That Pesky Social Web

Longtime readers here may notice that my entries here have been getting longer and less frequent. I tend to think of Brain Squeezings as more of my long-form expression space, and it seems to take an increasingly long time to contribute to the poor blog with every entry.

Sadly this has robbed the site of one of its main functions, that of apprising friends and family of what's going on in my life. I've been in a "reestablish contacts with friends" mode of thinking for a while, and so I figured I'd investigate some of the vaunted "social web" sites like myspace, Twitter, Facebook, and the like. A brave new world indeed!

Facebook and Twitter have seemed to fit me the best, so I'll post links to my pages in my sidebar to the left. (Caveat: in order to view my full Facebook page, you'll need to have a Facebook account yourself, and to be marked as a "friend." Such "sticky" membership requirements are common these days. Ah, well.)

Twitter
Twitter is the prototypical "microblog"; basically for every "tweet" you're given 140 characters to express oneself, so quick status updates and pithy comments are about the best one can manage. 140 characters also fits neatly within the 160-character limit of the SMS text messages sendable from almost any cell phone, so of course many Twitter users use text messages to tweet all day long.

Twitter's real magic, though, is that one can also follow others' tweets. Presidential candidates, tech luminaries, pop stars and of course one's own friends can be kept track of this way. Twitter's text-message immediacy has led to some impressive emergent behavior, too, like massively Twitter-interlinked crowds summarily abandoning boring presentations for more engaging ones at the recent South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, or even texting VIPs in content-lacking interviews with more interesting questions than those being asked by the rent-a-journalist.

Facebook
Facebook started life as a way for college kids to keep in touch with one another between and after classes. It's since expanded to a way for anyone to keep track of anyone--provided they'll "friend" you.

Facebook is (potentially) as elaborate as Twitter is simple: if there's a political affiliation, singing group, special interest or ad-hoc gathering, you can bet it's on Facebook, and can be "joined." If there's a high school, college or corporation, there's a Facebook presence wherein one can network, touch base, and give props or diss those involved.

Where Twitter is the moment-by-moment microblog, Facebook might be seen as the total-picture macroblog: it's a way to say, very splashily and in great detail, "this is what I'm up to, involved in and associated with." It's even got a Twitteresque "status" that you can update for people to see, and means of trading friendly "pokes" with one another to rouse someone who... hasn't updated their Facebook page in the last 20 minutes.

Facebook is also great for trading videos and photos, and other bits and snips of interaction. It really must be seen to be comprehended. It's also a bit much for many people--your mileage may vary.

Excelsior!
Lots of "social web" applications like these wind up able to talk to one another, so I can do things like have my Twitter "tweets" update my Facebook status, and even carbon-copy messages to the blog here.

It's a bit more work to keep all my online-presence plates in the air this way, but with luck I'll be able to sync everything together with clever programming.

Me on Twitter
Me on Facebook

-Rich

And the Third Giant Comes to Rest

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke, 1917-2008.

Not too much to say, here, other than that Sir Arthur C. Clarke is responsible for much of the direction of science fiction (and a surprising amount of the nonfictional science) that shaped the 20th century.

The idea of using geostationary satellites (in what have come to be called Clarke orbits) for telecommunications relays? Clarke's.

2001: A Space Odyssey? Clarke's.

Space elevators? Well, not completely Clarke's, but he was one of the primary proponents of the idea. ("It will be built about 10 years after everybody stops laughing." People are working on the materials science now.)

Wikipedia.

YouTube video of his last public statement to his fans.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, requiescat in pace.

-Rich

Feeling Irrational Today...

From Wil Wheaton: "when come back, bring π."

Yep. Posted early, but what the heck. Time's right.

-Rich

Called... To the Home of the Giants?

Lower the flags and ring the bells, across the Flanaess from the Sea of Dust to the old Great Kingdom: The Free City of Greyhawk knows mourning tonight.

(From Websnark. It's a long but good read.)

Gary Gygax has died. Creator of Dungeons & Dragons, the Gen Con gaming convention, Dragon magazine and a thousand thousand other things related to role-playing gaming, and fantasy's position in the "Fantasy and Science Fiction" section of bookstores. And video games. And movies.

To wit, from the linked article:

You know what else wouldn't exist now? World of Warcraft. In fact, the entire computer RPG, MMORPG, Action RPG and a Hell of a lot of Platforming games wouldn't have existed without Gary Gygax -- certainly not in the form they do now. Any time you level a character, it's because of Gary Gygax. Hell, Knights of the Old Republic used actual mechanics derived from his writing.

So, take out Gygax, and take out Final Fantasy at the same time. Take out Dragon Warrior. Take out Adventure and Zork and that Atari game with the bats. Take out WarHammer and City of Heroes and absolutely core and seminal elements of essentially all modern video gaming. Without Gary Gygax, that whole industry would look radically different today, if it existed at all.

You want to know what else disappears? All three Lord of the Rings movies from the 90's and the turn of the century.

Oh, you don't believe me? Look, right when Dungeons and Dragons was coming out -- and before it became well known or popular -- there were adaptations of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit was a Ruby/Spears cartoon for children most known now for the cloying song "The Greatest Adventure" (which is a bad rap -- The Hobbit wasn't bad for what it was -- a 70's childrens cartoon special meant for the family hour). The Lord of the Rings was a Ralph Bakshi trip and a half that was a commercial failure at the box office, leading to the story being finished by Ruby/Spears once more. The Lord of the Rings was a failure in the mainstream.

And Fantasy? Fantasy was a subsection of Science Fiction. A small subsection of Science Fiction. Most of the great fantasists were also Science Fiction writers, or were so crossover that it made no never mind (Michael Moorcock was at heart a true Fantasist, but somehow you could buy his work as New Wave SF too, for example.) Even The Dragonriders of Pern was a science fiction novel at heart (seriously. They're colonists on an alien world who lost their culture thanks to DEATH SPORES FROM ANOTHER WORLD).

[...]

Flash forward to the turn of the century. Most "Science Fiction" sections in bookstores are primarily Fantasy, along with a whole rack of licensed tie in books that sometimes is as big as the entire section. And alongside the (fantasy/horror) Buffy books, Star Trek and Star Wars books and the like are the books based on Role Playing Games.

The biggest chunk of that section? Dungeons and Dragons.

And those huge fantasy fans remade the marketplace. Fantasy movies started doing better. Ultimately, The Lord of the Rings was done again, this time (mostly) live action and epic, and it made more money than Ecuador.

My own time in the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons was far briefer and shallower than I'd have liked when I was younger, thanks mainly to being a fairly insular kid, and not living close to too many other D&D-obsessed kids. But my brother Matt and I had the first-edition rulebooks, and then some: Dungeon Master's Guide, Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, Deities and Demigods, Unearthed Arcana... I could recite over half of the Websnark article linked above verbatim. Many a teenage afternoon was whiled away by running Matt through die-roll-determined dungeon crawls from the few pages in the "random dungeon generation" section in the well-leafed-through back of the DMG.

Later in life (a scant few years ago, actually) I drove frequently from Richmond to the Washington, DC area to hang with some good friends there and battle orcs and the like using the third-edition rules. The comedy relief to be had by watching our motley delving crew do something so simple as scale a rope ladder was well worth the hours on the road. Note to self: reestablish contact there--there are far too many highly intelligent, funny and good-hearted people in that group to leave left-behind the way I did when I moved to Birmingham.

This barely scratches the surface: the roleplaying habit I acquired thanks to Gygax's work extended to the collection of more than forty GURPS rule- and sourcebooks I now own, a large segment of the videogames I play, the books I've read and want to write, the fact that Amy and I are now regular Dragon*Con attendees, and finally many of the good friends I've acquired over the years.

Gygax the man I never met, but by many accounts he was an iron-willed visionary within his games, a kindly mentor to the legions of gamers he inspired and led, and an industrial-strength son of a bitch when dealing with the gaming industry's business vicissitudes and turf squabbles.

His work, though, has influenced millions, made fortunes of billions, and shifted the dreams of a generation.

E. Gary Gygax, requiescat in pace.

-Rich

PS. Amy's a believer that things like celebrity deaths come in clusters, usually of three. Makes me wonder who's next.

A Giant, Called Home.

William F. Buckley, Jr., thinker, writer, conservative luminary: requiescat in pace.

National Review.

Human Events.

Redstate.

Rush.

Malkin.

Of all the people I want to look up and have a chat with in the afterlife, Bill Buckley resides right next to Ronald Reagan amid my top ten.

He died at his writing desk, "in the saddle" according to his son. This, more than any other detail, chokes me up today.

-Rich

Mooning About

For those of you that don't keep up with such things, tonight is/was a total lunar eclipse for most of North America. Amy and I sat outside and watched, despite forecasts of rain to come and rather daunting cloud cover as the event kicked off at 7:48 PM CST.

Patience paid off, though, as she and I sat, enjoyed some truly excellent tobacco (I succumbed to the lure of a gorgeous little briar pipe while in Gatlinburg, story to come soon) and a bit of Jamaican rum, and oohed and aahed as each progressively-larger rent in the clouds gave us a better glimpse of Luna as she coyly ducked behind Earth's shadow.

Finally, about half an hour into total occlusion, the clouds fell entirely away (leaving a clear-as-a-bell sky), and Amy captured a truly remarkable photo (click the pic to zoom in when you get there) with her several-year-old digital camera on a tripod.

Impressive for an amateur, no? My Princess is a woman of many talents--who knew that astrophotography was among them?

-Rich

...In With the New, and Many Happy Returns!

2008, the new year, has dawned and is now well and truly under way.

A Birthday!
It's Amy's birthday today! She's celebrated with a new blog template of her own (actually, I shamelessly stole the blog-modernizing idea from her), and is enjoying her day. It's been a wonderful, year, Princess, and I look forward to celebrating scores more with you!

A New Year, a New Blog Template
I've wrought a few look-and-feel changes around here, going for a vaguely newspaper-reminiscent format, with a little better visual organization and less clutter. I've also tamed the ever-lengthening list of archive links, packing it into a drop-down list over at top right, under Old Glory. I'm gonna put a blog-search button over there, too.

Current Events
Well, Fred dropped out of the Presidential race, Rutan and Branson have shown the world their new SpaceShipTwo design, Amazon's Kindle is still sold out, and we actually got snow in Alabama last weekend! Never a dull moment, I suppose.

More Toward the Personal
Amy and I visited my parents in Pennsylvania over the post-Christmas-pre-New-Year week, after which she and I had fun trading colds. Finally, possibly weakened by two weeks of sneezing and coughing, my back went out. All that has gone by the wayside--the back's all healed up now--and we're charging into the new year! Got a novel manuscript in progress, a vacation in the Smokies coming in February, loads of unread books on the Sony Reader, and a whole year ahead!

-Rich