Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Movin' Ramble covering communism, paleontology, vacation and poor Internet service

I'm now officially in the middle of the move after talking about it for half a year. I found the perfect small apartment in the perfect vibrant neighborhood. The move is going to be a trick. I don't really have a lot to draw on in terms of help. The standard stuff moves first, the bed, the desk, a dresser, and the PC. To my surprise, Charter can't hook up the Internet for a full week. What's with that, Charter? Are you trying to tell me I'm living in a 3rd world country that can't keep up with Taiwan in Internet service? It does remind me of my days in the communications industry in the years between the dot.com/telecom crash and 9/11, working in Internet maintenance. I remember the empty feeling as management realized Internet usage was only growing at a quarter of what they thought. I realized that they couldn't get the capital to improve the Internet from private sources anymore. We've privatized everything with the Internet, and so we're under-capitalized and lagging every industrialized country. We have the narrowist Broadband. You might tell that I'm not a capitalist. I think the capitalist ideal is a fantasy on par with "Lord of the Rings." It's really in to regard communism as a failure. While I don't have faith in communism, and I haven't read Marx, I'd say Bolshevism and all it's spinoffs are proven failures, but Marxism? Communism? I don't know. Also, everyone I heard attributes it to "central planning," when that's really what just about every company does. What the capitalist groupthinkers fail to consider is that Bolshevism was run by terror and enforced conformity. Maybe that was the reason for the failure and not the central planning? After Stalin, the most terrifying dictator, died, communism began to unravel, but it did take more than forty years to unwind. We probably won't find out in my lifetime if other forms of communism might work, since it has been buried before the autopsy, and it's not going to be disinterred or reconsidered for a while unless people become desperate. It certainly does look to me like the wealthy in this country are doing their level best to prove Marx right after all, with the banking-mortgage scandals and TARP. I went on a cheap vacation last week, to the beautiful Black River. I need to find out why it's called Black. It must have appeared different when they first named it. Now it was low, almost a creek. It's spring-fed, and almost all the water in it was spring-water. I do think about the Ozarks and how old those hills are. They're an eroded mountain range that go back to the Cambrian Period. For you Creationists out there, that's about five hundred million years before God discovered the earth. I just wish my State had dinosaur bones, but it was above sea level during the time of the dinosaurs, so everything washed downhill. The vacation gave me a chance to sleep in a quiet place for a week, I came back feeling revived. Just in time for a move. Usually, I meet with my writers group every week, but I might not have anything to present to them next week simply because of the move. I hate that, though, so I'll try to eek out something: a poem, flash fiction, anything.

Friday, August 5, 2011

My Depression: SF & Fantasy fans and Alienation

I lost a week to depression. It also effected my work in terrible ways. I was appalled and more than a little embarrassed at the critiques I got on Monday. I'm guessing now I wasn't quite myself when I wrote it. The depression wiped out a week of my life.

Two nights ago, I went back on my Trazadone. It's the one anti-depressant whose side effects I hate, but its very effective. Immediately slept 11 hours that night, with pleasant dreams and got up in a good mood, if a little stiff and with a painful muscle spasm in my shoulder (side effects). I hadn't been able to sleep, and at this rate, I should be caught up within a week.

Besides catching me up on sleep, it's the one anti-depressant that does prevent the heavy, downward swing, when combined with Buproprion.

People point out that we're over-medicated in the US, where doctors are wined-and-dined, and otherwise encouraged to prescribe medications. That all might be true, but if nobody has noticed (and there's a lot of people who haven't) things are very depressing now. Our economy is wrecked; our political process is corrupt; the citizenry is mis-educated and misled; the environment is being destroyed, and the world is overpopulated and full misery that will only get worse.

I realize there's a lot of good news out there. Crime is down. Teen pregnancy is at record lows. Automotive fatalities are as low now as they were in the 1950s. Those are things we had pipe dreams about in the '70s. New transmissions and mortality rate for HIV are down. The Mexican Gulf seems to have recovered from the Deepwater Horizon spill (though I'm still skeptical about this one).

Still, the bad news is overwhelming, and I'm not the only one who finds the bad news both sobering and a reason to get drunk. It may be true that doctors prescribe a lot of anti-depressants, but it's also true that most people willingly take them. They at least feel that there's something wrong.

Additionally, we wouldn't need so much escapism, so much media committed to SF and Fantasy, unless people really needed to remove themselves from the world. Look at any top ten list of box office movies in the 1930s-50s. There was not one SF or high concept movie on the list. In the early '60s, eight of the top ten shows on TV were Westerns.

The 1930s, remember, was the time of the Great Depression. The 1940s was a freaking World War. Yet, the movies were set in the real world. It appears that something in this world is somehow more stressful than the Great Depression and a World War.

SF geeks have received such a bad name recently (being called Fanboys or Fangirls). Not that they've ever been too well regarded, except now, people who actually make movies aimed at them admit to holding them in contempt (see Zach Snyder talking about his movie Sucker Punch). Not to mention the fact that those who see SF and Fantasy movies hold them in contempt. That's a bizarre case of self-hatred.

Nevertheless, they're people who feel alienated from the real world. Some are very intelligent. However, they have little or no power to effect what's happening now. To be accurate, in a culture that worships athletes and physical prowess, they aren't asked. They feel a disgust with what those in power are doing. Totally out of power, of course they find the real world boring. That's what I see in their personalities.

So, the geek looks to the future, after everything that's presently happening in the world becomes insignificant. They either escape there, or completely into a different reality, like fantasy. Or movements like “Goth” which celebrated the power of being dead. In some cases, however, they read or watch “cautionary tales.” Like the little girl in Pan's Labyrinth, sometimes fantasy doesn't let you escape your fear. Sometimes your terror enters your fantasy and it's no longer an escape. Usually, though, it's sublimed into a form you can fight in a way you can't in the real world.

Then there's also horror, my current genre. At it's lightest, it's an escape. At it's heaviest, though, it shows you a fantasy more frightening than reality. If anything, it makes the real world look better by comparison. It's also a way to ask disturbing questions that are real. A way, perhaps, to wake people up.

SF and Fantasy only became hot since the 1960s. I think it's from alienation. What else has changed in this culture that would explain such a great change?

So, now we have SF and fantasy and we have video games. Like religion, I'd call them the opium of the people. Or maybe religion is the opium while SF and fantasy is the crack and video games are the crystal meth of the people.

With me, that opium doesn't always work. For one thing, I know it's supposed to be opium. A layer of denial would probably make these far more effective.

Though, use of this metaphor does make me note that people do get high just to escape. The tendency to use drugs and get addicted to them, however, is set by biology.

I don't really escape from reality, though. I take medications to prevent it from getting me down. I used to have manics, too, a few were life-changing experiences, but those don't happen so much anymore.

So, now that I'm not down, I'm going to be working on my various projects. I'm going to submit my short story Wil o' Wisp this weekend. I'm keeping to who a secret. Let's just say, I'm starting at the top of the market and I'm working down. Thank you, Writers' Market!

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

The Party's Over: The End of the Internet.

I know I haven't written in a very long time. I have a lot of excuses for that: my mother died (more on that later), I've been concentrating on fiction writing, depression, and maybe at other times just plain laziness. More than anything else, though, I'm not sure what direction I want to take this blog. I decided that I won't discuss family- - too many privacy issues over the net. That's about 40 percent of life I can't discuss right there.

Without knowing the exact direction, it's hard to get attached to it. I have to somehow fit it into an hour a day at most.

As a horror/fantasy writer, I guess one thing subject I can write about are real-life horrors. There are so many bad trends today. Like the political process, the economy, and "everything else," that is to say, the environment. I'm not an optimist. Because I'm an atheist, I don't think a God is going to save us from any of them.

Today is a minor horror: I'm foreseeing the end of the Internet, the only thing that has made last ten years tolerable.

A story by Gerry Smith in the Huffington Post tells us of a massive, apparently coordinated global spying operation reported by McAffee, most of it targeted in the US. The attacks were leveled against both companies and governments. “The data stolen included closely-guarded national secrets, source code, email archives, negotiation plans and exploration details for new oil and gas field auctions, the report said.”

“Last month, the Defense Department said foreign hackers infiltrated the network of a defense contractor in March, stealing 24,000 military files in one of the most devastating data breaches suffered by the Pentagon to date.”

The economic consequences alone are staggering. Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee's vice president of threat research said that there has never been a transfer of wealth like it in the history of the world.

By now, it's apparent that the Internet, and computers in general, cannot be secured, that companies can't trust putting their data on them. The general public also is probably realizing the same thing. Privacy is going to come back into vogue.

The obvious, if unpalatable solution: don't put things on the web. I could see a backlash now where people and companies begin to withdraw from the Net: a great exodus. This will throw marvelous future we have come to expect since the 1980s into reverse. Markets will grow for “web-free” products and processes. Calls to do away with web anonymity and privacy will accelerate the process. People will come to see the web as predatory. Expect a surge in orders for “brick 'n' mortar” which might or might not help the company depending on the wealth lost by Internet based services. Expect also a surge in the use of plain old paper.

This has come in the wake of a few other problems that will also stymie the Internet. The upcoming lack of net neutrality will make it a less rewarding experience. Fewer people are going to want to sign on.

Innovation on the web is not going to be as bright and shiny now, either. Our stupid patent system, that allows anyone to patent the “picking your nose” process, is bringing innovation to a standstill.

Companies can patent anything with broad strokes and then sue over any product that rhymes with their patent is killing innovation. It's going to be difficult to reform the system, now that patent suits and their defense are a multi billion dollar industry. The lobbying against leaving it broke is going to be fierce.

It's adding up to the end of the Internet. The death of the dreams of the 80s & 90s. The Internet will have a niche. Just don't expect it to be the economic and innovation driver that it has been.