WWdN: In Exile

patton oswalt on geeks vs. nerds

Patton Oswalt, one of my favorite comics and one of the nicest I've ever met (he was a frequent guest on the J. Keith vanStratten show) and is a serious geek, as this comment to Wired illustrates:

Wired: There's a great line on your new album, Werewolves:  "My geekiness is getting in the way of my nerdiness." What's the distinction?

Oswalt: A lot of nerds aren't aware they're nerds. A geek has thrown his hands up to the universe and gone, "I speak Klingon — who am I fooling? You win! I'm just gonna openly like what I like." Geeks tend to be a little happier with themselves.

Awesome. There is nothing to be ashamed of, my fellow geeks! Embrace your encyclopedic knowledge of The Village and how many Redshirts died on the original Star Trek!

Patton also says that his mid-life crisis involves D&D instead of a sports car, and mentions that his wife wants him to put down the dice and go to a strip club. I'm going to give that angle a try and see how it goes.

Hey, Wired: if you want to talk to another geek about geek stuff, I sort of know a guy.

it was a magical time . . .

My mom remembered my story about looking at the moon 32 years ago, and e-mailed me her recollection of that night, which she said I can share with WWdN:iX readers:

I loved your post about the moon. I'm inspired to comment as I am one of three people in the world who shared that experience with you. I remember it like it was yesterday. I don't care about the science of it, or illusion that it may have been. I had never seen a moon like it, or have I since.

Like much of our time in the chicken coop, it was magical. Like the way the coop leaked from the bottom up when it rained, and how fearless the rats were - running through the un-insulated walls at night.

To flesh out your image, you may remember that just beyond the walnut tree - the same tree that MumMum would shake the nuts out of, before bagging them for sale in her little stand on Topanga Cyn Blvd. - was the duck pond. They were all sleeping, exhausted after a full day of teaching their babies how to swim in the blue plastic wading pond that we picked up in someone's trash. Dad made a little ramp for them so that they wouldn't all drown trying to get out. And that pasture you remember was also home to Trinket, our 20+ yr old mare, her favorite bantam rooster asleep on her withers.

Finally, you'd had enough of the moon, but Dad and I were enjoying the moment. We compromised by walking to the ice cream store - where, as usual, you were allowed to go behind the counter and get your own cone.  And, as usual it melted all over your overalls, but that was ok. It bought us a few more moments of that moon.

Thanks for sharing another walk down memory lane.

Love you,

Mom

MumMum was my great grandmother, and we called my great grandfather Papa. Their actual names were Daphne and Flavel, which were the funniest names I'd ever heard in my 5 years of life. I'd succumb to a fit of giggles whenever MumMum would call out to Papa, "Flavel! Come quick! Lawrence is on!" (She was referring to Lawrence Welk, who they watched so frequently on television, and called by name with such familiarity, I thought he was a close personal friend. I'm sure that, to them, he was.)

MumMum and Papa were incredible people, who came to America from Panama, where they met while he was working as an accountant for the US during the construction of the Panama Canal. They had a huge family, and lost most of their children to malaria, but you'd never know it from they way they embraced life with such unbridled joy. Aunt Val was their daughter, as was my mom's mother, Norma, who we called NuNu. They lived in the valley at a time when it was more or less a wild frontier (well, as wild as you could get in Los Angeles County in the seventies) and I thought they were awesome. This picture is of the three of us, probably taken in late 1973.

The ice cream shop my mom mentioned was a Baskin Robbins that was less than a block from our house (Google says it's still there,but our property has been apartments since the early 80s) just South on Topanga. We walked there all the time - if I was lucky, my dad would pull me in my Radio Flyer wagon - and the girls who worked behind there knew us pretty well, so I always got to walk right behind the counter and pick out my own cone, and though I don't remember wearing more than I ate, there is ample photographic evidence to back up the claim.

Wow. That just unlocked a rather lucid memory:

I don't remember why, but just before my brother was born when I was four, NuNu took me past Baskin Robbins, and across a major street that intersected Topanga. I was on my Big Wheel, and she told me that if I wanted to ride it across, "You have to stay between the white lines when we go across the busy street!"

She wasn't stern with me often, so I knew that it was really important that I listen to her. I looked at the street, and saw one wide white line stretching across in front of me. Before I could find the other line so I could stay between them, the light changed.

"Okay, we have to go fast!" She said.

I jammed my feet down on the Big Wheel's pedals, spinning the plastic wheel a couple of times before it found purchase on the ground. Because I didn't know where the other white line was, I did what I thought was the next safest thing, and carefully stayed right on top of of the bright white line.

The whole way across the street, she kept yelling at me to stay between the lines, so I gritted my teeth and held my handlebars as straight and tight as I could. We got safely across, and before I could look up to receive her fulsome praise for staying so perfectly on the line, she got really mad at me.

I don't remember exactly what she said, but I hadn't stayed between the lines, and I wasn't safe at all. On the way back, I'd have to hold her hand and pull my Big Wheel behind us.

It wasn't until months or maybe even a year later that I realized why she was so upset with me: she wanted me to stay in the crosswalk, and I'd stayed right on top of one white line, dangerously close to the traffic that was waiting for the light to change. I don't think I ever brought it up with her again, but it obviously made a strong impression on me, because I can still hear the traffic, smell the exhaust, and feel the heat radiating off the intersection while my grandmother sternly tells me to keep moving and stay between the lines.

As my mom said, magical was the best way to describe that house, and my memories of that time are magical as well: running between our chicken coop and MumMum and Papa's house, waving the stiff felt Los Angeles Dodgers pennant my parents brought me home from a playoff game while I wore a cape made from a beach towel . . . listening to a Star Trek adventure record in the TeePee my dad made for me from the big blue blanket and some broomsticks . . . playing The Gong Show in their huge kitchen with NuNu and Aunt Val . . . and watching wrestling with MumMum and Papa -- who were convinced the whole thing was real -- before their good friend Lawrence would count off "And a one, and a two . . ." before leading us all in a champagne sing along.

We didn't have much back then, and I know that my parents struggled like crazy just to make ends meet . . . but we had what really mattered: we were surrounded by the love of our family, and that made it a magical time.

"He stayed at his post!"

According to Wikipedia (Celebrating 750 Years of American Independence!) there were 74 Redshirt deaths in the original Star Trek.

The deadliest episode for for the fifth member of the landing party? Where No Man Has Gone Before, which claimed a staggering twelve Ensign Rickys. The second deadliest episode was The Changling, which sent six wads of Ensign Kleenex to the Great Gig in the Sky.

Geek in Review: Reach Out to the Stars

This week's Geek in Review is all about my love of science, especially astronomy, beginning with my first memory, looking at the moon when I was two or three years-old:

We lived in the Northwestern San Fernando valley, in a converted chicken coop on my grandparents’ property, which was one of many one-acre farms that shared space with weird-o hippie communes from the late sixties through the mid-seventies.

My dad was excited as he took me and my mom out of the house to stand beneath the walnut tree. Once outside, he didn’t even need to tell us why. There, rising over the pasture behind our house, was the biggest moon I’ve ever seen in my life. It was yellow and full and covered the entire horizon, like a drawing from a science fiction pulp novel. It was nighttime, but the glow of the moon lit up the ground in front of us as far as I could see, turning the leafless trees at the back fence into bony hands, reaching into the sky.

I stood between them in my OshKosh B’Gosh overalls, mom holding my left hand and dad holding my right, and stared at it while it slowly climbed into the sky. Though I was too young to understand the concept of beauty, I was still impressed; it was the biggest thing I’d ever seen in my life.

My dad picked me up and held me close to him. “That’s the moon,” he said. I can still hear the awe in his voice. In that moment, my life long love affair with space and science began.

By happy coincidence, I traded some e-mails with Phil Plait, better known as The Bad Astronomer, while I wrote my column, and I asked him if he could explain why the moon appeared to cover the entire horizon in my memory. He said:

You are a victim of The Moon Illusion!

You caught me in an expansive mood; I'm full of coffee and I just wrote 11,000+ words about black holes for my next book. So hang on.

The illusion is just that: an illusion. It can be really amazing, but in reality, even in your head, the Moon only looks two or three times bigger. This can be amplified by memory; some people swear they remember the Moon eating up the whole sky as you do (remember it, I mean, not that you eat the whole sky).

The illusion is a combination of two things. the first is the Ponzo illusion, where your brain interprets things as being bigger if it thinks they are farther away.

Second, the sky is not exactly hemisphere-shaped to our brains, it actually looks like an inverted bowl. Think of it this way: clouds overhead are maybe two miles up, but clouds near the horizon are a hundred miles away. So the sky looks bowl-shaped.

So when the Moon is on the horizon, your brain thinks it's farther away than when it's overhead. The Ponzo illusion kicks in, and your brain gets fooled into thinking the Moon is HUGE. As it gets higher, the illusion vanishes. If you actually observe the Moon with binoculars or with a 'scope, you can see it is no bigger on the horizon. In fact, it should look smaller because it's a few thousand miles farther away than when it's overhead.

It has nothing to do with foreground objects, atmospheric refraction or anything like that. it's a plain old illusion. I wrote a whole chapter about this in my first book, matter of fact. It was tough to research since people argue so vehemently over this topic. Fun though.

Phil's comments, and my ability to ask him for them, are yet another reason why we are so lucky to be alive at this moment. At what other time could I so simply and easily ask an astronomer such a noob question, and get an answer back so quickly?

This was one of those columns that easily could have turned into 5000 words, and I'm not entirely happy with the way I cut it down to keep it readable. I love science so much, and I am so fascinated by astronomy, that once I get going, it's hard for me to keep things brief. I didn't even get into Hyperspace (fish scientists FTW!) and all the stuff I learned about black holes and quantum physics when I was in my early twenties. I totally suck at math, and I've never taken anything higher than Algebra 2, so the fact that I can get even an elementary understanding of these subjects speaks volumes about the people who've written books about them.

If you're of a scientific mind, and you can communicate scientific ideas to guys like me, please keep on doing it. We're assaulted by pseudo- and anti-science on an almost daily basis, it seems, and enlightening the ignorant is the only way we're ever going to get off this planet before we destroy it.

it's good to be the geek

I've been really lucky to be involved in some awesome comics this year, including Dork Tower 36, the animated version of PvP, and of course my foray into the land of the undead, Dead Eyes Open.

My invasion of geektopia gained a little bit more ground last month, when I made an awesome guest appearance in PS238. For reasons that are best left to lots of silly excuses, I didn't even realize the comic was out until a friend brought it up today. In his blog, Aaron says that* I "was kind enough to lend me his likeness and let me insert him into the ps238-iverse."

This has come up a few times in the last few years -- in fact, for all the stories linked in this post -- and every time it does, I am totally blown away. I'm a huge geek, and I love that I get a chance to be part of geeky things that I already love.

* Which? Just kidding. I slay me.

a day of silence for internet radio

Inspired by the fun I had with RFB #9 (.nam daed ,no em nruT) I fell down the ephemeral audio rabbit hole on Sunday night, and was up until nearly three in the morning picking up all sorts of strange and wonderful audio for . . . well, I'm not quite sure what for, exactly. I may put together an RFB that's basically a mixtape with weird-o audio on it, similar to those cassettes we used to trade in the 80s, but I'm not sure if I'd be able to release it, because of copyright issues.

If you're into that sort of thing, I highly recommend starting your quest at WFMU's Beware of the Blog, and more specifically, their 365 Days project . . . but if you're into strange, unique, and just plain weird stuff, don't go there until you have a few hours and a couple of gigs to burn.

Speaking of audio on the Internets, and unique things that you'd never hear in the mainstream, today is a Day of Silence for Internet Radio. I'll let Tim from Pandora give the details:

Ignoring all rationality and responding only to the lobbying of the RIAA, an arbitration committee in Washington DC has drastically increased the licensing fees Internet radio sites must pay to stream songs. Pandora's fees will triple, and are retroactive for eighteen months! Left unchanged by Congress, every day will be like today as internet radio sites start shutting down and the music dies.

A bill called the "Internet Radio Equality Act" has already been introduced in both the Senate (S. 1353) and House of Representatives (H.R. 2060) to fix the problem and save Internet radio--and Pandora--from obliteration.

I'd like to ask you to call your Congressional representatives today and ask them to become co-sponsors of the bill. It will only take a few minutes and you can find your Congresspersons and their phone numbers by entering your zip code here.

And Bill from Radio Paradise says:

Don't believe the record industry propaganda that says that Internet radio is trying to deprive artists and labels of fair royalty payments. Under the legislation we're supporting, we would still be paying a higher royalty rate than any other class of broadcaster in the US.

As I said in a recent Geek in Review: this isn't about the RIAA (via Sound Exchange) protecting artists. It's about protecting a monopoly that has made the big labels who are the RIAA and a handful of broadcasters very, very rich. It's about preventing individuals like us from using the level playing field afforded to us all by the technological innovations of the last decade. This has never been about protecting artists. It's about limiting choice, and that's just wrong.

Please take a moment today to contact your congresscritter and ask them to support HR2060 or S1353. Only we can save internet radio, and spare our children the horror of living in a world where top 40 radio prevails.

internet jesus' crooked little vein

Warren Ellis has a new book coming out, called Crooked Little Vein. Publisher's Weekly  calls it a "snappily paced homage to William Burroughs's Naked Lunch."

If that doesn't get your inner Mugwump ready for a trip to Interzone, he posted a piece of Crooked Little Vein in his Live Journal recently that might just do the trick:

The radio scanned around a bit and landed on something that sounded oddly amateur. Listening and smoking, I came to understand it was a micropower radio station. A couple of kids broadcasting out of a back room somewhere. And somewhere close by, too. The kids, only one of whom sounded hopelessly stoned, explained that their signal didn’t reach more than a couple of miles, and only that if the wind was behind it and you were standing downhill with your arms out and a wire coathanger stuck on top of your head.

The unstoned one was pretty smart. In between the music – which apparently was all by local unsigned bands, and some of it wasn’t bad – he talked about what they were doing and why. By playing local indie music, they were both supporting his community and broadcasting donated content that didn’t require a royalty payment. They weren’t, they insisted, pirates. They were even observing band adjacency, he said – this one, the guy who hadn’t smoked a field of weed, was obviously the Head Geek – broadcasting on 94.2, clear space between two “lite”/soft rock channels. And that was the point, he figured – most of Columbus’ dial was all eaten up by soft rock, country and Christian radio. All the major monolithic radio entities ran stations in Colombus, but they all broadcast exactly the same kind of material.

This excerpt doesn't do it justice, but it should make you interested enough to go read the whole thing, I hope.

Warren has been watching with awe as his Amazon ranking climbs steadily upward, (it's at 302 as I write this) and I thought I'd help him reach the double digits if I can, thusly: Buy Crooked Little Vein today and you will wake up as the owner of a mansion and a yacht, surrounded by beautiful women or men as you see fit.*

I remember watching Amazon rankings climb for Dancing Barefoot (I think it peaked around 21 or so for ten minutes) and hoping to watch Just A Geek (which I understand cracked the top ten, but can't prove because Amazon's ranking updating gremlins were all off getting loaded the day Just A Geek was released. I guess I should have taken that as a sign of things to come, but I was young and filled with naive optimism.) Warren, like me, has an awesome audience and a great relationship with his readers, who are massively supportive of his work, and I bet we could all come together into a giant Voltron of readers that would make Cheetara and the Baroness totally hot for us.

Uh. What? Okay, to wipe that image out of your mind, one more bit from Publisher's Weekly:

"At the start of this dark, demented fiction debut from Ellis, the creator of DC Comics' Transmetropolitan and The Authority, the U.S. president's heroin-addicted chief of staff hires 25-year-old Lower East Side PI Mike McGill to find the other Constitution. This is a secret document privately authored by several of the Founders detailing the real intent of their design for American society, which a debauched vice-president Nixon lost in the '50s. With half a mill in black ops money, Mike hires cute tattooed Trix Holmes to be his guide to America's deviant underworld, whence the 50-year-old cold trail begins. In their search for the missing document, reputedly bound in the skin of the extraterrestrial entity that plagued Benjamin Franklin's ass over six nights in Paris, the pair make some wild pit stops in Columbus, Ohio; San Antonio, Tex.; Vegas; and, finally, L.A."

* Offer only good if you are already the owner of a mansion and a yacht, or if your name happens to be Elmer J. Fudd. Beautiful women or men will only arrive if you are Tom Vu, and have made "Millons" in real estate and infomercial scams. Offer not open to residents of Guam, Ivory Cost, and Florida.

In case you need to look more awesome . . .

There are two totally awesome new shirts at Threadless which* I think WWdN:iX readers will love. If you buy them through the images below, I can get them with points, so then when we show up at the same conventions, we can be all, "Hey! We're totally twins! Woo!" *High five*

*(that? which? What's the rule? Andrew? A little help?)

Radio Free Burrito: Episode Nine

Inspired by Goldfinger (the movie, not the band) and alone and a little bored in an empty house while my family is away, I decided to do a special episode of Radio Free Burrito.

This is entirely a music show, playing Exotica, Easy Listening, and Lounge Music from Comfort Stand Records, which is totally awesome and releases its artists under a Creative Commons License.

I had a giant pile of fun doing this show, and I hope you have a good time listening to it.

Show Notes:

• I tried to use chapters and images in this, because the latest version of GarageBand makes it appear easy. I don't know if I did it right.
• All the artists I played are at Comfort Stand dot Com.
• I played music from:
  
  • Coconut Monkeyrocket
  • Dana Countryman
  • Martinibomb
  • Skip Heller
• If you liked the music I played, and you want to hear more, Wikipedia's Lounge Music page is a great place to start.
• I also mentioned Joe Frank, who is awesome.
• Comments can be sent to podcast at wil wheaton dot net. Please use a descriptive subject line.
• Radio Free Burrito is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

This episode weighs in at 37 minutes, is 18.3 MB, and is in m4a format, instead of mp3 format, because I'm tired and not in the mood to remember how to convert it to an mp3 that still sounds good. I don't think it's that big a deal at the moment, because the size appears to be consistent with older episodes of the good old RFB.

Download radio_free_burrito_episode_nine.m4a

Enjoy!

Update: Our good friend and Torrent-Creating Guy Mann Dude, Brian has created two different .torrent files for Super Happy Funtimes:

High (orig):
http://athena.unearthed.org/torrents/radio_free_burrito_episode_nine.m4a.torrent

Low (mono, VBR bit rate range 0-24, 6.7 megs):
http://athena.unearthed.org/torrents/radio_free_burrito_episode_nine-low.mp3.torrent

Thanks for the .torrents, Brian, and thank you to everyone else who sent in comments or feedback. It's awesome to hear from listeners who enjoyed the show, and inspires me to do more in the mysterious future.

When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth

I just finished reading Cory Doctorow's Locus Award-winning novelette When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, which has been made freely available for all of us to read at Baen's Universe.

It's the first story I've read in ages that I read completely without stopping, and the first full-length story that I think I've ever read in its entirety online. Cory is one of the very few authors who inspire me as well as entertain me, because he tells great stories like this one.