Author: dave-o

I am depressed.
I’ve been depressed and anxious for a couple days, because this is how my brain is, especially as the seasons change toward the tail-end of the year. The angle of the sun early and late in the day becomes more acute, your shadow stretches out in front of you like a wendigo. It’s a harbinger of the gloom that will dominate the clock once fall finishes falling, and the cloud ceiling feels like it’s about seven feet over your head, waiting to crush you.
Once the sun starts getting low and skulky like that I begin to constantly feel like I’m about to tip over backward in a chair, like there’s someone just behind me about to punch me in the back of the neck. It’s unnerving, and constant, and so I’m anxious, and so I’m depressed.

Normally I’d treat this depression with alcohol or coffee, but it’s 9am and my stomach has been off and there’s a point where you Have to Talk to Someone About Thus, Dude, and I’d prefer that not be today.
So I made a new swing for my kids. The old one broke the other day, and I didn’t take it down immediately, and my 8-year-old has subsequently been sort of clinging to the remainder and dangling in a vain attempt to swing, which is pretty pathetic, and also sort of eerie looking, like a sophomore-year interpretive dance of a public hanging.
The new swing is a jankety-ass hack made from some junk from the garage (a length of 2″ PVC, a length of nylon runner I used to use for rock climbing, back in during the Clinton Administration), but I feel somewhat better. The sun was a little higher in the sky by the time I finished, and so I felt less like my shadow was waiting to stab me in the back, so that helped. Also, there’s something to be said for a cylindrical swing seat–it’s more like a trapeze, and easier on my old butt. I’m sure the kids will come up with some new and dangerous way to take advantage of this new design.
Anyway, I want to suggest this same mode of treatment to you, Gentle Readers:
If you are feeling depressed or anxious, and it is not yet at the Point Where You Have to Talk to Your Doctor, Dude, make your kids a new swing out of garage junk. Because here’s the thing: You’ll probably feel at least a little better–on account you will have exercised your rugged individualism or done something physical or reformed the world in your image or tikkun olamed a smidge, or however your worldview best frames voluntary unpaid manual labor in or near the home. But even if you don’t feel a damn bit better after you’re done building your swing, your kids will still get home at the end of the day, and there’ll be a new swing, and they’ll be happy about that.
And that alone will help. And all day you’ll know this one fundamental truth: At the end of the day your kids will be happy because there’s a new swing. And since you’ve increased the net daily happiness in the world, you have also increased the mean happiness enjoyed by any single human, even if only a smidge. By the magic of division, you’re *technically* happier already.
And, shit, by Internet standards, being *technically* happier–like being *technically* more qualified or deserving or right–is even better than being *actually* better. I think you could get round one VC funding on the basis of that math alone.
But whatever. One way or the other, your kids have a new swing–and you’ve got about six hours left in the day that you can use that swing all you want with no one trying to horn in on it.

DISCLOSURE: There is currently no pair of words in the English language that activate my couldn’t-give-a-shit gag response faster than “stretch goal”—nonetheless, I have to admit that this is a pretty damn worthwhile Kickstarter project: Clarkesworld: Chinese Science Fiction Translation Project by Neil Clarke — Kickstarter

Clarke is a good editor, and his magazine an excellent venue. I’ve got at least three readily articulable reasons that I think this isn’t just a good or lofty project, but rather a goddamned vital one. Here goes:
1) YOU ARE PROBABLY BIGOTED ABOUT CHINA If you are an American reader (and Google Analytics tells me that your probably are) who mostly interacts with other Americans, you almost certainly harbor a whole host of really fucked-up opinions about China and its citizens, which you repeat often and take as gospel and don’t even realize are fucked up and baseless. I host the very same psycho-flora in my own brain-gut–and only became aware if it because I happened to go to Costa Rica for a long visit two years running. CR has *much* friendly relations with China than the US does, and that trickles down to rank and file citizens. It was only in visiting CR that I became aware of the clanging bigotry of what were, in the US, totally garden variety “factual” observations about China. I needed the contrast to see it. This is a similar source of that much-needed contrast, but without having to pay a passport fee or ride an airplane.
2) YOU ARE GOING TO BE CHARMED BY THE SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE WORLDVIEWS PRESENTED IN THESE STORIES AND YOUR OWN This is another one that totally blindsided me, and it was only by the grace of fickle Fortune that I even got the chance to get blindsided. See, I’ve got this lil wistful steampunk robot-soldier-sexbot novella that got translated into Chinese a while back. The book is set just after the Civil War, and is largely about the uncomfortable quasi-friendship of a pair of outcasts, one a crippled Confederate veteran, the other a Japanese-American veterinarian/doctor. The clockwork soldiers are sort of a narrative foil, at best–or, at least, that’s totally how American readers take it (myself included). But then I saw a couple reviews from Chinese readers, and the scales fell from my eyes. To these Chinese readers, the story wasn’t really about the outcast crippled Confederate and doctor; it was about those those identical clockwork soldiers, who had done their duty and finally been released by their government, only to be viciously punished by their human neighbors for attempting to live free and remake themselves in some new image. Yeah, all of that was always there in the novella, but it took this new group of readers–and their own fears and fascinations and cultural baggage–to make it visible.
3) FOR THE MOST PART, WE DON’T GET MUCH IN TRANSLATION The US is a *major* worldwide culture creator and exporter; most everyone else takes *a lot* of their entertainment in translation. Meanwhile, we have the privilege of getting most of our thrills, chills, shits, and giggles in our own language and packaged in our own ubiquitous culture and its biases. It is good for your brain to have to try and breakdown strange new cultural proteins.
3.1) CHINA MAKES THIS WORLD The other side: Look around you (including the thing on which you are looking at these words): Without China, an easy 90% of the things in your house don’t exist, don’t function, or don’t matter because the things they need in order to function either don’t exist or don’t function, because they were MADE IN CHINA. It’s time we understood China much, much better, on its own terms.
Just sayin’, this is worth your support–but more than that, it is worth your *attention*.

I wrote my final column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle this month, marking the beginning of the school year and the end of that publication’s six years of perpetual (and profitable) publication. That final column is about our schools, education, the SAW film franchise, Presidents in Peril, ersatz wales, kids, and the ways we, as communities, show our children our true priorities. I’m pleased with how all of this has turned out, and relieved that we crossed the finish line *before* I succumbed to strep throat, followed by pneumonia, capped with a minor head wound and water heater repair. It’s been a helluva damned month. L’shana Tova, mofos!
My final column starts something like this:

. . . and goes on that way. There are more pictures than usual. Check it out: The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In It For The Money: Our Schools
Listen: I did this for you. I don’t know why, but I did.

At about this time on September 11, 2001–shortly after a jetliner hit the north tower of the World Trade Center–I was doing basically what I’m doing right now: Dicking around online when I should be working. The work in question was sundry administrative stuff (filing, I believe) in a small, alternative K-12 where I taught part time, filling out my work day as a sort of low-level assistant in the office. I heard about the “accident”–or, at least, we hoped it was an accident, I prayed it was an accident–on slashdot.org, which is what I was reading instead of working.
I went down to the high school room (it was a *small* school) and told the teachers and kids what had happened. Some of the high schoolers walked to the resale shop up the road and bought a TV so they could watch the news coverage (the school didn’t have a TV that would pick up broadcasts, and getting this one to do so took a bit of jerryrigging, as I recall). They watched all morning, and all afternoon. They saw folks jump from buildings. They saw Tower 2 collapse. They heard overtaxed reporters say “fuck” and “shit,” and just plain absurd things: “The tower, it came down, it peeled apart like a banana, but a banana full of people.”
I heard a man from the NSA say, “We’re still reviewing all the calls from that morning.” This I remember quite vividly. This was 2001. This was on national news, live. Edward Snowden was still in high school.
Later that day my cousin–whom I hear from hardly at all–emailed me because she knew a different ”Dave Nelson“ who’d died when the towers fell.
Outside the sky was clear and blue, cloudless, not a single contrail. You know, like a TV tuned to a dead channel. There are only two days whose weather I can meaningfully recall: 9/11 and my wedding (which was outdoors, in a gazebo, on 9/13/2003).
I don’t know what we’re supposed to *do* with this day. It’s like Armistice Day, but inside out. Maybe this should be a day for remembering wars that we lost by starting–which is to say all of them. Maybe a day to remember that the only problem that violence can conceivably solve is the problem of having too many live people, too many unraped people, to many standing buildings, too many passable roads, too many non-orphans, too much electricity and drinking water, too much industry, too much progress.
Maybe 9/11 should be a secular Yom Kippur, when we are free to honestly meditate on all the places we went wrong and screwed up, and all the suffering that’s created. There’s a thing we do during the Yom Kippur service, a “collective confession” where the entire congregation, together, reads aloud a litany of sins: We confess to arrogance and bigotry and jealousy and flattery, to being stiff-necked and holding grudges, to sexual impropriety and dishonest and abuse of power, to sinning in secret and openly, freely and under duress, in thought and in deed. And it isn’t like you just read the ones that you did; you read them all. We all read them all aloud, because we all have a share in it. If I’ve been honest, but I’ve let someone else’s dishonesty slide, then I’m part of that dishonesty. If I’ve been violent because I thought that violence somehow stopped some worse violence–it’s still violence.
So, I hated the wars and you hated the wars and we all think and thought the wars were all a bad idea–but they still happened, and most of you reading this helped pay the bill. These are our wars. This huge violence is ours, and it keeps getting bigger, and that’s ours too. So, if this is a day for anything, maybe it’s a day for all of us, simultaneously, to fess up to our transgressions, our weakness, our pettiness, the monumental destructiveness of these faults, and to ask humanity’s forgiveness and to, in turns, grant that forgiveness to the rest of humanity. Humanity kind needs a do-over.
And then let’s move on, further, together.
Amen.

The above quote is from the below video, which I’ve been watching as background research for some client work:
The Power of Abstraction – YouTube

Liskov is a very highly regarded computer scientist, and in that sound bite I used as the title she’s talking about programming (in a great deal of detail that is largely inscrutable to me, just yet), not books of any sort. But I believe what she says here applies to *all* writing, from fiction and creative essays to workaday ad copy and stereo instructions. My sound-biting also makes it sound like she’s saying that reading (e.g., to expand your own knowledge) is more important than creating new stuff. Although I *also* believe that, she’s actually saying something different. Here’s the pertinent bit of her talk, in its entirety (from around 17m37s into the video):

In other words, hers is a strictly–and gloriously–Utilitarian claim: For the good of the many, our focus (as people-writing-things) should not be on expressing that which we want to express, but in expressing things in a way most thoroughly intelligible to readers.
Depending on what kind of writing you think of as “writing” (and the value you place on “self-expression” *shudders*) you may believe something very different than this. That’s nice. But regardless of how you feel about this approach, I *can* tell you from personal experience that when you set your mind on writing for longterm readability (rather than self-expression), you get paid better, have a *much* easier time selling your creative work, and people generally like you more.

I have a lot of thoughts about both of these songs and videos–their sampling choices, the cultural expectations they embody and tweak and leverage, their wry commentary, the possibility that the cultural construct called “Nicki Minaj” is a day-glo voodoo space-witch mind-bender escaped from a DARPA project, while the cultural construct called “Taylor Swift” is a scrubbed alabaster voodoo space-witch mind-bender escaped from a DARPA project–but more than anything, the lasting impression is this:
Nicki Minaj and Taylor Swift would be fun kids to be stuck in an airport lounge with during an indefinite flight delay. They are, at their core, Weird Al-style goofballs, and in a dire and inescapable emergency, goofballs are the best.

Let’s face it: You probably know next to nothing about Israel and Gaza right now. You hear a lot of highly partisan screaming, but it’s all *so* polemical and contradictory that it’s pretty obvious that no one is being straight with you. So, if you want to understand what the hell is going on with Gaza, I strongly urge you to get your head around the tunnels; they are a very informative microcosm of the region’s politics.

You’ve probably heard of the “terror tunnels”–which have only really started to get the press they warrant in the last week or so. If you need a catch-up: Hamas has a tunnel-network of unknown size and complexity that allows soldiers to pop up on remote locations in Israel and launch attacks.
But that’s the least of the tunnels–and the easiest to understand (after all, it’s not that different from similar tunnel networks that were the nightmare-terrors of U.S. grunts in Vietnam).
It’s the *other* tunnels that can tell us so much about politics in Gaza, and Gaza’s relations with *all* its neighbors. These are trade tunnels that run into Egypt. Check out this 2012 paper by Nicolas Pelham (” a writer on Arab affairs for The Economist and the New York Review of Books. He is the author of A New Muslim Order … and coauthor of A History of the Middle East … , and has reported on Gaza extensively“) for the Institute for Palestine Studies (“the oldest independent non-profit, public service, research institute in the Arab world.“):