For those that haven't heard, Andrew Koenig, the son of Star Trek's Walter Koenig, was found dead of an apparent suicide in Vancouver's Stanley Park yesterday. Andrew played Boner, the goofy best friend of Kirk Cameron's character, Mike Seaver, on the '80s sitcom Growing Pains. As such, there are a number of cheap jokes being floated around gossip-o-sphere about the apparent humor of guy named Boner whacking himself.
I can promise you there are at least two people who aren't laughing: Walter and Judy Koenig. A couple years back, I got to spend a weekend with Walter Koenig as his fan liaison at a local sci-fi con. It was a privilege, and I took a great deal away from our time together. I would not be so bold as to call Walter a friend, but I am absolutely certain he was a proud and invested father who loved his children with an obvious, almost illuminated intensity. I have no doubt that the loss of Andrew has wounded Walter in a fashion I can barely comprehend.
No father deserves that, especially not one so generous and devoted as Walter. And whatever you think of Walter or Andrew or fame in general, no family deserves to have such a profound and horrific loss rendered a public punchline. So before you go make Boner jokes around the water cooler, take a moment and think of Walter and his family. They need our sympathies and our support, not our sarcasm.
Brown energy (n.) - Energy derived from non-renewable resources, usually through highly poluting methods. The opposite of green energy. A snarky term for any energy source, technology, or industry that the environmentalist movement doesn't approve of. Brown energy, in concept if not in name, is typically depicted as a root cause of environmental collapse in ecopocalypse and greenpunk fiction.
I bring it up because: The Bloom Box is making the rounds as the savior energy technology du jour, offering highly efficient refrigerator-sized industrial fuel cells. At sufficient scale, the Bloom Box can supposedly convert natural gas and oxygen into electricity with no toxic byproducts and for less cost per kilowatt-hour than conventional commercial electricity. Nonetheless, the Bloom Box runs on non-renewable natural gas and a single Starbucks-powering Bloom Box Energy Server will run your $800,000. So is this green energy, because it's non-polluting, or is it brown energy, because it's non-renewable? It's probably a little bit of both, but even money says a Bloom Box-esque eco-energy source gets namechecked in a quasi sci-fi TV show within the next six months. It's too trendy to ignore.
Roach motel (n.) - A media consumption device, format or service with such pervasive and egregious DRM that it precludes sharing content with any other device, format, or service. More simply, any system where "your data checks in, but it doesn't check out" -- which is a reference to the old tagline for Roach Motel insect traps. A roach motel is any technology that doesn't let you move your data off it with a minimum hassle.
I bring it up because: Both the Kindle and the iPad have been described as roach motels (notably by Cory Doctorow) in the wake of the Amazon/MacMillan pricing dust-up, largely in the context of both devices wanting to "own" the digital book market and thus having no incentive to make ebook portability a priority. This, in turn, revived discussion of the larger, lingering roach motel apocalypse issue -- format obsolescence. All digital data is encoded in a specific format, and that format will eventually fall out of use, which in turn means the decoding devices will become scarce, which thus means the data will be trapped in the old format. (Raise your hand if you have old single-density floppies that your current PC can't open.) Therefore, all data formats eventually become roach motels, which is why contemporary data portability is such a pressing longterm issue.
Charles Stross took this concept to a dramatic extreme in Glasshouse, wherein the distant descendants of humanity had to reenact (inaccurately) aspects of 1950s Western culture because most of the historical records of the era were trapped in encrypted proprietary file formats. Think that's farfetched? Ask NASA how easy it is to decode digital records of the moon landing. If the world's foremost manned spaceflight agency can forget how to read its own unencrypted video tapes of events of staggering historic importance, what chance does the average consumer have of avoiding personal roach motel hell 20 years on? Maybe the Data Liberation Front are onto something after all.
Can't research. Buried in snow. Going to old Geek Trivia bullpen. Blatantly milking Olympic fever. Don't judge me.
The 1976 Montreal Games were an overall success in spite of the fact that the widely anticipated Olympic Stadium, built to host the opening and closing ceremonies as well as several showcase competitions, was not completed before, during, or even years after the '76 Games. Designed to incorporate a then-cutting-edge retractable roof suspended from a massive architectural mast tower, the cost and complexity of the design skyrocketed construction costs and forced the stadium to open with no roof. ...
Despite such mishaps, Olympic stadia have a largely proud architectural tradition, even where roofs are concerned. In fact, another Olympic venue featured the largest single roof ever built, an engineering triumph still lauded today.
WHAT OLYMPIC VENUE FEATURED THE LARGEST ROOF EVER BUILT?
Hyperfiction (n.) - A form of fiction that takes advantage of interactive media to elevate a story beyond mere linear narrative. Basically, a story that incorporates hyperlinks to allow the reader to experience the text in any particular order, and to explore story materials that are ancillary to the main plot. For example, a hyperfiction novel might include interactive maps of the setting, video news accounts of events in the story, and blogs or journal entries made by several characters. Hyperfiction is still in its infancy, though Shadow Unit by Emma Bull, Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, Will Shetterly, Leah Bobet and Holly Black is perhaps the most well known sci-fi experiment in the medium to date.
I bring it up because:Hyperfiction is more than fiction on a hypertext-capable reader, as Elizabeth Bear informs us. This is the point being missed in the recent Amazon vs. MacMillan brouhaha, to say nothing of the announcement of the iPad -- fiction that is native to digital media does and is more than fiction native to analog media. Put another way, producers did more with DVDs than they did with VHS tapes. Interactive features, games, alternate audio commentaries, whole extra cuts of the film, easter eggs, and the like. This is taking advantage of the potential of the medium. To date, we've stuck analog books on digital readers and called them ebooks. But what does a hyperbook look like? How would a hypernovel differ from a novel? We haven't even begun to really ask the question. Until we do, don't expect e-readers to become "necessary" to the average consumer. You haven't replaced their novels yet. You've only copied them.
