Experiencing a significant gravitas shortfall
As I threatened last November, the new iteration of my website went live last week. Only two months later than I’d hoped to have it finished, which all things considered isn’t awful.
This iteration is a deliberate throwback to the days of static HTML pages. Minimal JavaScript (like, eight lines), no embedded external media or resources (even the fonts and icons are hosted on my server, and I haven’t even embedded a single YouTube video). Hilariously old-school, skeuomorphic design, the way we used to build web sites in the days before blogs and social media ruined everything. Background textures! Background textures! (I’ve refrained from adding animated 88×31 buttons and construction icons, but only just: you can only commit to the bit so much.) My CSS is almost certainly hiding all sorts of rendering errors, because my testing, it was not thorough. But this is what happens when you code things by hand and only sort of know what you are doing.
The whole thing comes in at around 15 megabytes—compared to the gigabyte or so the departing WordPress version took up (though to be fair, a lot of that was site backups). The smaller site footprint is also because only a fraction of my blog posts and other online writing—my greatest hits, if such a thing is a thing—has been carried over to this new version. For what I’ve kept, old links should forward automatically.
What hasn’t been kept? A mix of the dated and in-the-moment-but-the-moment-is-long-since-passed, the trivial, and the what-the-hell-was-I-thinking. The thing about blogging is that you’re not exactly writing for posterity. My contemporaneous reactions to a decades-old online slapfight or product launch should not be, shall we say, for the ages. Or for public preservation. To be sure, I’ve downloaded everything; I just don’t think it has to be online forever (the Wayback Machine notwithstanding).
This isn’t me going into archive mode; more will be added to the site over time. I just don’t need the footprint and headache of a full CMS any more. Also, if I need to repatriate my web hosting—and I’ve started doing some digging into how to do that—the smaller the footprint the better.
#maps
A bit of a subscription drive at The Map Room as I push a little harder to have enough Patreon members to be able to afford to turn off the ads. If I reach my target, I record a members-only video of my 2019 presentation on fantasy map design.
#politics
So the general consensus among the pundit class is that Justin Trudeau is leaving on a high note, that his handling of the tariff (and other) threats coming out of Washington could quite possibly be his finest moment. Some of this is because it’s okay to say nice things about him now because he’s safely on the way out (a statesman is a former politician, et cetera, et cetera); it’s a far cry from what they were saying when he was being more or less rushed out the door not too long ago.
One observation I read at that time (and as usual I failed to make a note of where I read it, and who wrote it, because after a quarter-century of shooting my mouth off online about things I read online I have yet to develop decent note-taking instincts) was that while Justin, an acknowledged big-time introvert, was a gifted natural campaigner, terrific on the stump in front of large crowds, he was much less good one-on-one or in small groups. Which was a way of explaining how in hell he lost the support of his caucus and cabinet: he wasn’t all that good at connecting with them. (Keeping the caucus onside was legendarily one of Brian Mulroney’s strengths: even facing polling numbers just as dire as Justin’s, he managed to keep almost everyone loyal.)
To say nothing of the fact that it should not be possible for someone that good on the stump to lead a government that has been regularly so bad at comms (a political reporter friend regularly says the Liberals can’t communicate their way out of a paper bag).
Justin is, in other words, another example of someone with some undeniable political gifts who is nonetheless possessed of some stunning gaps in the political skill set. This is something I’ve seen quite often. For example, the gap between electable politician and competent administrator is sometimes quite wide—and examples of people embodying both can be hard to come up with.
There’s this tendency in some parties to put forward candidates who on paper seem like they’d be great at governing, but turn out to be electoral chloroform. Most of the recent Democratic nominees for U.S. president not named Bill Clinton or Barack Obama fall into this category. So do a lot of Canadian cabinet members, especially of the Liberal variety: parachuted into the safest seats to fast-track them to the cabinet table, but turn out to be utter klutzes as leadership candidates or in a competitive district. It’s like an utter lack of charisma gets confused with gravitas. They’re dour and dull, so they must be competent is the political equivalent of they’re a terrible lecturer, so they have to be good at research.
Examples of the other extreme—charisma with an utter lack of competence, preternaturally electable dunderheads—will no doubt come to mind.
#sfmagazines
Jason Sanford broke the news last week that the three remaining science fiction/fantasy print magazines—Analog, Asimov’s and F&SF—have been bought by a group of investors headed by Steven Salpeter. (The sale also includes two mystery magazines that have been stablemates of Analog and Asimov’s for decades.) Analog and Asimov’s had been owned by puzzle magazine publisher Penny Press since 1996; F&SF had been owned by editor Gordon van Gelder since 2001 and was apparently in some difficulty. Staff will continue under the new ownership.
It’s a bit unnerving that all three of the sf print magazines will now be owned by a single company, but this isn’t the eighties, when with the exception of Interzone, a few semipros, and an intermittently resurrecting Amazing, the Big Three were All There Were, short-fiction-wise, and there was always some worry about What Would Happen if something were to happen to them. If they were to fold now it wouldn’t be an existential catastrophe, because other magazines exist online—and if we’re honest, are the ones taking up the bulk of the sf mindspace nowadays, because they’re free to read. That’s something the print magazines can’t match: they need to pay for printing and they pay their staff (online mags rely on a lot of volunteer labour)—a structural disadvantage that new ownership can’t change.
#links
- Apple’s machine learning boffins have published research on robots using expressive gestures and movements when performing tasks. That their prototype is a lamp that is for all purposes the physical incarnation of Luxo Jr. cannot possibly be an accident. See the video at the link.
- Roddenberry biographer Lance Parkin tries to square the circle of how a deeply flawed and frankly awful human being created something hopeful and utopian (tl;dr: it was the fans what done it, and GR ran with it) and comes up with as decent a take on the relationship between the artist, the art and the audience as I’ve come across.
- Paul Kincaid reviews The Last Dangerous Visions in Strange Horizons: “It’s a decent collection. J. Michael Straczynski has done a good job in the circumstances, certainly better than Ellison ever could have done, and among the contents there are some very good stories (though I don’t really suppose they will be featuring on award ballots the way the two previous volumes managed). But really all it does is lay a ghost to rest. We will not be troubled by stories of The Last Dangerous Visions again, we will not be subjected to endless, empty, impossible promises. And that is a good thing.”
- A short history of mail merge, which began in 1964 on IBM’s $10,000 MT/ST, from the guy whose service this newsletter runs on.
- The MT/ST also makes an appearance in Marcin Wichary’s book on the history of keyboards, Shift Happens, which I’m still working my way through. So does an engraving font that came to be known as Gorton, which Wichary writes about here. “Gorton wasn’t just on computer keyboards, intercom placards, and sidewalk messages visited by many shoes. Gorton was there on typewriter keyboards, too. And on office signs and airline name tags. On boats, desk placards, rulers, and various home devices from fridges to tape dispensers.”