Andrew Hickey

Well, I watched 'The Snowmen'.

It started badly, with the loner as unhealthy future villain. Watch out for the loners everybody - they're scary.

It briefly picked up with a rather good new title sequence.

Then we got into the mystery section, which was okay. I have serious issues with the idea that the Doctor is now mates with a Silurian and a Sontaran. Both races should hate his guts, the Silurians with good reason.  He's repeatedly failed to do anything but posture some platitudes for these Palestinians of the Who-world.  And then either sit by while his mates kill them, or kill them himself.  And the Sontarans don't work as comedy pratts.  I remember when they were satirical deconstructions of literal-mindedness and militarism, compared archly to medieval chivalric hypocrisy.  Now they're straight men.

But some of the jokes were funnyish, even if they did rely on the idea that it's okay to mock people for being short, looking odd, etc.

The spiral staircase was nice.

But then... Look, it's now clear that this show has no ambition to be anything more than put-down comedy and sentimentality, interspersed with stuff about how awesomely wonderful the Doctor is... despite the fact that he's now a prattling, petulant, sulky, self-pitying idiot.

Fatuous tear-jerkery. Manipulative, hollow gunk which instructs the viewer to feel certain things on command. No sense of history or politics at all, beyond some nonsequiturs about "Victorian values" which connected to nothing. And we have to get preached at about how wonderful it is to love your kids and cry. The most banal and bland moralising posing as inspirational and uplifting profundity. The most cynical arm-twisting of the feelings, posing as moving drama.

And then... "the only force in the world capable of conquering evil... the tears of a whole family on Christmas Eve". I just don't know where to start. I literally felt sick. It's like inhaling Steven Moffat's farts after he's spent 48 hours doing nothing but reading the insides of greetings cards and masturbating in front of a mirror.

And am I to understand that the Great Intelligence began as a lonely child's imaginary friend? You know, I have no problem with continuity being rewritten... but rewritten as explanations, couched in terms of cloying sentimentality, when there was no need for explanations in the first place?

Also, on the subject of the Clara mystery... who cares? I mean, how can one get interested in the solution to a riddle when you know that the solution will be 'some bit of sci-fi handwaving'. The interest in the best Doctor Who always used to be 'what does this mean?'. 'The Snowmen' tells you what it means (ie 'be nice to your kids, being a loner is bad for you, Victorian Values are BAD... whatever they are, and the Doctor is amazing'. Profound stuff like that.) The interest supposedly now lies in what everyone is feeling (which usually turns out to be something like 'Sad' or 'Happy' about completely inhuman and unrelateable experiences) and 'how will Moffat cleverly resolve this bit of apparently inescapable plot trickery?'.

Well frankly, fuck right off.

I like DW when it's 'just' well-made and unpretentious escapism (ie 'Terror of the Zygons') but this cack isn't escapism. Escapism would be something that took my mind off the fact that the world is turning to shit. 'The Snowmen' - being about the most perfect expression of Moffat's neoliberal Who - just rubs the shit in my face while screaming "cry, you proletarian meat-puppet!  CRY!!!!"

This is now not just a show I don't like. This is now something I actively hate.

Merry Fucking Christmas.

Andy Summers from The Police will be 71 on New Year's Eve. That may sound strange, but he had a long career before he met Sting, and this is one of the highlights from it.

Summers (or Somers as he spelt it for a while) formed Dantalian's Chariot with his friend Zoot Money, and this song of their is now regarded as one of the key songs of Britsh psychedelia in the 1960s.

After Dantalian's Chariot Summers and Money joined Eric Burdon in a later incarnation of The Animals. They have already featured here on Colored Rain.

MRS WIBBSEY'S FESTIVE DIARY

6

MRS WIBBSEY'S FESTIVE DIARY

5

Sometimes great works go unappreciated during their time. Other times their time knows exactly what they’re on about. The latter was the good fortune of Elite, Ian Bell and David Braben’s epic game of space combat, trading, and exploration. Arriving at a confused and confusing time in the British games industry, Elite caused a rush of excitement the likes of which had never been seen before even in an industry that seemed to live and die on hype, becoming a bestseller several times over despite being initially released on a platform, the BBC Micro, that was not generally considered much of a gaming machine. Bell and Braben became recognizable stars, their names tripping off the tongues of a generation of British gamers the way that those of Lennon and McCartney had their parents’. It was about as close as the industry would ever get to Trip Hawkins’s dream of game designers as the rock stars of the 1980s. As for the game they created… well, that’s gone down into history as just possibly the most remembered and respected single computer game of the 1980s. But we’re beginning with the ending, which isn’t our usual way around here. Let’s go back to the beginning and see how it all began.

Bell and Braben first met one another during the autumn of 1982, when both arrived at Cambridge University as first-year undergraduates. Bell was to read math, Braben physics. More importantly, both were avid hackers. Bell brought a BBC Micro to university with him, Braben an example of that machine’s predecessor, the Atom, which he had expanded and soldered on and generally hacked at enough to make Dr. Frankenstein proud. Bell had real professional programming experience, at least of a sort: he’d gotten his version of Reversi published by a tiny company called Program Power, and would soon see an original action game, Freefall, published by Acornsoft, software arm of the company that made the computers on his and Braben’s desks. Braben had a passion for 3D graphics, and some code that could draw and rotate wireframe spaceships. The two bonded quickly.

Not that they became precisely bosom buddies. As their later story would demonstrate to anyone’s satisfaction, they were very different personalities. If I may strain an analogy just one more time, Bell was the John Lennon of the pair, pessimistic, introverted, and perhaps just a little bit tortured, while Braben was the Paul McCartney, an optimistic charmer with one eye on the market to go with one eye on his art. If not for their passion for Acorn computers, they would have likely had little to say to one another. Both, however, had programming talent to burn, along with a less obvious but at least as important instinct for visionary game design.

But then in the era of Elite even more so than today technological innovation and design innovation were often inextricably linked, with the latter most often flowing from the former. Thus the design that would become Elite really did stem directly from those 3D spaceships Braben had rotating on his Atom’s screen when he arrived at Cambridge. To understand what made those spaceships so different, and so fraught with potential, we should look to the state of game graphics in general circa 1982.

Almost all action games of 1982 show their world from either directly overhead or sideways (like Defender in the picture to the left) or some odd hybrid of the two that doesn’t quite make sense in the real world (like Pac-Man in the picture to the right). They employ a third-person perspective; you see and control an onscreen avatar from a distance, rather than viewing the world through her eyes. She, her enemies, and perhaps some other elements like laser fire move over a relatively static background image. This approach makes life much easier for programmers in at least a couple of ways. Updating big chunks of screen is very expensive in terms of the computing power available to early PCs and stand-up arcade games. Therefore many of them implemented hardware sprites, little movable chunks of graphics that exist separately from the rest of the screen inside the computer, to be overlaid onto it by the video hardware at no cost to the CPU only on the physical monitor screen. A game like Defender or Pac-Man is an ideal fit for such technology; I trust it won’t be difficult to figure out which parts of the screens above are implemented as sprites and which as background graphics. (In the early days all of the work could be left to sprites: a few early games, such as Boot Hill, consist of only sprites which are sometimes projected over a painted background image.)

There’s also another, more subtle advantage to the traditional arcade-game perspective. If you think about it for a moment, you’ll realize that the worlds shown on the screens above don’t correspond to any recognizable version of our reality even postulating that it could contain invading aliens or munching heads being pursued through a maze of food pellets by ghosts. These worlds are strictly 2D; they lack any notion of depth. Pac-Man and his friends are living in a computerized version of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland; if we were to see this world through his perspective, it would be a very strange one indeed. Similarly, your spaceship in Defender can go up and down and left and right, but not in and out. This is very convenient for the programmer because the computer screen also happens to be flat, possessed of an X- and a Y-dimension but no Z-dimension. Thus the coordinates of any object in this flat world being simulated correspond nicely to its coordinates on the physical screen.

But what if you aren’t satisfied with a Flatland-esque world shown from a locked vertical or horizontal perspective? What if you want to immerse your player in your world good and proper, and to make it one that corresponds to our own of three dimensions while you’re at it? Well, now your job just got a whole lot more difficult. As it happened, however, that was exactly what Bell and Braben were soon trying to do. The crux of the problem, the crux of a huge body of 3D graphics theory as well as lots and lots of specialized hardware that is probably a part of the computer you’re using to read this and for which if you’re a hardcore gamer you may have paid hundreds of dollars, is disarmingly simple: how to translate the X, Y, and Z of a world that lives inside the computer to the X and Y of the computer screen. The starting point must be the rules of visual perspective, well understood by artists since at least the Renaissance. But that well-trodden path opens into a thicket of complications when applied to the computer. Lacking as it does an artist’s intuitive understanding of the real world, a computer has to be laboriously instructed on how not to draw objects that are behind other objects on top of them, how to figure out which surfaces of an object are visible and which are not, etc. Just to make the challenges even greater, sprites aren’t of any real use for 3D graphics: the entire screen is necessarily changing all the time when moving a first-person perspective through a 3D world.

Bell and Braben were hardly the first to enter into this territory. Indeed, the field of 3D graphics isn’t all that much older than the field of computer graphics itself. Academic researchers during the 1960s and especially the 1970s laid down much of the work that still grounds the field today. One minor contributor to this growing body of work was a graphics researcher and aviation enthusiast named Bruce Artwick, who finished a Master’s degree at the University of Illinois (home of PLATO) in 1976. For his thesis project, he combined his two interests. “A Versatile Computer-Generated Dynamic Flight Display” described a flight simulator featuring a first-person, out-the-cockpit view of a 3D world. In 1980, Artwick with his new company SubLogic brought to market the aptly titled Flight Simulator for the Apple II and TRS-80. Running in as little as 16 K of memory, it marked microcomputer gamers’ first encounter with the format that now dominates the industry: interactive, animated 3D graphics. The Flight Simulator line, whether sold under the imprint of SubLogic or Microsoft, went on to become a computing institution spanning some three decades.

Groundbreaking as they were, however, the early versions of Flight Simulator were also, as their name would imply, much more simulator than game. They provided no story, no goals, no sense of progression — just an empty world to fly through. Yes, they did include a mode called “British Ace 30 Aerial Battle,” which transformed your little Cessna into a World War I biplane and let you fly around trying to shoot other planes out of the sky, but, well, let’s just say that it was always clear when playing it that Artwick’s real priorities lay elsewhere. Mostly you were expected to make your own fun refining your piloting technique and, of course, marveling that this 3D world could exist at all on a 16 K 8-bit microcomputer.

A more traditionally gamelike application of 3D came to arcades that same year in the form of Atari’s Battlezone. In it you control a tank in battle against other tanks. You view the action from a first-person perspective, through a screen made to resemble the periscope of a real tank. Battlezone eventually made it to home computers and consoles as well, albeit not until 1983. While their awareness of Flight Simulator is questionable (it was an American product made for American platforms in a very bifurcated computing world), Bell and Braben were aware of and had played Battlezone in the arcades. It was the impetus for Braben’s rotating 3D spaceships and for the combat game Bell and Braben would soon be designing around them.

They were determined to bring 3D to a 2 MHz 8-bit computer with 32 K of memory, and to do it in the context of a real game with real things to do. At least they didn’t have to bemoan the uselessness of sprites to this new paradigm: having been created with educational and “practical” uses in mind rather than gaming, the BBC Micro didn’t have any anyway. Programming, like politics, being the art of the possible, compromises would be needed if they were to have a prayer. Braben had already made the wise choice to set his 3D demo in space. Space is full of, well, space. It’s almost entirely empty, thus dramatically reducing the amount of stuff their game would have to draw. One other obvious decision was to perform only the first part of the full two-part rendering process, drawing in the outlines of objects in their 3D world but not going back and filling in their surfaces, an even more complicated and expensive process. (As the screens above illustrate, Artwick and Atari had already made the same compromise in their own initial implementations of 3D.)

The pair ruthlessly simplified Braben’s original spaceship models to have as few lines as possible, just enough to make of each a recognizable shape. This turned out to be wise for another reason: complex designs shown in wireframe tend to turn into a confusing mishmash of lines. To simplify rendering, all objects were also made convex, meaning that any given line will only pass in and out of the object once; as Braben himself put it in a talk at a recent Game Designers Conference, a block of cheddar cheese is convex but a block of Swiss is not. They also favored symmetrical ships — ships for which one side was a mirror image of the other, and thus could be rendered by simply negating calculations for the side that had just been drawn. Braben estimates that this step alone sped up rendering by some 40%, while actually representing no large aesthetic sacrifice at all; most vehicles in our world are also symmetrical.

Another area of concern must be your control of your own spaceship, the one through whose cockpit you would be viewing this 3D universe. A spaceship, like an airplane, can change its orientation in six ways, being able to yaw, pitch, or roll in either direction. Yet a joystick can be moved in only four cardinal directions — perfect for a 2D world but problematic for their 3D world. Bell and Braben soon realized, however, that being in space saved them. With no ground, and thus no real notion of up and down with which to contend, turns could be accomplished by simply rolling to the desired orientation and pitching up or down; no need for a yaw control at all. While they took full advantage of the good parts of being in space, they also wisely decided not to try to make the game a remotely realistic simulation of spaceflight. Like Star Wars, their game would be one of dogfights in space, with ships inexplicably subject to a law of inertia that should have been left planetside. Anything else would just feel too disorienting, they judged. Most people would prefer to be Luke Skywalker rather than David Bowman anyway.

So, yes, this would be a game of space combat. That was always a given. But what should it be beyond that? How should that combat be structured, framed? With a workable 3D engine running at last after some months of concerted effort, it was time to ask these questions seriously. One alternative would be to make a traditional arcade-style game, complete with three lives, a score, and ever-escalating waves of enemy ships to gun down. To make, in other words, Battlezone with spaceships. Certainly what they already had was more than impressive enough to sell lots of copies.

Instead, Bell and Braben made their next visionary decision, to make their game something much more than just an arcade-style shooter. They would embed the shooting within a long-form experience that would give it a context, a purpose beyond high-score bragging rights. This was not, as effervescent popular histories of Elite‘s birth have often implied, completely unprecedented. Long-form experiences were not hard to find in computer games years before Bell and Braben — in adventures, in CRPGs, in strategy and war games. It was, however, rather more unusual to see this approach combined with action elements. Taken on their own, the action elements of Bell and Braben’s game were groundbreaking enough to go down as an important moment in gaming history. By refusing to stop there, they would ensure that their game would break ground in multiple directions, and go down as not just important but one of the most important ever.

The inspiration came from tabletop RPGs, a pastime both Bell and Braben indulged in from time to time, although, perhaps tellingly, usually not together. They liked the way an RPG campaign could span many, many sessions, could turn into an ongoing long-form narrative. And they liked the process of building up a character from a low-level nothing to a veritable god over weeks, months, or years. Of course, your “character” in their game was really your spaceship. Fair enough; your goal would be to upgrade that with ever better weapons and defenses that not coincidentally bore a strong resemblance to those in Bell’s favorite RPG: Traveller, the first popular tabletop RPG to replace swords and sorcery with rockets and rayguns. From here the rest of the design seemed to unspool almost of its own accord.

They needed a mechanism for upgrading the ship, something more interesting than just adding the next piece to the ship automatically every time a certain score threshold was reached. The natural choice was money; every option would have a cost, letting players prioritize and truly make their spaceships their own.

Okay, but how to earn money? Drawing again from Traveller (a game whose imprint would be all over the finished Elite not just in mechanics but in its overall feel), you could be a trader plying the spaceways, buying low in one system in the hopes of selling high in another — a whole new strategic dimension.

But then how would that involve combat? Well, the ships attacking you could be pirates. This would also go a long way to explain why they were so chaotic and kind of random in their behavior, an inevitable result of limited memory and horsepower to devote to their artificial intelligence. Pirates, after all, were chaotic and kind of random by their very nature.

But actually landing on all those trading planets obviously wasn’t going to be workable; avoiding those complications was the reason for setting the game in space in the first place. No problem; you could just dock at space stations in orbit around them. Bell and Braben came up with a new challenge to make this more interesting: in a bit inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, you would have to carefully guide your spaceship into the rotating station’s docking bay at the end of every voyage. Of course, over time this could get tedious as well as frustrating (a botched approach generally means instant death). No problem; for a mere 1000 credits, you could buy a docking computer to do it for you. Other non-combat-oriented ship upgrades were also added to the catalog, like a fuel scoop to gather fuel by skimming the surface of a sun instead of buying it at a station.

If those spaceships attacking you really were pirates, thought Bell and Braben, the authorities would probably be quite pleased with you for shooting them down. Why not put bounties on them, so you could make your living as a bounty hunter if you got bored with trading? Now the possibilities really started rolling. If you could shoot pirates for money, you could also attack peaceful traders — become a pirate yourself, in other words, if you felt you could outduel the police Vipers that would attack you from time to time once your reputation became known. They came up with an alternative use for the fuel scoop: use it to scoop up the cargo of ships you’d destroyed to sell on the stations. The fuel scoop also became key to yet another way of making money: buy a special mining laser, break up asteroids with it, and scoop up the alloys they contained to sell stationside. If only they’d had more than 32 K of memory, they could have gone on like this forever.

But 32 K was all they had, and that was a constant challenge to their growing ambitions. For this grand game of trading to work, there had to be a big, varied galaxy to explore. There should be planets with a variety of economies and governments, from safe, established democracies for the conservative, peaceful trader to visit to anarchies home to hordes of pirates for the brave or foolhardy looking to make a big score. They came up with a scheme to let them pack all of the vital information about a star system with a single inhabited planet — its location, its economy, its type of government, its technology level, its population, its dominant species, its GDP, its size, even its name and a bit of flavor text — into just six bytes. Even so, a modest galaxy of 100 star systems would still require 600 bytes that they just couldn’t seem to find. Now came their most storied stroke of inspiration.

In 1202 an Italian mathematician named Fibonacci described a simple construct that became known as the Fibonacci sequence. In its classic form, you begin with two numbers, either 1 and 1 or 0 and 1. To get the third number in the sequence, you add the first two together. You then add the second and third number together to get the fourth. Etc., etc. A common and very useful variation is to drop all but the least significant digit of each number that is generated. It’s also common to begin the sequence not with 1 and 1 or 0 and 1 but some other, arbitrary pair. So, a sequence that begins with 2 and 7 would look like this:

2 7 9 6 5 1 6 7 3 0 3 3 6 9 5 4 9 3 …

The sequence appears random, but is actually entirely predictable for any given starting pair. This variation, however, is only a starting point. You can apply any rules you care to specify to a sequence of numbers with entirely predictable results, as long as you are consistent about it. Bell and Braben realized that they could seed their galaxy with any sequence they wished of six hexadecimal numbers to represent the starting system. Then they could manipulate those numbers in a predetermined way to generate the next; manipulate those to generate the next; etc. They decided that 256 systems was a good size for their galaxy. They needed just those initial six bytes to “store” all 256 planets. In addition to the memory savings, this method of generating their galaxy also saved Bell and Braben many hours spent designing it from scratch. Indeed, growing new galaxies from different starting seeds soon became a game of its own for them. They went through many iterations before finding the one that made it into the final game. Some they had to throw out right away for obvious reasons, such as the one with a system called “Arse” and the ones that had unreachable systems, outside of the player’s ship’s seven-light-year range from any other stars. Others just didn’t feel right.

By late 1983, after almost a year of steady work, the basics of what would become Elite were all in place in their heads if not entirely in their code. They decided it was time to see if anyone would be interested in publishing it. Braben believed they should try to find the biggest publisher possible, one with the reach to properly support and promote this game like no other. He accordingly secured them an appointment at the London offices of Thorn EMI, the recently instantiated software division of one of the largest media conglomerates in the world. Very much a sign of this heady period in British computing, Thorn EMI had been founded in the expectation that computer games were destined to be the next big thing in media. Like their colleagues over in EMI’s music division looking for the next big hit single, they weren’t looking for deathless art or niche audiences; they were looking for big, mainstream hits. They had developed a checklist of sorts, a list of what they thought would appeal to the general public that wasn’t all that far removed from Trip Hawkins’s guidelines for American “consumer software.” Their games should be simple, intuitive, colorful, and not too demanding. Bell and Braben’s complicated game — while it was a technical wonder; anyone could see that — was none of these things. They said it was nothing for them, although Bell and Braben were welcome to come back any time to show a reworked — i.e., simplified — version. (In the end, Thorn EMI would find that technology wasn’t ready for casual consumer software, and wouldn’t be for years. The hardcore was all they had to sell to. Unwilling or unable to adopt to this reality as Hawkins’s Electronic Arts eventually did, they faded away quietly without ever managing to find the breakout mainstream hit they sought.)

Bell suggested they try Acornsoft, who had already published his game Freefall. In many ways Acornsoft should have been the logical choice from the start. Bell already had connections there, they knew the BBC Micro better than anyone, and they were located right there in Cambridge practically next door to the university proper, an institution with which they had deep and abiding links. (Regular readers will remember that it was Acornsoft and Cambridge oceanography professor Peter Killworth who provided a commercial outlet for the adventure games created on Cambridge’s Phoenix mainframe.) Yet Braben was reluctant. Always the more commercially minded of the pair, he knew that Acornsoft was hardly at the forefront of the British games industry. Their modest lineup of adventure games, educational software, and utilities had some very worthy members, yet the operation as a whole, like most software adjuncts to hardware companies, always felt like a bit of an afterthought. With their limited advertising and doughtily minimalist packaging, no Acornsoft title had ever sold more than a few tens of thousands of copies, and most never cracked 5000 — a far cry from the numbers Braben fondly imagined for their game. Acornsoft’s association with Acorn also concerned him in that it would necessarily limit the game to only Acorn computers. He and Bell weren’t hugely fond of the Commodore 64 or especially the Sinclair Spectrum, but he knew that their game would have to be ported to those more prominent gaming platforms at some point if it was to realize its commercial potential. In short, Acornsoft was… provincial.

Still, he agreed to accompany Bell to Acornsoft’s offices. It was, to say the least, a place very different from Thorn EMI’s posh digs in central London. From Francis Spufford’s Backroom Boys:

[Acornsoft] operated from one room of a warren of offices above the marketplace. You got there by sidling around the dustbins next to the Eastern Electricity showroom. Past the window display of cookers and fridge-freezers, up a steep little staircase, and into a cramped maze that would remind one employee, looking back, of a level from Doom. “Very back bedroom,” remembered David Braben, approvingly. In Acornsoft’s office they found a rat’s nest of desks and cables, and four people not much older than themselves.

Two of those four people, managing directory David Johnson-Davies and chief editor Chris Jordan, would become the unsung heroes of Elite. Both got the game immediately, grasping not just its technical wizardry but also Bell and Braben’s larger vision for the whole experience. They both realized that this thing had the potential to be huge, bigger by an order of magnitude than anything Acornsoft had done before. Of course, it also represented a risk. Bell and Braben looked and acted like the couple of headstrong kids they still were. What if they flaked out? Nor was Acornsoft accustomed to issuing contracts and advances on unfinished software. Acornsoft had been conceived as an outlet for moonlighters and hobbyists, who sold them their homegrown software only once it was finished. Their normal policy was to not even look at programs that weren’t done; Bell and Braben were there at all only as a favor to Bell, a fellow with whom Acornsoft had a history and whom they liked personally. Still, Acorn as a whole was doing well; there was enough money to try something new, and this was too big a chance to pass up. They offered Bell and Braben a contract and an advance.

Now Braben made a move that would be as critical to Elite‘s success as anything in the game itself. Still concerned about Acornsoft’s provinciality, he negotiated a slightly lower royalty rate in exchange for he and Bell retaining all rights to their game beyond its implementation on Acorn computers. Not quite sure what he was on about, Johnson-Davies agreed. With his share of the advance, Braben bought his own BBC Micro, retiring his hacked and abused old Atom at last.

As Bell and Braben worked to finish their game, Acornsoft provided essential playtesting while Johnson-Davies and Jordan served as an invaluable source of guidance and a certain adult wisdom. Sometimes the latter was needed to keep their ambitions in check, as when Bell and Braben burst into the Acornsoft office one day having had an epiphany. They had realized that, if all they needed to grow a galaxy was a starting seed of six numbers, they could have an infinite number of them — well, okay, about 282 trillion of them — in the game. They could let the player buy a “galactic hyperdrive” to jump between them, whereupon they would just generate a new random seed and let it rip. Jordan now showed a sharp design instinct of his own in walking them back a bit. Having more galaxies sounds like a great idea, he said, but having so many will actually spoil the illusion of a real persistent universe you’ve worked so hard to create. It will all just start to feel like what it really is: random. Nor will many of these new galaxies be pleasing places to explore, since you won’t be able to look at them and reject the ones with unreachable systems and the like. Bell and Braben agreed to settle for just eight galaxies, with a total of 2048 star systems to visit. That should be more than enough for anyone. Perhaps too many for Bell and Braben and Acornsoft’s testers: a planet Arse sneaked into one of these later galaxies and made it into the released version of the game.

Even as they gently squashed some of Bell and Braben’s more outlandish ideas, Johnson-Davies and Jordon still felt like something was missing. For all its technical and formal innovations, for all its scope of possibility, the game lacked any sort of real goal. Now, to some extent that was just the nature of the beast Bell and Braben had created. They would have dearly loved to have a real story to give context, had even planned on it at some stage (Braben says that “trading was originally going to be a very minor aspect”), but they now had to accept the fact that they weren’t going to be able to wedge some elaborate plot along with everything else into 32 K. Still, suggested Johnson-Davies and Jordan, maybe they could add something simple, something to mark progress and give bragging rights. Thus was born the system of ranks, based on the number of kills you’ve achieved. You start Harmless. After notching eight kills you become Mostly Harmless (a nod to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). Each rank thereafter is exponentially more difficult to achieve, until, after some 6400 kills, you become Elite. There was the goal, one that should keep players playing a good long time.

It was also in a backhanded sort of way a political statement. Cambridge University was awash with indignation over the policies of Margaret Thatcher; a major coal-miner’s strike which would become the battlefield for Thatcher’s final vanquishing of organized labor had the university’s liberal-arts wings all in a tumult from March of 1984. Bell and Braben bucked the university conventional wisdom to side with Thatcher. The player’s goal of becoming Elite was meant as a subtle nod toward the libertarian ideal of the self-made man, and a little poke in the eye of their leftist acquaintances. It also emphasized their view of their game as fundamentally about space combat, not trading. It gave players a compelling motivation to engage with what Bell and Braben still regarded as the most compelling part of the experience. You can make a lot of money as a peaceful, law-abiding trader who prudently runs from pirates when they show up, but you’ll never make Elite that way.

In finding an overarching goal they also found the title they’d been searching for for some time. They first planned to call the game The Elite, a name to celebrate the group that much of Cambridge was railing against. But the filenames used for the game just said “Elite.” In time, they dropped the article from the official title as well. Elite it became — shorter, punchier, and with fewer political ramifications for Acornsoft to deal with.

Similarly subtle swipes at Cambridge’s liberal-arts students, whom in the long tradition of hard-science students Bell and Braben regarded as mushy-minded prima donnas, made it into the text tables that Bell developed to describe the planets in the game. After the Fibonacci sequence had done its work, some were populated by “edible poets”; others by “carnivorous arts graduates.” Ah, youth.

Bell and Braben had disk drives on their BBC Micros. After compressing their code as much as they possibly could, they finally began to make use of their capabilities within the game. They split the game into two parts: the trading program, loaded in when you docked at a station, and the program handling travel and combat, loaded as soon as you left one. This concerned Acornsoft greatly because most BBC Micro owners still had only cassette drives, which didn’t allow such loading on the fly. What good was the game of the decade if most people couldn’t play it? So they convinced the two to fork the game three ways. One version, the definitive one with all the goodies, would indeed require a BBC Micro with a disk drive. Another, for a tape-equipped BBC Micro, would be similar but would offer a smaller variety of ships to encounter along with simplified trading and a bit less detail to planets you visited and to the overall experience. Finally, Acorn convinced them to create a third version, stripped down even more, for the BBC Micro’s little brother, the Acorn Electron, an attempt to compete with the cheap Sinclair Spectrum that Acorn had introduced the previous year.

Bell and Braben were naturally most excited about the disk-based version, particularly when they realized they had enough space still to add a little something extra. They made a couple of hand-crafted “missions” that pop up when you’ve been playing for a while: one to hunt down and destroy a stolen prototype of a new warship, another to courier some secret documents from one end of the galaxy to the other. These gave at least a taste of the more prominent story elements they wished they had space for.

While Bell and Braben finished up the coding, Johnson-Davies and Jordan worked to give the game the packaging and the launch it deserved. Acornsoft figured they needed to do all they could to justify the price they’d chosen to charge for the thing: from £12.95 to £17.65 depending on version, well over twice the typical going rate for a hot new game. They prepared a box of goodies the likes of which had never been seen before, not just from bland little Acornsoft but from anyone in the British games industry. Only some of the more lavish American packages, like those for the Ultimas and various Infocom games, could even begin to compare, and even by their standards Elite was grandiose. To a 63-page instruction manual Johnson-Davies and Jordan added The Dark Wheel, a separate scene-setting novella they commissioned from Robert Holdstock, an author just about to come into his own with the publication of his novel Mythago Wood. And they still weren’t done. They also added a ship-identification poster, a quick-reference guide, a keyboard overlay, some stickers, and a postcard to send to Acornsoft to tell them about it and get your certificate of achievement when you achieved the rank of Competent (an onscreen code revealed at that point would serve as proof). When the packaging began to come off the line they realized they had miscalculated slightly: the box, although far bigger than Acornsoft’s wont, still wasn’t quite big enough. It had a noticeable bulge, like it threatened to burst right out of its shrink wrap. This actually turned out to be a great way of advertising all the goodies inside, even if the boxes were just about impossible to repack and close again once opened.

Acornsoft stepped in and froze further development during the summer of 1984. The packaging was just about ready, and work on the game, while it would never be truly finished in the eyes of Bell and Braben, struck Acornsoft as about to reach a point of diminishing returns. And everyone was a little bit paranoid that something similar to Elite, even if it was nowhere near as good, might come out and steal their thunder. Bell and Braben grudgingly agreed that the time for release had come. But then, just as Acornsoft was about to send the master disk for duplication, Braben called Chris Jordan in a frenzy. They’d solved a niggling problem that had been bothering everyone for months, that of a “radar” scope to show where enemy ships are in relation to your own. The problem was, again, that of trying to map three dimensions onto two. Bell and Braben had done the best they could by providing two complimentary scanners that had to be read in conjunction to get the full picture, but it always felt, in contrast to just about everything else about the game, kind of clunky and un-ideal. Now they had come up with a way to pack everything onto a single screen. It was beautiful. Showing a commitment few publishers then or now could match, Acornsoft agreed to take the new version of the game, which brought with it the painful task of having the manual edited and re-typeset to describe the new radar scope. Now, two years after Braben had first started playing with 3D spaceship models, they were done.

Buzz about Acornsoft’s secret “Project Bell” had been high for months. Continuing to show a promotional instinct that no one had known they had in them, Acornsoft rented for launch day Thorpe Park, a small amusement park (nowadays a much bigger one) near London. In a darkened room, with suitably portentous music playing, the world got its first glimpse of Elite — and of its two creators, who for the next few years would be the face of the young British games industry. In their picture from the launch party they look much as the British public would come to know them: Braben in the foreground, glib and personable; Bell a bit more uncertain and stereotypically nerdy and, much to Acornsoft’s occasional chagrin, more liable to go off-script.

Elite itself, needless to say, became a hit. Acorn and Acornsoft were making a big play for the home-computer market that Christmas, trying to challenge Sinclair and Commodore on their own turf, and Elite became a big part of that push. Advertising was shockingly frequent and grandiose for anyone who remembered the Acornsoft of old. The £50,000 campaign even included some television spots. Actual sales figures for the Acornsoft Elite are hard to come by, but seem to have reached the vicinity of 100,000 units, a huge number for an absurdly expensive game on platforms not particularly popular with gamers. And most of those customers seemed to play Elite with an enthusiasm bordering on the obsessive. The first person known to become Elite was one Hal Bertram, on November 3, 1984, about five weeks after the game’s release. By the end of the year he had many companions in glory, while Acornsoft was positively flooded with postcards sent in by those attaining at least Competent status; they could barely make the badges they sent back to these folks fast enough. Undeterred, they sponsored a series of monthly contests culminating in a grand showdown at the Acorn Users Show.

Still, it was clear to Braben that the really big numbers would come only when Elite came to the Speccy and the Commodore 64. The game was the talk of the industry, with owners of those more popular platforms, who had not even been aware of Acornsoft’s existence a few months ago, clambering to play it after it — along with its creators — began appearing in places like Channel 4 News.

And now we see the significance of Braben’s determination to retain the rights to their game. He heard through the grapevine about a former literary agent named Jacquie Lyons, who had recently become the first agent representing game developers in Britain. Lyons:

A friend rang up and told me about Ian Bell and David Braben. Elite had just happened and Ian and David had retained all rights other than for the BBC, which was extremely bright of them. They wanted me to represent the rest of those rights.

With virtually every publisher in Britain dying for the rights to Elite, Lyons decided that there was one foolproof way to find out who really wanted them, and to make sure her new clients got served as well as possible in the process — i.e., paid as well as possible. At the beginning of December she held an auction, which, in her own words, “caused a lot of trouble in the industry — I was told this was an appalling way to go about it.” Lyons responded that such an approach was common in the publishing world from which she hailed. And what better way to ensure that your publisher would put everything they had into a game than to make them pay as dearly as possible for it? The deep pockets of British Telecom won the day amidst a flurry of media interest. Having just entered the software market with a new imprint called Firebird and eager to make a big splash with the highest-profile game in the industry, BT paid an undisclosed but “substantial” sum — Bell and Braben each got six figures up-front — for publishing rights to Elite on all platforms other than the Acorn machines. Suddenly Bell and Braben, who had yet to receive their first royalty checks from Acornsoft, were very wealthy young men.

For their part, Acornsoft allowed Bell and Braben to move on without fighting at all to retain Elite as a desperately needed platform exclusive. Indeed, they handled Bell and Braben’s departure with almost incomprehensibly good grace, even working out agreements to allow Firebird to reuse most of the wonderful supplemental materials they had stuffed into that bursting box. Perhaps they just had bigger fish to fry. Elite, you see, was the sole bright spot in a disastrous Christmas for Acorn as a whole, one rife with miscalculations which effectively wrecked the company. A desperate Acorn was purchased by the Italian firm Olivetti in 1985, and became thereafter a very different sort of place. The Acornsoft label was retired barely six months after its brief moment in the sun, with Johnson-Davies and Jordan and all of their colleagues going on to other things.

But the game they had introduced to the world was just getting started. Bell and Braben themselves ported it to the Commodore 64. That version is not quite as fast and smooth as the BBC version — the 64′s 6502 is clocked at just 1 MHz instead of the BBC’s 2 MHz — but took advantage of the 64′s better graphics and its positively cavernous 64 K of memory to add in compensation more color and a welcome touch of whimsy to undercut its otherwise uncompromisingly dog-eat-dog world. There’s a third special mission, this one a bit of silliness drawn from the beloved Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles.” When the tribble — excuse me, “trumble” — population aboard your ship has mushroomed to the point that the little buggers start crawling around the screen in front of you, it’s laugh-out-loud funny, even if it is just about impossible to figure out how to get rid of them absent spoilers. But best of all is the new music which plays during the automated docking sequence: Johann Strauss’s “The Blue Danube,” a tribute to everyone’s favorite part of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It comes as a complete surprise (if you haven’t read an article like this, that is…) when you first flip the switch to try out your hard-won docking computer and are greeted with this unexpected note of easy beauty. Soon your travels assume an addictive rhythm: the calculus of buying and selling, followed by the tension and occasional excitement of the voyage itself, followed by the grace notes of “The Blue Danube,” when you know you’ve survived another voyage and can sit back and enjoy a few minutes of peace before starting the process over again. Life in a microcosm?

The Commodore 64 Elite established a tradition of each port being largely hand-coded all over again; this gives each its own feel. Scottish developers Torus took on the challenging task of converting Elite to the Spectrum, which is built around a Z80 rather than the 6502 microprocessor at the heart of the BBC Micro and Commodore 64. Speccy Elite arrived several months after the Commodore 64 version and about a year after the original, touching off another huge wave of sales. Amidst the usual slate of added and lost features, it added yet more special missions, for a total of five. Missions became the most obvious way for the many individual developers who worked on Elite over the years to put their own creative stamp on the game, a trend actively encouraged by Bell and Braben; “just have your own fun” with the missions was always their response to requested advice. About the same time as the Spectrum Elite arrived in Britain, Firebird brought the Commodore 64 Elite to the United States, where it — stop me if you’ve heard this before — became a huge hit, one of relatively few games of the 1980s to make a major impact in both the European and North American markets. It served to establish Firebird as an important publisher in the U.S., the first such to be based in Britain and one which would give many other British games deserved exposure in that bigger market.

The ball was now well and truly rolling. For almost a decade the existing versions just kept on selling and the ports just kept on coming: to big players of the era like the IBM PC, the Apple II, the Atari ST, the Commodore Amiga, and the Amstrad CPC as well as occasional also-rans like the Tatung Einstein. Even the Nintendo Entertainment System got a surprisingly faithful and enjoyable version in 1991. In the end Elite made it to 17 separate platforms. Hard sales numbers for these many versions in many markets are, once again, beyond my abilities to dig up with any rigor. Ian Bell has guessed in one place that it sold about 600,000 copies. However, David Braben claims that Elite surpassed 1 million copies worldwide, a number which strikes me as perfectly reasonable. Elite was almost certainly the most commercially successful born-on-a-PC game of the 1980s, and if Braben’s figures are true very likely the first to pass that magic number of 1 million copies sold at some point during the very early 1990s.

Bell and Braben’s mainstream fame proved to be almost as enduring — in September of 1991 The One magazine could still write about the latter as “the most famous developer in Britain” — but their partnership less so. The two tried for some time to make Elite II for the BBC Micro and the Commodore 64, but never got close to completing it for reasons which vary with the teller. In Bell’s version, the game was just too ambitious for the hardware; in Braben’s, Bell was more interested in enjoying his new wealth and practicing his new hobby of martial arts than buckling down to work. Braben alone finally made and released Frontier: Elite II, a hugely polarizing sequel, in 1993. The erstwhile partners then spent the rest of the decade in ugly squabbles and petty lawsuits. To the best of my knowledge, the two still refuse to speak to one another. While both agreed to give talks upon the game’s 25th anniversary at the GameCity Festival in Nottingham in 2009, they agreed to do so only if they didn’t have to share a stage together. Like most people who have studied their history, I have my opinions about who is the more difficult partner and who is more at fault. In truth, though, neither one comes out looking very good.

Bell retired quietly to the country many years ago to tinker with mathematics, martial arts, and mysticism. He hasn’t released a game since the original Elite. Braben, in contrast, has built himself a prominent career as a designer and executive in the modern games industry. If he’s no longer quite the most famous developer in Britain, he’s certainly not all that far out of the running. He recently Kickstarted a new iteration of the Elite concept called Elite: Dangerous to the tune of more than £1.5 million, proof of the game’s enduring place in even the contemporary gaming zeitgeist and its enduring appeal as well as the cachet Braben’s name still carries.

And what is the source of that appeal? As with any great game for which it all just seemed to come together somehow, that can be a difficult question to fully answer. I could talk about how it was one of the first games to show the immersive potential of even the most primitive of 3D graphics, prefiguring the direction the entire industry would go a decade later. I could talk about how it was one of the first to graft a larger context to its core action-based gameplay, giving players a reason to care beyond wanting to run up a high score. I could talk about how perfectly realized its universe is, how it absolutely nails atmosphere; its cold beauty is just that, beautiful. Those minimalist wireframe spaceships are key here. I never quite felt that later iterations for more advanced platforms, which fill in the spaceships with color, felt quite like Elite. But then I suspect that for most folks the definitive version of Elite is the one they played first…

Maybe the most impressive thing that Elite evokes is a sense of possibility. You really do feel when you start playing, even today, even when you’ve read articles like this one and know most of its tricks, that you can go anywhere (as, given time and patience, you can), and that anything might happen there (okay, not so much). Yes, over time, especially over these jaded times, that sense fades, this Fibonacci universe starts to lose some of its verisimilitude, and it all starts to feel kind of samey. I must confess that when I played again recently for this article that point came for me long before I got anywhere close to becoming Elite. I think for the game to last longer for me I’d need some more of those story elements Bell and Braben originally hoped to include. But just the fact that that feeling is there, even for a little while, is amazing, the sort of amazing that makes Elite one of the most important computer games ever released. In addition to being a great play in its own right, it represents a fundamental building block of the virtual worlds of today and those still to come.

(In addition to being such a huge hit and such a seminal game historically, Elite comes equipped with a very compelling origin story. Together these factors have caused it to be written and talked about to a degree to which almost no other game of its era compares. Thus my challenge with this article was not so much finding information as sorting through it all and trying to decide which of various versions of events were most likely to be correct.

The lengthiest and most detailed print chronicle of all is that in the book Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford. More cursory histories have been published by Edge Online and IGN. Vintage sources used for this article include: Your Computer of December 1984; The One of January 1991 and September 1991; Micro Adventurer of January 1985; Home Computing Weekly of December 11, 1984; Personal Computing Weekly of August 23, 1984. David Braben’s talk at the 2011 Game Developers Conference was a goldmine, while Ian Bell’s home page has a lot of information in its archives. Other useful fan pages included FrontierAstro and The Acorn Elite Pages. And when you get bored with serious research, check out the Elite episode of Brits Who Made the Modern World, which in its first ten seconds credits the game with starting the British games industry and goes on to indulge in several other howlers before it’s a minute old. It makes a great example of the hilariously hyperbolic press coverage that always clings to Elite.

Finally, rather than provide a playable version of Elite here I’ll just point you once again to Ian Bell’s pages, where you’ll find versions for many, many platforms.)

Yesterday, after writing my way past the notional halfway point (both of the current novel manuscript, and of the trilogy it's the middle volume of), I went and over-indulged in food and drink with friends.

Over the beer, the conversation turned—for no sane reason—to computer operating systems. There being some non-technical folks at the table, I then had to cough up a metaphor to contextualize the relationship between Mac OS X and UNIX, thuswise:

There is one true religion in operating systems, and it is UNIX. Or maybe it's not the one true faith: there's an earlier, older, more arcane religion with far fewer followers, MULTICS, from which UNIX sprang as a stripped-down rules-deficient heresy in the early days of the epoch. Either way, if MULTICS is Judaism (and the metaphor is questionable at this point, for unlike MULTICS, Judaism is still alive), then UNIX is Christianity.

In the early days, the UNIX faith spread underground among nests of true believers; but they evangelized their friends and neighbours and gradually it began to spread in strange communities. And with the spread came the great split. By the mid-1970s there were two main sects: AT&T UNIX, which we may liken unto the Roman Catholic Church, and BSD UNIX, which we may approximate to the Orthodox Churches. And then lo, there were many schisms.

In an attempt to control the schisms, the faithful formed learned congregations who at major conferences defined a common interoperating subset of the one true religion that all could agree on—the Nicene Creed of UNIX is probably POSIX, but let us not forget the congregation of the X/Open Portability Group and others. The bishops and cardinals of UNIX were fierce in the defense of their own particular schismatic sect, and formed alliances to develop credos that excluded their rivals while cunningly embracing their temporary peers: thus was the holy war prosecuted.

Today, the biggest church within the Orthodox community—possibly the biggest church in the whole of UNIX—is Mac OS X, which rests on the bedrock of Orthodox BSD but has added an incredible, towering superstructure of fiercely guarded APIs and proprietary user interface stuff that renders it all but unrecognizable to followers of the Catholic AT&T path.

But in the late 1980s, the Catholic Church succumbed to the sins of venality and simony, demanding too much money from the faithful. And so, in 1991 or thereabouts, Linus Torvalds nailed his famous source code release to the cathedral door and kicked off the Reformation. The Reformation took the shape of a new, freely copyable kernel that all the faithful could read with their own eyes. This Protestant heresy spread like wildfire among the people but was resisted with acts of vicious repression by the high priesthood of Corporate IT (arguably in connivance with the infidel invaders from the Caliphate of Microsoft). The Linux wars were brutal and unforgiving and Linux itself splintered into a myriad of fractious Protestant churches, from the Red Hat wearing Lutherans to the Ubuntu Baptists.

Reformation came at a price: another wave of religious conclaves that tried to hammer out a common ground between the various reformed churches. (See also the Linux Standard Base, and also the internecine war between packaging systems such as RPM or DPKG—the correct way to print and bind a Bible. This was, arguably, won by DPKG, which should therefore be considered the King James Version of the Linux holy scripture.)

More recently, a deviant faith has sprung from Linux, grafting an entirely new user interface revelation atop the same kernel: Android, which true adherents of the UNIX faith (even die-hard reformed Church Linuxers) mostly deny the UNIX-dom of. Android is the Church of Latter Day Saints of UNIX: hard-working, sober, evangelizing the public, and growing at a ferocious rate. There are some strange fundamentalist Mormon Android churches living in walled communities under the banners of Samsung and Amazon, but for the most part the prosperous worship at the Church of Google.

Note that, as with all religion, those sects with most in common are the ones who hold the most vicious grudges against one another.

Is that clear?

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December 26th, 2013: This is a comic created for Cards Against Humanity, who put out their own comics section this year - check it out, there are tons of great comics yo! SERIOUSLY, YO. One year ago today: i hope you like jokes.tmp~ – Ryan

I went to see this this morning amongst one of the fullest houses I have ever seen at the Cottage Road cinema. I've watched and reviewed it twice before in this journal: once in 2010, when I found James Stewart's profile pleasing, but just couldn't buy into the sentimentality or the idealisation of small-town America and its reactionary values, and again in 2011, when I had moved on to considering James Stewart 'fab' and noticing the meta-referentiality of the first half of the film, but also expounded further on the racism and sexism - especially the scene where we are supposed to find the spectacle of a young George Bailey pressing his advantage on Mary while she hides naked in a hydrangea bush romantic and funny.

This time... I don't know. Maybe now that I've articulated how I feel about both the sentimentality and the various -isms embedded into or even celebrated by the story, it's easier for me to separate those out, treat the film like the curate's egg it is and enjoy those parts of it that are excellent? Or maybe it was just the large audience in a festive mood, who laughed along appreciatively to what are actually a lot of very funny lines - not to mention the mince pie and mulled wine which I bought during the intermission. It being my third time round I also spotted various small things which I don't think I've noticed before, like the large bust of Napoleon on the windowsill in Mr. Potter's office, which nicely symbolises his aggressively imperialising approach to business. That kind of attention to detail always helps me to warm towards a film.

I also thought properly for the first time about why The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is so important to the story that the angel, Clarence Odbody, goes round clutching it throughout the entire film, and then gives it to George as a Christmas gift at the end. In part it must be because the book puts such emphasis on the friendship between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, which fits nicely with Clarence's inscription on the front page at the end of the film: "no man is a failure who has friends." But (having just re-checked the plot on Wikipedia), I can see now that more important is probably the episode in which Tom, Huck and their friend Joe run away for a while to an island in the Mississippi, and have a wonderful time until they realise that their families back home think they have all drowned in the river. That resonates with two key notes in It's a Wonderful Life - not prioritising your own desire for adventure over other people's happiness, and (because Tom secretly observes how his family are responding to his absence) getting to see what the world would be like if you weren't in it. So, yes, I see how that's an important inter-text.

One more thing - it occurred to me this time that since the angel Clarence watches the first two-thirds of the film from heaven as though on a film-reel before he goes down to Earth and meets George Bailey, he should have seen exactly what happened to the $8000 dollars which Uncle Billy misplaced, and have been able to tell George where it was and who had it. Obviously, that would have scotched the sentimental ending in which everyone chips in to help George cover the loss, and as it has taken me three viewings to even notice it, I guess it isn't really a problem, plot-wise. Plus Clarence is characterised early on as a bit dim, so maybe he just didn't even realise himself that it might be helpful to explain to George what had happened. But still, it would have been nice at least to know whether Mr. Potter ever got his comeuppance for keeping it.

I probably wouldn't ever bother to watch this film again in my life if it weren't a regular fixture on the Cottage Road cinema's Christmas programme. Indeed, that was already true after only one viewing of it. But since it's there, and since after three viewings now it has effectively become a Christmas tradition for me, and since James Stewart... I guess I won't go out of my way to avoid future viewings in the same setting.

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

“Hello?”

“Merry Christmas, mom!”

“Robert! Oh, thank you, son! I didn’t think you’d have time to call me today.”

“No, it’s cool. I’m on my break. Even up here, we get OSHA.”

“So you’re still working for that man.”

“Yes, mom.”

“You haven’t thought about going back to school.”

“To get my Asian Studies degree? Have you got any idea what the job market is like?”

“You’re such a smart boy, Robert. I know you can do better than manual labor.”

“Mom, this is a good job. It’s a union salary. I’m a craftsman, not a ditch digger. And besides, we only work, like, three days out of the year, and we get free housing. I’m saving a ton of money because there’s no place to spend it up here.”

“It’s not proper work. What am I supposed to tell my friends you do for a living?”

“There’s really not a lot of job opportunities for elves, mom.”

“You’re only half-elf.”

“Whatever. It’s this, cartoons, or posing for the covers of fantasy novels. And you don’t want to know what that’s usually a front for.”

“What about your freind Hermey? He went to dental school.”

“Yeah, I want to leave this sure thing to hope I can get a job doing denture scrubs for retirees in Boca. No thanks.”

“I think you’re just not applying yourself. You shouldn’t let the elf thing stand in your way. You could be like…like the Martin Luther King of elves.”

“Mom. I like this job. If you didn’t want a life like this for me, you should never have hooked up with an elf in the first place.”

“I was young! I think there was vodka in the hospitality room punch at that con, anyway.”

“We’ve been over this. Let’s just let it go, okay?”

“Has that man made a pass at you?”

“What?!?”

“Your boss. I don’t trust him. He’s one of those people. A gay.”

“Are you serious?”

“Well, just look at his outfits, Robert. Don’t be naive.”

“Mom, he’s married.”

“A beard, they call that. And I don’t mean the one on his face.”

“He’s been married longer than you’ve been alive.”

“Mmm hmm. But not children, I see. Not unlike certain other people I could mention.”

“Mom, I told you, it’s hard to meet girls up here. I live at the North Pole, you know. It’s not like there’s a lot of singles bars.”

“What happened to that one nice girl you were dating, that Rebecca?”

“Well, we’re still sort of seeing each other, but she’s only up here part of the year, for her work. It’s tough maintaining a long distance relationship.”

“Oh, that’s right. What was she again? A Greenpeace activist?”

“She’s an atmospheric scientist.”

“She doesn’t make more money than you, does she?”

“Mom.”

“Because…”

“Mom.”

“What?”

“I gotta go. Merry Christmas. I’ll see you over the summer break.”

“Let me just ask you one question.”

“Okay, what?”

“Does he make you wear those shoes? Because they’re not flattering, I can tell you that. And they can’t be giving you much arch support.”

“I love you, mom. Goodbye.”

[This is a rerun of a piece I posted here four years ago...]

Christmas was never that big deal in our house, at least not after I hit age 10 or so. This was not because we were mostly Jewish. We observed every holiday we could find. If we'd known what it was, we would have celebrated Kwanzaa…but like all our holidays, with great restraint. We just never made that much fuss about any day.

My Uncle Aaron had been in the business of manufacturing store window displays and he gave us crates of leftover Christmas ornaments. So each year when I was a kid, we bought and decorated a tree, in part because we had twenty cases of decorations in the garage and it seemed like a shame to not put some of them to use. Eventually though, it began to feel more like an annual obligation than a pleasure…so we gave all the balls and snowflakes and garlands to a local charity and I'm sure the holiday baubles thereafter yielded more joy for more people than they'd ever given us. By the time I hit my teen years, we'd managed to whittle Christmas down to a family dinner and a brief exchange of presents.

I had friends who somehow managed to devote most of every December to Christmas…and often, it required a running start commencing shortly after Halloween. For them, the yuletide seemed to come with great excitement but also with all manner of stress factors relating to buying gifts, decorating homes, throwing parties and consorting with relatives who fell into the category of "People You'd Avoid At All Costs If They Weren't Family." So all the merriment was accompanied by a lot of angst and expense. A classmate once told me his father had found it necessary to arrange a bank loan that year just so he could afford a proper Christmas. That didn't sound like a holly jolly time to me.

We had none of that. No one felt pressure. No one went into debt. Everyone would somehow convey a few suggestions as to what they might like as a gift, and always an affordable one. That meant no one had to agonize too much to decide what to buy…and no one wasted their money on something the recipient didn't want or would never use or wear.

It all worked well but for a long time, I saw the huge productions that others made of Christmas and felt like I was missing out on something. Christmas was a special day but it wasn't as special to us as it seemed to be to others. I was well into my twenties when I figured out what was going on there. I was then going with a lady who dragged me into her family Christmas arrangements that year. Hours…days…whole weeks were spent planning the parties, the dinners, the gatherings. She spent cash she didn't have to buy gifts and purchase a new party-going outfit for herself…and the decorating took twice as long as Michelangelo spent painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

It seemed to me more like a chore than a celebration, and one night I asked her why she went to so much trouble. She said, "Christmas is important. When I was a kid, It was the one time of the year when we all got along…or came close to getting along."

There it was. She'd come from a large and dysfunctional family. Siblings were forever fighting. Parents drank and split up and got back together and screamed a lot and separated again. There was much yelling and occasional violence…

…but not as much at Christmas. Christmas was when they managed to put most of that aside. Christmas was when they generally managed to act the way they should have acted all year. That was why, when it came around, they made so much of it.

We never had to declare a holiday cease-fire in my family. We always got along. There was very little arguing between my parents or between them and me, and what little occurred never lasted long. I never had fights with brothers or sisters because I never had brothers or sisters. And my folks and I were known to give each other gifts for no special occasion and to occasionally get the whole (small) local family together for a big meal. So Christmas wasn't that much different from the way we lived all year.

A year or two ago, I told a friend all of the above and his reaction was on the order of, "Gee, too bad for you." Because in his household, Christmas was wondrous and festive and the source of most of his happy childhood memories. I never saw it that way. I have loads of happy childhood memories. They were just no more likely to occur around Christmas than at any other time…and I liked it that way. I mean, you can have Christmas once a year or you can have it 365 times a year. Peace on Earth, good will towards men doesn't have to stop later tonight.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I realized the Chipmunks (which I had always known as cartoon characters from my childhood) were actually, as pop-cultural entities, much older — dating back to their eponymous novelty Christmas record in 1958 or, arguably, the “Witch Doctor” song all the way back in 1952. There was a short-lived cartoon in 1961, but the Saturday-morning cartoon that I and people of my generation are most familiar with didn’t come around until more than 20 years later (1982-1990).

The audio trick that creator Ross Bagdasarian used to create the sound of the Chipmunks’ voices was so simple, and the resulting songs so popular in the late 50s and early 60s, that I figured they must have spawned some knockoffs. Sure enough — enjoy the squeaky sounds of:

The Nutty Squirrels (singing “Uh Oh”)
The Grasshoppers (singing “Shortnin’ Bread”) (More info)
The Three Happy Crickets (“We Wish You a Merry Christmas”)
Woody Woodchuck’s Christmas Sing Song (info only)
Sing Along with the Busy Beavers (album download)
BONUS LINK: The Happy Hamsters sing “Ghostbustin’”, a few decades later. Full album here.

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merry christmas! dinosaur comics returns tomorrow :o
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December 24th, 2013: I looked up "tomorrow" to see if I had a comic about the word "tomorrow" to match the "overmorrow" comic I linked to yesterday, but all I could come up with is this, and you know what? I'M TOTALLY OKAY WITH THAT. One year ago today: i hope you like jokes.tmp~ – Ryan

Interestingly enough, 2013 was the second seemingly stable year in the new normal we are all living in the publishing industry. 

Does that mean that nothing changed? Of course not. Some things changed, but not like 2009-2011.

And some things will continue to change. But when you step back and look at the business in general, the changes in 2013 were pretty minor and predictable and normal.

So I figured, as I did last year, to try to give a little perspective on the past year from the advantage of watching and living inside of publishing for thirty-five years now.

Traditional Publishing

In 2013, traditional publishers were in a normal state of flux. They cut warehouses and printing costs as a reaction to reduction of print sales as they did the year before. That move has been expected for decades. They are adding in more ways to get books into electronic editions where more profit-per-unit-sale lives. Just normal “run to the money” thinking of all publishers.

Of course, the problem with this is that in 2013, electronic book sales were flat and actually declined over all trade publishing. So traditional publishers must now search for other ways to replace the shrinking money from paper sales or find themselves in big trouble. This has been a major topic in the last few months of 2013.

A number of the big traditional publishers settled lawsuits with the DOJ over agency pricing, but all the short-term repercussions of that suit were already worked into the systems. So nothing new. We eventually will completely return to the old system that worked just fine for many, many decades.

Traditional publishers have already started the expected cutting of book lines and mergers. They are also starting new book lines, many are electronic only. This will happen at both large and small scales.

Smaller publishers will continue to grow into the areas left behind and become big publishers over the years. This has been the nature of publishing for longer than any of us have been alive, so nothing new there at all.

And following the trend that started three or four years ago, the big traditional publishers are working to tie down as many writers’ books as possible, and control as many rights. So their contracts in 2013 managed to get even worse and have become completely anti-writer.

So for the most part, traditional publishers are just on cruise control, but are facing major challenges that high income from electronic sales won’t save them from.

Traditional publishing “impact events” that might happen in the near future…

— The US or European courts are still messing with the “First Sale” doctrine of copyright law. There are a bunch of cases in courts right now around the world that could cause all sorts of issues with big publishers and small and indie publishers as well, depending on the rulings. Right now, electronic books are not sold, they are licensed. (The person buying the book license has no rights to do anything with the book except read it.) But if the courts rule that an electronic book sale is an actual “sale” and “First Sale” applies, then things will shift dramatically in many, many areas. (The very least of which is “used electronic books.”) There are other aspects of “first sale” rulings coming as well that could affect international sales. This all has been in the works now for two years and we might see some cases come down in 2014 finally.

— Traditional publishers catch a clue and go vertical, meaning opening stores and selling direct to customers instead of direct to the distribution chain only. That will shift everything, but so far I see no major publisher doing that at all, or even talking seriously about it, even with the distribution chain shrinking and moving to a more direct-to-customer approach in many other areas. They will be forced to face this new sales world at some point, but it might be years. I said the same thing last year and have zero movement on this at all.

— Amazon actually opening the rumored public stores. That should change a lot of things for books and act in many interesting ways like a new bookstore chain. Should be interesting if nothing else. But the Amazon Derangement Syndrome (as Passive Guy calls it) will continue.

— B&N will NOT go down. But they might drop different aspects of the Nook manufacturing and sales. That should affect very little.

Indie Publishing

More and more writers, both new and established, moved to indie publishing in 2013.

The indie publishing movement near the end of 2013 is still in some flux, as it should be after only four or so years in this new electronic-added world. Many writers are doing books or backlist titles themselves, but at the same time indie publishing is seeing the early adaptors starting to get discouraged and dropping out.

Again, this is nothing new in publishing. To make a career in publishing, you have to be ready for a long haul, often over decades.

Most beginning writers who went indie two years ago didn’t want to do that, didn’t find the “gold” they were promised after a ton of wasted promotion efforts, and have stopped. Nothing unusual at all. Writers starting off and then quitting was always the way it was even when I came into publishing back in the dark ages. Nothing different. But now it’s not quitting after fifty rejections, it’s quitting after three books up and very few sales.

At the end of 2013 we are also seeing a rise in larger indie presses and indie distributors. Presses such as WMG Publishing with over four hundred titles. And Wordfire Press with a growing list. No surprise there. There is a need and gaps to fill as traditional and mid-range publishers shift around. Again, this movement to fill a void has been standard in publishing over the decades.

The biggest event for indie publishers in 2013 was the silent removal of all labels about POD printed books from the Baker and Taylor and Ingrams catalogs. This allowed bookstores, depending on their credit, to get indie published paper books at varying discounts from 25% to 42%. So indie books starting in the summer of 2013 started slowly making their way through normal channels into bookstores. And many indie published books found their way into the ABA Indie Bound book program this last fall, mostly without the indie publisher even knowing it was happening.

This one change last summer will turn out to have a large impact for many indie publishers in 2014 and beyond.

In 2013, indie publishers finally caught a clue and the entire Kindle Select became mostly a thing of the past. Going exclusive in this new world is just flat stupid. There are no exceptions that I can see.

Smashwords, the largest distributor of indie work to stores (Amazon is a store), got faster and cleared out a bunch of bugs in 2013 and actually started a revamp of their site. But they still have a horrid accounting system that will eventually drive all but the erotica authors away. But it seems from the outside that Smashwords clearly had a good year. Right near the end of the year they partnered with Scribd, which may or may not turn out to be a disaster. Scribd is known for being a pirate site. Should be interesting over 2014 to see how that goes.

During 2013, indie publishing also got to experience the normal fluctuations of publishing seasons, since the explosion of electronic sales no longer masked the standard ups and downs of the publishing sales cycles. This, of course, drove a ton of beginning indie writers (who watch every sale) completely nuts and sent off waves of conspiracy theories, just as what happened in 2012. You would think the writers doing this would get tired of conspiracy theories after a time.

Also in 2013, the early adaptor price of 99 cent ebooks was even more of a no-mans’ land for most regular book buyers than it had become in 2012. That helped indie writers make more money by getting their prices up just under traditional publishers electronic prices. Now the 99 cent price is being used in a smart way by many as a short term sale price, which often has worked.

During 2013, indie publishing in many, many ways, both paper and electronic, spread out over the world. Now your indie books get a much wider reach than any traditional publisher can manage, which not too many people have talked about yet, but will in 2014.

Yes, I said that. Your books go to a wider worldwide audience when you indie publish them than if you sold them to a traditional publisher. Something most beginning writers never think about as they search for the worthless agent.

Also, the Kobo move into brick and mortar stores is having an impact, with Amazon also trying to follow in the last few months of 2013. Next year should be an interesting year as the big electronic stores battle for the growing number of brick and mortar bookstores. (Yes, again in 2013 there were more indie bookstores than the year before.)

And, of course, the news that everyone knows. Electronic book sales flatlined for 2013. I had figured that overall trade sales of electronic would hit 30% eventually and everyone thought I was too low. I doubt the sales will get to 30% now. I think the number will continue to hover around 20% of all trade for years to come. Of course, that varies by genre.

Also, the world is one more year farther away from the stigma that used to be attached to self-publishing your own work. There are still idiots out there holding on to that old belief, but they are few and far between and have no power to influence anything. However, you should never call yourself a self-published author, because bookstores will avoid you. Have your own publishing company and treat that business like your publisher, same as you would treat Simon and Schuster. In other words, act like a business person.

Indie publishing “impact events” that might happen in the near future…

— See the comment above about “First Sale” court cases. Major impact if that goes in a number of different directions for indie publishing. We can only wait and see. Again might not happen in 2014.

— I worry about Smashwords. Their accounting is so bad and so questionable, it has to bite them at some point if they don’t fix it. And partnering with the great pirate site of Scribd is yet another question mark. I think another area to keep an eye on is the Kobo/Amazon push into indie bookstores. That should really be interesting to watch.

Agents

Agents had a horrid year in 2013, just as they did in 2012, and the future does not look bright for an area of publishing that, for the most part, seems to have outlived its value. Many agents, ignoring any hope of pretending to be an actual “agent” under agency law, opened up their own publishing arms to take care of writers too lazy or afraid to do electronic backlist publishing themselves. Many other agents just turned themselves into scams to make a living off of taking writers’ money. But in 2013, many of them learned it wasn’t going to help them.

And with advances and paper sales falling like a stone for even the top bestselling writers, agents entire business model is falling apart around them. We should see some pretty major collapses of agencies in 2014.

There are still a ton of great agents out there, but often they work for agencies that have sticky-finger issues with client’s money. Watch for some more lawsuits to hit the news as well, just as some hit in 2012. That will happen since writers give agents all their money and all the paperwork and then wonder why they get ripped off with money gets tight for the agent. Duh.

Agents started spreading the myth in 2011 (and increased the push through 2013) that writers needed agents to sell movie deals and overseas deals. A total myth, of course, in this new world of world-wide email. But it helped agents feel relevant to focus on an area that before was only a sidelight for them. It is not helping their bottom lines at all, since overseas agents hold most of the money from them. It is a standard area for sticky fingers.

And the traditional publishers still have on their guidelines that you need an agent to sell a book, even though most smart writers have figured out that guideline is just a tissue paper roadblock to ignore. Just like the old “no unsolicited manuscripts” was when I came in.

Also, with traditional publishing contracts getting so nasty over the last four years as publishers made rights grabs, agents can’t negotiate a contract anymore. Agents are not lawyers. These days you need an IP attorney familiar with publishing contracts to even get close to a decent contract. And unless your advance is north of six figures, you won’t get it even with a lawyer.

So agents are the buggy whip area of publishing, and I sure can’t see much that will save most agents over the next decade or so.

Agent “impact events” that might happen in the near future…

— Many large traditional publishers are in the process of setting up direct submission systems. This forward process slowed in 2013 some. Because of the draconian contracts that take all rights from writers, it is in traditional publishers’ best interests to get as many books headed their way as possible and not stopped by agents. Electronic submissions systems direct to traditional publishers (already going in a number of smaller genre lines) will put the final coffin nail in the agent world. This will start up again in many major companies and you will start seeing these new systems appear in late 2014 and the year beyond. And that will start killing the “you need an agent to be published” myth.

Writers

For writers, 2013 has just been another great year in the second golden age of fiction. Writers, both new and old-timers like me, have discovered indie publishing. Many writers are working both sides of the fence just fine. But now with indie publishing we don’t have to wait on late contracts, late payments, and agents who only block what we do.

And the strange or cross-genre work we produce now can get to readers.

2013 was a year that started to prove that being able to sit in a chair and produce is a valuable skill in writing once again, just as it was in the first golden age of fiction in the 1930s and 1940s.  Readers want more books and stories from favorite authors and don’t understand the “only one book per year” thinking of traditional publishers.

Writers can now get direct feedback at times from readers, something that was almost impossible under the old system.

But in 2013, there was also a split between writers, people who write, and authors, people who have written and like to promote. A ton of myths have sprung up around promotion and what works and what doesn’t. We’ve had some of those discussions here as well. This silliness will continue.

The main word I heard the last few years from writers was “freedom.” It seems that suddenly we all feel free to write what we want, not what we think some editor and sales force might like. That’s great fun and really became a clear force in 2013.

We also have the freedom to not take bad contracts from traditional publishers if we don’t want. That’s a fantastic bargaining chip in a negotiation, so smart writers gained power over the last year. And now writers who care about their work have an option. And smart writers go to lawyers now, not agents, for help on contracts of all sorts.

“Control” was a word I also heard a great deal from writers in 2012 and in 2013. Control of covers, control of the proofing, control of the quality, control of the rights. All that control became very important and part of many conversations for writers this last year. And that is, let me simply say, fantastic!! I expect those conversations to continue and increase in the coming years.

So writers (with all the changes becoming normal) gained control and freedom. 2013 was a year for writers to try to figure out what each of us wanted to do with that new control and that new freedom. Every writer is different and every writer this last year seemed to react in a very different way. It’s going to be great fun to see how those two words keep pushing the conversations over 2014.

Control and freedom. A real golden age in writing for writers.

Writer “impact events” that might happen in the near future.

– See the discussion about the “first sale” under traditional publishing above. I have no idea how that’s going to be ruled on in all the different cases, but it’s important to writers. Watch the cases, folks. I will try to report on the important ones here.

– Scams in 2013 took out more and more writers and will continue to do so in the coming years. The scams that take writers’ money are becoming so thick it’s hard to tell the good players from the scammers. From “publishers” willing for a percentage fee to put your book up to “editors” willing for a fee to read a writer’s work to “agents” willing for a percentage fee to help you try to sell your book. And so much more.

Sadly, by being lazy and afraid to learn how to do things on their own, a lot of writers will lose their dreams or a number of books or at least a lot of money before this trend calms down again. It has gotten beyond ugly and I see it only getting worse before it gets better. Caution on hiring out work in 2014. Make sure you know who you are dealing with.

– Writers are going to lose all rights to millions of books (traditional publisher’s rights grabs and writers signing something because they feel desperate).  Many writers will be sued by publishers and publishers will be sued by writers as more and more writers try to break out of horrid contracts they signed.  The writers will lose most of the cases because they signed the contracts. Over the next five years a lot of case law will be built on all this. And most of it won’t favor the writers I’m afraid.

Know what you are signing, folks. And know that if your advance is under six figures, you will never see the rights to those books again.

Summary

2013 was the second “new normal” year we have been through. Publishing sales trends have now applied to indie press work, and a vast majority of established writers are moving some backlist or all of their work to their own publishing press.

Traditional publishing is going along just fine, taking and controlling more and more book rights from poorly represented writers who don’t know what they are signing. Traditional publishers face some major changes, but in 2014 we will only see rumblings of that. Profits right now are solid in almost all the major corporations’ quarterly reports. But they will be faced with more and more writers turning away from bad contracts. A few of the smaller imprints and publishers and a few editors might start the process of pulling that trend back. But it will take years.

And with the flatlining of electronic book sales, traditional publishers will have money troubles by the end of 2014 that will cause more cutbacks and mergers.

Writers are not used to the “control” and “freedom” concepts just yet. Old myths die very, very hard. So agents will keep taking advantage of new writers, and new writers will continue to sell all rights to their novels for next to nothing.

When boiled down, it is a game of control here at the end of 2013, just as it was at the end of 2012.

— Traditional publishers want to control all rights and control the writers that work for them.

— Agents feel their control and place in the industry slipping away, so are turning more and more to scamming writers.

— And writers are learning how to use the control and freedom they have gained over the last few years.

But even with all that, 2013 has been a pretty stable year with most developments favoring indie writers. I have a hunch that unless one of the major impact events actually happen, 2014 will be about the same.

And that’s great fun.

Stay tuned.

————————————————

Copyright © 2013 Dean Wesley Smith

Cover art copyright Philcold/Dreamstime
————————————————–

This chapter is now part of my inventory in my Magic Bakery.  

I’m now writing fiction like crazy, so every word I write here takes time from that. And I have to justify this somehow in how I make a living.

So, if you feel this helped you in any way, toss a tip into the tip jar on the way out of the Magic Bakery.

If you can’t afford to donate, please feel free to pass this chapter along to others who might get some help from it.

And I would like to thank all the fine folks who have donated over this last year. I don’t always get a chance to respond, but the donations and the comments both after the posts and privately are really keeping me going on this. Thanks!

Tip Jar: Go To Paypal

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Yes, the holidays are approaching, the time when we celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. We wish you all the best of seasons, and hope you will celebrate in a devout and solemn manner, as opposed to the drunken revels of the hated Saxon. Just as a reminder, anyone found drinking spirits or engaging in lewdness during the high holy days will be boiled alive. Thanks!

Also, many of you have inquired as to the holiday work schedule. You may, of course, take Christmas Day off, and you may also take Christmas Eve or the day after Christmas off, providing you do not object to being boiled alive.

LABOR UPDATE

Lately there has been some talk of labor unrest. We are not sure what this means. However, we have always prided ourselves on being an organization that advocates for the rights of the peasant. Therefore, anyone attending one of these trade-union meetings will be scalped and skinned for their failure to recognize our benevolence.

There have been questions about the fate of Antioch Bebescu and Sergiu Medrea, who organized just such a trade-union and have not been seen for several months. All those who posed such questions have been scalped and skinned.

SAFETY CONDITIONS

All in all, December has been a banner month for workplace safety at Castle Bran. Cold weather conditions notwithstanding, we have seen an overall decrease in injuries, and the new labor crews working on the expansion of the windows on the west wall have reported dramatically fewer unsafe conditions. We attribute this to the former west wall labor crew’s actions: they reported extremely hazardous conditions, and were subsequently locked in a shed which was then set on fire. Let’s all learn from the good example of the new west wall labor crew!

We’d also like to report a new change in our medical policy. Starting January 1st (a new year, already! 1472 will be the best yet, Wallachia!), employees who are injured on the job will not be immediately put to death. They will be sent instead to the new “infirmary”, where we will wait for them to die of their injuries. If they show signs of recovery, the infirmary will be locked and set on fire.

THE TURK

It wouldn’t be a company newsletter without a mention of those darn Turks! Here’s a rich one Lord Tepes heard at a local tavern: It seems a pair of the vile Mohametan heathen were fishing on Lake Van in a boat they stole from a devout Christian lady who was later raped and killed to feed their filthy appetites. They caught so many fish that the first Ottoman says, “We must come back here tomorrow!” The second Ottoman asks, “How will we remember the spot?” The first unleashes his scimitar, which was no doubt used to butcher an infant in the sacking of the Holy City of Jerusalem, and carves a big ‘X’ in the bottom of the boat. “There!” he says. “Now we’ll just look for the ‘X’!” The second Ottoman is furious. “You idiot!”, he shouts, “How do you know we’ll get the same boat?”

Lord Tepes was so delighted by this witty tale that he commanded we tell it here. He also had the owners of the tavern decapitated for selling intoxicating spirits on Sundays.

IN CLOSING

As the most holy time of the year draws near, we realize that there are many issues weighing heavily on the minds of our employees. Some of you have sinned; some know of others who have sinned; and a select few foolishly constructed the arrow slits in the north tower several inches under specification, and attempted to blame their incompetence at following blueprints on being unable to read. Thankfully, these illiterate ne’er-do-wells were castrated and impaled, and their widows fed to the wolves, but it doesn’t have to happen to you! Spiritual guidance is available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week at the local parish. We urge you to confess your sins, the sins of others, and the possibility of future sins and those likely to commit them, to one of the priests in great detail. We especially recommend Father Goga, who is a very good listener.

Merry Christmas to all the Dracula “family”! (Please note: non-relatives who represent themselves as actual members of the Dracula family will be castrated and impaled, and their widows fed to the wolves.)

Recently, our friend Neil Gaiman appeared at the New York Public Library and performed a public reading. It was of an odd version of A Christmas Carol written by someone named Charles Dickens, who for some reason completely cut Mr. Magoo out of it. Why someone would want to do that, I don't know…but it actually works surprisingly well sans Magoo, and Neil gave it a colorful performance. The woman you'll hear in this recording before Neil is Molly Oldfield, a writer and researcher for the BBC…

Hey, just a reminder that any holiday gifts purchased through my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada) would, in theory, throw a little money my way without costing you a dime extra! Just Sayin'.

MRS WIBBSEY'S FESTIVE DIARY

4

MRS WIBBSEY'S FESTIVE DIARY

3

MRS WIBBSEY'S FESTIVE DIARY

2

MRS WIBBSEY'S FESTIVE DIARY

1.

A [supporter/member/if you're lucky MP or Peer] of [political party you don't like] has made a [comment/speech/if you're lucky bad taste joke] that has offended a number of people.

Calls have been made for the [supporter/member/if you're lucky MP or Peer] to apologise for the [comment/speech/if you're lucky bad taste joke] that was made on [Tuesday/Question Time/if you're lucky Twitter].

The gaffe comes just [months/weeks/if you're lucky days] after [supporter/member/if you're doubly lucky MP or Peer] of [political party you don't like] also caused controversy with a [comment/speech/if you're on a real outrage winning streak bad taste joke] that also offended lots of people. [supporter/member/if you're doubly lucky MP or Peer] apologised for this at the time but these latest scandalous remarks show that they simply have not learned their lesson.

"They just don't get it" said a spokesperson for [pressure group/political party you do like/political party you dislike less than the political party you don't like]. "It's absolutely typical of people associated with that party and demonstrates why you should never vote for them."

Dear BT,

As you may know, I’m kind of against internet filtering anyway. Like many others, I share concerns about blocking important resources about sexuality and sex, and think it’s vital that children are able to access information about what options are available to them, and what is and isn’t OK. It’s vital that this information is available.

We’ve all heard horror stories about sex education sites being inadvertently blocked as porn, due to false positives on filtering. This is, of course, terrible. What’s worse, though, is that you’ve actively set up Sex Education as a category in your parental controls. That’s pretty iffy in and of itself, and gets much grosser when we look at exactly what you’ve explicitly decided to give parents the option to block:

Sex Education will block sites where the main purpose is to provide information on subjects such as respect for a partner, abortion, gay and lesbian lifestyle, contraceptives, sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy.

I’ve got some news for you, BT. This is really, really important information that young people need to access. This is information that keeps them safe from abuse–information about what is and isn’t OK. Respect for a partner is something vital that young people need to know about.

About the only way what you’re doing is OK is if you’re using your filters as a red flag list for spotting potentially abusive families. Are you trying to find out what sort of parent would block their children from knowing about respect, so you can help get their kids out of that situation?

Nope?

I thought not.

Basically, BT, I didn’t think much of you to begin with, and I certainly don’t think much of you now. Your priorities in what information you want to help block are really, really fucking skewed.

No love,

Stavvers

P.S. Terms like “gay and lesbian lifestyle” are homophobic dogwhistles, you pile of skidmarked Y-fronts.

Edit 22/12/13: I note you’ve now reworded, BT. But are you still blocking all of this vital information? If so, all of this still stands.

Darling,

I know that you said you didn’t want to see me, or hear from me. But I think this card complies fully with the court’s order of protection, provided I do not hand-deliver it to you. I know it just looks like a cheap 89-cent greeting card manufactured in 1986 and purchased from a dusty, underused spin-rack at a truck service center in rural Nebraska, but to me, it expresses perfectly my feelings at this, the time of year we are so far apart and should be so close together.

See the comical drunk on the cover, leaning woozily around a lamp-post and sporting dishevelled pajamas and an ice-bag on his head? That lovable scamp is me, on Thanksgiving night, and on the seven previous holidays we’ve spent together going all the way back to last Halloween, and also every weekend and Thursday and Monday night for the last two years. See the nagging wife with her hair up in curlers, stuffed into a shabby floral-print dress, wielding a rolling pin like some frightful poleax? That’s you, only you’re much prettier, sweetheart. And see the punchline inside, about how I don’t have a drinking problem — I just drink, get drunk, fall down, and no problem? That’s like our relationship. No problem! Only now I realize, there is a problem. A big problem. A problem so important and unique that not even the spin-rack at the Torrington Travel Terminal could help me. A problem called me.

Now, it would be easy to place blame. I could, for instance, if I wanted to, blame you, for being less attractive than you ideally could have been (not that you aren’t beautiful!), thus driving me into the arms of women who care a little more about taking care of themselves. Or I could mention how, since you’re a teetotaler (some would say “killjoy”, but not me, darling, because I love you), you miss out on all the hilarious comments I make when I’m drunk. But I’m not writing you this card with a golf pencil I found in a guy’s shoe who hung himself in our cell to play the blame game. I’m writing you to say: I’m sorry.

I’m sorry I’m so mean to your children. And my children. And our children. And the children that are probably ours but we’ve given up trying to find out whose exactly is whose and besides, a check is a check. Just children in general, I guess. Kids really get on my nerves, but that’s no excuse for my behavior. Although you’d think they’d learn to stay away from me by now, especially when I’m drunk.

I’m sorry for being so drunk all the time. I can’t take all the blame for this one, since it’s my body that’s betrayed me by letting itself get totally polluted off of a six-pack when it used to take as many as nine beers just to get a light buzz on. Is it my fault that this has happened? Am I to be punished by your forbidding me to drink at all just because of one little armed robbery? But the fact is, even though I intend to keep drinking a fifth of rye every twelve hours, that doesn’t mean you should have to suffer for it. I’m sorry for stealing the diaper money to keep myself in booze; a person who really cared would steal from strangers, not from his loved ones. Tell the kids I’m sorry about their lunch money, too. Maybe soften the blow by mentioning it was really top-shelf rye.

I’m sorry for burning your house down. I know what you’re saying: there’s no need to apologize for that, it was my house too. But the fact is, I was deliberately trying to burn down just your parts of it, because they irritate me so much. It turns out that you can’t really selectively burn a house down, and that the flames really took to the collection of old tit magazines soaked in rubbing alcohol that I kept in the tool room, but even if that wasn’t the case, it was wrong to burn down your parts of the house, especially after you warned me the last six times.

Darling, I’m saying all this because I ran into one of the kids — Mike? Danny? You know, the one with the red hair and the gap teeth — when he was being taken to juvie this morning, and he said that he got busted for trying to hock some of the Christmas presents. So, sweetheart, love of my life, if there is even a light chance there are still presents, and an even slighter chance that some of them are mine, please believe me: I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I love you, and if you can throw my bail long enough for me to come home and open my presents, I promise you I will be a changed man.

Merry Christmas, baby. Please come home. “Home” being, at the moment, cell 14 of the municipal lockup. Ask for Randy; they think my name is Randy at the moment.

Love forever,
“Randy” (remember that)

The knowledge that attempting to block porn on the internet is bound to backfire has now gone mainstream. (BBC News, Telegraph) Well, there’s a temptation to say “we told you so”, because we did. Repeatedly.

So far, sites we know that are subject to overblocking on either TalkTalk and BT include BishUK (a sexual education site for teenagers), LGBTfriend, Edinburgh Women’s Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre, Sexual Abuse Scotland, Doncaster Domestic Abuse Helpline and Reducing The Risk (Another domestic abuse help site).

At the same time, the filters failed to do what they were supposed to – when BBC Newsnight tested on TalkTalk, 7% of porn sites were still accessible.

The trouble is one of resource – the same problem that makes “Report Abuse” buttons problematic. As of the end of 2012, there were over 600 million web sites on the internet. We’re probably over a billion by now.

If all 2,500 TalkTalk employees spent their entire time checking web sites, averaging one minute per site to classify it, it would still take over three years to check a billion web pages – by which time there would be another billion sites to check. You can filter this some as only around a third to a quarter of sites have unique content, but even with 2,500 staff you’ll never be able to keep up with new content.

The solution will inevitably involve technology, perhaps with some human input for the top 0.01% of sites. (One person can probably get through that much in about a year) But it’s only in the last three or four years that the so-called Scunthorpe Problem has been mostly solved, with notable recent relapses including Virgin Media censoring TV programme descriptions in 2011 if they included “anal” (As in “Arsenal”) and “dick”. (As in Dickens)

Given these problems, is it any wonder that automated filters are going to get it wrong spectacularly often? It doesn’t help that the whole system is shrouded in secrecy, with no notification of blocking, no way of checking what sites are being blocked and no clear appeals process.

The problems with such systems have been well known within the industry for years, which will have been a large reason why ISPs resisted implementing these filters and only did so under pressure from government ministers.

Oh, and as to the most serious problems facing children on the internet – Grooming, Cyberbullying, etc? Filters don’t help there at all.

Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without a discussion about the economics of the Star Trek universe, would it?

There’s been a bit of a back-and-forth about this recently, for example here, here and here.

The crux of the issue is that Gillian and Kirk have this exchange in Star Trek IV:

Gillian – Don’t tell me: they don’t use money in the 23^rd century?

Kirk – Well, we don’t.

I’ve always been a little suspicious that he’s saying it just to get out of paying for dinner, but it’s a remark that’s come to dominate discussion, and while Scotty can say ‘I just bought a boat’ or Kirk can talk about ‘selling a house’, and while private property clearly still exists, later entries in the series have made it clear: in the Federation, they’ve abolished money. Whether Kirk was joking or not, Picard’s statement ‘A lot has changed in three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of “things”. We have eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions’ leaves little room for another reading and  Tom Paris’ ‘When the New World Economy took shape in the late 22^nd century and money went the way of the dinosaur, Fort Knox was turned into a museum’ eliminates any last vestige of doubt.

Obviously, this is one of those things that a running series came up with on the fly, rather than something they thought through and intended as a great political statement. And, naturally, the implication of the line is that, taken at face value, it is the most important single fact we know about the Star Trek universe and has to underpin everything else we see.

The Federation has been able to abandon money because, basically, machines do all the work – there’s a real world economic model for this, ‘cybernetic communism’, which envisioned great robot factories replacing all human labour. In Star Trek, the solution is even more direct than that, they have the ‘replicator’, basically a cornucopia that can produce a replica of any item, including food and clothing (it uses technology similar to the transporter to assemble them at the molecular level). We also hear about ‘industrial replicators’, which produce bigger items.

The Federation is a land of abundance – as well as replicators, there are anti-matter engines that produce practically infinite levels of clean energy, there are thousands of habitable planets, so there’s enough land for everyone. It’s what’s known as a ‘post scarcity’ economy. People in Star Trek’s Federation simply don’t need to accumulate money because everything we buy with money now is freely available. Money can’t possibly be for anything. Saving, loaning or investing money would be utterly pointless. Human labour exists – there are doctors, freighter pilots and so on – but whatever motivates them, it’s not a paycheque.

The proponents of cybernetic communism dreamed of a world where everything was leisure. As in this picture, Paul Signac’s In the Time of Harmony:

Note the steam engine at the back. And this is broadly the model Star Trek pushes. The Federation is a work in progress. Its endgame must be something like Iain M Banks’ Culture, an almost unimaginable diverse and abundant galactic utopia, where trillions of citizens can live utterly self-determined lives, and (just as importantly) most are psychologically equipped to cope with such abundance. Banks’ books tended to deal with the very few who don’t quite fit even the most accommodating of all possible societies.

 But this is by no means the only possible result of a work-free society. In the Judge Dredd series, machines do all the work – with the result being pandemic unemployment among the human population, leading to deprivation, desperation and all the social ills we know that can lead to. Mega City One is essentially a sink estate with a population of 800 million people. Some people there dress up as robots and try to sneak into building sites and factories to work.

I think the most interesting Star Trek story is one that’s never been told: what happened the day they invented replicators. It would be an astonishingly disruptive period of history. We saw the fuss this year when someone invented a printable gun. Now imagine that everyone in the world suddenly has access to a device that could produce weapons grade plutonium and an infinite number of dollar bills. It’s hard to imagine an area of life that wouldn’t be affected. The first few years must have seen orgies of excess. The first generation of replicator users in Star Trek must have filled their houses with stuff. Everyone must have sat around in (fake) furs, dripping with diamonds on platinum thrones.

Vance Packard’s book The Hidden Persuaders says that when freezers became widely available in America, people used to keep them stuffed to the brim. It was a new technology, much of this food was quickly ruined – the temperature control wasn’t very precise, and people simply didn’t know how to store things or understand freezer burn. Freezers were hugely successful anyway, because the appeal was psychological, not practical – for a generation that grew up during the Depression, the idea of having enormous amounts of food in the house was astonishingly powerful, even if the food was actually inedible. It was about having, not using.

The first people with replicators would, surely, do the same thing: surround themselves with luxury. The fact that in this brave new world gold and diamonds just pour out a slot in the wall wouldn’t matter for a while: people would cling to the idea gold had an intrinsic value.

In one of his futurist discussion documents, Gene Roddenberry stated that historians had concluded that the average person at any given time had the quality of life of the richest people two hundred years before. It sounds a little too hard-and-fast to hold true to me, but you can see the general principle. The average American now has a lifestyle beyond the dreams of even the elite in Washington’s time – a more varied diet, the ability to travel further and faster, healthier lives, access to (ownership of, in many cases) libraries that dwarf Jefferson’s, less physically demanding jobs, an almost limitless range of entertainments and other leisure activities. Those harking back to the golden age of the framers of the Constitution might be right that their rivers were cleaner, but their drinking water wasn’t.

Looking ahead, Roddenberry’s vision is that in the Star Trek universe, the average citizen lives like one of the super-rich does now.

There’s a problem. As Ben Elton pointed out in Stark, there comes a point where you just hit an absolute limit of needs being met. Your problem becomes that your house is too big and people are living too long. The rich can eat the very best food in the world, all the time. The Tasting Menu at the Fat Duck costs ₤195. If you ate there every night, that would cost you ₤73,000 a year. A vast, obscene and ridiculous amount of money … and about what Mitt Romney makes every weekday. In a world of replicators, the only real obscenity – the price – goes away, as do some of the other problems (getting a reservation, for example) and a citizen of the Federation could just eat that Tasting Menu every night, and with less effort than it takes us to heat a can of soup.

OK, so in two hundred years time, the very best cuisine may be even more exquisite and rare – can you imagine what Heston Blumenthal could serve up if he had a replicator? – but how delicious and novel is it actually possible for food to get? One of the least convincing things for me about Star Trek is that they seem surprised by alien cuisines. Surely, surely, surely they have not lost the impulse many of us have now to seek out new restaurants, to boldly eat what none of our friends have eaten before?

And if the Fat Duck sold press-of-a-button meals, would it still be the Fat Duck? Isn’t the appeal that the meal was prepared, or at least directly overseen, by a top chef? That the location itself is important? Isn’t the point of the Fat Duck that it’s a once in a lifetime experience, not something easy? After a while, I think, the appeal of easy indulgence would dwindle. You can imagine the second generation of replicator users shunning conspicious displays of material wealth, preferring a more austere life. And this is what we see in Star Trek. They eat really boring food.

Faced with technology and leisure time – not to mention a tolerant society – that meant everyone could dress like Lady Gaga if they desired, civilian clothing in Star Trek is astonishingly drab and boring:

People all seem to live in fairly austere, even spartan rooms.

Decoration is confined to a few personal mementoes and perhaps an antique or two. There’s clearly at least a subculture with the urge to live pastorally – colonist farmers, space hippies, even Captain Kirk lives in a log cabin for a while and takes Bones and Spock camping. Modest lifestyles are clearly trendy. People have clearly decided, as individuals and as a society, to life lives of self control. There are no drug addicts (or even smokers), no one is obese. Some kind of Amish-like instinct to value ‘honest work’ exists. Geordi painstakingly builds a model of a sailing ship, and when Data points out he could have just replicated it, we’re supposed to agree with Geordi that Data’s missed the point.

There’s one interesting bottleneck in this abundant society that’s a very visible presence in the Star Trek shows: it’s difficult and desirable to get into Starfleet Academy. This fact alone demonstrates that there’s more in play at the Federation than ‘freedom of choice and self determination’. Yes, you get in on merit … but someone at Starfleet is assessing those merits. Like the ‘good universities’ and financial firms of our era, if you’re trying to get in, it doesn’t seem to hurt if your parents were there. Wesley Crusher is a smart kid, but he fails to get in on merit the one time he tries, and eventually gets into the Academy because Picard has a word and a rule bends. Is that corruption? Perhaps not, but how many other people got in because of a quiet word? Wesley has a huge advantage because he’s surrounded by people in the know who can offer advice. What about some smart, motivated kid who doesn’t know the right people?

Starfleet Academy has a limited – it’s implied that’s it’s a strictly fixed – class size. Exclusion exists, then, in the Federation. You can’t always get what you want.

Star Trek, bless it, does tend to play the same story over and over. The regular characters almost all fall into two categories – people whose parents were in Starfleet and people whose families disapproved so much of them signing up for Starfleet that it led to a family rift. The unplanned corollary of this is that it paints a picture of an Earth were a chunk of the population vocally dislike Starfleet and what it stands for. The reason why is often stated in terms of Starfleet (and those who wish to join) being ‘above itself’. Perhaps, in this post-scarcity economy, the mere fact Starfleet is an exclusive institution is offensive to many people.

But there must be other places where decisions are being made about the allocation of unique resources. While a replicator could be used to make an exact copy of, say, the Mona Lisa, it wouldn’t be the Mona Lisa. So, who gets the one Leonardo painted? There are private art collections in the Federation. In two we see, Requiem for Methuselah and The Most Toys, we even see original Leonardo Da Vinci paintings. Spock can use his tricorder to check they’re not fakes, and presumably *Fajo didn’t acquire his Mona Lisa before knowing for a fact it was the real deal. But how did he acquire it in the first place? He makes a point of saying that he collects things for the bragging rights when he meets other collectors. Other people want it, so why did he get it, not them?

Presumably there’s some law or institution that allocates these things based on … well, we don’t know. It needn’t be nefarious – if Fajo had supplied medicine that saved a million French space colonists, perhaps a grateful French nation granted him the painting. He might be seen as more ‘deserving’ than some art museum that already had ostentatious amounts of fine art.

The Federation, though, is clearly not quite a post-scarcity society. There are limits. There are some materials which can’t be replicated. Starfleet can’t just whisk up a thousand new starships overnight (and, perhaps as pertinently, couldn’t crew them if it did).

Here’s something I noticed:looking closely, most Star Trek episodes are about a planet that lacks something which the Enterprise can supply. Missions typically involve delivering rare medicine to a planet suffering from a plague, key personnel like ambassadors and top scientists to planets where they are needed. Even the more overtly military missions – racing to the aid of a planet under attack – implies that the planets themselves can’t just whisk up a starship to fight or flee. At a more abstract level, the insight Kirk or Picard can bring to a situation clearly makes them rare assets themselves.

The conclusion has to be that this is a function of the Federation being not quite a post-scarcity civilisation. Starfleet has a mission of exploration and scientific discovery, but it – and virtually all the non-Starfleet space travel we see – is actually about redistributing the last few scarce items.

There’s another wrinkle to this, though. As we run down a list of things that can’t be replicated, we hit a really interesting one.

Some of the advocates of cybernetic communism (and plenty of science fiction writers) envisaged a world of male births and artificial wombs. Some feminist writers saw the liberating potential of this. It’s fair to say that most see it as a sign of inhumanity. In the post-Byrne Superman stories (including the movie named after his relaunch, The Man of Steel), Krypton is a world of marvels but the ‘gestation matrix’ represents something of a loss. The loomed Time Lords of the Doctor Who novels are sterile and unimaginative, not vital. The ur-text, of course, is Brave New World, where bottled clones serve the worldstate.

The Federation looks in places like Brave New World on a good day, but it abhors artificial enhancement of human beings. Sure, Geordi has his VISOR, Picard has an artificial heart, but these just restore them to a baseline. Humans have an almost weird phobia about androids that look human. They’ve banned cloning, genetic engineering and all sorts of related technology. The Eugenics Wars seem to have left the human race with a deep distaste for developing posthumans. People train themselves to improve, any machine help is seen as cheating and even unnatural.

If you want a baby in the Federation, it’s going to gestate in a woman’s womb. And there’s a (large, but) limited number of wombs available. Therefore, wombs in the Federation are a valuable, scarce commodity.

Perhaps we could go as far as to infer that it’s this, the scarcity of wombs, that’s led to the sexist attitudes we see in the show in all its incarnations, the marginalisation of women, the society-wide heteronormativity, the short skirts, dancing girls and sanctioned sexual harrassment, the light treatment of rape and attempted rape. If so, the Federation is a society that’s eliminated virtually all the old inequalities, but had an economic system that’s enshrined one of the oldest and most fundamental.