M. Thomas Apple's Blog, page 62

It’s Hot Enough to (Insert Offensive Ethnic Slur or Sexual Reference Here)

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I was going to say “it’s so hot you can fry an egg” but it turns out that the temperature needs to be at least 130F for that to happen.

But still…it’s hot here in Kyoto. It’s freakin’ hot. And not that “dry heat” blah blah. The kind of heat that makes me use up three hand towels just to wipe off the sweat from my arms on the way to work. The kind of heat that makes it painful to breath, let alone walk to work.

Naturally, I’ll be going to my martial arts practice later. This is because I am basically insane and enjoy losing 10 pounds in sweat within 30 minutes.

All this makes me wish for the cold reaches of space…

Well, maybe not. In a single day on Mars, the high can go from a pleasant (if dusty and oxygen-bare) 70F to a yes, you will die frigid -100F.

Let’s go back to searching for people trying to fry eggs on the sidewalk (literally hundreds of videos…what’s with the egg-frying fetish?) and trying to break the 60,000 word mark on the novel…

Farewell, Harlan, y’old so and so

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I remember the only time I met Harlan Ellison.

Well, “met” is perhaps too strong a word. Talked with. Listened to. Got a signature and shook his hand. I was nervous as all hell.

I was living in Boston at the time, working for a Jewish community weekly newspaper (one of only two goyim on staff). A reporter I had a mild crush on had told me she wanted to go to an open lecture by Harlan, so I managed to get two tickets for the limited audience event.

In the end, she had to undergo surgery and couldn’t attend, so I invited my housemate instead. We met after work at a great big Anglican cathedral downtown. I had on my typical button down shirt and slacks. My roommate had come from the bronze casting foundry, covered in bronze dust and looking exhausted.

He was none too happy about going into a cathedral. He was Jewish (my mom is Catholic and my dad is Methodist, so I’m naturally a “free agent” agnostic). But we went in, showed our tickets, and sat down in a pew towards the front.

Just a few minutes later, without any announcement being made, Harlan came in and walked past our pew. A guy seated behind us suddenly hailed Harlan, offered a brown envelope, asking Harlan to look at his manuscript.

Harlan shook his hand and sat down next to me, explaining over the back of our pew that he couldn’t look at the manuscript because he might get accused of stealing ideas if he happened to write a similar story in the future.

“I’m sure it’s a great story…” he started, then corrected himself. “No, it’s probably a piece of s$#t, but anyway, sorry. Keep writing.”

Then he winked at us and got up again to begin his sermon. It was all we could do not to bust up.

And what a sermon it was. The stories. The stories! His argument with Star Trek. Training with Bruce Lee. Being briefly in the Army and going AWOL. Staggering into a Born Again Christian revival tent, arms spread, shouting that once he’d been blind but now could see, hallelujah, he’d been saved.

Going into a hotel in Indiana and seeing “a dead Jew hanging from the back of the door” (audience collectively caught our breaths).

Asking the front desk to take down the crucifix (we breathed out in relief). And at the concierge’s bewildered expression, adding with a Boris Karloff flourish, “And turn all the mirrors around, too.”

He finished by pontificating from the elevated lectern, preaching down at the speculative fiction congregation. We lined up to mount the spiraling stairs, books under each arm. He signed one book, and I asked if he’d sign another for my colleague in the hospital.

“What’s her name?”

“Fern.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Fern, sir.”

I gulped. “Sir.”

“And please.”

“Yes, sir. Please.”

He cracked a devilish grin, scrawling a crooked signature with a practiced hand.

“There you are, sir,” he quipped, handing me his own books.

“Thank you, sir,” I said. He shook my hand and motioned for the next in line.

I returned to the pew, shaking a bit and sweating. As I sat, my roommate turned to me and spoke for the only time that night.

“This guy’s a complete asshole,” he said. “He’s awesome!”

Farewell, Harlan, you cantankerous bastard. You were brilliant, obnoxious, abrasive, and funny as hell. Of course you had to go and die on my birthday. Repent!

The extrasolar immigrants are/have been/will be here

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Though discovered nearly four years ago, an asteroid in orbit near Jupiter ( BZ509, or just “bee-zee” for short) is now said to be originally from outside our solar system. The aliens are here (have been here…).It’s a controversial idea that many astronomers disagree with. Unlike ‘Oumuamua which came hurtling towards the Sun at breakneck speeds before being flung back from whence it came, BZ is locked into a retrograde orbit with Jupiter.

Only it’s too old to have done so recently. And if it’s as old (or older than) the rest of the solar system, it should be orbiting in the same direction as everything else.

What’s more, there are 82 other asteroids on similar retrograde orbits. It’s possible they originated in the Oort Cloud, and not from extrasolar sources. But who knows?

I’m a writer, Jim, not an astronomer. Where the scientists see opportunities for journal publications and endless academic arguments, I see storyline possibilities…

In his house at R’yleh…

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Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!

In his house at R’yleh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming…

…because of course his ancestral DNA was brought to Earth aboard an asteroid, as part of an ancient bombardment that seeded life…

Well, maybe not. It’s a controversial idea only in the sense that octopi are not aliens and no DNA can possibly have survived an asteroid bombardment hundreds of millions (or even billions) of years ago.

Still, asteroids seeding the universe is a fun idea for fiction writers. Which is the germ of my novel in progress…

https://qz.com/1281064/a-controversial-study-has-a-new-spin-on-the-otherworldliness-of-the-octopus/

Half-finished, half-destroyed, hybrid? Syncretic culture

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During the first week of May my family and I had a chance to explore ancient Greece.

Well, OK, modern Greece. With some ruins thrown in.

In addition to the museums of Byzantine culture, early Christian churches, old Turkish baths, reconstructed tombs of Phillip II of Macedon and all that, we also wandered around downtown Thessaloniki (Thessalonika) quite a bit. I was struck by the prevalence of half-destroyed, half-rebuilt buildings in various states of disrepair/renewal/disusage/usage.

I’ve been obsessed with Alexander the Great (Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ Μέγας, Alexandros ho Megas) since childhood. At the time, I had been introduced to Greek myths (and later, Norse, Germanic, and Celtic myths) by my father, and I eagerly devoured every book I could find. The books I read as a child presented the gods, goddesses, satyrs and nymphs, demigods and heroes as individual people/images that had remained the same since the world first began.

Now I know that they were mostly hybrids, syncretic images created from the merging, borrowing, conquering, combining of cultures, beliefs, and ancient peoples.  Some of this syncretism surely came about by design; politically, it would have been easier to accommodate conquered peoples by deliberately blurring beliefs, presenting them as differing aspects of the same concepts.

But how much of this hybridization and change happened over time, by accident, naturally, as people themselves mixed, intermarried, learned to live together, and formed a new culture (or cultures)?

As a teacher of intercultural communication, I’m interested in helping my students understand this process, but as a writer, I’m also interested in portraying how this might happen, both in the past and in the future.

What would happen if people originally from different cultures found themselves isolated on a new world, millions of miles away from their homes, and came to start a new culture?

Religion and religious beliefs often make SF writers nervous. SF movies and TV shows typically avoid the topic, for fear of offending religious viewers. But if SF intends to portray the “what if” of actual human history, religious beliefs and origin myths cannot be ignored. Beliefs drive culture. Cultural accommodation, assimilation, or syncretism should be a part of any good SF.

Figuring out how to write it – that’s another issue…

Why I’m leaving Facebook (and why you should, too)

[image error]About ten days ago, I started a countdown on my Facebook “wall.”

Some of my “friends” asked if I was going to send something into space.

When I “commented” that I was leaving Facebook as of May 1st, they begged me not to.

The system will police itself, they argued. User complaints and the #deletefacebook movement/backlash would force Zuckerberg & Co. to change their policies.

Hardly. Instead, they’re doubling down.

In fact, Facebook has been terrified for years that its users would eventually find out that  it’s nothing more than an online marketing tool for greedy companies – and that Facebook has sold them out.

It took me a while, but finally I decided enough was enough.

I’m leaving Facebook. Here are a few reasons why I hope you will, as well.

1. Facebook is watching your every move, 24/7

Even when you’re not actually using FB, it’s tracking you. Every time you click on an ad on FB, every time you “like” a web site using the FB button, every time you (of course) do a FB “quiz,” you’re giving information about yourself, your family, and your “friends” over to hundreds (thousands?) of third-party companies.

This is the nature of “Big Data.” But although companies claim that the data is kept anonymous, it’s not. They know who you are and where you are.

Originally, FB allowed users to opt out of ads. But not any more. They can’t figure out how to make money other than by tracking you every where, all the time.

This is Big Brother. If you’re not frightened yet, you should be.

2. Facebook is encouraging your reality tunnel to become a cave

The use of algorithms in Facebook’s “news feed” means that you only see posts that are similar to what you have already posted. So the more you write about a certain topic, the more posts you see about that topic.

That goes for attitudes, emotions, “facts,” and specific words that you use.

Eventually, you only see posts that reflect your own feelings back at you. Of course we all have a tendency to favor those who agree with us. But when we never talk to people who are dissimilar, who come from different backgrounds, who may have even slightly different ways of looking at the world, this reinforces our tribalism.

It’s been well known for a while now that SNS in general has widened the political divide between progressives and authoritarians. Now we now that politicians and lobbyists are actively encouraging such behavior by spreading rumors and disinformation. Governments are promoting chaos in the voting process by exploiting our own psychology via carefully targeted online ads.

It’s true. Facebook is destroying modern democracy.

3. Facebook has no idea what “friends” and “community” actually mean

Mark Zuckerberg, one of the “founders” of Facebook (who nearly got expelled from Harvard for copyright and privacy infringement, and was sued – successfully – by former classmates for stealing their ideas), once famously claimed that he wanted “everybody in the world to be friends” (or some such words…a recent post says he wants everybody to “connect” and “build strong communities.” And no, I’m not going to post a link to his Facebook post.)

Now we know why. He wants everybody’s private information to help businesses target them with ads.

But aside from that bit of nefariousness, why on earth would you want to be friends with everybody on earth?

At one point, I had over 500 “friends” on Facebook. Occasionally I would get a reminder that I had been “friends” with somebody for X years.

X years on Facebook, of course. I had been actual friends with some people for twenty to twenty-five years (Facebook has been around about 14 years but only took off after it went public twelve years ago and then finally turned a profit for the first time nine years ago).

So why am I always using quotation marks to denote Facebook “friends”?

Because a lot of them are not really friends. I value friendships, but I only confide in a limited number of people. I’m uncomfortable in large crowds, and while I do enjoy a night out, after a short while I need to unplug and recharge in a quiet room, alone, with a book.

I don’t think I’m the only person who needs the occasional break. There are lots of introverts out there.

The problem is that Facebook is what happens when an extravert tries to take over the Internet.

We do not all need to be “friends,” Zuckerberg. We can all be friendly, but if by “friends” you mean sharing private and personal information with complete strangers halfway around the world, then no thank you. This definition of “friends” is shallow and hollow. Just like the man who invented the definition.

“Building communities”? What does this shallow serial plagiarist know about actual communities? Making a Facebook “Page” and sharing stories that haven’t been fact-checked doesn’t qualify as a “community.”

You want to “build a community,” then how about shutting off your smartphone and introducing yourself to people in the apartment next door? How about finding out who’s new to the neighborhood and then holding a barbeque with all your neighbors? Or going to a social event with fellow colleagues at work? Or with parents of your kids’ friends at school? Or joining a social group that actually does stuff together in real life, and not in some “online” virtual “community”?

Facebook is encouraging us to stay online all the time, pretending that we are “engaged” in a “community,” when really we’re just sharing posts from people who reflect our own opinions and whining about everybody else not like us, never doing anything in reality.

 

4. Facebook doesn’t really give a rat’s behind about you

If FB really cared about your right to privacy, the company would obey the law.

Instead, they will copy over 1.5 billion accounts that currently exist on servers in Europe to the US and Canada, where that pesky new EU privacy law doesn’t apply.

The new law is called the EU General Data Protection Regulation, and requires online companies to ask for permission before they use online data for business purposes.

So why is FB spending enormous time and effort to move all these accounts?

They don’t give a crap about users.

Except to sell them like a product.

Companies now scour prospective employees’ SNS to uncover “undesirable” traits. Facebook wants to go one step further by using data about users’ personalities to send them ads.

It wants to use facial recognition technology not only to encourage “tagging” in photos and videos but to require tagging. So that users can find “new friends.” (So that Facebook can get even more data.)

It’s only a matter of time before this information is used not just to analyze people, but to control them.

Everywhere you go. Everything you see. Everything you read.

“Every breath you take…every move you make…”

I would prefer that Gordon Sumner’s lyrics remain a song and not a reality.

Yeah, but can we do anything about it?

Online companies should be forced to give our information back to our control.

But they won’t be. They have no ethics and no morals and cannot be trusted.

So we have to take our information back by ourselves.

Delete SNS apps from your smartphones and tablets. Don’t log in to apps or websites using your Facebook ID. Don’t let them track you.

Refuse to give private information like your mother’s “maiden” name or your childhood street address.

Stop using those asinine online “games” like Farmcrap and Candy Crud; deny them access to your friends names, birthdays, and email addresses.

Take down the photos and videos of people you know. That especially include your kids (who deserve the right to control their own online presence).

Demand transparency and simplified privacy laws.

And #deletefacebook – because it’s just not worth what you’re giving up for it.

(And yes, I am fully aware of the irony of having this “shared” on Facebook. It will be one of my final posts before pulling the plug on May 1 – International Workers’ Day.)

Brand me? Brand *this*

[image error]On a lark, I signed up for a “BrandYourself” account a few weeks ago.

I’d read about it via a Quartz link and was curious. I’ve been living outside the US Culture Bubble for about two decades now, so I’ve largely missed the “OMG my employer is checking my SNS posts” terror that (apparently) has been sweeping the nation.

My first BrandYourself warning: You have 738 Risk Factors!

OMG. What were they? Was I really putting myself at risk?Of course, I haven’t bothered to pay anything, but my free account did allow me to peruse the nature of said “risk factors.”

One of the “risk factors” was “bigoted language.”

Gee, that’s not good. What did I say?

I checked it out.

Ah. I posted an article about how Jeff Sessions has a racist past, and a Facebook friend commented that Sessions was obviously a bigoted white supremacist.

This, evidently, qualified as “bigoted language.” A complaint that a Nazi was a Nazi. Hm.

Another “risk factor”?

I posted a photo of a beer vending machine from the inside of a hotel on Amami-Oshima, southern Japan.

OMG, my future employer might think I drink beer. (Ya think?)

Another one?

My friends are I dared talk politics.

I think I detect a pattern here. OMG, I am, like, *so* offensive.

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So…according to this company, I should never discuss political or religious beliefs, I should never post any pictures of alcoholic beverages (even when I’m not actually drinking), and I should never point out that people are racist.

In other words, I should never have an opinion about anything that actually matters and I should behave like a good like Beaver Cleaver?

Here’s what I say to “BrandYourself” people:

Brand *this* MFer.

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Sakura: An Easter story

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My friend, you died on Easter morning.

We all knew it would happen sometime soon. But still it seemed sudden.

My grandfather also died during Easter weekend, many years ago. Good Friday, in fact. I was 10. We had to have the wake and funeral right away. The Church said they wouldn’t allow him to be buried on Easter Sunday.

My mother told us that Grandpa went straight to Heaven, because he died on Good Friday. That we would one day see him again.

Terry, you died on April 1st. But it was no Fool’s. It was Easter. You were sleeping, and did not wake.

Easter afternoon, I went with my daughters to the park. Children played. Parents talked and ate sandwiches. The cherry blossoms were in full bloom. Past peak, just a little. The sky was a perfect blue, the temperature mild. Bumblebees chased each other among the pink-covered tree branches. Spring birds chirped and looked for a place to nest. Overhead, an airplane coming in for a landing.

It doesn’t seem fair. You are not here.

I’m supposed to do research today. From tomorrow, prepare for classes. New students will arrive, and I need to meet them. Friday, the first class.

But these students will never know you, Terry. From you, I learned the art of communication, presenting, editing, organizing. Being open was never my strong point, but you always gave an ear (and a heart) to everyone.

I still hear your voice. Many dinners and drinks, many stories and long conversations. Politics and religion. Teaching and learning. Relationships and family. You were my teacher. My co-author. My brother.

The wind picks up. Scattered blossoms flutter. Bees buzz. Another airplane. A tennis ball thwack. Students laugh.

The world is an emptier place without you, my friend. But how much sadder, how poorer would it be, had you never been.

Rest in peace, Terry. We will meet again, someday.

Technology and control: The Eye in the Sky/I

[image error]It’s been a few days now since the “big reveal” that a social science researcher sold information from 50,000,000 Facebook users to a third party company (which used said info for various campaign purposes, but that’s another topic for another blog….).

Somehow, we all managed to be surprised by this. What about our right to privacy? How dare our personal information be used without our permission!

How did we all get so naïve about technology and its control over us?

Every time we invent something to make our lives more convenient, we quickly become so dependent on it that we can no longer remember a time we didn’t have the technology.

Remember when you didn’t have a phone?

The internet?

A computer?

A TV?

TV gave us the illusion of choice. Even before cable TV, we still had a handful of broadcast channels. Then came cable TV in all its coaxial glory. Now we had dozens of channels from which to choose — except the programming was pretty much the same.

In fact, the programs we watched, the content and character and genre — these were all controlled by the broadcast companies. Oh, we could switch the channel, to show our disdain for certain shows (and TV companies still obsess over “ratings” rather than “intelligent, creative content).

But we couldn’t control the schedule. It controlled us. We *had* to be home at a certain day and time to watch our favorite shows.

Then came the VHS recorder. Now we could record what we wanted and watch it when we liked. (If we could figure out how to program the damn thing, and if the VHS cassette actually worked properly, andbif it didn’t accidentally record over our other favorite shows).

But the content…the commercials…

Along comes Netflix. Now we can control everything!

Naïve. Of course, we can’t. We are still under control. Like hamsters in a media cage, pushing buttons for pellets. Instant gratification.

I logged into my Facebook page this morning via PC (not mobile, since I’ve removed those apps) to check on things. A message popped up: “Your fans haven’t heard from you in a while!”

It’s been a week. “OMG!” my endorphins scream. “We need stimulation! AAaAaAh!”

We post and post and post, desperate for social validation.

“Like me! Share me! Love me!” we scream at each other on SNS. We share things that strangers should not share, and complain when they don’t (or complain when they do…)

We use technology to attack each other and be attacked, which infuriates us, and so we attack again.

Who controls whom? Or what?

Information is control. Technology is its Tool. We are the Watcher Being Watched, the Eye in the Sky. Judging and being judged. We are the jury and executioner.

Blame Facebook? Blame yourself. Blame human nature.

Wait a hundred years…

Death of a Cherry Tree

Click to view slideshow.

This past Monday, city workers came to cut down a cherry tree near our house. It had been there for years.

We found out later that a neighbor had complained that leaves falling in her backyard were a nuisance to clean. The fact that local children (and adults alike) treasured the cherry blossoms each spring seemed to escape her.

And cherry blossom viewing season is just around the corner. What a shame. A waste.

More’s the shame, I only have two pictures of the tree in full bloom.

Fleeting moments, lost in time and memory.

My children wrote a heartfelt letter to the tree, and I taped it as best I could to the stump:

“To the Cherry Tree,

For always showing your cherry blossoms to us until now, thank you.

We miss you, but we’ll never forget that this stump is the stump of a cherry tree.

If this stump ever grows, we want to see cherry blossoms again.”

Stories are made by fools like me…

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