This Thursday...

On Thursday, Robin Abrahams -- Boston's very own Miss Conduct and VP, Human Resources at Improbable Research -- is going to be on the Today show!

She'll be talking about layoff etiquette, but I hope she also has the opportunity to plug Miss Conduct's Mind over Manners. It's her first book and it's being released at the end of May. I always enjoy (and learn from) her blog and am eagerly awaiting the book's release.

Robin's scheduled appearance on the Today show is the reason I'm unexpectedly spending the last half of April without a dog. The Ig Nobel Tour of Denmark starts tomorrow and Milo the Moon Dog was originally scheduled to come and stay at Toad Woods while both Marc and Robin were in Denmark. But time didn't do it's job. Time is supposed to keep everything from happening all at once, but on Thursday, the Today show will broadcasting from New York, not from Denmark. So Robin stayed on this side of the Pond, and Milo is staying with her, where he belongs. I look forward to his next visit, whenever that turns out to be.

I have the inklings of a theory. Perhaps time's been laid off. That would explain a lot.

This Thursday...I expect to be watching NBC between 10 and 11 am. On a real TV, if possible, but online at Todayshow.com if need be.

I love living in the future. (Much though the fact that the future is now may well be additional evidence supporting my theory-laden inklings. Hmm....have theory; must investigate. In my Copious Free Time, obviously.)

My thoughts about Dreamwidth

This started as a comment to a locked post on a friend's journal. Before I finished it, I recognized that it belongs here instead.

synecdochic is on my Friends list, so I've been following the development of Dreamwidth with interest for quite some time now. I've logged in to the closed beta Dreamwidth site with a verified Open ID account and taken a bit of a look around. I haven't asked anyone for an invitation; it's just not something I'm wired to do. Heck, I turned down unsolicited offers of LJ invites for well over a year before lsanderson simply sent me one without checking first.

Time will tell whether most or all of my friends list migrates over to Dreamwidth, and whether or not I do so myself. But the idea of the conversation moving somewhere seems utterly natural to me -- it's what the conversation has done since long before I was on the net. Before LJ, it was rasff, and pieces of it still are. Before rasff, there was the Well, and the SF Roundtable on Genie...or whatever it was. That was years before my time, but I remember how frequently friends would mention something that had happened there. It was the happening place, until the conversation moved on and suddenly it wasn't.

Before Genie, there were bulletin boards on Fidonet and Plato users and ARPANET/DARPANET...etc.... Way back in the Pleistone, there were paper apas, and there still are. They've mostly been supplanted by email lists and blogs in the greater scheme of things, but apas and fanzines still come in ink-on-paper formats as well as electronically thanks to eFanzines.com and Fanac.org.

Everyone has their preferred venues. There's also an abundance of complaints both valid and petty about the venues we use and the multitude of other communication and networking paths we have at the end of our fingertips. I expect the migratory pattern to continue for the next decade or two at least. Already, scores and more have migrated to Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Ustream video feeds from conventions with virtual consuites, and more. The conversation was going strong on Making Light back when it was pnh and tnh's separate blogs, and that pre-dates my LJ account IIRC. And just look at the readership and discussions over at John Scalzi's Whatever and at tor.com. One 10+ years old, the other still in its infancy.

Some of the old options are still around, valuable backwaters providing community and continuity. Some have vanished all together, and others are still around but have become little-used by the particular world wide communities I belong to. Remember Friendster? It's still there. When's the last time you heard a dozen people burbling about it in the same 2-3 week period? Minicon-L was a force of good before it turned utterly toxic to so many of its inhabitants and eventually met its demise. There are dozens of other examples I could cite, and that's just fan-friendly and fan-centric lists and venues I've participated in -- there are as many and more that I haven't.

Our options will expand and contract; it's the way of the world, and it's especially the way of a product life cycle in a rapidly-changing environment. My only expectation at this point is that we'll continue to use electronic means to communicate. The internet and the world wide web will continue to evolve. If and when they stop, they'll be replaced or overthrown by the next hot thing.

There have been and will continue to be growing pains. That, too, is the way of the world. But just as we marvel at the child prodigy and pin our hopes for the future on the youth of today, the internet is barely reaching young adulthood in terms of its place in the world. A hundred years from now, the net of 2009 may be viewed as a toddler, the "terrible twos" that people go through on our way to learning the world and how to be a civilized, contributing member of the human race.

I marvel at and treasure the multitude of ways the net has already transformed our ability to know, share with, and understand each other, to experience, know and understand the world. And I applaud all who work to improve it. Welcome, Dreamwidth. I wish you the best of success.

Absolutely fascinating

This afternoon, apostle_of_eris posted a link to JG Ballard in Shanghai, today's post from James Fallows in the Atlantic. That column led me to Ballardian Rick McGrath's Empire Of The Son: Exploring JG Ballard's Shanghai Home & Haunts. Rick wrote a detailed report of visiting JG Ballard's childhood home and neighborhood in September, 2007, decades after Ballard lived there. The report includes pictures, video, letters, maps, and a floor plan drawn from memory by Ballard himself, and I found the entire thing absolutely fascinating.

It's the journey, the story, the caught me rather than it being about Ballard Himself. I'm not all that familiar with the man or the writer; in fact, I'm woefully ignorant of both. That's another artifact of having come to SF around the time I turned 30 rather than getting hooked in my high school or college years when Ballard's dystopias might have resonated with my concerns and outlook a bit better than they have since. I have a vague recollection of picking out one of his short story collections from galaticvoyeur's extensive library and having a go at it, but I either bounced off it hard or knew after reading the one that his style wasn't my cup of tea in the 1990s. I suspect I'll be far more interested in his autobiographical works. After reading about his home, I intend to find out.

I don't have nearly the material or memory, but the entire time I was reading and savoring every detail of Rick's long article, I was mentally writing the equivalent piece about Oblique House, home of Walter and Madeleine Willis until the mid-1960s when they moved from Belfast to Strathclyde at 32 Warren Road in Donaghadee, Norn Iron. ( Four paragraphs highlighting that tale )

Just what I need: another fanwriting project crammed into my hindbrain along with all the rest. While I disagree with Ballard, who wrote "Still, this is of little interest to anyone but myself," the similar tale of Oblique House is a minor sidenote compared to the attention I still need to give to "He Preferred to Stroll." That's my incomplete account of the remarkable friendship and adventures I shared with Walter, Chuch Harris, James White, and Vin¢ Clarke during what turned out to be the last dozen years of their lives. Woven in there somewhere, or perhaps all along the way are various musings about British and American fandom, all sparked by a drunken 3am conversation with Greg Pickersgill and Pam Wells in the Residents' Bar at the Central Hotel, Glasgow during Intersection. I made a 5,000-word start on it most of a decade ago; one of these days I really do need to pick it up and keep going. It's been long enough that I finally think I can do it taking more comfort and delight in the treasure that was than in reliving the agony of the loss, much though the latter will always be a piece of the landscape.