Category: Serious Stuff

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...And Little E Makes 3 Critters Serious Stuff

You could change your life, and never be the same

Oberon on the day we adopted himIt’s two years today since a lot of stuff happened around here, but perhaps the best way to mark the occasion would be to celebrate Obi Day. Two years ago today, we adopted a fluffy little kitty guy who had been hanging out in our yard for about 48 hours or so. Unlike a lot of other stray kitties who had come and gone over the years, Oberon was laid back enough to pass muster with Othello…and of course, it didn’t take much for Olivia to decide he was a new friend. I’m going to hazard a guess that there are probably all of two months’ difference in Oberon and Olivia’s age. The rest litmus test, though, was always getting Othello’s approval. That was a rare and precious thing. Othello had readily accepted Olivia earlier that year, but she was a tiny kitten and it was pretty easy for him to establish dominance there; Oberon was bigger than Olivia and – more importantly – male, but Oberon never made an attempt to be the alpha male of the house. Even when challenged, he was laid back – he’d give ground. I’m sure that appealed to Othello in his old age. Obi had permission to stay. … Read more

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Serious Stuff Television & Movies

Harlan goes over the (city on the) edge

Announced yesterday in the forums on Ellison Webderland:

Tomorrow, at about 8:30 AM, Susan and one of my attorneys, John Carmichael (he of the successful AOL lawsuit, & others), will go before a judge of the California Superior Court for a preliminary conference hearing on my litigation against Pocket Books, Simon & Schuster, Sony, Paramount, STAR TREK, and about a dozen editors and apparatchiks thereto owing allegiance, in the first large step to making the gigantor ST franchise pay me what they owe me for using the elements of my CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER story and teleplay. In the offing, if they choose to continue to be arrogant and non-responsive, is a Federal Suit that will make it possible for ALL past Star Trek writers–such as, notably, David Gerrold–to seek substantial reparations for 40 years’ worth of pillage and greed by Paramount, et al.

Watch this space. I’m old, but not yet senile or frightened.

Guardian, please take me back to a time when Harlan wasn't pissing and moaning as a full time career.Harlan Ellison is one maddening little cranky-assed bastard. He’s capable of such brilliance, but what does he do to draw attention to himself? Nutball crap like this. I’m not saying this out of – as he frequently accuses anyone who disagrees with his stance – some kind of fealty to a particular studio, show, or what have you. My biggest beef with Harlan, as he whittles away what’s left of his career complaining about how many times and ways he’s been “wronged” by every other producer in Hollywood who hired and paid him to write stuff, is that for all of his complaints about artistic integrity…where’s Harlan’s integrity? Why the hell does he keep cashing the check if he feels this strongly about it? ‘Cause you know he’s getting some kind of residuals for this one episode of Star Trek he wrote in 1967. Maybe it isn’t as big a check as he’d like, and maybe he’s pissed that the story he created has been absorbed into the Trek legend overall and has inspired novels, comics and whatnot…but you know, most writers would probably wear that as a badge of honor.

It’s funny that he invokes David Gerrold’s name here: Gerrold’s not far behind him in the whole “still cashes the check and does the paid convention appearances while moaning about how mistreated he is” schtick. And invoking Gerrold may sink his whole case, because we’re just a few days away from the fan-film adaptation of Gerrold’s rejected TNG script hitting the ‘net – technically, violating Paramount’s copyright and leaving himself without a leg to stand on. I’m not sure I’d be grateful for Harlan dragging my name into the fray if I were Gerrold.

I’m all for the underdog, but this is just undistilled 100-proof stupid. Harlan could have a fantastic legacy as one of the definitive voices of 20th century fiction, except that he’s spent most of the latter half of his life pulling attention-whore stunts like this rather than creating more works of literary genius that he should be remembered for. I can already hear him saying that he’s forced to do this because the well’s run dry for him and he has to make a buck somehow.

If that’s the case, maybe he shouldn’t have spent decades bitching in public about how awful every studio or producer is who’s ever hired and paid him to write scripts – scripts that he’s frequently abandoned in mid-stream and left for others to rewrite because he disagreed with being asked or told to perform rewrites that would dilute his original vision. Never mind that, barring The Starlost or a few installments of anthology shows like The Outer Limits, these were always works-for-hire, based on someone else’s characters and situations, rather than wrongfully mangled installments of The Harlan Ellison Show. If he hadn’t spent a few decades making himself virtually unemployable as a scriptwriter, maybe he wouldn’t be in dire straits now.

Harlan Ellison’s a brilliant writer – I love his prose and even many of the TV projects that he feels turned out wrong, but I can’t stand this attention whoring routine he’s settled into, especially when it’s turned into a career of its own with books written on the subject. It’s because of his TV credits – TV credits which almost always read “written by Harlan Ellison,” despite his frequent habit of jumping ship (and, I feel compelled to say again, cashing the check) before the cameras even roll – that I’m even aware of his prose to begin with.

The man has had an extraordinary career and has had an extraordinary voice (I feel compelled to put that in the past tense for some reason). I’m awfully sorry he hasn’t gotten his way all along. That just puts him in the same boat as the rest of us.… Read more

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Serious Stuff

So now that THAT’S all over…

SQUEEEEE!...for democracy.Yay! The election’s over. That’s the good news, right? Well, maybe just from my perspective – I think it’s vitally important for everyone to at least make the effort to participate in the process, no matter who they vote for. But I guess I’m all chipper because – at the risk of making this all sound like a contest where you try to bet on the winning horse – for the most part, at almost all levels, I got my wishes. My guy’s headed to the White House. I have faith in him. I have faith that where he has rough edges and maybe not as much experience, his advisors, his instincts and his even-keeled temperament will be his best assets.

I didn’t agree with Barack Obama on everything, straight up-and-down-the-line, platform-wise. Maybe about 75% of it, really. Which is a hell of a lot more common ground than I had with Senators Clinton or McCain, or with anyone running on a third party ticket. (Keep in mind – I voted for John Hagelin in 2000. I liked the backbone of his policies enough for forgive/overlook the wacky-doodle stuff in the background about how he hoped to achieve peace through transcendental meditation. I have no qualms about going third party.) On the issues, I agreed with Obama 3/4 of the time, which is a better match than I had with either Gore or Kerry. I tend to lean left in some areas (but not all). I felt distinctly discouraged when, post-primaries, it seemed like so much of the inspirational message of primary season fell by the wayside in favor of party-dictated talking points that seemed, by comparison, diluted. I was incredibly irritated by the wildly unprecedented amount of innuendo that was put into circulation by folks who apparently felt like they had a lot to lose, accusing Obama of being everything from the Godless socialist baby-killing spearhead of a secret Muslim takeover of the government to the Antichrist. Whatever. For my money, he’s a more even-tempered, pragmatic and adaptable candidate than anyone else who was in the running.

But that’s all water under the bridge: the man will be President of the United States. And that’s an occasion that opens the door a bit for something I’ve been wanting to vent about.

I’ve been sick of politics for much of this year because, among other reasons, it’s generated more spam than all the Nigerian bank cons, penis enlargement drugs and other crap I’ve gotten in the three years prior to 2008. A lot of it was anti-Obama, accusing him of being the aforementioned Godless socialist baby-killing spearhead of a secret Muslim takeover of the government, but let’s dance the real waltz here: with me being in the redneck south, if you’ll forgive me being uncharacteristically blunt, a lot of it was recycled nigger jokes. Any racist joke you can think of where you’d ever seen the word “nigger” was regurgitated here with Obama’s name cut-and-pasted in. I even received some of this crap tonight after the Arkansas polls had closed – what the hell effect did the sender think this e-mail would have?).

Let me get down to why, exactly, this bugs the fuck outta me. I can go on and on about respecting the position even if you don’t respect the man (come on, if we’ve been according due respect to President Bush for the past eight years, I think this one’s a no-brainer). But ultimately, my concern isn’t about political correctness. I am raising a young boy who’s already walking, working on talking, and is eagerly drinking in everything he sees and hears and experiences and taking it on board. I intend to teach my son that people – all people – are to be valued and respected. It doesn’t matter who they are or what they look like. You treat people with decency unless they give you a damn good reason to treat them otherwise.

I see President-Elect Barack Obama giving his acceptance speech and outlining his hopes for the future, and I can’t help but marvel as how far we’ve come as a nation. I then think about the number of times that I’ve heard people around me, including close family members, talking out in the open about how they “don’t want a nigger in the White House,” and I can’t help but be reminded that we have so far, so very far, yet to go. And so much more to learn – about according basic respect to a fellow human being.

I realize that there are plenty of people who voted against Obama on grounds of policy rather than race. I respect that. And for those who, for whatever reason (oh, let’s cut to the chase: it’s upbringing, pure and simple), object to Mr. Obama on the grounds of his race, I don’t expect to change your mind. I don’t expect the world to hand me an obstacle-free path to raising my child – I know better than that. But show some common decency and respect in public. The world does enough to gradually strip away the carefree joys and innocence of childhood as our kids grow up; I’ll have to cushion those blows and teach my son to rationalize them as best I can. Just because you disagree with Obama politically does not qualify him for that insulting label (or any of its synonyms for that matter).

A black man is about to become the leader of the free world. And it’s not the end of the world. I’d appreciate it if some folks would stop going on and on like it is.

So far to go, so much more to learn. All of us.… Read more

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Serious Stuff

Insidious advertising

I saw this the other night and instantly thought it was more insidious than any campaign spot I’ve seen this year – and that’s saying something.

A big part of my diet this year has been kicking the high fructose corn syrup right off the menu. I have no doubt that it’s a big part of why I’ve dropped as much weight as I have. But this commercial is just off-the-scale insidious: because this guy can’t think of anything wrong with it, it is therefore by definition just hunky-dory? You know, I probably couldn’t, on absolutely no notice, cough up detailed studies about why smoking is bad for you from memory, or instantly recall a full list of the side-effects of taking heroin. This doesn’t mean, however, that these things are “just fine in moderation.”

Sometimes I think all the Cold War psych ops types moved to Madison Avenue when there was no more Soviet Union to topple.… Read more

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Serious Stuff

Itchy and Lumpy

Lumpy!My apologies if I’ve seemed like an asshole the past few days (or at least like more of an asshole than usual) on message boards or elsewhere. I’ve had trouble sleeping and between being exhausted and being in pain (more in a moment) and having a little bit of cabin fever from the “stuck in a submarine with a baby” syndrome. The pain and the lack of sleep came from a lump that appeared, disappeared and reappeared immediately behind and below my left ear. It felt like it was about the size of a bottlecap, but it was resting right on that bone, putting constant pressure on it…hence constant pain. I think to put it charitably I’ve been impossible this week. Also, having a lump suddenly grow on you is very unnerving with or without the pain, so off to the doctor I went. Turns out that it’s an infection that’s set up near the glands back there, so now I’m on these horse-pill-sized antibiotics…and I’m still just having to rough it where the pain is concerned. I can tell that the swelling is going down, but it still hurts like hell. So at this point I’m not much better behaved than Evan is when he’s feisty, only I know more colorful four-letter words than he does (but I certainly can’t do the cute BAH BAH BAH BAH BAH! that he does).

Funny thing about the doctor I saw: I went to elementary school with him. He was the first kid I knew who had a TI 99/4a, and he introduced me to Tunnels Of Doom. I think I may have sold him on the PDF DVD while I was there – I probably need to start carrying a couple of them with me for these kind of eventualities. 😆 We also had a mutual friend with an Astrocade, so with me and my Odyssey2, we were kinda like The Kids Who Don’t Have An Atari and stuck together pretty closely. I’ve wondered more than once how in the world I came across to someone I haven’t seen in nearly 30 years. If I try to look at it from outside the sphere of my own interests and hobbies, it’s like I’m suddenly this fat nerd who’s still playing the games that were out in 1982. I tried to explain that I’m a bit of a historian in that regard, but I’m not someone who’s got an acclaimed book to back up that claim – just a self-published DVD, most copies of which are labeled in Sharpie. I don’t have any regrets for my own life choices, except maybe the Eating Too Much part, but I kinda wonder what the discrepancy was between what he expected to see and what he did see. Really more out of curiosity than any sense of being self-conscious. I am who I am, and I look like what I look like, and I’ve grown into a sense of comfort about both of these things.

Anyway, I’ve taken enough stuff to knock the edge off the pain from this thing (which is still there), so I’m gonna go to sleep.… Read more

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Cooking With Code Serious Stuff

Arrrgh

My apologies for not getting theLogBook updated on time – I’ve literally spent most of my weekend filling PDF DVD orders (!!). Hopefully everyone who’s gotten one has liked ’em. So help me God, I’m going to go get a new office chair in the next couple of days, so I thank everyone from the bottom of my…well…bottom. It’s a little unnerving to sit down and feel the seat start to slide down to its lowest altitude like someone’s let the air out of the tires. I look forward to not experiencing that anymore very soon! Seriously though, the response to the PDF DVD has blown me away. At this point, my biggest fear is that I’m not going to have duplication nailed down for the second run while the orders keep coming in. I honestly was not expecting it to blast off like it has. I’ve also learned a few things (the hard way) along the way, including how to generate Paypal links that actually do something helpful. I think you guys would be stunned to know just how much I’m making this whole thing up as I go.

Turbo Turtle, a.k.a. Gamera, has disappeared from the yard – hopefully to go kick back in a body of water somewhere. Turns out he was a humongous snapping turtle…not good for Zathras. I really don’t need to step out my door and have one of my toes eaten by a cranky and huge turtle.

Another thing that’s occurred to me today is that everything I’ve been doing pales in significance next to the loss of life in China and Myanmar. I can barely even begin to process the kind of numbers of dead we’re talking about there, much less what can be done about it. Perhaps it’s just as well that I’ve got all these distractions.… Read more

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Serious Stuff

Friend, foe or fan?

If you run, enjoy or just hang out at any kind of fansite, you might ought to pay attention to this legal case. I’ve got some plans to do a book later this year with material from theLogBook, and you better believe I’m watching this one very, very closely.

While I respect Ms. Rowling as the creator of all things Potter (and feel that the author of the other book perhaps could’ve done more to acknowledge her as such), this case is waltzing right into very dangerous territory. Intellectual property owners seem to spend an awful lot of time catering to superfans (or readers of superfans’ sites – let’s use Gateworld.net as an example), and cutting that particular cultural phenomenon off at the knees would have a worse effect than Paramount setting its internet phasers on Cease & Desist 12 or so years ago – mainly becuase back then, the ‘net was still more or less a curiosity, and now it’s practically another substratus of the world community. Fans will organize and rally against it.

Now, the flipside, to be fair: I’ve been in a copyright lawsuit (as the plantiff, no less), and my understanding of the law is that you’re on pretty stable ground so long as you bring your own scholarship and your own critical analysis to the table in a “derivative work”. A dictionary that probably leans very heavily on someone else’s written work is very likely not on that same stable ground. A book analyzing and critiquing the Harry Potter series would stand a better chance.

But when even the judge is urging everyone to settle? I don’t think anyone’s in any doubt that this case is wading into a minefield.… Read more

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Gadgetology Serious Stuff

Fun facts about Alltel and consumer deception.

I'm kinda mad right nowSo my wife got a new Samsung Hue phone from Alltel – nice little gadget, bluetooth, camera, the whole works, and pretty cheap too. I was even thinking about seeing if father’s day might come a little bit early this year after seeing it in action. 😆 The one hiccup she’d really had with it was when she tried to pair her bluetooth headset to it – she couldn’t ever get the two devices talking to each other, and had to go back to the store to do it, where one of their sales/service people took the phone and the headset behind closed doors and got them to work. That really should’ve been a red flag right there.

She wanted me to put the slideshow of Evan pics on there that we’ve both had on our Nokia phones for ages; this was basically an animated GIF that cycles through numerous pictures of the little guy from the day he was born up to the latest round of professional pictures we’ve had taken of him. With the Nokia phones, I was able to just bluetooth the GIF across and be done with it; this also accounted for the bizarre collection of ringtones that both of our phones sported, everything from the Lexx theme to Katamari music to the haunting Torgo theme to Starcon 2 tunes to a gob of ELO MIDI ringtones (don’t ask me how that happened).

Anyway, I couldn’t just send the files across to her new phone via bluetooth. After going through the documentation (custom printed for Alltel) and finding them extremely, almost suspiciously lacking in information about the use of the bluetooth feature, I did a little bit of digging around online and that quickly got my blood boiling. Here’s the deal: Alltel cripples OBEX file transfer on the Samsung Hue phones. You can’t use it. Only they can, on their premises. They’d rather charge you extra for a USB cable and their proprietary software, when in fact neither of the above should be necessary. They don’t want you to bluetooth your own MIDI files to your own phone in your own home. They don’t make money that way. They make money by you buying ringtones, etc. through their store, or through their affiliates who give Alltel a kickback to thank them for letting them sell to Alltel’s customers. They don’t want me beaming a few MIDI files across from my computer.

Via a member of the family, we actually have the ear of one of Alltel’s VPs, so we tried to play the old nepotism card, a phone call which yielded another very interesting fact: Alltel only sells one phone with all the features unlocked, and that’s the Motorola Razr. So hey, if you’ve got one of these unweildly, non-user-friendly bricks, there’s finally a perk in it for you. Yay for you!

In a few minutes we’ll be going to pay them a visit at the store where the phone was bought, point out that we were looking at getting a second one just like it, and then insisting that we can’t buy another one – or for that matter remain as customers of Alltel with any phone – unless this feature is unlocked so the phone works as advertised. I’m not glued to my cell phone 24 hours a day, I don’t txt my bff all the time (zomg!), I’m not really a “power user”. We just like having our kid’s smiling face on our cell phones, and a few oddball ringtones. Is that so wrong? Apparently Alltel thinks so.

I have a gut feeling we’re going to walk out of the Alltel store looking for a new cell phone provider.… Read more