonymousish explanation. So hello from the future; this is why.

Also, being more evil than stupid, I wouldn't actually destroy everything on the site they have as of now; I'd just redirect the domain. So, to the NPO, there in the future: if you guys wanna fix this mess, through whatever series of revolts, knock yourselves out. More accurately: knock out your managerial oligarchy, replacing it with something serving your interests. Then we can talk about pointing the domain back to your account on my server and getting back to what we'd had working. You know how to reach me when that's happened.

Back here in the present: More later....

Of course, we used to have a word for that format: hypertext.

To work out how and whether to write Kindling, I grabbed a copy of Kindle Formatting [See also KindleFormatting.com], ironically enough in paperback [still haven't yet bought a Kindle, personally] which proved in my case to be useless for learning hypertext again, though it is pretty useful for telling me what I can't do, and in cases how to do it anyway. So that was twenty bucks I don't really miss.

Here's the tl;dr: the whole thing really is just hypertext, in a sort of crippled capacity. Most of the tags I've become used to using over the last fifteen years are beyond the Kindle's abilities; and some of the recommended tags are things I haven't seen used since 1995. The thing has a ways to go before HTML4 will serve a purpose.

Meaning nothing, of course. The second generation of Kindles, as an example, allows for downscaled <TABLE> tags, theoretically allowing for inline images [<IMG ALIGN="RIGHT"> does nothing useful, to date] within tablecells. But, that being an option, the same file downloaded to a Kindle1, which can't do tables, is gonna kinda suck.

I guess I could just format for each model, DRMing the files to stick with the original device. But there's still that suck wherein the Kindle1 simply doesn't work correctly. Which is why they replaced it, I suppose.

Funny's that I used to write these things differently [not What's News specifically, though I am actually typing this into my phone], literally writing novels into Spirals with pens. Looking at various things written twenty years ago or more, I was at the time using a beta version of hypertext, italicising on paper by encapsulating words in anglebrackets, like <this>, and underlining boldfaced stuff. I didn't fully invent that by the way: someone at Marvel Comics started anglebracketing English words in dialogue to indicate translation from whatever other language, back in the eighties; I just repurposed that trick halfway into hypertext. Cool, huh....

Drat. The dangers of writing things into a phone: someone calls, and the world ends. Anyway....

So, I used to write things differently. Meaning less technologically advanced...ly. And possibly a little like that. If I can kinda get back into that habit, at the least ignoring advances made in desktop publishing over the last twenty years, I'll be more okay with writing first and foremost for the Kindle, and then adding whatever is currently exclusive to PBooks, and cool enough to bother with, before releasing the same thing on paper.

There is of course the really good news: this kinda resets everything. Meaning that whatever I as an entity have written since the eighties, under whatever names, remaining under whatever contracts, the Kindle replaces all of that. A book officially written by a guy you people have either never heard of or, at the least, wouldn't guess was secretly also me, is fair game again; anything I've got going on with publishers apart from Wasted applies only to books displaying mass. Which for the purposes of the analogy includes audiobooks, which I hate too much to acknowledge anyway.

So there's just the annoying matter of actually retrowriting things into hypertext, probably testing them out on a Kindle, uploading them under whatever names, ???, and profiting. Or something.

Hoping to get a dent into that clever little plan before the end of the year. Probably starting nowish....

In other news, we got together to work out music for Deophagy overnight. I recorded some of it for you. For some reason. Various Noises

More later....

But we've been talking about it again lately. The whole thing with the band. So I'm back to playing with a few things. Like writing songs.

I pulled one out from 1986, noted what didn't work anymore, and updated it a bit. I never gave the thing a title back then; now that it's updated, the obvious title is Deophagy.

If you're tonedeaf, ignore the little hints about the keys; if you're not, it might help to understand elements of the music itself:

Deophagy [1986, 2010]

A        Veronica wears
G#       Her humblest of clothes
G        As she sits in the church
F#       Amongst the devils she knows
A        Her christ is her love
G#       She'll do whatever he asks
G        In symbiotic return
F#       For his omnipotent tasks

F        And she gives him herself
G        Her body and soul
G#       Because he died for her sins
A#       And he filled up her hole
F        And he gives her his blessing
G        Whenever she sneezes
G#       So her life will be lived
A#       For Jesus

A        But she's fucked in the head
G#       Because her Jesus is dead
G        The voice of her lord
F#       Is just an empty word
A        He said 'let there be light'
G#       And he saw it was good
G        So she opens her mouth
F#       And she treats him like food

F        But she's saving herself
G        Because she wants to survive
G#       So she can laugh at the sinners
A#       Should armageddon arrive
F        And she lives on her knees
G        With a heart for the lord
G#       And her ten percent
A#       Which she can barely afford

A        If he created her in
G#       This image she sees
G        Should he be nailed to a cross
F#       Should she live life on her knees
A        But still she opens her mouth
G#       To take communion within
G        That unleavened dough
F#       Of he who died for her sin

[probably some sort of solo thing here]

F        Pascal's Wager suggests
G        That if christ doesn't exist
G#       Then this thing that she eats
A#       Merely helps her subsist
F        A metaphorical god
G        A crude analogy
G#       A consumable symbol
A#       Of deophagy

Of course, that kinda led to the next song [I'm apparently writing out some sort of concept opera thing here], which is loosely related:

Consume [2010]

Bassline                           Treble
D, D, D, D, E, E;                D, D, D, D, D, C
F, F, F, F, G, G;                D, D, D, D, D, C
D, D, D, D, E, E;                D, D, D, D, D, C
F, F, F, F; G, G;                C, C, C, C, C, C

VeriSign and debit
Amazon and credit
You’ve got the wealth so spread it
Buy it all; buy it now

WootDotCom and eBay
You just can’t wait for payday
Maybe they’ve got layaway
Buy it all; buy it now

Bassline
A, G#, G, F#, F, E, D#, E

As a child
You rode your bike
Down to the store
Or to the mall
You had a dollar
To buy a soda
Or a comic
And that was all

But now you’ve got a mortgage
And you’ve got to pay for college
But nevermind the shortage
Buy it all; buy it now

Defined by your possessions
You’re a tool of your obsessions
There’s always been recessions
So buy it all; buy it now

Life was so much
Simpler then
A stick; a ball
A lifelong friend
That summer seemed
To never end
But then
That was all

And int’rest rates from loansharks
And taxhikes for a new park
But you remain an easy mark
Buy it all; buy it now

And new books for your Kindle
And BluRay by the spindle
Go make your funding dwindle
Buy it all; buy it now

When you were young
You saw the lie
Grownups struggling
Just to survive
Being told
You just got by
Don’t ask why
And that was all

Lowfat halfcaff lattes
And you’re off to your pilates
In your shiny new Toyotas
Buy it all; buy it now

You have a new disorder
There’s a book on it at Borders
Near the MP3 recorders
Buy it all; buy it now

Back in the day you
Got up at four
To throw the papers
At all the doors
Fullcoloured adverts
For cool toys
You had a job now
And that was all

If suicide is painless
Then consumership is brainless
And six figures becomes gainless
Buy it all; buy it now

So thanks for hitting iTunes
You’ll prob’ly need a new Zune
The new disc should be out soon
Buy them all; buy them now

That is all.

Regarding the whole thing, I've got the first and last songs done musically. The first song is instrumental beneath a monologue I haven't really written yet. The last song is something I wrote about ten years ago, so I remember the music but I'm not sure about all the words anymore; it's around here somewhere; I'll find it.

More later....

Well: not science, really. Except that I'm a scientist. So the things I do are, like, scientism. So it's all scientistic. Or something.

I dunno. I just work here. When I'm not playing videogames here. Which is more often.

So. What's new...

Partly, I've just been kinda...broken lately. I had an impressive headache a couple days ago. One of those neat things where breathing hurts. It wasn't even strictly a headache, since it spanned from my scapulae, up over most of my head. The good news is that, while most of my headaches are functionally indescribable, this one's easy to relate—though it involves a bit of work on your end: go park a 1966 Buick Electra on your hand, then wait for ten or fifteen minutes until you really start to notice it. When it really starts thudding as the bit of blood able to get through tries to force the arteries open despite the external pressure forcing them shut, you'll be in the ballpark. Personally, I just hid mostly underwater in the tub for a couple hours, mashing the top of my head against the sloped end, waiting for the opiates to kick in and do something about it.

I'm okay now. Headachewise. Though, possibly unrelated, I've got a blistering cankersore the size of a Datsun at the base of my tongue. I'm not sure how that happened. But it makes talking something of a problem. I've been kinda drinking saltwater at it, trying to make it different if not necessarily better.

Of course, you didn't come here to hear about these things. Or, maybe you did. I can't guess what's wrong with you people....

This of course is all just in the last couple days. What's really starting to annoy me—I'm not even sure when this happened, anymore. I think it was in the spring of 2008 or 2009: one of those warmish days when my knee didn't hurt all that much. So I thought I'd see what would happen if I tried standing on a skateboard all backwards [technically, that's how I do it now, keeping my bad leg free to kick off for speed, bending my good leg to reach the ground], kicking with my good leg while bending the bad one. Which worked, at the time. Until I forgot what I was doing, and went to kick again with my bad leg. If you understand the layout of a skateboard, you can guess the results already: the foot remaining on the board was behind the rear axle, so the board shot out from under me.

Of course, being selfaware, I ran with it, just kinda sitting instantly down on the pavement. That's the good news. The bad news is that, so far as I can guess, I got something embedded in the back of my leg, and it keeps not healing right. The surface heals just fine; but something deeper inside keeps infecting something, swelling up the whole site until it rips out through the occasionally healed impact crater. So that's annoying the hell outta me. I'm seriously about to open the whole thing up with an XActo knife and see what's causing all this.

Maybe there are botflies in Denver. Probably there aren't.

So that's what's going on with being completely in hell at the moment: sometimes my head hurts, usually my knee hurts, I've got a puncture healing and bursting and leaking black blood and healing again, and the base of my tongue feels like a gunshot wound. And my hair is doing this weird, frippy, NeilGaimany thing; that doesn't exactly hurt, but it's bugging me.

And I've been reworking websites lately. I probably mentioned that we got Wasted rewritten. Following that, we reworked NotS too. And some other sites which aren't really mine, so identifying them might be weird. But, videogames becoming boring, I guess I'm getting back into writing websites for people. Especially now that the rules have kinda changed.

Back when I started with writing sites, there was no good way to prevent them from just being stolen. Write a website and make it functional; in most cases, that meant writing it out in WordPad and saving it as .html. At which point anyone seeing the thing could pretty much just copypaste the sourcecode and run away with it. Unless it was just a screenshot, which didn't really let people see the site. On the bright side: for a while there, the people who couldn't write websites themselves didn't know how to steal sourcecode; so that all worked out.

Then there was the transitional phase into Web2.0 [which I still maintain began with UseNet in the seventies], and we went all .asp and .php and whatever, preventing those learning to copypaste the sourcecode from copypasting inclusionary files along with it. Until, today, everything's pretty much stylesheeted blogueware, which almost no one understands. Which works for me, since I understand it; better still, Hunter understands it and can type most of it out before bothering to go playtest the results. So that works out nicely: I can design approximately anything and, before I can get done thinking about a way to make it work, she'll have banged out a sourcecode doing exactly what I'd just photoshopped. It's a little like that thing where most chicks can just go do the dishes without making a huge production out of it, where guys pondering the same job will take out SuperBowl adverts announcing their intentions; except that there's a lot of coding around here, and the kitchen sink is about a week away from qualifying as a bodyfarm.

What: I'm not gonna do it; I'm male.

So, yeah: I'm thinking a bit about getting back into webdesign as a paying hobby. Really just any sort of hobbyjob at all [historically, when I got into this mood, I'd go grab a telemarketing gig to kill eight hours for about a hundred bucks while annoying people; but, historically, people had landlines], if not quite WalMart Greeter. Believe me: I of all people am unqualified to thank people for waddling into WalMart; 'Hi there, you fat, ugly moron; I assume you're here either for the pizza, or for clothes I could use to cover my car if I parked it out in the sun'; 'Le'me guess: American Idol boxset, or sparkly pink Nokia shitphone faceplates'; 'You're in luck: the porkrinds are just over there, next to the Cheetos; the oranges and things are further back, since people eating those will live long enough to reach them....'

Hey: fire me.

Of course, no one ever does. I still haven't finished writing out the filmscript here. I was about to; then the headache happened; and now I'm doing this.

Speaking of filmscripts, if any: I watched VeryNormal Inactivity last night. You know: BlairWitch 2009. Wow, did that suck. And I saw it beneath RiffTrax, which can only have improved it. I kinda liked BlairWitch. A little. For what it was. It was done kinda well, all things considered. It was one of the worst films of 1999; but there were a lot of decent films that year. So I didn't really hate it.

Paranormal Activity, on the other hand....

My first thought, ten minutes into this mess, which I mentioned to Hunter, was: 'If this were at YouTubeDotCom, no one would still be watching it.' The only thing keeping me remotely involved was the counterpoint dialogue from Nelson, et al. I'm tempted to hit imdb.com to see whether something they mentioned in the riff was even true....

Oh wow. It was. Budget: $15,000; Gross through 17th January 2010 [in the US]: $107,917,283. And yet there are those who still believe in deities.

I'm less tempted to go back into the messageboards to see what I can only guess is this bad or worse:

ok so hears my thory on wen teh girl 1st got posesed i men if she acualy was pssesed at al i mean if u remeber how i dont no when nite it was i thing mayb nite 18 and she was out on teh swig in the back yeard unless it was there front yard idk lol but i think that was ater she was standig completly still for all nite and then she was out on the swign and we no bcuz mika[sp?] founf her ther with he camara rite? thats when i think she first got possesed by the devil or demin or whatever it was supose to be idk lol but anyway thats my thery and maybe im wrong but probaly not any anyway im 12 and a genious so if u dont like my thery cum up with ur own but mines good 2 lolololol

if u love jesus put this in ur sig and tell others to put this in there sig

This is why I hate people: because they have EnterKeys, and they use them.

Rubbernecking the trainwreck after all:

I watched it alone,and i'm 13

"Civillian In Peace Soldier In War,I am the guard"-Southern Comfort

if you are 13 then how did you get to watch it??
I'm 31 btw the way

Knew I shouldn'ta looked....

Who the hell would actually taunt a demond? And who in their right mind would stay in the house and sleep with all the lights off? I'd have every friggin light on in the house and have 20 friends watching me. Run around the house in the dark are these people nuts?

Of course, I've actually done this. Not that there was a daemon. But there was a reportedly haunted house here in Denver to which I went to get shots of with this band wanting to be shot in a haunted house. Nothing's much funnier than taunting daemons in a haunted house, watching LARPers get really scared—not as much that the daemon will show up and be all daemony, but that it won't show up, despite their ardent makebelieve. Somewhere, I probably still have footage of the DVC pointing up the chimney [seconds earlier, the LARPers had convinced themselves that they'd heard daemons in there] and me screaming into the flu: 'Hey! Mister Daemon! Get out here, ya pussy! Do something, you boring preternatural 'tard!'

It never did show up. But the house had a badly photoshopped print of a half opaque dumpy goof in comicon quality greasepaint dropped in among a group of people standing in the parlour with different lightsources; that was their holy grail of proof that the place was haunted. They were boring little people.

I should go work on the filmscript. And/or something I could film for fifteen thousand bucks, designed to make nine figures. Or drink some saltwater or something.

More later....

I say they spammed us because Xenu didn't give them any names, apart from Resident [of course, it was right about that; so I guess it's like omniscience], meaning that we both get to fill out their little personality test. Because it's scanned in and there's Photoshop, making it replicable, portable, demonstrable, and even sillier.

Scans are in the LAN. And...in Photoshop. So, let's go....

'...answer as soon as you understand and then go on to the next question.' Apparently, most people taking this test are a little dumber than scifags tend to be.

Unsolicited Mail received by Gremlin will be assessed a $500 annoyance fee, in accordance with current antispam laws; all submissions automatically become the property of gremlin.net and cannot be returned

I wonder what my results will be. And whether the 'tard grading me will be anything like the last scifag I encountered. And whether I'd actually have to mail the thing in.

Nah. If Almighty Xenu wants its groupies to know about me, then they'll know. That works for me.

More later....

It's not precisely that I've got nothing else to do; it's that everything else is kinda boring, which is bad for you.

Apart from videogames, I could be writing the filmscript. Somehow, that's both boring and difficult; I've got a really tiny maximum pagecount [runtime, really] which I'm roughly halfway through already. So I'm kinda writing it; just not literally: I'm thinking about the book in general and working out which parts of it absolutely need to be in the film. If the sum total of those parts fit within the runtime, things'll work out; if not...I dunno.

Sad is that it's a short book. It was kinda meant to be, so it could be filmed. It just wasn't apparently short [or, arguably stupid] enough. So that's a problem.

Meanwhile, I've kinda been meaning for years to start porting novels to the Kindle. Which is easy, if it's just that sentence. Actually doing it, on the other hand....

Fundamentally, the Kindle is just hypertext. And less. And a little more. And it's a mess.

Any given novel on the Kindle is, behind amazon.com's retrofuckery, the most basic of hypertext:

<P>It was a dark and stormy night.</P>

<P>According to the National Weather Service, it had been since the summer of 1938.</P>

The question then becomes how that becomes this:

It was a dark and stormy night.
According to the National Weather Service, it had been since the summer of 1938.

...like a novel should kinda look.

The answer seems to be allowing that amazon.com will replace all instances of <P> with something like <BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

That sounds helpful, until you realise that you'll therefore get this:

It was a dark and stormy night.
According to the National Weather Service, it had been since the summer of 1938.

...which isn't what I want.

So, the bugfix is to do this:

<P CLASS="noind" HEIGHT="30">
<P>According to the National Weather Service, it had been since the summer of 1938.</P>

...which isn't that big a deal, except that it's just one example of the attrition. Remember that this is about going through—in this case—3,234 paragraphs and marking up each with the appropriate paragraphing tag.

Thank hell I've got videogames instead.

But I'm looking at the novel here. I exported it to hypertext from MicrosoftWord, complete with all the needlless <span> shit it includes. Which means that I also get to delete all that. Saving it as, like, Web Page Filtred isn't real helpful either.

Easiest might actually be to turn off SmartQuotes and things, and just search for all instances of italics in Word, adding <I> and </I> to each. Though really easiest would be outsourcing it. I've just got something of a problem with outsourcing anything related to hypertext, since I've been doing this since at the latest 1996. Sorta. That the Kindle uses hypertext from 1996 should be good, since I occasionally do that too; I've just become used to using more advanced tags in the last fourteen years or so.

On the bright side, also, if I do it myself, it'll remind me [even after I want it to stop] exactly what's in the novel, and therefore what needs to be in the film. Films are never as good as books; in this case, I'm hoping to get closer than usual. The good news is that I couldn't make it as bad as, say, H2G2 if I tried.

Meanwhile, I'm not even completely sure what the point is. How many people are really reading books on Kindles? I know that a lot of the devices have been sold, and that the number of books available for them is large; I'm just not sure how practical it really is: would enough people grab the book on a Kindle, before the Kindle is replaced by something better, to have made formatting this and other novels worth the time and effort.

I'm inclined to do it anyway, if only because Lurkers itself kinda promises that it's available for the Kindle:

I’m probably cynical and certainly realistic enough, living in the twenty-first century, to allow that the MySpace Generation at least, with its misspelled brevity, might likely tl;dr this whole thing in favour of whatever they hope to find in later chapters. Animgifs, maybe. MP3 controllers. Viral fucking videos. Anything to make this archaic pulpmatter more kinetic and interactive. The lucky ones will read it on a Kindle.
--Lurkers, 2008

For those just joining us: catch up. Also, the novel's a fictional firstperson thing—unreliable narrator and all that. But, if I were just some guy reading it, I'd be wondering why the thing's not available on the Kindle as suggested.

Not much. I've actually never bought a Kindle. Yet. I keep kinda thinking about it; but, every time I get back to amazon.com, they're showing off the next, better model. Right now, I'm thinking about the smaller DX, for a couple of reasons: I don't really want the thing to be the size of, say, an Apple Tablet; and, I'd rather have control over rotating the screen. That it's half the price [if about half the storage] isn't really a large factor, though I suppose I'll take it.

Unless I don't. Because, every time I'm about to, they announce the bigger smaller faster better newer model. Which of course might change all the rules to date on hypertexting something for it. But, at that point, I'm not sure I care anymore.

Anyway: back to working on—oh yeah...I haven't played SimCity4 in months....

More later....

Initially, I was thinking it started earlier than it did. Because timezones suck. Someone at twitter.com mentioned that the game started at three, which I took to mean 15.00EST. Apparently, that was 15.00PST, so the game started around here at four, not one. Because there are twenty-three unique&special snowflake timezones too selfimportant to make sense and go with ZuluTime.

Of course, things started at one, insofar as the only chance of getting a table at the pub involved getting there around noon. So we wound up at more of a houseparty to see this thing.

About the game: it wasn't really my problem. I guess I was hoping Indiana would win, simply because I hate NewOrleans, know someone in Indiana, and have heard of Manning. It's all the criteria I have. Not that the symbolism of a guy whose name is a homonym of breeze winning for a city once trashed by Katrina and the Waves is lost on me.

But this isn't really about that. It's more about this:

Great game; lousy commercials
--MondoHebe

I guess. Whether the game was great is beyond me. But the adverts were boring at best. And, at worst:

This seriously bugged me. Partly because I'm not a big fan of Audi, or for that matter any other car whose name sounds like a hillbilly saying hello. I only ever see them for sale amdist Lamborghini and Porsche as a sort of concession prize for people who want a European car but can't go into six figures to get one. Kinda like going to Chevrolet and seeing Corvette and Camaro, and driving home in a Malibu.

The larger problem is that I know too many people who are actively praying for this orwellian circumstance to develop. We call those people ecotards.

I've explained this before, but it hasn't sunk in yet. So let's start over....

Actually, this is a good time to start over, since there's some new information. Specifically that we're finally to the point that even the stupidest people are lawling at the misnomer of global warming. At the very least, we can start to expect that meaningless term to die.

Al Gore didn't invent the internet, but he did make up global warming
--Anonymous

Global warming doesn't exist. That said: climateshift does occur. Aren't words fun? They mean things.

Why does climateshift occur? Lots of reasons. Most of them prehistoric. Few if any modern or industrial. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Here's how Earth works. A star dies and supernovas. Its MatterEnergy floats around for a couple billion years, eventually congealing into new stars and bits of dirt, really. The bits of dirt float around, drifting toward each other in relative zerogravity, snowballing into larger bits of dirt, which we could call rocks. And the rocks drift into each other, compiling into bigger, oblate spheroid rocks which we'll call planets. One of them is Earth.

Smaller rocks, which we'll call meteoroids, drift into Earth, adding new and interesting atoms and molecules to the whole. A whole 'nother planet, in fact, drifts into Earth, dislodging the moon and changing Earth's rotation. A third planet, which we'll call Jupiter, hangs back beyond Mars being really very large and preventing most of the meteoric little rocks from drifting into Earth now that Earth is actually up to something.

Wait about three hundred and ten million years. Close to five times as long as it's now been since the last tyrannosaur died. And microscopic lifeforms called extremophiles compile autopoietically from amino acids developed back in the nebulae and deposited on Earth by drifting rocks over the last three hundred million years; the extremophiles are a bit boring, making even Paris Hilton look advanced, but they thrive in the lava for half a billion years until evolving into more advanced and less boring bits of RNA, and eventually DNA.

The bits of DNA are still a bit boring, but they're on the right track. Another couple billion years, and the stuff evolves into what we'll call the eukarya, which is bigwordese for reasonably boring multicellular life. If you're into big words, the eukarya evolved endosymbiotically from the prokarya which evolved from the protobionts which evolved from the extremophiles; if you're not into big words, go live in lava.

We now have mutlicellular life, and a couple billion years to go until it starts making adverts for European grocerygetters. This is something like progress.

To save myself some typing, and to cater to the creatards [the enemy of my enemy is my enemy], here's something I wrote a few years ago, lacking a couple new points of information, attempting to reconcile reality with biblical bullshit:

Creatards like to pretend that Earth was formed in BC4004. To accommodate this newish pretension, I've worked out a timeline for the planet, based on their date of origin, along with the fossil record:

 
Hope this helps....
—Gremlin, 25th July 2007; 17.58.34 Mountain Daylight Time

Let's focus for a moment on the beginning of the eighteenth century, back in the Mesozoic. Since that's really kinda my field, and there are a couple surprises there.

First, look just above it, where the Permian ends and so do nineteen in twenty species. The creatards being batshit LARPers, realise that this didn't actually happen within sight of the industrial revolution: this was 250million years ago. Just bear that in mind. Also this:

The neat thing, to me, about the Mesozoic is its global mean annual temperature. If Mesozoic is a big word, we can use another big word which people think they know: Jurassic.

Why's the Jurassic cool? Because it's not. Because, in fact, we've got dozens of millions of years to wait for velociraptors and tyrannosaurs and triceratops to evolve, despite the certainty of millions of morons who saw and misunderstood a laughable film. Also because it's really kinda warm.

Globally warm.

Like, as if global warming were happening.

Why's it happening? Because that's how Earth works. What, apart from really warm, is the Jurassic? Full of oxygen. Lots and lots of oxygen.

Enough oxygen that, though the north pole averaged tropical temperatures, animals were dwarfing modern elephants and most modern whales in size. Remember that too.

The Jurassic ends. We're into the Cretaceous. Huge animals: Tyrannosaurus rex and Edmontosaurus annectens and Titanosaurus indicus and so on. Because a hot planet, full of oxygen, allows them to thrive.

Then they die out. Those species, that is. Stegosaurs have been dead since the Tithonian; birds are in little danger. But all the cool things like the velociraptors and tyrannosaurs and triceratops that you think lived in the Jurassic die out at the end of the Maastrichtian Age, for whatever reason—probably not an asteroid, very probably a zoonotic plague, and very possibly a natural climateshift.

Hang on: don't think you know something yet. There's more.

A valid hypothesis [that's like a guess made by smart people, which isn't yet a theory; where a theory is a proved hypothesis] is that the ornithischians, at least, died out at the end of the Cretaceous, sixty-five million years ago, in response to a massive climateshift. Which, A) wasn't manmade [creatards: sh'up] and B) was a massive climateshift toward an ice age.

Ooh. The plot thickens as it freezes.

Yeah. A valid hypothesis is that things like tyrannosaurs died out because they'd evolved to thrive in hot, oxygenated environments which disappeared on them.

Not really a big deal in the larger scheme. The creatards have us into the twentieth century now. And we've got about eighty-eight years to kill.

Primates evolve; one of the newer ones is the human animal. The human animal dicks around for fifty-four months or 160,000 years depending on your psychosis. One reportedly gets nailed to a telephone pole. And, about fourteen minutes [or eighteen hundred years] later, the rest start producing carbon emissions.

This is largely seen as a good thing, for a while. Since it allows the human animal to control the environment. At least, within an enclosed space. Now humans can be warm and dry on average, occasionally making rain in the shower and snow in the fridge. Humans rock. Cats and dogs, which might rock even more, work out that they can be warm and dry for even less effort, by pretending to like humans. Spiders and snakes could pretend to like humans, but it probably wouldn't help much.

All until about forty years ago. That's realtime—not roughly the time at which shrews were trying to become rats, on their way to becoming human. Forty actual years ago, a bunch of hippies employing thinkaboutitism decided that, if something weren't done about pollution [and it really wasn't], we'd be deep into a lifekilling ice age by...ten years ago.

They were wrong. Or they were really good at reverse psychology, expecting pollution to worsen, knowing in 1970 that it would lead not to an ice age but to the thawing of Greenland. So, I'm going with wrong here.

So: great. It's 2010. The titanosaurs are extinct, because there's less oxygen and less heat. And the ecotards are telling us that there won't be less heat, unless there's not less oxygen.

The sentence made sense; the ecotards don't.

Unless, they're telling us, we don't lower carbon dioxide and raise oxygen, the planet will get warmer. Because they don't understand how the planet works. Because they don't understand much.

I've tried to talk to these people. I've tried to allow that they might know something I don't. I've tried asking how and why their little guess could happen. But that was my real mistake: it's not their guess; it's something they heard somewhere.

Ecotards aren't scientists. They're barely even junkscientists. They're gossipers. They heard somewhere that pollution [and of course the corporations producing it] are bad, because it crowds out oxygen, making things warmer.

When their rumours fail to impress me, they make the worse mistake of trying to appeal to my emotional side, which as a scientist I kinda lack: Don't you care that polarbears are dying? Isn't that sad?

No. Polarbears are evolved brownbears. They evolved and took advantage of a temporarily cold north pole. If anything's sad, it's that the temporarily cold north pole killed off Troodon formosus, which used to live there. I prefer troodontids to ursids; it's a palaeontologist thing, I suppose.

Moreover, if I happened to give a damn about the planet, I'd be watching for what it wants. And, since it seems to prefer it when the north pole is warm enough to support reptiles, I'd wanna work on making that happen again.

Not that I give a damn about the planet, being not emotional. I'm just aware without relying on rumours that life does better overall when there's less ice.

Of course, I'm also taking the ecotards at their inaccurate word, which is another mistake. Because—and ask any of them—they wanna Save the Planet.

Oh.

They want to save the planet from humans, primarily so the planet doesn't force humans to move out of Miami when the icecaps melt.

Because the icecaps are gonna melt. And the coastlines are gonna flood. And that's gonna cause problems for humans. It might even start to kill humans off. Which would be bad, because then...humans couldn't, erm...cause...global...warming...anymore.

Did I mention that ecotards are stupid? I really should.

In an effort to prevent humans from dying out, allowing them to stick around and cause the global warming required to kill humans off and make room for titanosaurs again, there are those ecotards who actually wanna see the Audi advert come true. Not the part where some sanctimonious, selfserving ecotard gets to drift into the carpool lane because he bought a nadaporsche: the part where everyone else goes to prison to hang out with the weed dealers because they didn't buy a soviet approved lightbulb.

These people are fucking idiots. And they vote. And they could conceivably get their way. And that kinda disturbs me.

Not much, of course. There's the reality of the scenario. Suppose I throw away a sodacan. Again. And, this time, I'm arrested and charged and arraigned and—objection: his honour is wearing an industrially textiled robe; move for mistrial. You show me an impartial ecocrime jury, and I'll show you a dozen naked people with bad hair and no makeup.

The absurdity of the fucking GreenPolice...you know what: whatever. Do it. Go for it. Vote. Let's do this thing. Make it illegal for humans to be anything more than furry, grunting apes. Whatever kills the species off the fastest, I'm in favour of it. Go. Now. Shut off the computer and go live in the woods. Get out of my fucking civilisation.

More later....