The lamp: taken.

[jazzfish]

I wonder...: "I wonder if people would say that we shouldn't rush to levy judgement on Dave just because I blogged that he punched me in the face." (Context is everything.)

Are polyamorous relationships hard?: "I just don’t buy that relationships are anywhere near the hard work that self-development is. Once you start focusing on the self-development part, the relationship part seems to be a pretty nice side effect of that." Word.

Tobias Buckell makes a good point in the steampunk war: "[S]teampunk is a just a modern iteration of the previous generation's pastoralism. Tolkien was looking back a couple hundred years to a time just outside his horizon and thinking of it as 'a better age' ... Now in the 21st century, our previous age was industrialization, that’s the age we look back to that’s *just* outside of our horizon where we can strip out all the negative stuff of the Industrial Age and think of it as a simpler age." Fair enough.

(Somehow when I linked to Charlie's rant I neglected to also link to Kate Beaton's definitive takedown of steampunkers. Now I can rectify that, and can also link to Eeyore's steampunk infestation of Star Wars.

Speaking of Star Wars, Ben Kenobi, Private Jedeye: "That's Greedo, the guy Han Solo shot first!"

---

The showing of GET LAMP and discussion afterwards were neat ("When Dave Lebling was writing Shogun, he'd write to Clavell's agent and ask 'why is this character doing this here?' and after awhile the agent would write back and say 'James doesn't remember.' I have footage of Dave apologizing for Shogun. It's great."). Seen a second time, it's... not exactly unfocused, but sprawling. It touches on an awful lot of stuff. The Richard Bartle rant ("Wouldn't it be great if we had the technology to tap directly into the imagination, so you could see all these things... well, we do, it's called text, and it's been around for about three thousand years") is still my favorite bit. I do want to sit people down and make them watch the Infocom "featurette" and the bit on A Mind Forever Voyaging, though.

And it was good to briefly see plumbob78 and baranoouji, and to hang out and talk with daghain and LJless-as-far-as-I-know Jen for awhile. I'm no longer feeling either shut in or overpeopled, which is kind of nice. Balancing the proper quantity (and quality) of People tends to be hard.

But I have books, and writing, and a shiny new computer, and when I need good people I can generally find some. It just takes some looking, sometimes.

Comments

[rbandrews]

Geez. I'd just like to say this:

I went to Bar Camp Houston in 2006 or so, and while there were annoying jerks there, they were more of the "annoying marketdroid looking for people to recruit" sort.

I went to the Lone Star Ruby Conference this year, and while Ruby gets a pretty bad rap for things like this it's largely unfounded. I heard several people, both in the hallway and in actual talks, reference those slides and make fun of "those sexist Rails assholes". It's like Ruby descends psychologically from _why the lucky stiff, and Rails from DHH.

So I guess my point is, I dunno. Not everyone at tech conferences will grab your junk, even if you're a cute woman? Most of us are more into our laptops and the free t-shirt table.

[plumbob78]

I think a large part of steampunk stuff you see is bullshit, but not because the Victorian Age was a time when people were horrible to each other. It certainly was, but people have been racist and murderous and all sorts of horrible to each other for centuries and will be until we make ourselves extinct, because people suck. It's bullshit because people have forgotten what it's supposed to be. It's supposed t be like cyberpunk, but with steam. So if you have lasers where all the metal is bronze and there's distressed wood and stuff, that's not steampunk, just a laser with a retro touch. Sticking gears on everything is just some kind of antiquarian affectation. Now If you make yourself a fancy powered exoskeleton powered by a steam engine, that's steampunk. Or if you're using a difference engine to make the calculations for the long-range cannon you're using to deliver the mail faster than any horse or airship could or something. Everything else is just shit people think looks cool and old.

[mneme]

Oh, but you've gotten punched in the face before. So it must be your fault for provoking fights, not Dave's for punching you in the face.

*sigh*

I should see GET LAMP.

[sketchthecow.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'd say the problem with GET LAMP (and this is the director speaking) is that the weight of being the first and possibly last text adventure documentary means that I wanted to get to a lot of subjects and bring them together, not just in a linear narrative, but also in one that at least was watchable and somewhat random access. This is not the kind of documentary that is usually made.

As a result of its sharp focus, Infocom is more of a traditional documentary, with a beginning, middle, and end, and so people might enjoy that one. But if GET LAMP had just been about Infocom, what a tragedy that would have been.

[selki.livejournal.com]

Really a great roundup of links, though I hope you will overlook my occasional penchant for st......k.