A Philadelphia overture

Seattle is experiencing 100+ degree heat (That's 38 to you metric weirdos). Meanwhile, Philly's having a cool-ish, wet summer.

We were seriously looking at moving to Seattle for a couple of months this year, but things (as they do) changed, and barring freak circumstance, Philly has become our point of medium-range residency.

I've been here almost 5 years. That was never in the plan. Yet, as I review my reasons for moving to Philadelphia, I realize nothing was in the plan. I never had a plan.

Vaguer than a plan, my expectation was to be somewhere else by now. California. Seattle. New York City. Dallas. Austin.

However, not only am I not somewhere else, I am more here than ever. I guess it's time to start liking Philadelphia.

My ambivalence re Philadelphia is on record. The place has good points, but oh so many bad ones.

But since it seems I'll be here a while longer, it's time to start liking the burg. I've already spent too long on the fence; I won't compound the mistake. Philly, I've kept you at arm's length, and that's only hurt us both. You're shockingly violent, too ethnic for my immediate comfort, your roads frankly suck, and you're nearer New Jersey than I'd ever hoped to be. But you have kick-ass museums, and a decent film festival. The gaming here is robust, and the cry for Jesus is almost too loud for my weak ears. You're not perfect, but Lord knows neither am I. There's plenty for us to do and become. Let's love like brothers.

So they say

The New York Times reports that "they/them" is pretty much dead cert to become the gender-neutral 3rd person singular. Again.

It's no surprise that we'll get there soon, and it's not really a surprise that official grammarians are caving.

Rather, the interesting bit is the hidden truth that "they" was pulling double duty before the he/she regime came down in 1745:

This will surprise a few purists, but for centuries the universal pronoun was they. Writers as far back as Chaucer used it for singular and plural, masculine and feminine. Nobody seemed to mind that they, them and their were officially plural. As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains, writers were comfortable using they with an indefinite pronoun like everybody because it suggested a sexless plural.

...many great writers — Byron, Austen, Thackeray, Eliot, Dickens, Trollope and more — continued to use they and company as singulars, never mind the grammarians.

I've tried to maintain the singularity of gendered pronouns, but this bulldozer puts me off high-falutin' ground. I'm'a start making the switch. Anybody doesn't like it, they can take it up with Byron.

Inside Netflix

HackingNetflix.com got an invite to take a look at a Netflix distribution center. A dearth of oompah-loompahs, but otherwise interesting insight.

The future soon

I wish it would hurry up and be the future.

Students embed stem cells in sutures to enhance healing
Stem cells are so great. I want more stem cells in my life.

Pedal-powered mass transit
This has been making the rounds recently, and I usually try to avoid bandwagon-hopping here at QT, but what the hell.

Telescope implants
It's meant for people with eye problems, but I'm thinking: cyber-pirates.

Electronic tattoo runs on blood
As we join it, the future has been trending away from cyberpunk. But it's good to know that it's still lurking, under the skin.

New bike lanes downtown

I have a high opinion of riding bikes, but a low opinion of Philadelphia bike riders because they are lawless ruffians. I see bumper stickers and activists bleat about how drivers should be more careful around bikes and I think, "You first."

I understand how this happens. You get on a bike, and you have all this visibility and mobility and you can get away with more than you can in a car. I know. My hypocritical opinion remains unchanged.

Nonetheless, I am pleased to see the city of Philadelphia trying something by installing wide bike lanes on Pine and Spruce. Read the Inquirer story here. Partly because I want to see bike riding in town encouraged, and partly because it's likely to keep bikes farther away from cars. Win. Win.

An enjoyable excerpt from the story:

And, officials note, this is just a pilot program. The paint won't cost anything extra.

"We're not deciding between million-dollar projects," said Hacker, of the regional planning commission. "We're just trying stuff out."

That's the style of civic innovation I want to see from my city officials in these Tough Economic Times(tm).

Map appropriated from Philadelphia Inquirer site.

Good company

A game project I worked on has just had the full author list revealed. Check it out at Paizo.com: Guide to the River Kingdoms.

Here's the author list:

Eric Bailey, Kevin Carter, Elaine Cunningham, Adam Daigle, Mike Ferguson, Joshua J. Frost, James Jacobs, Steve Kenson, Rob Manning, Colin McComb, Alison McKenzie, China Miéville, Brock Mitchel-Slentz, Jason Nelson, Richard Pett, Chris Pramas, Jeff Quick, Sean K Reynolds, F. Wesley Schneider, Neil Spicer, Lisa Stevens, Matthew Stinson, and John Wick.

A plurality of writers is usually a bad sign, but it makes sense for the fractious River Kingdoms, land of the politically improbable. Once again, I'm fairly happy with my work on this book.

Also, please note that I've now worked on a project with China Mieville. That's one for the weaselly self-promotional bio!

The French Capital

I was reading up on how Napoleon rebuilt Paris today, and I found a fantastic original source: The New York Times.

They've scanned and made available their entire archive, and this story, dated "December 13, 1867, Wednesday" was a treat. In addition to the useful information, I read the top journalistic stylings of 150 years ago. It's quite a bit chattier than I'd expected.

You'll need to log in, and then download a pdf, but it's worth the hassle. Here's bugmenot if you're a privacy goon like me.

Check that out.

Organizing game books is for suckas

Reading an interview with David "Zeb" Cook over at Grognardia tonight reminded me of another great value of wikis for RPG presentation, which also applies to any technical document.

Role-playing game manuals must do two, often contradictory things. They have to present information sensibly for the new user, and they must serve as reference manuals for the experienced user.

So when you organize, you usually lean toward making them reference books, because they'll only be introductory material once, but reference material dozens of times (you hope).

Along comes hypertext, and your linear need to organize like a reference manual is dead as a dot matrix printer. Now, feel free to organize the whole manuscript for the noob. A decent site map will make your hypertexted wiki rule book completely accessible for in-game reference purposes.

3 stories on being a writer

I have difficulty thinking of myself as a writer, because I do not write for "fun", and writing is a painful, tooth-pulling experience. Earlier this year, I had decided to give it up. Here is what I wrote to myself on March 4:

I have decided to stop benig a writer, and to stop thinkin gof myself as a writer. I do not write. I do not like writing. Writing is difficult and obstreperous, and chiefly, I do not do it. I have many friends who are writers, and what they do is write. I do not.

So this leaves me with a hole in my perception. I don’t know what I am, or what I do or how to categorize myself now. I have an uncommon facility with English. That and a familiarity with layout sofware seem to be my marketable skill.

I don’t know who I will become now. Hopefully, somoene better, someone with fewer illusions.

I was basically ready to think of myself as a professional editor who dabbled in writing on the side. That still might be a sane idea for me.

Instead, about two weeks later, I signed myself on with a company called World Leaderz as Head Writer and Web Content Specialist. The backsliding didn’t even seem strange at the time, I just blundered in and started.

==

Since then, I have heard, unbidden, from four different people involved with the company, that I am an “excellent” writer. People use the word so uniformly, I wonder if they’re humoring me. I have no method to discern whether I am actually an excellent writer, or an accidental bullshitter.*

The difference is in confidence. Not the blustery unself-aware confidence that marketing employees use like motor oil to lube their ill-defined engines of commerce. I’ve tried that confidence, and a fairer-weathered friend I’ve never known. I’m talking about the confidence borne of experience and clear thinking.

As an editor, I have this latter confidence. I’m totally worth my money as an editor, and I can tell you why. Writing, however, is so much harder to do, requires more attention and grit, has fewer objective, measurable standards, and I’m such a weak-willed, lazy man. If I’m ever any good, I can’t tell you why. I’m an epistemic slot machine.

==

In junior high school, they occasionally took a bunch of the gifted kids into a room and talked to us about more interesting things than we had in class. (One wonders why we couldn’t maybe come up with an entire curriculum of the interesting stuff.)

One of these sessions involved an aptitude test. There were 14 or 15 areas of aptitude, things you might actually be sort of good at naturally. Above a certain score in each area indicated that you might be suited for this sort of thing as a career. The instructor told us that we should probably have three areas above the line.

I had one: verbal skills. I wasn't just good at it, I brushed the ceiling with it. Then about eight other areas were just below the line.

For all the crap aptitude tests get, this one was practically oracular about my future career. I’m not demonstrably good at anything, but somehow I’m great at telling you about everything I’m above-average at.

==

I’m back on the job hunting trail again. If you are or know of anyone looking for an above-average generalist who can show his work, my email is in the right column.

*Yes, they might be the same thing on some level, but anyone attempting to smear some of that smarmy wisdom on me is really saying they’re not trying to understand my point.

Humans Ape Dolphins

It's been two weeks since I've written anything here, and I won't try to tell you my life is too boring to write about, because it isn't. I haven't said a thing about riding bumper cars in Atlantic City with Teller, or going to Boston for a weekend to play games with long lost friends, or the bizarre job I've been doing on Bible trading cards, or the monsters I've been cranking out and giving away lately.

And it isn't that I've been "too busy" to write. Here's a free bullshit detector tip: People who are genuinely busy don't tell you they're busy. They tell you what they're doing, because they're parietal lobe-deep in the work, and that's all they have to talk about.

As usual, I've got a few half-formed ideas about faith and games and the ongoing process of becoming productive that I haven't bothered to write down. But I haven't written any of them down, so you won't see those here either.

Instead, I'm breaking my electronic silence to link to an article about humans learning to function with echolocation. It had never occurred to me that people would be capable of it. Huh.