My baby just wrote me a letter

In 1477, Margery Brews wrote a letter to her fiancé, John Paston. Her handwriting is very fine and ornate. She wrote the following: “If you love me, as I truly believe you do, you will not leave me… Because even if you did not have half the wealth that you do, and I had to undertake the greatest toil that any woman alive should, I would not forsake you. And if you command me to remain faithful wherever I go, I will indeed do everything in my power to love you and no one else ever. Even if my friends say I am acting wrongly, they will not prevent me from so doing. My heart commands me to love you truly above all earthly things for evermore. And however angry they may be, I trust it shall be better in time to come.”

And this, we think, is the first ever love letter.

When we say “e-mail” today, we’re discussing a very specific type of digital transmission; namely, transmission of an original human readable message from one source to one or more destinations, using the SMTP protocol, which in turn is built on the telnet protocol, which in turn is built on the TCP protocol. But “e-mail” as a technical concept predates its current SMTP implementation.

There are other, parallel forms of e-mail as well. In the mid 1980s, Tom Jennings wrote a BBS system and a protocol document called FidoNet. At the time, BBS systems were still quite popular. They required a dedicated computer that answered calls on a dedicated phone line. In particular, FidoNet required that compatible BBS software obeyed what was called Zone Mail Hour, or ZMH, which was a period during which the BBS was expected to send and receive EchoMail to and from other BBSes, typically by calling them directly. Because this wasn’t always practicable, FidoNet had a basic routing capability that permitted you to route messages to through other nodes to their destination nodes.

The early 1990’s explosion of FidoNet was predicated on the existence of cheaper, faster modems as well as cheaper, faster personal PCs. By 1996, while schools and universities were using Internet based email to send messages, the FidoNet community contained almost 40,000 nodes.

As the Internet, and the World Wide Web in particular, exploded in popularity in the early 1990s, FidoNet rapidly died off. Internet e-mail benefited from an “always on” design in which central servers could theoretically speak with dozens of e-mailers at the same moment. E-mail delivery on the Internet was nearly instantaneous. FidoNet servers could typically speak to only one or two users at any given moment, and EchoMail could be delayed up to a day.

Now you would think, given the Internet’s clear advantages on e-mail, that FidoNet should be well dead by now. But as you can see from FidoNet’s most recent nodelist as of this writing, there are several hundred nodes still operating and still interchanging EchoMail with one another.

Successful technology dies very slowly. And very successful technology doesn’t die at all.

Some people think that the automobile destroyed the horse and carriage industry.  These people have never been stuck behind an Amish buggy.

Ten decades in the future, people will take a break from augmented reality in order to write an e-mail, just like their grandparents did. Because e-mail is so quaint, and so old-fashioned, and so romantic.

Why is this the case? Why are people still using this outdated and quaint form of communication with one another?

Perhaps for the same reason that amateur ham operators still try to talk across the Atlantic on longwave radio, when international phone calls are cheap and reliable.

Perhaps for the same reason that vinyl records have seen a resurgence in manufacturing, even though compact discs have significantly better signal-to-noise ratios.

And perhaps for the same reason that handwritten love letters still travel through the post office, a thousand million times slower than an e-mail might.

E-mail (and programs that send e-mail) will be with our race centuries after you and I die, because it has sculpted and defined the lives of countless millions; and we are a nostalgic and romantic race of beings, much more so than being a technologically efficient race.

Hail victory, hail victory victory, hail victory victory

In honor of Memorial Day, I propose the following improvement on Martin Niemöller’s text, to make it more historically accurate. This poem should be read, slowly and heavily, at memorials, funerals, military gatherings, wakes, brises and significant ceremonies of all sorts.

First, they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Socialist. Then, they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then, they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew. Then, they came for the sick, the so-called incurables, and I did not speak out, because I was not sick or incurable. Then, they came for the Catholics, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Catholic. Then, they came for the disabled, and I did not speak out, because I was not disabled. Then, they came for the homosexuals, and I did not speak out, because I was not a homosexual. Then, they came for the Bohemians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Bohemian. Then, they came for the Slovaks, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Slovak. Then, they came for the Czechs, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Czech. Then, they came for the Austrians, and I did not speak out, because I was not an Austrian. Then, they came for the West Prussians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a West Prussian. Then, they came for the Bolsheviks, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Bolshevik. Then, they came for the Serbs, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Serb. Then, they came for the Protestants, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Protestant. Then, they came for the Albanians, and I did not speak out, because I was not an Albanian. Then, they came for the Austrians, and I did not speak out, because I was not an Austrian. Then, they came for the Latvians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Latvian. Then, they came for the Lithuanians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Lithuanian. Then, they came for the Estonians, and I did not speak out, because I was not an Estonian. Then, they came for the Poles, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Pole. Then, they came for the Freemasons, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Freemason. Then, they came for the Ukrainians, and I did not speak out, because I was not an Ukrainian. Then, they came for the Byelorussians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Byelorussian. Then, they came for the Moldavians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Moldavian. Then, they came for the Sammarinese, and I did not speak out, because I was not Sammarinese. Then, they came for the Monacans, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Monacan. Then, they came for the Yugoslavians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Yugoslav. Then, they came for the Romanians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Romanian. Then, they came for the Dutch, and I did not speak out, because I was not Dutch. Then, they came for the Esperantists, and I did not speak out, because I was not an Esperantist. Then, they came for the Italians, and I did not speak out, because I was not an Italian. Then, they came for the Hungarians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Hungarian. Then, they came for the Danish, and I did not speak out, because I was not Danish. Then, they came for the Belgians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Belgian. Then, they came for the Aegeans, and I did not speak out, because I was not an Aegean. Then, they came for the Finns, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Finn. Then, they came for the Croatians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Croatian. Then, they came for the Macedonians, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Macedonian. Then, they came for the Luxembourgers, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Luxembourger. Then, they came for the Montenegrans, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Montenegran. Then, they came for the Romanis, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Romani. Then, they came for the citizens of Danzig, and I did not speak out, because I was not a citizen of Danzig. Then, they came for the Soviets, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Soviet. Then, they came for the political prisoners, and I did not speak out, because I was not a political prisoner. Then, they came for the leftists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a leftist. Then, they came for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jehovah’s Witness. Then, they came for the German Mennonites, and I did not speak out, because I was not a German Mennonite. Then, they came for the Lutherans, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Lutheran. Then, they came for the Christian clergy, and I did not speak out, because I was not clergy. Then, they came for the Amish, and I did not speak out, because I was not Amish. Then, they came for the Hutterites, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Hutterite. Then, they came for the lesbians, and I did not speak out, because I was not lesbian. Then, they came for the transgender people, and I did not speak out, because I was not transgender. Then, they came for the deaf, and I did not speak out, because I was not deaf. Then, they came for me, and I told them, what took you so fucking long?

Cars and trucks fly by me on the corner

It really pisses me off when you ask me to fix your computer.

It pisses me off, because I love you.

When you give me the “can you fix my computer” call, the call means something different to me than it means to you.

To me, it means I will have to stay up all night, buy and try and swap replacement parts, image and restore your hard drive, remove all the malware, and make your computer work the way you imagine it once did, all while ignoring my other family members, my paying work and life commitments.

At my standard rates I would typically charge around $4,000 to fix your seven year old virus-ridden Dell. Your seven year old virus-ridden Dell isn’t worth $100 on Ebay. Should I tell you that? Will you think I am lying or making the $4,000 number up? I am not. You will think I am insulting you if I tell you I make $4,000 for similar work. You are too poor to pay me anywhere near that much though.

Of course I could always send you to Geek Squad. They would of course stupidly and automatically reformat your hard drive and reinstall the OS. If I do that, you will lose all your bank records and baby pictures permanently, to vastly less competent technicians than myself. They would take your money and destroy your data, and they would not even fix the true source of the problem. And you would be very, very, very sad.

And I would know in my heart I could have helped you, but didn’t.

No. I won’t do that to you.

I will take pity on you because you are clearly panicking and unable to eat, sleep or breathe until I save you and your data.

For you, and you alone, I will do a first-rate professional forensic data recovery and reinstallation. I’ll image the drive, work around all the bad sectors, copy it onto a virtual machine, extract your baby pictures and Quicken data, install a new non-shitty hard drive, reinstall all the apps and operating system and your recovered data (sans viruses and spyware), replace the dying fan, update the BIOS, and I will furthermore provide you with an external drive and teach you how to back up your system regularly with it.

Disappointingly, you will fuck up your computer again in a few years, when you refuse to take my advice and do regular backups on the backup drive that I bought for you, specifically for that purpose.

And when your piece of shit computer fails again, you will call me. Panicking. Again.

And the agonizing cycle will repeat.

Being the computer expert in the family is like being the doctor in the family, except you’re the surgeon and everyone expects you to operate on them constantly, suddenly, perfectly, AND pay for the operating room and sedatives and hospital recovery, AND you still consistently refuse to follow my medical advice.

I do all this, for free, because you are so thankful afterwards.

I do all this, for free, because I love you.

I just wish you weren’t so fucking stupid about computers sometimes.

Girl it doesn’t matter just as long as it’s healthy

There is a stock photo of a baby in distress up there, which is critical for getting clickthroughs from social media. Now, I will write a dire-sounding article about a new trend on the Internet.

This new trend is hate speech against babies.

I claim, in an incredulous and yet serious-sounding way, that there is a new and dangerous movement on social media that advocates violence against all babies, just for being babies.

To further develop this clickbait, I search Twitter for a few obnoxious catch-phrases, including “babies hate” and “babies disgusting.”   I then provide a few links to some particular troll posts on Twitter, that make it seem as though this “hating babies” concept is truly an active movement:

“The trend of hate speech against babies is disturbing,” Dr. Hans Kutzler, a Ph.D. and Ed.D. at the University of Northern Nebraska, who I just made up. “This sort of claim to authority, even though it is never actually fact checked, lends an air of credence to the clickbait. But I might not actually exist. Or if I do, I might just be trying to make a few bucks myself through writing clickbait on the side.”

Do YOU think this trend can be stopped? How do YOU stand on the question of hating newborns who have barely come into existence? Inviting the reader to take action is key when writing clickbait. At this point, you have an emotional reaction to this article. And you want to write some long-winded diatribe yourself in the comments section, about how unfair it all is. And because you are all worked up about the wild injustice this article portrays, you will Share with all your friends on social media, thus increasing our page ranking even further in the search engines.

Make sure to post some incredulous question with your share, like “OMG is this real? Somebody tell me it’s not…” When someone tells you it’s not real, make sure to leave the link up anyway, thus increasing our advertising revenue even further.

All of the colours locked away, come out and saturate the gray

 

Flow

The novice asked Master Git: “My git flow is impeded.  I use a graphical tool to start and finish new features and hotfixes.  Today, my graphical tool is broken, and I cannot start a new hotfix.”

Master Git handed the branch of an olive tree to the novice.  Then Master Git said:  “git flow –help“.

The novice ran the command, and was bewildered.  After meditating upon the gifts, she was enlightened.

 

 

The Stolen Cherry

Git Expert was walking through a farmer’s grove.  The scent of cherry blossoms wafted through the air.  As he walked, he spied a beautiful cherry hanging low on a branch.  “git cherry-pick“, he said, and the cherry was transported to Git Expert’s tree.

Whereupon Master Git appeared and said unto him: “You bring discord upon yourself.”

Git Expert laughed.  “How could picking but one cherry hurt the farmer, if we do not tell him?”

Master Git disappeared without a word.  Later on, when conflicts occurred between Git Expert and the farmer, Git Expert was enlightened.

 

The Needs of the Many

Git Expert complained to Master Git: “I understand the perils of git rebase. I only rebase my own work. Why must I use the novice git pull, git merge and git push instead?”

Master Git said: “One is always less than more than one.”

Late at night, Git Expert forgot Master Git’s words.  He initiated a git rebase, but there was conflict.  At this point, Git Expert remembered the advice, and decided to limit the changes via git rebase –skip.  He pushed his changes and slept.

The next morning, the town seized Git Expert, tied a rope around his neck, and pulled him up on a tree.

In his next lifetime, Git Expert was enlightened.

 

The Historian

The historian came to Master Git. The historian asked: “My history is confusing. May I rewrite it to be clearer and easier to understand?”

Upon hearing this, Master Git nodded.

The historian asked: “Your history is confusing. May I rewrite it to be clearer and easier to understand?”

Upon hearing this, Master Git beat the historian to death with a bamboo pole.

In the next lifetime, the historian approached Linus Torvalds and asked: “Your history is confusing. May I rewrite it to be clearer and easier to understand?”

Upon hearing this, Linus Torvalds beat the historian to death with a bamboo pole.

In the next lifetime, the historian rewrote others’ history secretly, without asking permission first.

He lived nine hundred years, whereupon he was killed by a falling cherry tree.

 

I’m gonna swing from the chandelier

Back when I was an undergraduate at Harvard, we were pretty sure that Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Phantom of the Opera was camp. The travelling performance at the Segerstrom tonight confirmed it readily. The show is a grand, bloviating, overbearing noise, so confident in its declamations that it bored literally every single soul in the theater, on stage and off.

Phantom of the Opera doesn’t know it’s camp. It takes itself maddeningly seriously. There are holes in the story big enough to drop a chandelier through — why don’t all the theater performers merely quit when the Phantom threatens violence? Why don’t the policemen immediately shoot the Phantom either of the times they have him in their sights? (He manages to get in several long refrains before anyone can pull a trigger at him.) Why does the Phantom set the cemetery on fire? How does one burn a cemetery? Are headstones flammable?

Beeeewaaaaaare, the Phantom of the Awwwwwpraaaaaa! The melodic concepts are, to be fair, up there with Mozart and Wagner. But the orchestration is stuck firmly in 1987. It neither requests nor requires any apologies for the blaring front-and-center synthesizers. Waaaaaaaaaaaaa, waaa waa waa waa waaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Listen to this goddamn song, you rubes! Weber stole the Phantom of the Opera theme from Pink Floyd’s song “Echoes.” No, really, he did, note for note.

And during intermission, the only thing anyone could talk about was how fast the chandelier dropped. Man, did you see that thing fall? It fell really fast! I thought it might not stop! Whoa, that was scary, that chandelier. Nevertheless, when an act one climax depends on a prop and not on story meaning, then your story needs retooling. And that’s why Phantom is not aging gracefully — its emotional core doesn’t exist until Act 2, when the Quasimodo storyline takes over.

So why does Phantom refuse to give up the ghost? For the same reason Ringling Brothers does: it’s a spec-tickle, something to give the out of towners the smell of elephants and the sense that They’ve Seen A Shew. It’s loud and busy and ornate and noisome and not in the least bit sincere, just like a circus ought to be.

There’s fluoride in the water but nobody know that

To be a cultural citizen of the United States means to believe in the They.  They are the nameless, faceless swath of Otherness, the group of people to which you and I and the people in immediate earshot do not belong. They can be Islamic terrorists, Christian fundamentalists, rogue cops, vegans, Hassidic Jews, Dittoheads, the editorial staff of the New York Times, or the Conspiracy of J. R. Dobbs.  They desire power, secretly or no, but They are obviously unfit for it, and it’s only up to you and me and the other sane decent people to join the struggle against They.

We never tell you the names of They; that would require too much intellectual rigor on our part, and anger gives us sharper words than clarity when we talk about They. Anyway it would be both legally and morally actionable if we gave you names. They might sue, or worse yet, They might post on our timelines. Ergo They must remain formless and disembodied. The membership of They seems, superficially, to be defined by what makes We angry. But if We were willing to be honest (and We aren’t), then We would whisper to you that They are truly defined by what We fear.

We haven’t talked to They in a while. We unfriended and blocked They a while ago… when They posted that thing.  Motherfuckers, all of They.

Since assaulting They requires physical exertion, and since naming the They requires more thinking than is comfortable, our best solution to containing the They involves group monitoring.  We want editors-at-large, formal oversight committees, body cameras, snarky sound bites, internal audits, grand jury indictments, and we want it to be televised in thirty minute loops and simulcast on the Internet.  They will not get away with it.

They should be pilloried virtually, digitally. They should get comeuppance, in one hundred forty characters or less.  And we want to scroll and seethe and Share the anger. Yes yes yes, We knew it, We believed it in our bones: it was They all along.  Click Like if We are We.

Drain the whole sea, get something shiny

I’ve had a few churchgoing friends write Internet posts agonizing over the conflict between Romans 1:26 and yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling.  The word of God is superior to the rule of man, reason these religious folk.  And anyway, what law can require a minister to sanctify a marriage that he sincerely believes is a sin?

Reasonable question, churchgoing friends.  Let’s talk about your church.

Your church gets a number of privileges in our society because it’s a church… it doesn’t have to pay taxes, it can’t be told what to believe about the genesis of the world, and it gets the freedom to teach whatever it wants about God and morality.

Yet, as a resident organization of the United States, it is required to follow the laws of the country, regardless of religious beliefs. It cannot for example claim “Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death” (Leviticus 20:9) and expect parents can get away with killing kids who talk back.

Believe me, I’d be dead and gone if that were the case.

Now in the US we have a series of laws, including today’s ruling, that reinforce the principle that people should receive equal access to public services regardless of what they look like, or what they believe. For example, if you own a restaurant and have a religious conviction that blacks are lesser than whites, you have no right under the law to refuse to serve blacks.

The Equal Protection clause has been interpreted many, many times in the courts consistent with this opinion.

Similarly, despite whatever a church’s religious beliefs are, if it provides a public service (as churches do), it must serve equal people with equal respect under US law, because it operates under US law and receives the benefits thereof.

That is not only the law; that is the morally right and upstanding thing to do.

So we can dance and lose it, lose it, lose it, lose it

I’m building something new and strange, that I can’t talk too much about.  Software construction is much like creative writing; it’s a lonely process, and one fraught with mistakes and false starts and encouragements and setbacks, none of which can be shared publicly until the result is ready for mass consumption.  The process of creating it has been expensive, and emotionally challenging, but I stand the chance to make a great deal of money if my talent matches my ambitions.

I am building it for the same reason that I wrote Zombie Vixens from Hell and The Hermit Bird and Silent Hill: Homecoming and every other large and important creative thing in my life; namely, the thing already exists in my mind and I am arrogant enough to believe that the world will benefit immensely from having the thing that is, at the moment, only real to me.

After all this is over, even if I am wrong and the world does not need what I am making, I will remember that, unless I had built it, I would never have known if I was right or wrong.

It’s hard.  It’s expensive.  And time is ticking into the past, never to be recovered.

And yet, despite the expense and the time and the minor disappointments… yet again, I believe that can I see the future of things, the same way I did with all those plays and songs and scripts and games that I’ve worked on.

Commandment number one of Captain Beefheart’s Ten Commandments for Guitar Playing is this: “Listen to the birds.  That’s where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from.”  So I did just that.  I went outside and I recorded a blackbird and then I came back and pulled that sound apart, frequency by frequency.

Mother Nature, she’s not wasteful.  Three quarters of the genes in mice exist in humans, and only two percent of our genes differ from us to the apes. All those strands of DNA, matching, mating, reintegrating, but the underlying patterns are the same. The algorithms for finding the common subsequences, the music of us… we are all the same.

You listen to a guitar riff on the radio, play it back, change it, recombine it, improve it. Imperfect copies of imperfect copies of imperfect copies, until the original Xerox isn’t even recognizable.

I can hear things now.  Things that other people can’t hear. Patterns, relationships. How sounds flow into other sounds. How frequencies beget frequencies.  I know where music comes from.

Everything will be possible; all the sounds that might exist, will exist.

I want the world to be able to hear things, the way I can hear them.