News You Can Bruise

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 22:31:16 GMT

Andrew Appel posted about Thoughtcrime Experiments to the prestigious Freedom to Tinker weblog (alas, still not called Freedom To Tinkle). Andrew is one of the authors of "Using Memory Errors to Attack a Virtual Machine", the paper that partially inspired Ken Liu's Single-Bit Error. Andrew writes of the anthology:

It's not all honey and roses, of course. The authors got paid, but the editors didn't! The Appendix presents data on how many hours they spent "for free". In addition, if you look closely, you'll see that the way the authors got paid is that the editors spent their own money.

It certainly wasn't my intention to hide this fact! But more generally, this is my impression of how things work in the antilucrative world of SF/F short fiction publishing. When I sell a story to a magazine, I get a check signed by the editor. In almost all cases, that money is in some sense the editor's money. The only thing different with TE is that we're not trying to make our money back.

Here's what I mean. Unless you're Gordon Van Gelder or Sheila Williams or Stanley Schmidt, you don't draw a salary. A small-time editor/publisher spends their own money, in quantities that are obscene to them and laughably insufficient to the writers, and then tries to make that money back. There are different strategies for this. Strange Horizons solicits donations and runs public radio-style fundraising drives. Futurismic runs ads. Small print mags sell hard copies and/or subscriptions.

It's your money being spent because you're the publisher: if you make a profit, the profit is yours. The flip side of Stanley Schmidt drawing a salary is that if Analog should sell a million copies one month, he doesn't get to keep the money. It belongs to Dell Publications.

The thing is, you'll never make a profit. Even in the good old days the SF magazines scraped by, and these days are bad and new. Find an online magazine with Project Wonderful ads, look at their PW graphs versus their payment rates, and do the math.

Here's a ridiculously optimistic assumption: let's say ten percent of the people who downloaded our PDF would have paid us ten dollars for it, and that everyone who bought a five-dollar hard copy would have paid ten. We'd still have lost money, to the tune of a few hundred dollars. And that's just the loss on the money we paid out! I'm not even thinking about the money value of our time. The unprofitability of this whole realm of publishing is no secret; it's a running joke. Even people who try to make some money back aren't doing this for money, but because they like the non-monetary returns they get on their investment.

Sometime in the past decade I learned a valuable lesson from Jake Berendes: know when to say "screw it". Do the thing you've been waiting for someone else to do. Removing the commercial angle altogether will save you disappointment and headaches. Spending money to create something interesting for everybody feels much better than losing slightly less money in a commercial venture.

Well Now I'm Pushing Thirty

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 20:47:09 GMT

The title is a line from a song I wrote when I was seventeen, and now it's coming true. I've got less than a week of my twenties left. When I wrote that line of that song, I was worried about selling out (I learned the term, but not the concept, from a Reel Big Fish song). The lesson of my twenties is that the creative things a teenager thinks of selling, when he thinks of selling out, are not worth that much money. Nobody's buying. You might as well give it away.

What you can sell is your time. I get good money for my time, and for the money I worked at CollabNet two, three years after I'd stopped having fun. Ten years ago today I ported robotfindskitten to Linux. I very rarely write software for fun anymore. The time for that is no longer in stock. Sold out.

Apart from that, which I wouldn't have predicted as recently as five years ago, my twenties exceeded every goal I might have set. I got married, I wrote a piece of software that became very popular, I wrote two O'Reilly books, and I sold a science fiction story to a pro market. My current secret project is something I've wanted to do my whole life. There's a lot of sadness but not much to regret.

In reality I didn't set any goals. The day I turned twenty I didn't imagine myself today, about to turn thirty. But today, I can't conceive of myself as other than a transitional Leonard between the one who wrote that weblog entry and the one who will link to this weblog entry in 2019.

When I turn forty I know I'm going to be seriously worried about the time I have left. I'm worried now, but right now I have ten years more than I will then. I need to use it and not sell more than I need to.

Their Love Was Validated By Householding Algorithms

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:11:44 GMT

We got a piece of political spam addressed to "The Harihareswara & Richardson Household".

Lintsagna

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:24:09 GMT

Here's a story from when I was in Little Rock working on the Clark campaign. Every night after work I'd go home and have an hour, hour and a half to myself; enough time to do one thing. Like make and eat my own dinner, or read for a while, or do a load of laundry.

There was no laundry in my tiny apartment building, but I had a special "laundry key" which opened the front door of a totally different house. In the foyer of this house was a washer and dryer, and if you lived there you'd have a different key that opened up the house proper. It was an odd system.

The first time I hauled my laundry over to this house someone else was using the washer, so I had to come back the next night. The second time I made it. After drying my clothes, I tugged on the lint trap to clean it out. The trap practically exploded out of its receptacle as the hundreds of loads worth of lint it contained expanded to fill the space outside.

I peeled the lint off the lint trap. It was two inches thick, a lasagna of lint, striated in colors like the geologic column. There was no trash can in the laundry room, so no one had ever emptied the lint trap.

I didn't want the house to burn down, so I took the lintsagna with me and threw it in my building's dumpster. Sometimes I can still hear it calling me. It says, "I'm a pile of compressed lint and incapable of speech, but nonetheless youuuu are responsible for my deaaaaath!" I generally ignore it.

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:25:55 GMT

Edits for "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs" are done. Hopefully you'll be able to read it in July or August.

Another data point I'm not sure what to do with (see Dada Chess weirdness passim) is that both stories I've sold had their origin in weblog entries I posted to NYCB. "Mallory" was the end result of this bizarre entry, and "Awesome Dinosaurs" was the end result of this more-obviously-an-idea entry. I sold both stories to the first market I sent them to, though for both I had to do a revision and resubmit. If a story didn't start in this weblog, I haven't been able to sell it.

You Will Go To See Moon

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 01:18:13 GMT

You should, anyway. It's a good movie. I'll see pretty much any movie set on the moon (offer not good for other celestial bodies) and this is one of the best. It's got beautiful visuals, the characterization is great, and the callbacks to precursors (2001 and Silent Running) are well-done and often extremely inventive. But I can't leave well enough alone, I have to pick at things.

There's artistic license stuff like sound in space and stars visible from the lunar surface during the daytime. That stuff doesn't really bother me, and Moon at least gave alternate POVs for most of the sound you heard while the camera was in vacuum. There's stuff that would just be too expensive to get right, like filming all the scenes in lunar gravity. Moon did get the exterior scenes right. And then there's... the whole premise of the movie. Which doesn't make any sense.

And the movie knows it. As in many movies, there's a scene where the characters nibble around the fact that the premise doesn't make any sense, and then defuse it with a joke and move on. I call this the "Gremlins 2" solution. I wasn't even happy about it in Gremlins 2, which played it for laughs. I'm sorry but I can't let it go.

It's a good enough movie that I keep thinking of ways to tell similar stories without doing anything nonsensical. While the movie was going on I coped with the situation by deciding I was watching a horror movie. Horror movies work on the logic of nightmares, where something like what happens in Moon can make sense. But it's not satisfying to me as science fiction.

The other thing I was worried about was that this movie would be so similar to a story I wrote that I'd never be able to sell the story, but despite some shared inspirations the stories are pretty different. Not that I'll ever sell that story!

Dada Chess Addendum

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 21:07:29 GMT

The last time I did some Dada Chess statistics, White checkmated 7.8% of the time and Black checkmated 8.1% of the time. That was with 5787 games played and I thought it wasn't a significant difference. But now with 13308 games played, White checkmates 7.6% of the time and Black checkmates 8.4% of the time. The total percentage of checkmates is pretty much the same (15.86% then, 15.96% now).

The numbers are large and steady enough that I'm starting to wonder if there is some significant advantage in Dada Chess to not moving first. I can't think of what it could be.

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 04:17:33 GMT

I read Marc Levinson's book The Box, about the history of containerized shipping, and I had an epiphany. Creative epiphanies are rare for me and when they do happen they're usually not very interesting. I was on the plane coming back from Barcelona and I thought: "Dada Chess". I wrote down "Dada Chess" in my notebook, and when I got home I wrote Dada Chess. Not that interesting. (But now over 10k games played!)

But for the better part of the decade I've been trying to come up with some fiendish plot involving shipping containers. Wednesday I was reading on the subway, when I looked up and envisioned a shipping container with the logo of an organization from my current writing project. I thought: Why would they make shipping-- and then I knew why. One of this organization's plot points makes one of my old shipping container schemes usable. It took years to create, but it fits together.

The feeling you get when everything fits together is a drug that I'm addicted to. It's why I write and read and play games. Like all drugs it's probably not good for me on balance, but unlike other drugs it produces things of value as a side effect.

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:44:46 GMT

We bought copies of my three favorite Miyazaki movies and I noticed that the titles form a story: "Kiki's Delivery Service Spirited Away My Neighbor Totoro."

The Enormous Egg

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 02:24:43 GMT

Going through postcards I was reminded of a book from my childhood, The Enormous Egg, about a triceratops that hatches from a hen's egg and throws the nation into turmoil. I looked up the book online and saw people claiming it had a political subtext, so I decided to Bookmooch it and reread.

The book arrived today and I reread it. The political subtext is only sub-textual if you're a kid, but it did its job. Pretty much everything in the book is part of my adult philosophy, right down to the ham-handed satirical dialogue I write for government employees. Highly recommended assuming you want your kid to turn out like me.

The illustrations are also awesome. My main complaint (also mentioned in the postcard, which will show up sometime in the next 3 years) is that if a chicken gave birth to an evolutionary throwback it would be a theropod, not a saurichian like Triceratops.

When I mentioned this book to Sumana she immediately countered with Homer Price (the book with the story about the donut machine), which I remember being really good. I was also considering John Fitzgerald's Great Brain books for the "lesser-known but awesome childrens' books" list, but those books have a pretty good Amazon sales rank (they're outselling RESTful Web Services) so they're not as obscure as I thought.

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 02:11:41 GMT

If I'd been smart I would have started the Roy's Postcards today, it being Father's Day. But I've spent over half my life not celebrating Father's Day and somewhere along the line I forgot it even exists. I said hi to Sumana's father today, though.

I got a huge amount of writing done yesterday. Today not so much. I really hope I can show you this soon (ie. by the end of the year--it's a big project). Most of what you're seeing from me this year is sparks thrown off from this project or things I'm doing to procrastinate or recover from working on it.

Recently an article made the rounds of my syndication feeds, to the effect that you shouldn't even mention things you're working on until they're done, because your brain treats announcing a project as work on the project. If you look at my very early weblog entries they're full of promises I never followed up on. But after about 2000 I generally follow this rule, albeit sometimes to my detriment--I should have announced RESTful Web Services earlier to get more feedback. This time I'm happy to work on a big project in semi-silence because I'm still not convinced I can pull it off.

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 01:39:09 GMT

I enjoyed this picture that uses airplane imagery as the background for a video game. There was a brief vogue for this kind of thing in the year after Google Maps launched, but the games weren't terribly good (they were Javascript games integrated directly into GM) and I'd like to see something more sophisticated. Thanks to GM it's pretty easy to grab scrolling tiles of much of the earth at decent resolution--I did it for Dada Maps.

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 22:20:14 GMT

I'm tired of frying tofu, so I just tossed it in oil and put it on a silicone sheet and baked it at 375 degrees. It worked fine. It's not 100% as good as fried tofu, but it's so much easier to make, and it cooks more evenly.

The other day, we saw a sign: "Area Rugs On Sale". "That's the worst Onion headline I've ever seen," I said.

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:56:33 GMT

Added another 100 postcards to the pile. I'm going to keep going until I've done them all, rather than wait a year until the backlog runs out, because there are a few duplicate scans and I can eliminate them if I keep processing the postcards while they're fresh in my mind.

Roy's Postcards

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 04:37:30 GMT

Still needs a little work, but I think it's ready to launch. Roy's Postcards is a new Crummy weblog that will feature a new scanned and transcribed postcard from the 1980s, every day for the next three years. Most of the postcards were written by my father, either as notes to himself or as letters to me and my sisters, sent while he was on one of his many business trips. Some of the postcards are quotidian, some are crazy or silly, some are emotionally charged. A lot of them have beautiful, interesting, or bizarre pictures on the front. I hope you'll give it a look.

This is the largest extant corpus of my father's writing and I've been trying to figure out the best way to present it since I discovered these postcards in 2006. I think the one-a-day format, in a weblog intended to be experienced through the RSS feed, is the best way to keep the presentation interesting. It'll give you a little visual break every day in your feed reader while letting me go into some detail on each postcard, point out funny things, and explain what needs to be explained.

Over the past week or so I've processed enough postcards to have a year's worth of backlog. I estimate my total time investment in this project at about 100 hours. Not bad for three years of daily entertainment.