Archives for October 2015

Respect clichés

Respect clichés. Clichés are old and wise and powerful. Nothing gets to be a cliché without being used and used and used — and nothing gets used that much without having a lot going for it.

Mary Catelli

Life, Carbon, and the Tao

My essai for the first anniversary of L. Jagi Lamplighter’s Superversive blog is now up in full:

Part One: What’s so special about carbon?

Part Two: What’s so special about the Tao?

Reposted on SuperversiveSF in one piece.

Go, read, and I hope you enjoy.

In other news, I shall not be writing this week, as I have finally enlisted some help to do a top-to-bottom cleaning of my flat, which is many months overdue. The accumulation of books and papers was making it impossible for me to hoover up the dust, and the dust was making it difficult to do anything else. I have been living largely on a diet of antihistamines and facial tissue. Enough of that!

ERB to 4E

I have nothing to say about this that John C. Wright has not already said better.

Aeons ago, Forrest J. Ackerman, the science fiction fan to end all fans, wrote a fan letter to Edgar Rice Burroughs. Mr. Burroughs replied exactly as follows:

burroughs_zpsggk9b5kz

Amen, ERB, and thank you, 4E.

Legosity

So far, I have described my thoughts about ozamataz up to the point where I asked whether one could attract that kind of self-sustaining fan participation, and if so, how. This is also the point at which the Muse, or the Guardian Angel, or the Collective Subconscious, or Something, stepped in. Perhaps it was the Great Oz himself.

Having worked out something of the nature of ozamataz, I asked my brain: ‘OK, brain, what is it that makes some things have ozamataz when others don’t?’

And my brain, without missing a beat, obligingly answered: ‘Legosity.’

I was duly annoyed, for I then had to figure out what legosity was. My brain is cryptic and has no manners, and seldom troubles to explain itself.

The one thing my brain did deign to tell me is that legosity has something to do with Lego. This made sense on the face of it. Lego toys have an ozamataz of their own. They have inspired movies, games, theme parks, and of course, the imaginations of millions of children the world over. The manufacturer’s recent habit of producing specific single-purpose Lego sets like model kits, which hardly fit together with other Lego and are hardly intended to, is most regrettable. These kits tend to take up shelf space at the toy shops and displace the kind of Lego that you can really play with. But the original bricks and doors and windows, Lego people and Lego cars and Lego trees, and so on – those are still available, and you can do anything with them. Nowadays, you can even buy Lego with moving parts and electric motors, and build Lego machines that can be controlled via computer. There are Lego robots in the world, and serious men with doctorates in the hard sciences have been known to play with them.

As the unfortunate history of the kit-model kind of Lego shows, it is not so much the brand name, or even the mechanical ingenuity of Lego that gives the toys their unique quality. It is the concept. At bottom, Lego consists of a whole range of bits and pieces, all designed to fit together easily and without fuss, so that they can be used to build anything the imagination can conceive. You do not have to be a skilled carpenter, or a watchmaker, or know how to build ships in bottles, to build houses and cities and fairy castles out of Lego. The skill in your fingers (especially a child’s fingers) ceases to be a limit on what you can achieve, and the mind is set free to soar.

Even the name Lego is well chosen, and means, I think, more than its inventor intended. We are assured that it comes from the Danish phrase leg godt, ‘Play well’. But it is also Latin and Greek, and in those languages the word has a wide and subtle range of meanings that reach right down into the guts of the human psyche. [Read more…]

Life, Carbon, and the Tao (part 1 now up)

The estimable L. Jagi Lamplighter is featuring my new essai ‘Life, Carbon, and the Tao’ on her Superversive blog. Part 1 is now up; part 2 to follow next week.

Ozamataz

I have spent the last week or so (when not sleeping off my medications) in a fairly continuous process of brainstorming, chewing over several new-to-me ideas and figuring out how to turn them into actual writing techniques.

I forget exactly what prompted me to revisit the Key & Peele skit I reposted some time ago, in which the duo performed a thorough piss-take on the silly (and often self-inflicted) names one so often sees among American football players. Of all the daft monikers they introduced to the world, one in particular seems to have caught the public imagination: ‘Ozamataz Buckshank’. The name Ozamataz has been ‘repurposed’ for any number of online game characters and social-media personas. I think part of the reason lies in the delivery: in the original skit, the name was pronounced in a drawl reminiscent of Jimmy Stewart. It is, in fact, a fun name to say aloud, and I think that contributes to its popularity. But there may be more to it than that. A name like ‘Jackmerius Tacktheritrix’ or ‘Javaris Jamar Javarison-Lamar’ is too Pythonesque, too blatant in its silliness, to have much staying power. ‘Ozamataz’ is almost, but not quite, realistic; it could plausibly be an actual word.

And so, hearing the name again, I asked myself: If ozamataz were a word, what would it mean?  [Read more…]

Mumblety-mumble

By the way, a disturbing development: Today is my Getting Older Day. For my trouble, I got the free birthday breakfast at Denny’s (at 4 p.m.), and wrought away on the post for Mrs. Wright, so that now I have a lot more of it than I can use. Tomorrow I shall have to trim it gently with an axe.

How much older, you ask? I admit to Eleventy-Six; but that is a ruse to make people pet me and flatter me, and tell me that I don’t look a day over Eleventy.

Frustration

A Vogon poem
In honour of the Technical Documents.

Why won’t you understand?
It’s so simple a child could do it.
You only need to be willing to learn
And master the Splectic Method.

Now this is the Splectic Method,
So called because the dinobial splexum,
Instead of flanding perobically,
Is isoporadic and pletcher-free
With respect to the fornic tondle.
It’s so simple a child could do it.
Now counterforadically frendle the fremm
(Taking care not to pindle the retrofuge)
To mark the axis of co-quixation,
To fiddle the faddle and squink the squonk,
And that is the Splectic Method.

But first,
Take care that the dectic relambature,
Instead of flanding perobically,
Is isoporadic and pletcher-free
With respect to the flange of the splexum.
You only need to be willing to learn
To adjust the flinding renoberator
To less than the critical crillament
Of the anasybotic trexus.
And once you have tannelled the trexus
(Taking care not to pindle the retrofuge)
You mark the axis of co-quixation,
To fiddle the faddle and squink the squonk,
And that is the Splectic Method.

Oh, dear!
You didn’t refrux the relambature,
And now the frinch is deplenerated
And starting to fland perobically,
Not isoporadic or pletcher-free
with respect to the orthozonabulum.
Why won’t you understand?
You have ruined the whole dyspractic.
You have even pindled the retrofuge,
In spite of my simple instructions,
As clear as the peridenobic fluid,
(Or rather, as clear as it used to be
Before you disprickled the peridenobes).
It’s so simple a child could do it.
You only had to be willing to learn,
And master the Splectic Method.

     (Signed)
     H. Smiggy McStudge

Sarah D: Mobile apps are not a web solution!

That paragon of outdated thinking, the Calgary Public Hobo Mausoleum Library, has drawn down the wrath of Sarah Dimento. She speaks wisely, as is her wont, and without profanity, which is unusual for Sarah in a wrath.

Key bit:

A single-purpose mobile app is about as useful as a unicycle. Sure, you might be able to ride it down the street, but it was never designed to get you much further.…

Back in 2011, every clueless CEO wanted a mobile app (that does nothing a website can’t already do) because they heard it was the latest, hottest thing and wanted to jump on the bandwagon. It was a terrible fad that had its day because it was a terrible idea. Yet here you are, in 2015, telling people, “Please use our unicycle instead of the bicycle we can’t be bothered to fix. Unicycles are still hip, right? Pleeease try out our unicycle. We lost our bicycle building budget over this!”

Read the rest.

No news

Wednesday: Worked on an anniversary post for L. Jagi Lamplighter’s Superversive blog, but did not get usable words finished.

Thursday: Sick day. Adjusting to the new meds is taking time. On the bright side, I no longer wake up in the middle of the night with neck pains and headaches. On the non-bright side, I’m having trouble staying awake. This is expected to pass in a couple of weeks.

Today: Back to work, if I can get my brain back together. Has anybody seen my parietal lobe?