It just occurred to me to email Jym to recommend it, but then I thought "Say... don't I have a blog?"

The evolution of telephone voice menus reminds me of this. Listening for the number corresponding to what you wanted was annoying and slow, but it worked reliably once you knew it, and if it was a menu you used regularly, you could quickly skip ahead. But now there's an exciting new feature! You don't have to press buttons! You just say what you want! OK, so now you have a guess the verb problem until you listen to all the choices, which takes as much time as it used to. And you have no idea how many times you'll have to listen a machine say "I didn't quite get that. Please try again." and repeat yourself. But, hey! No buttons!

I just bought a Nook ebook reader. One of the reasons I chose it was that it had a touchscreen. I like touchscreens. In years of using Palm PDAs, I found them quick, reliable, and easy to use. I thought thumb keyboards were a great step backwards -- they make the device bigger and heavier, and are much slower to use than Fitalystamp on my Palm ever was.

But, silly, naïve me, those were the quick, reliable, and easy to use resistive touchscreens of days of yore. That's old and outdated technology now! Now everything's capacitive touchscreens, with an exciting new feature! You don't need to use a stylus! You can use your finger! Sure, your fingertip is blunt and broad and you'll routinely need to try more than once to hit what you wanted, and the touchscreen will get greasy and smeared anytime you use it. But no stylus! Well, you can get a capacitive stylus, but it has to simulate your finger, so it's blunt and broad, too. It doesn't come to a nice, discrete tip like an old stylus did so you could actually reliably hit a nice, discrete location on the screen. But that was old technology! This is new technology! And, in a pinch, you can always rub pork products against your device!

I'm most of the way through The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. In practice, the e-ink screen is as good as I had hoped. Noticeably less contrast than a printed page, but the quality of the text is otherwise very nearly as good.

But, just in case I haven't been clear, I loathe the touchscreen so much that I'm thinking about whether to avail myself of the 14-day return period.

The idea of mutilating a book pains me, but I figured I could get over it. That book sitting at the library book sale priced at a nickel isn't doing any other good in the world.

So the very first book I was checking as a candidate because it was a hardcover of about the right size and with a sound binding was a library discard with this bookplate inside the front cover:

Your careful usage of this volume will preserve its value for those who follow you.

Now I feel like a jerk.

I'm planning to get an e-ink reader some time this summer -- I'm waiting for some of the dust to settle in the price wars. It seems potentially nifty to read the strips there. So I looked into converting the strips into an actually useful format.

Some websearching turned up that a kindly hacker had come to my rescue with a script that converts the image format on the CD to directories of jpegs, which I ought to be able to convert to something readable on any reader out there.

The extra effort is a pain, though; it would have been much moreso without someone having done the hard work already. This, essentially, is why I'm planning to get an e-reader but not any DRM-ed e-books. I don't want to pay extra for the privilege of needing circumlocutions to read my books on different platforms going forward. (Techniques to crack most, maybe all, of currently popular DRM-ed e-book formats can be readily found, but I don't need the bother.)

Night Shade Books and the other publishers of DRM-free science fiction available on WebScription are liable to get a lot more business from me in the near future. (And ManyBooks, but without the payment part.)

But I looked up that earliest citation, from Thomas Dekker's The Wonderful Year. The cited passage occurs in a foreword "to the reader." It's an entertaining rant; I recommend the whole thing. It's hard to excerpt without doing violence to the whole, but here goes:

Alas, poore wenches (the nine Muses!) how much are you wrongd, to haue such a number of Bastards lying vpo[n] your hands? But turne them out a begging; or if you cannot be rid of their Riming company (as I thinke it will be very hard) then lay your heauie and immortall curse vpon them, that whatsoeuer they weaue (in the motley-loome of their rustie pates) may like a beggers cloake, be full of stolne patches, and yet neuer a patch like one another, that it may be such true lamentable stuffe, that any honest Christian may be sory to see it. Banish these Word-pirates, (you sacred mistresses of learning) into the gulfe of Barbarisme: doome them euerlastingly to liue among dunces: let them not once lick their lips at the Thespian bowle, but onely be glad (and thanke Apollo for it too) if hereafter (as hitherto they haue alwayes) they may quench their poeticall thirst with small beere.

I can't be sure I'm following everything in the Elizabethan English (and the Latin) fraught with both contemporary and classical allusions. But it really seems as if it's hack writers whom Dekker is characterizing as Word-pirates. I think it's an early day complaint that idiot readers are consuming trashy bestsellers instead of recognizing his artistic genius, not an early day complaint about IP violators.

About $13 and 5 minutes of work later, and I'll never have to bend over backward again. Sometimes, there's a really easy fix.

Things I didn't know: he says the story is mostly true as told. In the 1969 film adaptation, Officer Obie played himself. Guthrie bought Alice Brock's church, as depicted in the song; it's now home to The Guthrie Center. And a serial killer acting as his own attorney played the song in its entirety during his trial. He's on death row now.

To console myself, I bought a CD of The Best of Arlo Guthrie the next day and played it for Pocahontas. I'm gratified to report that she liked it as much as I do, and wanted to listen to it again the day after that.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the Nova Albion Steampunk Convention in Emeryville. (Emeryville is a tiny city on the San Francisco Bay wedged between Berkeley and Oakland.) I don't go to many cons these days; I figure I'm practically obliged to go when one shows up at my doorstep.

More goggles, corsets, and top hats than you could shake a stick at. (Though some of the costumes seemed to edge into the twenties or thirties. Dieselpunk poseurs.) It's like we're verging on a Victorian phyle. I didn't have a costume, but the book I had on me was Great Expectations, so that ought to count for something.

I went to a couple of panels about the nature of Steampunk, and no one mentioned my own pet theory about its popularity.

A little longer ago than Jeter coined "steampunk", Vinge started talking about the Singularity, and Drexler popularized the idea of self-replicating nanomachines and some sf writers were gripped for a while with the idea that they couldn't talk about the far future without dealing with their inevitability. If there hadn't been a singularity or gray goo apocalypse, then why not? And if there has been one, then who do you write about and how?

This produced some interesting fiction by Vinge, Stross, MacLeod and others, as constraints often can. It seems to have become passé by now.

Maybe we have more pressing concerns. The human population is projected to hit 7 billion this year. But if you talk about overpopulation, you're a crank who hates humanity. Our energy infrastructure continues to depend on burning hydrocarbons. We know they'll run out at some point (or, rather, that the energy cost of retrieving them will eventually exceed the yield) and we don't know when that'll be. But if you talk about anticipating it instead of having blind faith that a technological miracle will save us all, you're a luddite crank. Burning hydrocarbons produces CO2, which predictably traps more heat energy in the atmosphere, creating more extreme weather and climatic conditions. Unchecked, it threatens the possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect, in which permafrost and clathrates melt, releasing trapped methane, itself a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. But if you talk about conservation, you're a hairshirt-wearing martyr who hates civilization.

In the face of continued denial, it's hard to be optimistic about anything changing for the better anytime soon.

So how do you write about the future without it being another tedious environmental dystopia? How do you write fun high-tech adventure fiction like they did in the forties, and thirties, and all the way down, back to Verne?

You go all the way down, back to Verne. In 1870, when Verne wrote 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the global population was about one and a quarter billion. We hit two billion around 1925. With the number of people in industralized and industrializing nations as low as it was, it doesn't really matter if you fictionalize vastly increased coal consumption for ridiculous steam-powered devices -- there isn't the population density and time for it to have a significant global effect (not to discount local health and pollution consequences from mining and burning that much coal, but that's a different story.)

So you get your rocketsairships and your robotsclockwork androids and your raygunspneumatic flechette pistols, and keep your mad scientists, and your brave and beautiful heroes and heroines, and your tales of derring-do.

And you don't worry that you're writing about a civilization that's writing a check the world can't cash.

Just like ours.

Title credit: Professor Steamhead.

But book piracy is as old as novels. Don Quixote had an unauthorized sequel out before Cervantes' own (like Harry Potter much later.) And the term "pirate" in this sense is as old. The OED says:

A person or company who reproduces or uses the work of another (as a book, recording, computer program, etc.) without authority and esp. in contravention of patent or copyright; a plagiarist. Also: a thing reproduced or used in this way.
[1603 T. DEKKER Wonderfull Yeare sig. A4, Banish these Word-pirates (you sacred mistresses of learning) into the gulfe of Barbarisme.] 1668 J. HANCOCK Brooks' String of Pearls (Notice at end), Some dishonest Booksellers, called Land-Pirats, who make it their practise to steal Impressions of other mens Copies. 1703 D. DEFOE True-born Englishman in True Collect. I. Explan. Pref. sig. B3v, Its being Printed again and again, by Pyrates. 1758 D. GARRICK Let. 4 Dec. (1963) I. 295 But pray what performances have we Exhibited for literary Pirates, which we have rejected from the Original Proprietors? 1822 BYRON Let. 13 Apr. (1979) IX. 142 If you publish the latter in a very cheap edition so as to baffle the pirates by a low price--you will find that it will do.

I'll accept this usage of "pirate."

Some cavillers more specifically object to "pirate" to describe someone who acquires copies known to be unauthorized (e.g., by downloading them) as opposed to those distributing them (e.g., by making them available for download.) But anyone using torrents or most other P2P software is implicitly both. I'm not sure how useful it is to draw a distinction.

Lost might be the most complicated tv show ever, but rest easy: anything you've forgotten, anything you never noticed, and even connections I don't doubt were a surprise to the creators is likely to be found in the Lostpedia.

Mild spoilers for the already broadcast five seasons below.

I was there today. The staff is still unloading boxes, and look to have a lot of work cut out for them. But it's shaping up to be a nice place.

I will now sound like the rubiest rube to ever fall off a turnip truck.

We were seated first, of course, and could get comfortable while everyone else was still milling about at the gate. There was no concern about whether there'd be space for my carry-on bags. A flight attendant asked if he could check my coat.

The seats are as much better than coach as they always looked. There's elbow room, leg room, and you can actually make it through the flight without touching your neighbor. I could cross my legs. The person on the inside could get past the person on the outside as easily as at a decent movie theatre.

There seemed to be two flight attendants assigned just to the 16 of us in first class. Before lunch, one of them came through with hot towels to wipe our hands with. Then we were asked about salad dressing and whether we'd like the seafood appetizer for the first course. They were served with real metal silverware.

We had a choice of three things for the meal, one of which was vegetarian. In coach, your choice was a turkey sandwich.

For the first time ever on a plane, I didn't have my own water but remained adequately hydrated, because they kept offering us drinks. They served them in real glasses, about twice the volume of the plastic cups in coach.

The dedicated bathroom meant no line. But it wasn't any different from a coach bathroom (and even with only the few of us, it was kind of nasty by the end of the flight.)

Another lack of difference from coach was that the entertainment options were the same fixed programming on the same crappy little lcd screens hanging from the ceiling, too close or too far for half of everyone. I watched an episode of "Big Bang Theory" and otherwise stuck to reading and a crossword puzzle.

In what seemed almost like a parody of what one might imagine first class to be, the flight attendants came through and took ice cream sundae orders. It wasn't an especially good sundae, but like the dog walking on his hind legs, you are surprised to find it done at all.

Toward the end, my jacket was returned to me, and we were first off.

I hadn't realized it for a while, but across the aisle from me was Lewis Black, off to do a New Year's Eve show in San Rafael.

I figured it would make flying suck less. The big surprise was that it made flying not suck.

Pity I'm not rich and it's back to coach for me.