/dev/null productions

All right, I need to vent, and this web site is closest. This is a rant; you have been warned.

My PS3 has joined the thousands of others that have perished under mysterious circumstances. What circumstances? Well, the system hardlocked to the point where no amount of holding the power button would shut the thing down. Turned the thing off, then back on. . . and lo and behold, it suddenly won’t read a disc. I don’t even get an error message; it’s like the drive isn’t even there. Supposedly a bug in the firmware is the culprit; there’s a lawsuit out in California that I’ll be watching pretty carefully for the next few months, I think.

So, anyway, I was going through and backing up my data this evening in preparation of parting with the PS3 (and $150) to send it to the service facility for repair. Naturally, the PS3 backup utility failed, so I had to resort to copying my save game data over to an external hard drive by hand. I reached my file for Demon’s Souls (a game I’ve put a ridiculous number of hours into, considering the short time I’ve had it), went to copy it. . . and discovered that the save game file was copy protected. No way to back it up.

I can understand (but strongly disagree with) putting DRM on music, movies, and games. My question, though, is why the hell would anybody feel some kind of burning desire to copy protect a save file? “Hey, you can use those bytes to reconstruct part of our intellectual property! We can’t let you do that!”

Yeah, this entire situation is pathetic.

Jim.Opinion.FROM_SOFTWARE = Jim.Opinion.SONY = INT_MIN;

Maybe it’s lazy. Maybe it’s a cheap way of using technology to substitute for actual experience and knowledge. I can’t deny any of those arguments for a second, but the fact of the matter remains:

Google Maps rocks.

And not just for getting directions (amusingly enough). What I am pouring love out to Google for relates to my writing efforts.

I make no secret of the fact that I do not travel much. Most of my vacations are taken to well-established ground, and normally while flocking in a group. Until I got married, I had never even been off the East Coast except for one quick trip to Chicago (when I worked for Verizon. Man that’s a story and a half). When we got married, my wife and I took our honeymoon on a cruise to the sandy pink beaches of Bermuda (though we never actually made it to those beaches. Was way too windy to don the swim suits).

As a result, though, my experience of other cities and locations is extremely limited. Most writers will insist that you only write what you know. I’ve tended to go by that philosophy in my time, writing quite a bit about the tri-state area around which I live. Many of my stories orient around the DC metro area, since it’s popular enough to be interesting and local enough that I might know what the heck I’m talking about.

I’m trying to branch out, though. There are two ways I can do that.

The first I tried in Wayward Thread, my most recent completed novel manuscript. In this fashion, I am intentionally vague. The story takes place in the Boston area. I even go so far as to specifically mention Boston College. However, much of the story takes place in unnamed locations along unnamed streets. The finale of the story takes place in a cabin in “the middle of nowhere”. While I believe this method was effective, to me it became clearly transparent that I was writing about a location I knew nothing about.

The second method I’ve tried in Taming Pandora and Nobody of Importance. This, as mentioned in this article, features Google Maps to the rescue. Both of these stories feature some level of law enforcement, including the FBI in Nobody of Importance. It would be really, really hard to write a whole novel without mentioning where in the world the story takes place, and without referencing some actual, living locations.

I picked Chicago in this story because I’ve actually been there, even if I did not get the chance to scour around. It’s also a high-focused city insofar as satellite imagery goes. The Google Street van has been through a big chunk of the city, offering real-life perspectives of the area.

I’m not saying this is a permanent practice. If I am still writing by the seat of my pants in ten years by asking Google what I should believe as opposed to seeing it for myself, I’ll be very disappointed. But for now, for a starting writer with a very limited budget, it’s a tool. It’s a very valid tool that makes it seem like I know what I’m writing about.

And that is always a plus.

I posed a question to a few people recently:

Imagine that you woke up one morning and you discovered you were back in 10th grade. You still had all of your memories of growing up, of your adult life, but you’re once again a youth. What would you do?

I suppose I am not too terribly surprised by the resulting answers. Most people that I asked responded by saying they would either terminate a crappy relationship or try to initiate a successful one earlier than they had the first time around. One of my friends even mentioned that she would go across the state to her current almost-fiancee’s school and cause a disruption during his football practice. When I asked her why, she just commented:

“To see if he notices me! He always said that if he knew me he would have liked me, and I want to try and prove him wrong.”

Time travel is powerful stuff. When i was in tenth grade, it was 1997. That was before the bombing to the USS Cole in 2000. It was obviously well before the WTC attack in 2001. If I was better acquainted with 90′s history, such future knowledge could be well used.

Yet, I will say this…

The question was originally borne from an idea I have for a short story series. Essentially the main character wakes up back at his parents home in the past, when he was in high school. His first gut instinct is to call his wife, who no longer remembers him. Grief-stricken, he blindly fumbles his way through school, only to encounter an ex-girlfriend there that he seems to have a poor history with.

So obviously, my first reaction to writing this series is the emotional angle as well. Granted, this story angle has some pertinence to the series, but that’s still a curious aspect of the human mind. We are relationship-oriented creatures; that’s an obvious fact. I just find it curious how far we’re willing to take that orientation, and how much of the “better good” we would allow to slip to see it happen.

Given the vast number of zombie-related games, movies, and other media available lately, it’s obviously no secret that there is a vast interest in the undead. Wikipedia blames George Romero, and rightly so. He certainly popularized the zombie in modern media and gave it many of the connotations presently attributed. I would say this interest ties into the post-modern expression of the Doomsday scenario. If you branch out to that level, there are even more end-of-the-world movies, games, boardgames, whatever available to fill any need. One only needs to look at the mid-90′s to see a slew of movies that fit into that genre nicely.

And yes, I enjoyed Independence Day. I still enjoy that movie. So whatever.

Most of these movies, games, and other paraphernalia center around mankind’s survival, its ability to overcome these kinds of tragic, seemingly-inevitable extinction events. Undoubtedly this stems from the human fear of death, and what happens afterward. If we feel we have a fighting chance to delay it, most people will be able to accept a situation and push forward to try and prevent it. I think that’s the appeal for such end-of-the-world plot lines. It’s certainly a reason, I believe, why Armageddon fared better in theaters than Deep Impact (though don’t be disallusioned: Deep Impact still raked it in with a lower budget than its competition).

End-War Chronicles is not an “end-of-the-world” scenario, per se. It certainly holds that level of threat, but the idea of the story series is to expand upon what man would do in the aftermath of an undead uprising. I’ve enjoyed crafting a world together from the remains far more so than describing the actual war (of which I’ve written very little). My wife has very little interest in the actual “zombie stories”, but she has been intrigued when I tell her about the situations and circumstances some of my characters have gone through. She’s interested in the survival conflicts, the same as she was when she watched Independence Day or Day After Tomorrow.

My main focus with this series, as a result, has been to aim my story lines at that very aspect: survival. Sure, I have the requisite combat and creepiness associated with such stories, and I’m certainly not trying to imply that I don’t enjoy those aspects. Quite the contrary: I had plenty of fun recently describing the battle one of the 13th Rangers encountered prior to his infection.

However, the real enjoyment came later on when I described what he encountered prior to his turning. It’s these mental aspects that keep any undead series original. Think back to recent films: what was more enjoyable? 28 Days Later or the new Dawn of the Dead? If you’re like me, the latter film bored you to tears. There was nothing original. Sure, the zombies ran. Big deal. We’ve seen this already.

That’s been the big challenge of the End-War Chronicles: what can I do to keep it new? I can create scene after scene of zombie encounters, but let’s face it – it gets boring after a while. There are aspects I can do to change it up, but in the end if it’s just “undead invade again”, then nothing new has been gleaned. The story essentially chases its own tail.

I’m about 12 stories or so into the End-War series (despite the wiki on this website being broken and unattended for some time). The stories I enjoy the most bring something new to the table. They show the walkers and similar undead evolving, and what’s more, how humanity reacts to such evolutions. Most of them are fairly simple. For example, one recent story featured walkers who did not fall down dead when a bullet pierced their brain pans. It’s a simple change, and certainly not that much of a stretch with creatures that can take inhuman amounts of damage anyway.

What was intriguing about it was how humanity saw that. It introduced the concept of undead growth and response. It hinted at the walker’s ability to adapt, something unknown and frankly terrifying. These creatures already ransacked the world, and now they are showing the ability to make themselves even more resilient. It opens the question of what comes next? Is it permanent? Will all walkers now require three bullets in the head to put them on the ground? What kind of evolution will they undertake next?

Better yet, how can a dead creature evolve?

These kinds of exploratory concepts make these stories so interesting to me, as a writer. I’ve gotten the opportunity to bounce ideas off of what I would consider my target audience: a friend of mine that loves Resident Evil and enjoyed watching 28 Days Later. These concepts intrigue him the most. They don’t wander too far from the normal concept of a zombie, yet introduce elements that can be truly terrifying (assuming I don’t screw it up in the telling).

I’ve enjoyed crafting the walker undead, and further enjoy evolving them in some fashion. The grief-stricken aspect was only the beginning. It made them different. It made them creepy. Now I need to find ways to make them terrifying without crossing the line that Resident Evil made. I don’t want biological terrors. I want human ones.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

So after 3 years as a computer science major, I find myself fervently wishing I would’ve done something else with my time at college. Why? Well, I’m finding out that, in all this time here, I really haven’t been taught a damn thing. Nothing I’ve learned or done in any of my computer science classes can possibly ever help me in my search for a job (save two projects, but I’ll get to those later). Also, our school is in love with using Solaris as a build environment for EVERYTHING we do, which means anything that possibly COULD be resume material needs to be ported to work on an intel box. Porting things from Solaris to x86 has never worked all that well for me, just because Solaris is the biggest POS operating system I have -ever- seen in my life. Perfectly legal code that works everywhere else makes it break. Blatant errors in code don’t trigger appropriate errors (“Hey! Let’s keep running the program even though it just overwrote its own stack with garbage because the programmer did something stupid, just so it’s difficult to figure out what’s going on when the programmer tries to debug!”).

So stupid. From what I’ve seen, 90% of workplaces nowadays are using Visual Studio in some form or another, and in the course of my education I’ve never been taught how to use it. “Oh, we teach theory here in the computer science department. This isn’t a -trade- school!” *derisive laughter* What the hell? Seriously! I came to this place to get an education, and the only thing I’m learning is how irrelevant an education truly is!

It’s a truly frightening thing to see a computer science program stuck in the stone ages, so to speak. Watching professors explain how teaching alternate languages and development environments and the like is unnecessary and just a stupid idea makes me furious. It takes people here years, on average, just to get a *grasp* of the Solaris operating system well enough to use it to program. Why? Because they’re never taught. There isn’t a SINGLE class at this university that teaches people how to use the *nix family of operating systems. No Perl classes. No Python classes. I find it sad somehow that many people are still using nano and pico to program in their senior year of college.

The other thing I find scary is that a lot of people I’ve talked to like to use big words without understanding what they truly mean. “Oh, well, I can’t be getting a segmentation error across my stack because the heap hasn’t been corrupted enough for the garbage collector to complain.” … Okay. There are so freaking many problems with that statement, I truly don’t know where to begin. Personally, I feel that unless somebody can explain something to a person in terms a three-year-old can understand, they don’t have a clue as to what they’re talking about. “Oh, well, if you didn’t understand what I just said, your level of intelligence is obviously simply too far below mine to comprehend the material.” Wrong. Your level of intelligence isn’t high enough to break the material down into something other people can comprehend, and saying otherwise is simply convincing the other person they can never learn and breaking their self-esteem, which is generally the most fragile part of a person. Usually, once somebody’s self-esteem and self-confidence in something is gone, it takes a long time to put it back together. What right does a person have to hurt another person’s feelings simply because they’re suffering and they have some need to make the other person feel inferior?

Anyway, I’ll cut it short for tonight; that’s enough venting to keep me happy for the moment. Expect more posts here as the summer rolls around and I find myself with more time to spare.