Ungrounded Outlet

It’s been over a month since I last touched my current Cocoa project.

I need to start working on it again. Otherwise, by the time I finish it, it will have been obsoleted by software agents that look like Tom Baker.

And while I want Tom Baker in my computer as much as anyone, I’d like to write something cool on my own first.

I’d also probably keep calling him Doctor. And I bet that would annoy even a virtual Tom Baker.

I’m really excited because I’ve decided to finish reading Michael Flynn’s Eifelheim when I get home today. I’m at about the half-way point in the book, but I’ve gotten there by reading a page here or there. I haven’t really sat down and read a book since I finished reading Spin. That was also when I started reading Eifelheim.

It’s amazing how easy it is to get sucked into watching crappy television series (like Smallville) or great television series (like The West Wing) instead. To just collapse onto the couch, reach for a remote control, and have entertainment spoon-fed into my mind is…well, easy. And don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with easy entertainment. And certainly, shows like The West Wing or Buffy or Firefly play with big ideas that are worth thinking about. Indeed, those three transcend the bounds of trashy TV entertainment and enter the realm of art. (And then there’s Smallville, which is dumb while still being enjoyable; but I keep wondering what it would have been like if it had been done by Joss Whedon. Among other things, I imagine that Lana would be a much stronger character and not just wait around for Clark to save her all the time.)

But TV lacks something. And I don’t hold with the traditional reasons why books are “better” than television. It’s not about imagination or thinking-skills or superior dramatic presentation or anything like that.

Every episode of The West Wing challenges the viewer to think in some way. Its dramatic presentation is often flawless and simply couldn’t be done without the skills of the actors or directors or cinematographers. It just wouldn’t work in book-form and I’m happier as a person to have seen it (and to own the DVDs so I can watch it over and over again. I just finished season 3 again last night.).

As for imagination: don’t even try to tell me that a world where demons wage war against a small suburban California town and a vampire-with-a-soul is in love with the one woman in the world with both the power and mandate to kill him doesn’t require quite a bit of imagination to deal with. The threshold for the suspension of disbelief is so high that it simply requires one’s imagination to get a workout. Indeed, this is true for any good sci-fi or fantasy. It’s easy to demonstrate too. Just find the online communities of fans and watch how they invent new rules of the fictional universe just to keep individual episodes consistent with one another. And then, of course, there’s fanfic…

Too much TV doesn’t ask the viewer to think (*cough*DayTimeTV*cough*), but I don’t like it when people judge the entire medium based on the flaws of the poorly executed. So there’s that.

The something that TV lacks is the tactile nature of reading: The weight of the book in my hands, the feel of the pages on my finger tips, the smell of the paper, the sound of the turning pages, the elegance of well done typography. These things combine to create an experience that’s completely unreproducible in any other way. Everything else after that (owning the characters in my mind in a way that I’ll never own Buffy or Mal or President Bartlet, creating a world that’s unique to my imagination, etc.) is just gravy.

And that’s why I’m excited to be planning to go home tonight and leave the DVD player off. I’ll turn on my reading light, sit down in a reasonably comfortable char, and hold a good book in my hands. And despite all the turns my life has taken, it will be truly good to be me.

July 20, 1969

Does anyone else think that Al Gore III looks a bit like Frank?

It looks like Spamalot is playing at the Peace Center in Greenville in April of 2008.

I think people need to make plans to go see it with me, because otherwise, I’m going to a play in Greenville by myself.

(Avenue Q is playing in July of 2008 and I think people should make plans to go see that with me too; but I’m less adamant about it.)

covered in BEES
Originally uploaded by danguyf.

Neil Gaiman is COVERED IN BEES! (It’s an Eddie Izzard joke, a LOLCat joke, and a picture of Neil Gaiman all at the same time. This picture has broken the needle on my awesomeness meter.)

Moments ago, I just finished reading Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. It was some of the best sci-fi (I despise the term “speculative fiction” and “SF” always makes me think of San Francisco) I’ve read in a very long time.

Finishing a good book is always a little weird. The characters’ voices have been in my head for days and now they’re suddenly silenced. An entire universe has ended and its story is finished. It makes me a little sad and whistful.

I wish the pages never ran out and the words never ended. But that’s not what I wanted to say. There’s a feeling that I need to write something; but maybe that’s just the after-effect of having read writing good enough to be written down. I can’t write anything like that so I scribble like a child on the Internet and it pleases me a little.

The space shuttle Atlantis took off a week ago. Did you notice? I won’t blame you if you didn’t. I flipped through the news last Friday and all I could find were pictures of a rich girl in the back of a police car. I would have been somewhat mollified if the news had been taken up with the botched war going on, (30% of Americans still think that the President is doing a heckuva job. WTF?), but Paris? That just pissed me off.

On Friday, we SENT PEOPLE TO SPACE. Sure, it’s just Low Earth Orbit; but most of us can’t find our way to the new grocery store that just opened across town. So I think that strapping eight men and women into a shiny brick, strapping that brick onto several tons of explosives, and sending them into OUTER SPACE is something that should be mentioned when it happens.

Instead, you only really hear about it when something goes wrong. Stop and think about that last sentence. Sending people into space has become so routine that it doesn’t even register. That right there should be heralded: “In other news, we are still a space-faring species. We’ve conquered nature in an unprecedented way that was almost unimaginable even a hundred years ago. Little more than talking monkeys, we’ve extended our grasp to the stars and proven that we can escape our terrestial prison. The universe has taunted us with its marvels and mysteries from the day we crawled from the ocean and gazed into the sky; now we are prepared to step into that universe and say ‘Here we are. Show us.’”

Why isn’t something like that on TV every single day? Why can’t we rise above our terrible wars, religious silliness, greed, and everything else that’s holding us back and say, “We’ve really done something great. How much farther can we go if we work together?”

I know why. It’s because we forget. We get so wrapped up in our daily lives of working and eating and pooping and screwing and sleeping, and we forget. We tune in to see what the latest antics of the latest celebrity couple are, and we forget. We spend all of our energy telling others who they are and aren’t allowed to love, and we forget. We work hard to make enough money to buy a bigger TV than our neighbors, and we forget.

The folks at NASA remember. And the ESA. And little children around this globe who look through a telescope for the first time. They’re doing amazing things with very little money and constantly being asked to do more with less.

Right now, two men are walking in space. Throughout all of human history, this is the sort of thing that we could never imagine anyone but gods doing. Yet, there they are, suspended above our pale blue dot: just doing their jobs.

I would plead with anyone that would listen: don’t let us stop. We’ve come so far and accomplished so much. Let’s see what else we can do. When I started this, I had a point; but it’s turned into a love letter to space exploration.

And I’m okay with that.

So I’ll end this with a quote from season 2 of The West Wing (the episode is “Galileo”) where Sam explains why we have to go to Mars:

Because it’s next. For we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill, and we saw fire. And we crossed the ocean, and we pioneerd the West, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on the timeline of exploration, and this is what’s next.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, and Ashley (because no one else actually reads this blog):

I present to you my latest project: Ungrounded Software.

It’s truly awesome as long as you take “awesome” to mean something completely different than the standard definition.