News You Can Bruise for 2002 August 25

After great travail and significant cost to myself, I've managed to get my mother's computer running a rudimentary form of Windows ME. Argh, I say. Instead of brooding on the many horrors I beheld today, let me talk about the wild party I attended last night, hosted by Mark Fasheh. I saw a lot of the LUG dudes I hadn't seen since graduation (Mark, Peter, Dan), and of course I also hung out with Adam, Kris, Kim, and Melissa.

I'm going home tomorrow. I'm taking the day off. My current task (debugging our indexer plugins with the help of a class I wrote which generates scary-looking SourceCast sites full of random text) has become onerous as of late, but I found new enthusiasm for the work commiserating with the LUG people at the party. But the many hours I spent today trying to get my mother's computer not to be dead crushed any enthusiasm I had for working on anything to do with computers (damn you, Windows, crusher of enthusiasm!). Hopefully after another holiday I will be back in the mood, or at least the zone.

On my way to and from LA I listened to my newly-acquired copy of Lucky 7, from The Reverend Horton Heat. The Rev preaches a gospel of boozin' and cruisin', and his Subgenius-tinged ska-rock sound is always welcome 'round my place, ever since Kevin's radio station first introduced me to it. As with so many religions, I don't buy any of it, but the music is great. [The hell? Are you pretending to be the Salon music critic? -Ed. Hey, Danny O'Brien pretends to be a Wired reporter! That's different and you know it. -Ed.]

I will never write this story, for a very simple reason which is that my self-esteem is okay, and also I'm no good at writing stories. But some self-loathing yet competent author could implement it and maybe make a little money. It's called "Life of Author" and it takes place in a future in which copyright has been scaled back to last only the life of the author plus fourteen years.

The main character is a mercenary hitman for EvilCorp, a huge conglomorate which owns the rights to much of the world's intellectual property. His job is to bump off authors who won't sign up with EvilCorp, thus causing their works to (soon) pass into the public domain. Of course, authors in the EvilCorp stable are given life-extension technologies and, near the end of their extended lifespans, kept in near-cyrogenic vegetative states to give EvilCorp perpetual ownership over their works. But something goes wrong or there's a twist of some kind; this is where the self-loathing comes in.

Tangentially, Disney is going to release a science fiction version of Treasure Island which looks really cool. It reminds me that I've been meaning to make a science fiction version of Steamboat Willie-- oh, wait, I can't.