Jackson Allen's Blog, page 23

Sci-Friday #191 – That Time Gordon Freeman Called In

Yay – Sci-Friday – we made it! Let’s enjoy that time Gordon Freeman called into Coast to Coast AM to describe his troubles at the Black Mesa Research Facility. This might be confusing to you if you’ve never played Half-Life, but if you have it’s positively hilarious. Take a listen:

So yes, in case you’re wondering – this is a total prank. The anonymous caller stays in character as ‘Gordon Freeman’ throughout the entire call and George Noory falls for it hook, line, and sinker. ‘Gordon’ goes through all the Half-Life story tropes, the facility admin, Dr. Breen, his friend Barney the security guard, they’re working on ‘portal technology’ and ‘he can’t talk about it.’

As I’ve said before, ‘you don’t need a big budget or crazy amounts of detail. All you need is a simple ‘what-if’ scenario, and your story will often write itself.’ In this case, the ‘what-if’ was: What if Gordon Freeman called a radio show? Positively brilliant.

If you enjoyed this discussion, please feel welcomed to dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years. Have a great weekend! 

Creating Art is Creating Yourself – Part II

Circling back around to something I wrote about almost two years ago – Creating Art is Creating Yourself. Back then, I said: “Creating art, putting it out there, getting the feedback through publication, letting failure help you begin more wisely. Creating art is creating yourself, providing you’re willing to let the process change you.”

Still true, and it’s time to talk about creating art and creating yourself now that I have a better understanding of what creativity does for, and to, you. If you’ll permit me, I’d like to articulate some of the things I’m still confused about, and leave myself open to the answers to some challenging questions.

I started Inkican in 2016 because I had some questions I had to answer. Who am I? What am I trying to say? How can my voice connect me to others? How can that conversation make the world better? Actually, let me take a step back – I didn’t have questions inside of me. I just new I had something inside – something that no amount of self-destructive behavior would kill. What was that thing? What did it want me to do?

It took me years to understand that, and I’m still working to understand. I don’t have the whole story yet, but I’ve gotten better at articulating the problem and potential solutions, and all this Inkican work is the reason why. This thing inside me has to come out.

It reminds me of an old song by a guy named John Lee Hooker. He recorded a song called Boogie Chillen’ and one line in the song always stuck with me: “One night, I was laying down and I heard mama and papa talking. Papa told Mama: ‘Let that boy boogie-woogie – it’s in him, and it’s got to come out.'” Yeah, people. It’s in me, and it’s got to come out. This Inkican work is about getting it out. 

How do you get it out? Well, you start. Simple as that, get whatever’s inside of you out – colored pencils on a blank sheet of paper, acrylic paint on a blank canvas, or in my case a keyboard and a blank screen. Just start, make something, write something down. Then look at it. Does *that* resonate with your soul?

Then you share it with others. ‘Here is something my creativity has moved me to make. Does it resonate with you?’ The act of self-expression is the first step in a feedback loop that helps you collect signal about your perceptions, experiences, and perspectives.

But wait, what’s ‘signal?’ Just as an army signals intelligence officer listens to everything happening around them, you’re listening to everyone who experiences your creation and catching their response. That’s ‘collecting signal.’ Where do you collect signal? In person, social media, whatever medium you’re using to put your work out there. As you create, publish, and listen, you’re looking for the answers to some important questions: What is the signal – what are people saying? What does it mean? What was I right about? What was I wrong about?

The next thing is covered in my Survival Guide for Creative People – managing your reaction to the signal. Some people like your work? Awesome! Many others do not? Catastrophe! Without proper management and preparation, you may find yourself drowning in a sea of emotions you weren’t expecting. Nobody ever tells you how to handle it when you find out that people think your work sucks.

Learning how to manage those emotions, channel the signal into actions, accepting that your ‘failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again?’ That’s all part of the process of creating yourself.

Creativity is an illeism that allows you to put your emotions, your experience in the third person so you can step back and gain perspective you’d never get otherwise. Create your art, let your art create you.

 

 

Notes from Eugene – 08/01/2023

The phone call came in on Monday – he was in a panic. “They pulled together some BS HR claim,” he said. “I just lost my job.” I sat there, disappointed but not surprised. He had always been too nice, too open, too naïve.

“Shut your mouth and lawyer up.” I hung up the phone, too fragile for such nonsense. Twenty years ago, I barely escaped with my mind and soul intact. Who am I to advise on successfully fighting a bad boss and a large corporation? RoseMarie smoked a cigarette out on the sidewalk. It only took a minute for me to tell her the story.

“Isn’t he your friend?”

“That’s not the point.”

RoseMarie’s eyes narrowed, sucking on her cancer stick until her cheeks sank into her skull. She gets her brand at the Cigarettes For Less, refuses to switch over to e-cigs. I drive her there since there’s a Safeway next door and the cats like their brand of generic dry food. Something in my answer has offended RoseMarie’s sense of justice.

“You ever get the feeling that maybe, it’s not about you?”

“I hear you,” I can feel my chest tightening, the anxiety seeping in. “If I was stronger, maybe I could do something.”

“You don’t know until you try.”

“Just leave me alone, okay?”

“It’s your life.”

I have problems of my own. The current draft of Mike Sierra Echo is 126 pages, eighty-one pages longer than the ex-president’s third indictment. What will it mean for the 2024 election? No one seems to know. The negative possibilities spiral out of control, like a galaxy sucked into the singularity of a black hole.

Meanwhile, Reddit and X (ex-Twitter) duke it out to be the most hated social media platform in the world, with Threads trailing behind – a toady to the big boys, too small to hurt, to mean to die. Earthquakes pulse across the Internet, thumps and rumbles that remind me of the fans jumping and screaming at a Taylor Swift concert.

But nevermind all that now. We’re both too old and too ugly for a fistfight. My friend – close though he is – has to fight some battles himself. Coming out of the darkness brings its own complications. Maybe I can make some phone calls. Maybe it’ll be okay this time. Maybe this is the beginning of a huge mistake.

I stood there in silence with RoseMarie until the sun slipped beneath the hills. The monsters weren’t due on Mill Street.

Sci-Friday #190 – How Did Oppenheimer’s Atomic Bomb Work?

People have been exploding this week about the Oppenheimer movie – for this Sci-Friday let’s answer the question: How did Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb really work? You may be surprised to learn that an atomic bomb’s detonation isn’t as simple as an explosive bomb. More is involved, and it underscores the pure genius at work in making this terribly-destructive weapon. Watch the video and then we’ll discuss what it all means below:



You can’t watch a video like this without wrestling with the human, moral questions of nuclear weapons. The human cost of the Manhattan Project is still being felt today, and the specter of nuclear holocaust has hung over humankind since 1945. Somehow, we’ve managed to live with the unthinkable, but that dark corner of terror continues to haunt us today. Oppenheimer knew it, he spent the rest of his life speaking out against the use of nuclear weapons and suffered greatly for it.

So, why did Oppenheimer do it? In his own words, Oppenheimer says “The horror of the war which military planners expected to continue for a long time was so very great that it was more or less taken for granted that if a new weapon could put an end to this agony, it should be so used.” Additionally, he later states an underlying hope that somehow the world would recognize the need for peace after seeing the atomic bomb’s destructive power. Sadly, history hasn’t supported that conclusion.

I hope you enjoyed this moment of scifi science! Please feel welcomed to dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years. Have a great weekend!

 

21st Century Malcontents

Today folks, let’s discuss 21st Century malcontents. What’s a malcontent? Why is it worth talking about? I’ll get into all that. First, let me take a moment to put my rant hat on.

——- Rant Hat On ——-

You are doing no one any good when you gatekeep new innovations in cleaner technology, more sustainable technology without providing a recommended solution. If you’re going to complain about cleaner technology, more sustainable technology it is your responsibility, nay – YOUR DUTY – to tell us how to make it better. If you aren’t prepared to do that, if you’re not willing to do that, then please do us all a favor and shut up.

Sorry – I hate to be stirred about this but well, I am. This comes out of twenty years spent listening to people gatekeep cool new green tech because they see potential problems in the solution. It’s almost a hobby for them – gatekeeping to prevent or dilute the progress that people are attempting to make as they create cleaner technology, more sustainable technology.

I know it’s cool to be the guy that says ‘hey you’re doing it wrong,’ but there’s a ‘missing stair’ in your social media hot take: what purpose is served by constantly telling people what is wrong with their solution? If you know so much about the problem and the solution, why haven’t you come up with a solution yet? You aren’t Noam Chomsky or Peter Finch in Network – babbling about the problem with the solution doesn’t help me – WHAT’S THE SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM??

Frankly if you feel you’re smart enough to point out others’ flaws, I’m surprised you haven’t seen this one for yourself.

——- Rant Hat Off ——-

Okay, sorry. I had to get that off my chest. What am I talking about? I ran across a response to one of my mastodon toots (not linking it – they’re not worth the attention) celebrating a new innovation in sustainable jet technology. Is it the last solution we’ll ever need? Of course, not. But progress is being achieved toward the goal of making our world more sustainable – that is worth celebrating every single day.

So you can imagine my frustration when the response to this celebration is to say, ‘hey they’re not doing enough. It’s not a complete solution.’ Don’t you think we already know that? Is there a purpose being served, elbowing in your way to the front of the conversation so everyone is forced to listen to you point out the flaws? Some people might say yes, but those people are solving the problem at the wrong level. They’re ignoring the very real need for cleantech / greentech solutions to be front and center of everything we’re innovating in the 21st century.

It’s worth mentioning that greentech and cleantech face a challenge never seen in the first and second Industrial Revolution, or even in the beginning of the digital revolution: Malcontents. You know them – the cranks who clogged up social media complaining about masks during COVID, or posting ‘All Lives Matter’ memes. Were they really bad actors we could ignore, or were they surfacing genuine concerns we should pay attention to?

You know the rest. Sociologists attribute America’s failures to cooperate in mitigating COVID-19 to our culture of ‘rugged individualism.’ I think the answer is far simpler – we have an ancient problem in the 21st Century: Malcontents. The dissatisfied; discontented – a malcontent is a person who, when not satisfied with current conditions, refuses to engage but refuses to yield. We’ve got a planet full of these cranks in 2023 and it’s going to be a huge problem until we deal with it.

If the First or Second Industrial Revolutions happened in 2023, we’d still be riding horses and wagons to market. If social media existed in the 19th and 20th centuries, malcontents would have killed off Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine for ‘killing jobs.’ They would have cancelled Henry Ford for developing an assembly line in Detroit. Marie Curie would have dropped all her atomic research after receiving death threats because ‘a woman’s place is in the home.’

Do you see where I’m going with this? All human progress has happened progressively, iteratively, and sometimes by embracing ideas that make no logical sense (Looking at you, people who rejected Esparanto). Our duty, as humanity works to save itself from its pollution-induced fate, is simple. I said it at the very beginning. If you’re going to complain about cleaner technology, more sustainable technology it is your responsibility, nay – YOUR DUTY – to tell us how to make it better.

If you aren’t prepared to do that, if you’re not willing to do that, then please do us all a favor and shut up. The world has enough misery due to malcontents. Don’t be part of the problem.

 

 

New Scifi Short Story – Mons City Obituary

Happy Monday, folks – excited to say I’ve published a new scifi short story: Mons City Obituary! It’s available free on Smashwords as part of my hot scifi summer free book giveaway! 

I wrote Mons City Obituary as a flash fiction piece and you’ll love it as a celebration of classic space race-era scifi mixed in with some ‘lumberjacks in space’ characters. Here’s a quick description:

They found Jenny on Sunday morning. Her chunky form slumped against fabbed brick walls of the Temple Bar, a mile from her coffin-sized hab. No statues or grand parades. No plaques or Netflix biopics. Jenny died as she lived: poor but proud, alone but autonomous. Jenny’s mortal remains passed into the composting system to be reconstituted into valuable plant fertilizer within a day. None of this was a surprise. Her kids stopped taking her calls years ago and would probably say she deserved it. Those regrettable facts ignore the truth: Jenny saved my life. I’m writing this obituary to record the story that Jenny never got to tell.

Who is Jenny? How did she die? That’s what you’ll have to read Mons City Obituary to find out. Grab it for free on Smashwords or support me by buying it on the links below. Happy reading!

 

 

Sci-Friday #189 – NASA’s Rubber Room

Happy Sci-Friday – please enjoy this video essay and 3D animation of NASA’s ‘Rubber Room,’ a safety bunker located beneath the launch pads at Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39. Watch the video and then we’ll discuss some interesting details:

When I first ran across this video, my first thought was ‘wait, is this like the rubber rooms of NYC’s Department of Education?’ Happily, the answer is no. NASA’s rubber rooms were purpose-built to address unthinkable safety issues (would you have time to escape thousands of tons of LOX and hydrogen exploding?) and reflects that period of exceptional engineering where smart guys really did try to think of and address every scenario.

Here’s some fun facts about the Rubber Room from Wikipedia: After the Apollo era ended, the rubber rooms fell into disrepair. Water pooled in the bunkers and the exit tunnels, and several species of Florida wildlife took up residence. When the launch pads were refurbished for the Space Shuttle, the bunkers were classified as “abandoned in place” rather than refurbished with the pad above. As of 2012, the pad B room was closed due to lead paint risks, but the pad A room remains accessible. When NASA leased pad A to SpaceX in 2014, the terms of the lease included a requirement that the rubber room, among other historic portions of the pad, be preserved as historical artifacts. 

I hope you enjoyed this moment of scifi science! Please feel welcomed to dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years. Have a great weekend!

Epitaph for a Hacker – RIP Kevin Mitnick

Just learned last night that Kevin Mitnick passed away on Sunday – I think it’s fitting to say RIP and write an epitaph for a hacker. I never knew the guy but it’s safe to say that his life story did a lot to inspire me as a writer. Was Mitnick a villain, a cyberpunk warrior, or a counter-culture activist? Let’s take a moment to pause and reflect.

First, some basic facts: As it says in his obit, ‘Kevin David Mitnick, 59, died peacefully on Sunday, July 16, 2023, after valiantly battling pancreatic cancer for more than a year. Kevin is survived by his beloved wife, Kimberley Mitnick, who remained by his side throughout their 14-month ordeal. Kimberley is pregnant with their first child. Kevin was ecstatic about this new chapter in his and Kimberley’s life together, which has now been sadly cut short.’

Mitnick was a lifetime hacker – makes sense for us to consider him since we’ve spent so much time documenting the History of Hacking. His life story was equally romanticized and demonized by media outlets – a cyberpunk hero or a villainous vandal, depending on who you talked to.

Law enforcement, major corporations seemed to hate and fear Kevin Mitnick. When he was released in prison, his supervised release forbade him to use any communications technology other than a landline telephone. How did he get started, and what drove Kevin Mitnick to become what Katie Hafner and John Markoff would later call ‘the Dark-Side Hacker?’

“At the end of the day, my goal was to be the best hacker.” – Kevin Mitnick

For Kevin Mitnick, the road to infamy was non-linear. In the 80s, he was a member of a small group of ‘phone phreakers.’ Phone phreaking, at the time, was an interesting cross between geekery, urban exploration, and crime. ‘Yes, it was wrong to break into major telephone companies, but was what were they actually doing actually wrong?’ – so the logic went.

Kevin’s curiosity, expertise, and daring led him to greater acts of cyber-shenanigans. The Internet, in its infancy, was largely open for those who knew how to get around telnet and home-brew BBS systems. Hackers began collecting what they learned on places like Pirate’s Cove in Boston and 8BBS. At the same time, Mitnick and other hackers began exploring virtually DEC and physically breaking into Pacific Bell’s COSMOS center in Los Angeles.

Mitnick and the public fascination with hacking seemed to feed on each other. Mitnick’s allegedly hacked into the North American Defense Command (NORAD), which he has always denied conducting, served as the inspiration for the 1983 film, WarGames. He denied ever actually doing this: “If I hacked into NORAD or wiretapped the FBI, I certainly would have been charged with it. I got into trouble largely because of my actions. However, because of the media reporting, I was treated as ‘Osama bin Mitnick.'”

A quick browse through Wikipedia fills in the gaps of the story: “In 1988, Mitnick was convicted for breaking into DEC’s network and stealing software and sentenced to 12 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release. Near the end of his supervised release, Mitnick hacked into Pacific Bell voicemail computers. After a warrant was issued for his arrest, Mitnick fled, becoming a fugitive for two-and-a-half years.

“The FBI arrested Mitnick on February 15, 1995 in Raleigh, North Carolina, on federal offenses related to a two-and-a-half-year period of computer hacking which included computer and wire fraud.

“Mitnick was released on January 21, 2000. During his supervised release, which ended on January 21, 2003, he was initially forbidden to use any communications technology other than a landline telephone. The case against Mitnick tested the new laws that had been enacted for dealing with computer crime, and it raised public awareness of security involving networked computers. The controversy remains, however, and the Mitnick story is often cited today as an example of the influence that newspapers and other media outlets can have on law enforcement personnel.

Kevin Mitnick moved to Las Vegas and became a public speaker, author, and security consultant after his release from prison. He died there last Sunday at the age of 59. I keep coming back to the same question: What do we learn from the life and times of Kevin Mitnick?

While many people focus on the technology and danger of hacking, I feel like there’s a ‘missing stair’ in the motivation of people like Kevin Mitnick. Ignore the tactics, study the motivation. Why do they do what they do?

I’ll talk more about this later but I think the answer in a nutshell is: social mobility. Kevin, as a poor kid, relied on the bus system in Los Angeles to get around. Then he discovered with a few simple tweaks, the system could be made to serve him. He had free rides wherever he went. Later, with phone phreaking, he had free phone calls!

It’s hard to say ‘no’ to that kind of social mobility, especially when you’re a latchkey kid to a single parent within a system that has largely failed you. Was Mitnick a villain, a cyberpunk warrior, or a counter-culture activist? The answer to this question is: none of the above.

I would invite the reader to do one thing that forty years worth of law enforcement and media hype never seemed to do: Look at Kevin Mitnick as a person.

Good night, weirdo.

 

 

Mars – Musk and Bezos Aren’t Going Anywhere

Interesting Twitter scroll this morning regarding Mars and yes, it reassures us that Musk and Bezos aren’t going anywhere. Remember when I said ‘life on Mars will suck?’ I wasn’t kidding and here’s some more context, if you needed it. Read on:

Brilliant takedown of the ‘Mars for Billionaires’ idea. I thought it was a bad idea to begin with, but I appreciate @Sim_Kern saying it, too. Of course I’m not saying @Sim_Kern is the smartest human ever (She’s using Threads … ew) but we can use every brain we can get when it comes to SAVING THE HUMAN RACE.

May this motivate the Musksimps and Bezosbrains to re-think their cunning plan – if a billionaire does blast off from Earth, there’s almost no way they’ll take you with them. Even if you find a way to Mars anyway, there’s zero chance you’ll enjoy the ride.

Think about it.

Home is Where Your People Are – Reddit, Kbin, and Mastodon

Vacation gave me time to think – “Home is where your people are” – here are some notes on Reddit, Kbin, and Mastodon. The last couple of weeks validated my decision to move to the Fediverse. Let me share some conclusions with you – an author or author-supporter – about social media platforms for your personal creative project.

Number one – the much-touted Twitter replacement, Threads – launched a couple of weeks ago to massive fanfare. Should you, or I, be on Threads? It’s a Mastodon-adjacent social media platform owned by Meta. ‘Nuff said. Everything I’ve said about Meta/Facebook being bad for authors is going to be true about Threads, if it isn’t true already. Last week, I ran across a Toot that suggests Threads wild sign-up numbers are nothing more than a cheap bot sham:

“My partner just created her # Threads account and the account that showed up on top as suggestion to follow was mine. However, I don’t have a Threads account. Basically, anyone who has an Instagram account, #Meta is automatically creating a shadow account for them and also allowing users to follow those shadow accounts. My partner had tonnes of follow requests as soon as she made the account.” – @Some_Emo_Chick

Number two – the implosion of Reddit as the dominant virtual third place continues. Reddit’s new monetization strategy is ‘converting Reddit gold into real money.’ That’s right, when you create things and people give you Reddit gold, we’ll give you a cut! Don’t worry, bots won’t make this place unusable – we got rid of all the third party app developers who manufactured anti-bot apps for us!

Reddit – started as a genuine, altruistic virtual third place – has become a terrifying experiment in cash-grabbing. “We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive,” Steve Huffman the CEO of Reddit, wrote in a recent AMA. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

I’m not the only one who feels this way. Cory Doctorow drew an interesting parallel between forest fires and social media companies. “We don’t have those controlled burns anymore. Yesterday’s giants tower over all, forming a thick canopy. The internet is ‘five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four’ … ‘Mark Zuckerberg is personally monumentally unsuited to serving as the unelected, unaccountable permanent social media czar for three billion people. The real problem is that no one should have that job. That job shouldn’t exist. We don’t need to find a better Mark Zuckerberg. We need to abolish Mark Zuckerberg.”

The Failure of Virtual Third Places

Third places, by definition, “are ‘anchors’ of community life and facilitate and foster broader, more creative interaction. In other words, ‘your third place is where you relax in public, where you encounter familiar faces and make new acquaintances.'” Third places historically were created as a public service, not as a public

Virtual third places with parasocial relationships need to take a page from actual third places with parasocial relationships – the medieval tavern, gardens, libraries. Your people were there – so your home was there. Third places exist because to serve the community, the community doesn’t exist to serve them.

More and more, oligarch-run social media platforms have abandoned this simple concept. Twitter, Meta, and Reddit are different manifestations of afluenza at billionaire scale. It isn’t enough to build a third place, or support a third place – IT HAS TO BE MY THIRD PLACE.

When you think about it – it’s pretty sad. Musk and Zuck, can’t say ‘yes’ to the question ‘Is home where your people are?’ Home is where they own things – home is where they control things. They don’t think in terms of connection, community, and trust. Musk and Zuck think in terms of control, coercion, and custody. Sad. People like Musk and Zuck are going to go to their deathbeds never experiencing the humanness of altruism. We’re all paying the price.

Virtual Third Places Can Succeed

The only rational answer to these trillion-dollar monuments of failure is to build a universe where they don’t exist because they can’t. We’ve watched metadata-selling, you-are-the-product virtual third places like Facebook and Twitter fail for nearly twenty years now. One would think that the answer would have manifested itself before now, yet here we are continuing to struggle with the pons asinorum. 

Think of social media platforms like gardens. You can spend thousands drowning your flowers in insecticide, OR you can grow a garden that discourages pests and encourages holistic growth. Good gardens take time to grow.

Kbin and Mastodon – so far – seem to be the Internet version of a holistic garden. Gardens – as you’ll recall – are third places. They’re taking time to grow, but we’re on our way! Fediverse-based social media, by contrast, exists by the support and consent of the community. Donations are accepted to help support the platform with more servers to improve service, but otherwise no cash-grabbing involved. Discussions are boosted by choice, not by promotion. Your ideas are worth spreading, or they aren’t.

On Mastodon and Kbin – We’re here because we want to be. Our needs are being filled there. If we stop getting our needs filled there, we’ll go someplace. 10.4M active users may not seem like much, but there’s a certain comfort in knowing they are real. My people are here – the Fediverse. Bots, wherever they are, seem to be the exception, not the rule. The network is the power, not the place.

So to wrap all of this up, I want you to remember this – Home is Where Your People Are. Home is where you can experience connection, community, and trust. Wherever that place happens to be – go there. That’s where I’ll be. That’s where we can be together.

PS – Grab one of my stories from Smashwords if you haven’t already – they’re free!