Ravings of a Textual Deviant

One of the things I like about the job I’m doing now (Technical Writer/Document Controller) is that I get to take a lot of nice walks. I spend a lot of time routing documents, which is to say, taking them from one person the the next for review and approval signatures. I was in the neighborhood, so I dropped in on my former coworkers who are still working on the Project of Elemental Evil. It was very good to see them again, and we had a nice little chat. I left the building, and before I got thirty feet from the door, one of them was behind me, calling my name. She asked me if, “off the top of my head” I would consider coming back to the project. I didn’t even think about it. I said “no” practically before she’d finished asking the question. No snappy one-liner, no theatrical twitching. Just no. In an uncanny coincidence, yesterday, I was head-hunted for the very job I quit on the same project, by another company. Again, no.

Justin has a few words about Spider Robinson’s recent rant in the Toronto Globe and Mail. As it happens, entire sections of the article are directly quoted from the speech he gave as Toastmaster at this year’s Hugo Awards.

I quote Sturgeon’s Law “Ninety percent of everything is crap.”

As for the other ten percent, may I recommend, in no particular order, the works of Nancy Kress, Jack McDevitt, Octavia Butler, Allen Steele, Robert J. Sawyer, Kage Baker, Mike Resnick, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, and Connie Willis, to name only a few of the much-deserving midlist.

Fantasy is ascendant right now, and I cannot help but wonder if it has as much to do with poor science education as it does disenchantment with the future. Public schools do a damned poor job of teaching critical thinking, organized religion is forever interfering in science curricula, and the money’s not there for supplies, let alone current textbooks and good teachers. (Don’t just support science education in your local public schools–demand it!!)

Finally, science fiction doesn’t always have to be about space and/or computers. Connie Willis’s work comes straight out of sociology, Robert J. Sawyer’s from anthropology, and Jack McDevitt’s has an archeological basis. Bruce Sterling wrote a novel in which the science is meteorology, of all things (Heavy Weather).

I have been chatting via email with one of my cousins who’s starting her freshman year of college. One of the items she mentioned from her orientaion week was “Food: Pretty good, lots of it, a lot of free food everywhere. Am worried about weight.”

And not unreasonably. It’s a major change in lifestyle, going from whatever you’re used to at home to a dormitory cafeteria that serves food designed to offend as few people as possible. I know from experience that it’s very easy to gain a lot of weight when you get wrapped up in school. In 2 1/2 years of graduate school, I gained about 55 pounds (starting from about 105) and somehow didn’t notice until the dust cleared and there was a third more of me all the sudden. Almost ten years later, I am still trying to lose the weight, although to be honest, this is my first truly serious, sustained effort. (5-6 days a week at the gym. Weights and cardio three days, just cardio 2-3 days. Lots of sweating.)

So, my advice to her, and anyone else is a similar position is this: start exercising before you need to. Heck, start exercising even if you don’t think you’ll need to. All kinds of exercise count. As an undergrad, I rode my bike all over campus (in all kinds of weather, with an amazing disregard for laws of both physics and traffic. Dorothea will confirm this, I’m sure). I also did two seasons of marching band (IU’s Marching Hundred, for those who care.). I took PE classes–aikido, karate, and archery. I was in a dance group during my freshman year. The PE classes were particularly effective, I think, because I was guaranteed to get some serious exercise done at least three times a week. Try an intramural sport, if that’s your thing. Take advantage of the school’s phys ed building, pool, etc.; usually there’s something that’s free and open for all students. Sometimes dorms have gyms as well. You might even meet a trainer-in-training who needs victims guinea pigs clients.

Finally, start slowly. If you do too much too fast, you’ll probably hurt yourself and that’s not only no fun and painful, it is also a setback in the whole working out plan. Expect to feel results before you see them. Persist. Even if you have a big test, or a major paper, or a ton of reading, take the time to exercise. When your body works better, your mind works better. Personal example–after three months of serious exercise, my clinical, prescription-medically-treated PMS has gone from “don’t want to be in the same room as myself” to requiring little to no mood altering medication.

Just finished Martin Greenburg’s new anthology, Vampire Slayers. It’s interesting that in most of the stories, the authors assume that vampires have taken over the world. The stories are good, but I could have done with some departures from the unintentional theme. I’m an unabashed fan of Charles de Lint’s work, so his (very) short story was my favorite, but all are good. Worth a trip to the library for sure.

In order to get to my new work site, I have to go through what I call the Tunnel of Doom. It’s a combination pedestrian walkway and conduit tunnel under some railroad tracks. I took a good look at the labels on some of the dozen or so conduits today–acetone, sulfuric acid, steam, ACN (I don’t even know what ACN is, but I have been assured that it contains cyanide), and city water. (If you’ve ever tasted Indy’s city water, it’s a whole lot less funny.) I was told that there’s nothing in those conduits most of time…by the same person who then proceeded to tell me a story about melting shoes. Apparently, spilled sulfuric acid looks a lot like spilled water. I am so not looking forward to the next rainy day.

It’s nice to have only little things to complain about for a change.

I have discovered the bad apple in the barrel at my new job. Destructive, frustrating to work with, inconsistent, and damned near incapable of performing basic job functions correctly on the first try.

Fortunately, it’s only the photocopier.

I’d like to thank Rob for showing me what is probably the very worst piece of alleged entertainment made in the twentieth century…but I don’t think I can. “Thank” is simply not the right word. “Persecute,” “punish,” and “flay” all seem more appropriate somehow. Words cannot describe how utterly wretched this thing is. Worse than Zombie Lake. Worse than Sorceress (Cathy disagrees). Worse than Plan Nine from Outer Space, and I didn’t think that was possible. It is the video equivalent of smelling something that’s been surreptitiously festering in the back of the fridge for months, having a violent allergic reaction, and projectile vomiting until you have dry heaves and strained muscles between your ribs. (Ed agrees that this is a fairly accurate description, and he’s a connoisseur of bad films and TV.) Rob admitted that he only watches it once every ten years or so, because that’s all he can stand. Personally, I was ready to claw out my own eyes by the time the opening credits were over.

And what is this unmitigated dreck? Legends of the Superheroes, a live-action, made-for-TV-movie from the mid-seventies, the existence of which DC has been categorically denied practically since it aired. And its sequel. The acting is bad. The script is bad–the entire story, such as it is, is bad. The costumes are bad. The set design is bad. The costume design is bad. The special effects aren’t special, nor are they particularly effective. The lighting design is bad. It has a laugh track. The concept in and of itself is bad, and if I ever meet the persons responsible for producing that piece of cat sick, I will not be held responsible for my actions. And the the sequel is worse, because it has Ed McMahon and a musical number (not together, fortunately, or I might have died from a cerebral hemmorhage right there in Rob’s living room). I am surprised that the video tape holding this travesty of television has not collapsed into a black hole of elemental badness and sucked the entire universe into it, there to suffer forever the unending pain induced by Legends of the Superheroes.

Ginger asks about all the gaming you do outside your games. Specifically,

What kinds of game-related things do you do when you?re not gaming? Do you write journals or fiction, create web-pages, make character images, or indulge in other outside game-related business? If you game regularly face-to-face, do you play by email or chat outside the game? Does your GM give you experience or character rewards for your efforts? And if you don?t do any of these things, what are your reasons for not doing them (disinterest, insufficient time, etc.)?

My one-word answer is: plotting.

I’ll occasionally write up what we call “offstage scenes” for games I’m playing, in order to let the GM know where I’m going with a characters, or occasionally just to give him/her a plot cookie. When I’m running a game, I love plot cookies, because I think that the whole point of an RPG is to let the characters drive the game. I’m just steering. (Cathy and I recently had an interesting conversation about this. That topic is probably another Game WISH entirely, so I’ll stop now.) I used to do a lot of this, as Doug will attest. Now, I try to limit it so that he doesn’t feel as though he has to read a novel every game. I have strong feelings about handing out points for this sort of writing, which is that so long as you don’t have characters levelling by leaps and bounds through prolific writing, I’m OK with it. (Unless everyone is a very prolific writer, which I suppose would make it OK. The point is that so long as nobody gets major advantages over other players through writing, it’s all good.) Lately, I’ve had plenty of game ideas running through my twisty and evil mind, so I’ve been spending my time on research and development, as it were. Most of the other things Ginger suggests sound like fun, but there’s only so much time and money to go around.

I’m cautiously optimistic, most the of the caution stemming from the fact that I am a devout believer in Murphy’s Law.

The good news is that the person I am replacing is very good at conveying information, is easy to get along with, and is well organized. Likewise the supervisor and coworkers. The bad news is that I’m only going to get to do this for a few weeks. Everyone I met today is reasonable and either sane or pleasantly insane (either one is fine, as far as I’m concerned). I suspect it’s the sort of team I could quickly and easily get used to working with. I didn’t realize how good I had it on the state agency project–working on a team with no idiots or assholes–until I went into the Project of Elemental Evil in June.

So, a good start, if nothing else.

I’ll start my new work assignment tomorrow morning. I’ve got a little bit of new-job jitters, but this is a fairly low-stakes assignment, so it’s nothing to worry about. I’m just filling in for someone else while she’s on medical leave. It’s a nice way to ease back into working. I’m ready.