Praise for George W. Bush

Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Laura Ingrahm have all gone on the air to criticize President Obama for reacting quickly to the Haiti disaster, all the while waiting several days before reacting to the PantyBomber. The logic seems to be that Obama should have gone on the air to pat America on the head and reassure us all instead of letting the appropriate authorities and agencies do their job, but reacting so quickly on Haiti was a cheap attempt to win the praise of, as Limbaugh put it, "Light brown and dark black people."

Enter former President George W. Bush, who was asked about this criticism. He said, "I don't know what they're talking about. I've been briefed by the President about the response. I appreciate the President's quick response to this disaster."

See, according to the bloody-minded right, waiting three days and letting more people die would have been the appropriate thing for our President to do. That way, it wouldn't have looked like he was politicizing the suffering.

The Singularity comes one step closer. Either that, or the Real Doll Apocalypse

satisficing - Seeking or achieving a satisfactory outcome, rather than the best possible. (Deardorff's Glossary of International Economics.)

In a recent article in the New York Times, The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s, Brad Stone discusses how his 2 year old now (correctly) identifies a Kindle as "a book," and how every generation is so different from the previous, the pace of change so fast that 40-somethings are bewildered by their wired, multitasking, overachieving progeny. (Hmph. He hasn't met my family.) And I've seen other kids expect laptop screens to be touchable. Hell, I wonder why my laptop screen isn't touchable, and have run synclient into the ground trying to get the touchpad to be as responsive as an iPod.

One of his observations is this:

And after my 4-year-old niece received the very hot Zhou-Zhou pet hamster for Christmas, I pointed out that the toy was essentially a robot, with some basic obstacle avoidance skills. She replied matter-of-factly: "It's not a robot. It's a pet."

Well, no. It satisfices as a pet, which is different than saying it is a pet. And for some fraction of the population, satisficing is all that's necessary.

Stone has put his finger on a problem Peter Watts covered extensively in his book Blindsight, and I've been hammering on since the late 1980s: every iteration of technology that replaces some form of human/human interaction (or human/animal interaction) will satisfice a larger pool of people than the previous iteration. Eventually, at some tipping point, the satisfactory outcome will become the preferable one: having a real pet will be closed in by the PETAs on one side ("Keeping a real animal is cruel!") and the descendants of the Zhou-Zhou ("Keeping a real animal is icky, inconvenient, and allergenic!") and will eventually become taboo.

The same will become true for human relationships. That'll take longer, but eventually it will become true. Having emotional expectations of your partner will seem like an imposition: doing it to a satisfactor robot will seem like a relief to all concerned.

Three Things For Today.

No great announcements, just a few writerly things I saw today:

#1: Regarding my recent reviews of Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, Jo Waltonnails my opinion to the floor:

The techniques of writing and reading [science fiction] have developed in that time. Old things sometimes look very clunky, as if they’re inventing the wheel—because they are. Modern SF assumes. It doesn’t say “The red sun is high, the blue low because it was a binary system.” So there’s a double problem. People who read SF sometimes write SF that doesn’t have enough surface to skitter over. Someone who doesn’t have the skillset can’t learn the skillset by reading it. And conversely, people who don’t read SF and write it write horribly old fashioned clunky re-inventing the wheel stuff, because they don’t know what needs explanation. They explain both too much and not enough, and end up with something that’s just teeth-grindingly annoying for an SF reader to read.

Exactly right, and that’s what’s wrong with everything fromWinterson’s The Stone Gods to the atrocious “science fiction” of e-book only romance writers like Jet Mykles and Reese Gabriel.

#2: The Five Stages of Publishing. See, I skipped down to acceptance right from the beginning. And it’s always worked for me.

#3: I’ve been writing again, and it’s been an iffy thing. The skill comes and goes like a guilty whoremonger. But I received an invitation for an anthology of “Queerpunk,” and have been thinking about how to work cyberpunk, homosexuality, near-future transhumanism, and I think I have an opening:

I met him in the one place where we could possibly have met: on a de-orbiting shuttle. I was coming back from another freelance job in orbit, all wracked out and drained but carrying so much new knowledge it had weight. He had a suit, and a tie, and all the signs of a lunar career.  We’d have never met if it hadn’t been for the blackout, that fifteen minutes of silence when you’re cut off from the net.  We were forced to talk to each other.  Hell, we were forced to notice each other.  Which wouldn’t have happened without the blackout.

Our seats were side by side.  But he had all the newest stuff, corporate double-signed and encrypted with Diffie Hellman Six, every one of them with a publicly visible EULA and the checkmark box visible should the Pirate Corps come looking.  And me?  Diffie Hellman nine but GPL’d, man… all the way.

I’m not sure where to go from there. I know I have to get them into bed and emotionally involved, but what’s the plot? Hmm…

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.

I'm getting all giggly and erect!

I'm having fun with this story. In fact, I think I'm even going to work my favorite contraceptive into this story:

I was deep inside myself, running virtual fingers through the goldmine of new knowledge I'd picked up from my last freelance gig, when a loud bang yanked me back to reality.

Keep reality out of the reach of children.

"Always use a new reality with each and every sex act." "Reality make may some noise during sex. This is normal." and "Reality may become twisted during sex." "Reality only works if you use it." "You may notice that Reality moves around during sex." "Don't tear reality." "Some people may feel reality, and some may not." "Remember, reality can only work if you use it." "Reality is both strong and soft."

So, let's see: I want to write a story heavy on the gay sex, heavy on the introspection, heavy on the moral difference between open source and closed source software, with a decrepit, near-future SFnal cyberpunk background, and work in an entire series of winks about an obscure female contraceptive?

Between 3500 and 7500 words.

And I'm out of practice.

No sweat.

"Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you're doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it." - The Cult of Done Manifesto, Credo 4.