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Twitter Will Murder You While You Sleep

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

If you are vir­tu­ous, you have have lit­tle to fear from Twitter.  But if you screw up, it will cut you, man. It will cut you DEEP.    I will explain how I think this can eas­ily be avoided, but first, let’s talk about Twitter.  I swore I would never make a blog post about the “power of Twitter” but this is too fas­ci­nat­ing to pass up

In the after­math of the #ama­zon­fail  deba­cle, I am only just now com­ing to real­ize the ulti­mate power of Twitter and just how dan­ger­ous it can be to the sta­tus quo and those in posi­tions of power.  That power remains mostly untapped and com­pletely undi­rected, for now.

The scan­dal broke over the week­end.  I won’t go into detail, but let me sum­ma­rize by say­ing, basi­cally, a crap-​​ton of books by gay authors, on GLBT themes, etc  were delisted from search and from sales rank­ings.   I was dri­ving cross coun­try and missed the begin­ning, so when I tuned in on Monday, it was a bit bewil­der­ing.  I imag­ine that’s how Amazon’s man­age­ment felt on Monday morn­ing when they were briefed on the issue.

From my per­spec­tive, the issue was a per­fect storm of  issues– GLBT rights and pub­lish­ing.   As I move in writing/​publishing cir­cles,  the last cou­ple of days on my twit­ter feed have been one long angry, out­raged dis­cus­sion, with links, retweets, the whole deal.  It con­tin­ues as I type this.

Don’t mis­take my detached atti­tude here to be one of con­done­ment.  What hap­pened was bad for writ­ers, bad for pub­lish­ers, and as we have seen, very, very bad for Amazon.  I am how­ever ambivi­lent about ascrib­ing blame or malev­o­lence.  I’ve worked in large orga­ni­za­tions, and it’s very easy for me to believe that this entire prob­lem was the result of a bureau­cratic error.

In the infor­ma­tion void that existed on the week­end, many inten­tions were invented to explain.  Right-​​wingers had col­lab­o­rated to manip­u­late the sys­tem via tags.  Amazon had capit­u­lated to right-​​wingers and dropped the titles.  It was a pro­gram­ming error.  A mas­sive con­spir­acy of inter­net pranksters man­u­fac­tured it so that they could feed on the out­raged tears of  twit­ter users.  And so on.

Much like Nature abhors a vac­cum, the inter­net ahbors an absence of information.

Amazon’s lack of imme­di­ate response allowed the con­tro­versy to build to unprece­dented lev­els.   Rarely have I seen the inter­net move in one angry direc­tion so effec­tively.  It never would have moved this quickly in the time before Twitter.  Email, texts, none of them had the per­fect assem­bly of fea­tures and usabil­ity that Twitter does.

The equa­tion looks some­thing like this:

(Incredibly Easy Link Sharing + Social Networking + Tagging) X Programming Error/​Scandal/​Gaffe  = Internet Shitstorm of Epic Proportions

We’ve been see­ing this with peo­ple los­ing jobs via Twitter as well.  You tend to think, as a twit­ter user, that the world is small, lim­ited to your fol­low­ers.  But they fol­low oth­ers, and oth­ers fol­low them, and it’s easy to resend some­thing you said with a click, and… it’s Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, only instead of being linked to the excel­lent star of such films as Footloose and Wild Things, you get fired and mocked by 30 mil­lion people.

Do some­thing bad, catch the atten­tion of Twitter, and don’t respond for sev­eral days.  This is a recipe for total and utter rep­u­ta­tion ani­hil­i­a­tion.

So how do you avoid this?  Well, nim­ble com­pa­nies should not be threat­ened by Twitter’s awe­some might.  The faster you fill the void of infor­ma­tion, the more quickly Twitter as a whole will move on to some­thing else.   It prob­a­bly doesn’t mat­ter what you say.  All you have to do is acknowl­edge it.  Say, “We see the prob­lem. We don’t know what’s caus­ing it.  We’re on it.  Thank you.” And then keep peo­ple updated.  The lack of response is as impor­tant as the mistake.

Larger com­pa­nies like Amazon face a big­ger prob­lem.  I sus­pect Amazon can’t decide what brand of toi­let paper to put in the employee bath­room with­out six­teen com­mit­tees and mas­sive exec­u­tive over­sight.   The peo­ple in power in these com­pa­nies tend to believe in out-​​dated ideas like “I shouldn’t have to work on the weekends.”

So, two things if you’re Amazon-​​big.  One–your rep­u­ta­tion doesn’t turn off on the week­ends. You need peo­ple mon­i­tor­ing it at all times thanks to the inter­net.  And Two– empower the peo­ple mon­i­tor­ing your rep­u­ta­tion to man­age it.

Sounds risky, huh?  Only Bezos should have that power!  Right?  That’s the kind of think­ing that will get you into an #ama­zon­fail scale mess.  Top-​​down man­age­ment method­olo­gies will not last in today’s cli­mate.   Twitter and the inter­net will eat such com­pa­nies alive.  If your sur­vival depends on the decision-​​making of one or a few wealthy elites who can’t be both­ered to check their email on Sunday, to call an emer­gency meet­ing or some­thing, then you are, roy­ally and truly fucked.

To sum­ma­rize:  pay atten­tion, respond quickly, and for god’s sake, set up an search feed track­ing your com­pany name.  If Comcast can respond to any tweet that men­tions their name, so can Amazon.

Or, ya know, we can all start shop­ping at Barnes & Noble or Powell’s or some other smaller inde­pen­dent chain.  We don’t really care.  Twitter as a whole loves get­ting angry.  Outrage, kit­tens with bad gram­mar, and porn  are the fuels in the engines of the inter­net. And the inter­net makes it just as easy to order a book from Mom & Pop Reseller as it is AmazonCo.  Brand loy­alty doesn’t really count for much, and in the face of con­tro­versy, it evap­o­rates pretty damned quickly.

The Madness and Genius of John Brown

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I can still remem­ber the first time I ever saw an image of John Brown.

I’m ten years old, and we are tour­ing the Capitol build­ing in Topeka Kansas.  We have been learn­ing Kansas his­tory all year, all about Bloody Kansas and the found­ing of Topeka and the Nebraska-​​Kansas Act.  None of it means any­thing to me. The Capital build­ing smells funny and is full of weird old men who look like grand­fa­thers, wear­ing ugly brown suits.  It’s the mid-​​80s and polit­i­cal fash­ion in Kansas has not left the 1970s.   I want to climb the 296 steps to the top, to look out upon the city of my birth, but we are not allowed because they are reha­bil­i­tat­ing the old dome.  At that very moment, my father’s father is hang­ing from scaf­fold­ing some­where high above us and installing new windows.

Our tour enters the east wing, and there I see for the first time what is to become one of the most iconic paint­ings of my entire life, along­side works by Monet, Dali, and van Gough.  It depicts a giant of a man, with a long and flow­ing beard, mad­ness in his pierc­ing eyes, hold­ing a rifle in one hand and an open book, pre­sum­ably the bible in the other, stand­ing astride two fallen sol­diers.    Behind him Union and Confederacy forces clash.   On the Confederacy and the man’s left, flames fill the sky with dark clouds, and on his right, with the Union, a twister has come down from the sky like God’s own fin­ger.   I remem­ber nearly every detail of this paint­ing from that moment on.  But it is the eyes of John Brown, the man in the paint­ing, that never leave me.  Those mad, mad eyes.

They lec­ture us in school about John Brown, the abo­li­tion­ist.  His his­tory is framed as a fail­ure.  John Brown the abo­li­tion­ist set out to start an upris­ing among the slaves.  His clash here in Osawatomie where I write this is con­sid­ered by some to be the first bat­tle of the Civil War.    But he was tried and hung in Virginia before the war ever began, and in his spe­cific goals, he was indeed a failure.

I grew up think­ing of the man as an tragic com­i­cal fig­ure, a fool with a sad end.  A man who dreamed of doing some­thing amaz­ing and fail­ing at it.  A man who was mad as a hat­ter, because that is what my teach­ers said.  Madness was the thing I always asso­ci­ated with him.  He fright­ened me, with those eyes, and with his actions of the Pottawatomie Massacre.

But today, I vis­ited the John Brown Museum and I learned things that put John Brown in an entirely dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive for me.  He was many things, but I am not so sure he was a fool.

Most every­one famil­iar with Civil War his­tory is famil­iar with the inci­dent at Harper’s Ferry, in which John Brown unsuc­cess­fully  led an attack and failed to ini­ti­ate a slave revolt.  He was cap­tured and even­tu­ally hung by the state of Virginia.    The way the story of Harper’s Ferry was por­trayed to me in my school­ing at least was that it was a ter­ri­bly mis­guided attack, a fool­ish one, and that only an ego­ma­ni­a­cal mad­man would think such an attack could suc­ceed.  Another black eye was that the first casu­alty of the bat­tle was a freed black man (not among Brown’s men).    Brown’s life, like many of the men from the time, was full of a mix­ture of busi­ness suc­cess and fail­ures.  He tried many paths in mak­ing a career for him­self.  But when his sons were threat­ened by pro-​​slavery forces here in Osawatomie, he set out from back east to come and help pro­tect his fam­ily and help fight to make Kansas a free state.

At the time, “Border Ruffians” had gath­ered in the area, all pro-​​slavery men, mostly from Missouri, around Osawatomie.  They intended to attack and wipe out the abo­li­tion­ist set­tle­ment.   Brown and his fam­ily, act­ing in I guess what might be a pre­emp­tive retal­i­a­tion, attacked and mur­dered 5 men, hack­ing them to death with broadswords, not miles away from the place where I sit and type this entry.  This became known as the Pottawatomie Massacre, and it was used to vil­lify Brown in later years.  Certainly, it is hard to jus­tify these actions, but they must be under­stood in the con­text of the time.  Lawrence, my home town, was sacked by pro-​​slavery forces, and then burned to the ground dur­ing the Civil War by Quantrill and his men.  It was the com­mon belief among Kansans (and mostly true) that the pro-​​slavery forces would use vio­lence and any other means to ensure that Kansas became a slav­ery state (and I am happy to report that they failed).

Brown was not a great mil­i­tary leader, that much I know now.  His most suc­cess­ful bat­tle, here in Osawatomie, involved shoot­ing at raiders from the trees, out­num­bered 7 to 1, but his defense ulti­mately failed, he retreated, and Osawatomie was sacked and burned.    So his great­est suc­cess was a failure.

In America, we like a win­ner, and when it comes to mil­tiary action, Brown was not a win­ner.  But I learned today that as an intel­lec­tual, he was a man who was will­ing to take action when few oth­ers would.  John Brown not only believed and espoused the abo­li­tion­ist phi­los­o­phy.  He was deter­mined to take action.

Reading a famous bit of Brown’s writ­ing made me real­ize that he was no mad­man, but an ide­al­ist will­ing to take any action nec­es­sary to sup­port his ideals.  He was no blood thirsty killer either.  In this news­pa­per col­umn that was widely reprinted, he com­pares the pub­lic response to the round­ing up and sum­mary execution-​​style shoot­ing of then men from the Lawerence area for being Free State sup­port­ers to his free­ing of 11 slaves and the death of one slave owner.    Read  John Brown’s “Parallels” and tell me that those actions speak of an unhinged per­son.  The slan­der against his name and his cause existed even then, and have only con­tin­ued to this day.

It was a quote from Fredrick Douglass, a black leader from the time, that finally, irrev­o­ca­bly changed my opin­ion of the man who many claim started the Civil War:

“Did John Brown fail? John Brown began the war that ended American slav­ery and made this a free Republic. His zeal in the cause of free­dom was infi­nitely supe­rior to mine. Mine was as the taper light; his was as the burn­ing sun. I could live for the slave; John Brown could die for him.”

Ordinarily we have the upmost respect in the U.S. for those will­ing to die for free­dom.  And yet some­how, I learned from the edu­ca­tional sys­tem that John Brown was a men­tally unbal­anced fool who failed at every­thing he did.  Because, I think, more than we like some­one who is com­mit­ted to pure ideals, we hate a loser.

John Brown was no fail­ure.  He did not live to see the impact of his actions take hold on the coun­try, but take hold they did.   Perhaps we can attribute his actions as the cause of the War, at least, one of many.  A hor­ri­ble war, but nec­es­sary, I believe, to begin the long and ongo­ing process of secur­ing the words and spirit of our Constitution and Bill of Rights.    John Brown saw that, and he gave his life for it.  He has noth­ing but my pro­found respect.

Now when I look at the pho­tographs and at the famous paint­ing by John Steuart Curry, and I look into those eyes, I do not see the mad­ness that was once sug­gested.  I look into those eyes and a see a fierce deter­mi­na­tion to truth and equal­ity.  It should only look like mad­ness to those who oppose such things.  It is a stare that should strike fear straight into the hearts of big­ots and racists every­where to this day.

The Hidden Spring and the Abandoned Hog Farm

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

My step­fa­ther Mike dri­ves me out into the coun­try  to show off some dis­cov­er­ies he made while walk­ing through the woods look­ing for cast-​​off deer antlers.    He and an older man by the name of Chester often go look­ing for such things.

We drive nearly up to the Missouri bor­der and park in an area under con­trol for the Corps of Engineers.   Hills sur­round  a low field that has yet to be plowed under.  Corn stalks still stand here and there like sol­diers on the bat­tle­field at the end of the war, while oth­ers blow across the ground in the breeze.  Purple clover car­pets the soil beneath the stalks, good nitro­gen for when the farmer even­tu­ally does plow and plant for another season.

The sky is strung with low-​​hanging gray cot­ton clouds, thor­oughly obscur­ing the sun. It’s a wel­come change from the sunny bright weather of Colorado, actu­ally.  Overcast days are rare where I live now.  A sharp, cold wind blows, mak­ing me pull my coat around me tighter.  We walk down a muddy road.  Water is every­where, but it hasn’t been rain­ing much, so it seems to come out of nowhere, and I won­der aloud about it. Mike nods and leads me up the side of a hill.  Water trick­les slowly down the slope  through the grass which has become mat­ted down in places with the wet.  We fol­low the water up into a tree­line, step­ping among fallen logs until we come to a stone ridge at the top of the hill.  We move around along the ridge until we spot the source;  an old spring.

A half-​​circle of lime­stone pieces, fit together with no mor­tar, pre­ci­sion work that I become very famil­iar with through the rest of our explo­ration, has been set into the hill­side three feet deep.  the water half-​​fills the hole.  Someone, per­haps as much as a hun­dred years ago, found this tiny upwelling of fresh water, dug it out and rein­forced the walls with stone from the hill­side.  No one lives around here for miles, but that wasn’t always the case.  (More below the photo)

I take pho­tos, trim­ming away brush and debris, clean­ing up the scene as best I can.  The water is green with thick algae, and lichens and moss coat every­thing.  The grass and weeds have yet to grow back, although sky-​​blue wild­flow­ers have sprung up here and there beneath the trees.

Mike gives me a grin as if to say “you haven’t seen any­thing yet” and we set off back down the hill and along the muddy road, around a pond fed by yet another spring.  We walk below the earthen dam that holds back the water, and along­side a  field, fol­low­ing muddy tracks of a doe white-​​tailed deer that passed not more than a cou­ple of hours before us.  We find an old horse-​​drawn plow, rust-​​red in tall grass, the plow­share still bit­ing into the soil. The gears and levers still func­tion.  I pull them and mar­vel at how a 50+ year old plow can be still rel­a­tively intact.  All that it misses is the seat and chains to har­ness to the work horse.

From the plow, we fol­low the base of the large hill until Mike points out a dis­used wagon trail whichs cuts back and angles against the slope, climb­ing to the sum­mit a hun­dred feet or so above the pond and field.  The trail is steep on either side as if heavy wagon loads were carted up and down here until .  When we reach the top, it’s not hard to imag­ine what loads were brought up.

Among the thicket of young trees, maybe 30, 40 years old in places, some older, Mike has found a com­plex of 3 foot high lime­stone walls that fences in more than a football-field’s worth of space.  The walls show the same details and crafts­man­ship of the walls of the hid­den spring.  The stones are not cut of quar­ried.  They are field stones that have been gath­ered and care­fully fit together, tens of thou­sands of them.

First we exam­ine  a cut into the hill­side, a cel­lar almost, walled off with lime­stone as well, with some pale stones show­ing signs of hav­ing been exposed to intense heat.  Here, Mike thinks, was the smoke­house where the pork was hung and cured.   This was a hog farm once.  The walls seem­ingly hap­haz­ard were added to over time as the steadily wealth­ier owner added pens.  I dig around in the rub­ble around the smoke­house and find bits and pieces of old bot­tles and some porcelin.  Mike leans down to me and exclaims “Will you look at that!”  I look up and he’s found an old horse­hoe, rusted bent nails and all.

“It’s a lucky horse­shoe,” I say.

“Well, it is now,” Mike says.

Mike points out a small alcove of walls with a nar­row entry­way, not more than four feet by six feet, and explains that this is where they would have kept the boar away from the sows, let­ting him out only a few times a year to sire young.  It seems like a frus­trat­ing life for an ani­mal, to hear and smell beau­ti­ful women just on the other side of a wall, but only able to get to them so very rarely. We move on.

Peeking out from just behind the bare trees, I can see a soli­tary brick chim­ney stand­ing twenty feet into the air.  We explore the con­crete foun­da­tion which has heavy iron bolts set in to fas­ten the walls joists which have long since rot­ted away.  I kick away at the fallen leaves and find old roof shin­gles, cor­ru­gated alu­minum sid­ing, and rot­ting wooden floor­boards.    It’s impos­si­ble to look at all of this and not start ot pic­ture the peo­ple who lived here, to imag­ine their ani­mals.  I begin to won­der if they had a barn.  They clearly had a wagon drawn by horses.  I wan­der the grounds and sure enough, I find the buried foun­da­tions of another build­ing, small, but not far from the open­ing in the walls where the wagon trail led into the ruins.  This, I believe was the barn, where the horses were kept, and the walled area around it their yard.

How old is this place?  When did they leave?  How much money must they have had to have raised hun­dreds of hogs here?  The ques­tions the stones illicit are end­less.  We wan­der, trac­ing the out­lines of the farm, and I try to pic­ture it, try to travel back in time with my mind’s eye.  I imag­ine that the farm was first built in the late 1800s, per­haps by a civil war sol­dier home from the war, weary from the killing.   Weary of peo­ple, he buys a par­cel of land far away from the embry­onic towns of Northeast kansas.  It’s not ideal, but some instinct left over from the war instructs him to build his home and farm atop a large rise where he can see for miles around, see the river cut­ting through the hills and carv­ing steep banks below.  there’s not much hard­wood for build­ing, so he begins to fence in his prop­erty with piece of yel­low­stone that lit­ter the ground.  Perhaps he hires a cou­ple of hands to help errect his home, and he takes a young wife from one of the nearby rail­road towns, maybe even Osawatomie.   He pur­chases his first hogs and begins to raise ani­mals.  He plows a field below the hill and plants corn and wheat.  It’s hard work, but not as hard as killing men, there’s that much.

His wife gives birth to three sons and a daugh­ter, and it’s not long before they are put to work expand­ing the fences, build­ing more pens for the hogs.   They strip the hill bare of stones to make their fences, but they don’t sim­ply pile the rocks together loosely.  The hogs could push over poorly built walls–no, they fit the pieces together care­fully.  Sometimes they take a sledge to a piece to break it into smaller pieces, but mostly they use the pieces exactly as they are when they find them, sim­ply fit­ting them together with thought and patience.

The years go by in hard, ful­fill­ing work.  The farm pros­pers.  His daugh­ter and two sons move away to the nearby towns, marry, and raise fam­i­lies.  He is made a wid­ower when his wife suc­cumbs to a fever in the sum­mer, some tick­borne dis­ease.  The sec­ond son, the one for whom farm­ing had always seemed to be his fate, takes over on the farm after his father dies from pneu­mo­nia after a hard win­ter.  The son buries his father in a grave on the hill­side and sets a lime­stone into the ground to mark the spot. He is illiterate–his old man had never placed much stock in edu­ca­tion and did just fine with­out it–and so no words are etched into the marker.  The grave over­looks the acres that the old man has bought up with the growth of his farm and the lucra­tive sale of hogs and pork.

The son spends some of his inher­i­tance and builds a new house, this time with a con­crete foun­da­tion.   It’s small, enough room for a cou­ple of peo­ple to live com­fort­ably.  He mar­ries a woman, but they never have chil­dren.  The depres­sion comes, and things get harder.  Few can afford to buy his pork and hogs.  Eventually, they sell the land to a nearby rancher and move to the city to try their for­tunes there.

And my crys­tal ball goes hazy.  I won­der if there are descen­dants some­where who were raised on sto­ries of life on the old hog farm, but who have never seen what I have seen, never vis­ited their ancestor’s lands.    My fam­ily were farm­ers, not so many gen­er­a­tions ago, but I don’t know the lands they worked.  Arkansas some­where, I am told.

With the ruins explored, Mike and I walk back to the truck in the driz­zling rain.   I feel today as if I have some­how reached back into time and touched the life of some face­less stranger.  History is a funny thing, and I feel closer to it here than I do any­where else.  I don’t know why.

10 Lessons Learned in 2008

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’m not going to do New Years res­o­lu­tions.  I’m going to reflect back on what I learned, and allow that to guide my progress forward.

In no par­tic­u­lar order of importance:

  1. Cyberfunded Creativity Does Not Work
    For me, that is.  At least at the level I would like (break­ing even on expenses).  I think you stand the best chance of mak­ing money online if you have pop­u­lar­ity for some­thing other than what you’re doing. It’s damned near impos­si­ble to build an audi­ence for some­thing like Dr. Roundbottom.  For one, it’s too much of a niche inter­est (steam­punk photo fic­tion).  Second, I don’t have the pro­file of a BNA (Big Name Author).  I’ll keep doing it in 2009, but not with the same level of dedication.
  2. I Love Photography But it Won’t Make Me Rich
    I do.  I really love being behind the cam­era, shoot­ing just about any­thing.  Sure, it’s frus­trat­ing and the pic­tures rarely turn out the way I pic­tured them, but I feel like there’s a ton left to learn.  In 2009, I will be expand­ing my for­ays into pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­phy by doing some live band shoots I hope.  I will be mak­ing more and more trips into the Rockies to shoot wildlife.  I may open a print store to sell prints of some­thing other than Dr. Roundbottom images.  But unless I give up every­thing else, go back to art school, and pur­sue pho­tog­ra­phy as a full time pro­fes­sion, I can’t make a liv­ing from it.  Even then, jobs are scarce com­pared to the num­ber of peo­ple who want to be doing it.  Like many of my inter­ests, I got in at a time where the bar­ri­ers to entry were lower than ever.
  3. The World Doesn’t End if You Lose Your Job
    One of my great­est fears prior to this sum­mer was los­ing a job.  I take a great amount of pride in my job, and I also have a lot of school debt, so the two fac­tors com­bined cre­ate a lot of stress for me.   When I was laid off from my last job, I felt good, then depressed, and then 3 days later, I threw myself into look­ing for any kind of work I could get.  I picked up great new clients (Thanks, Jeff! Sarah! Jay!) and I learned a lot about the busi­ness.  Which leads to num­ber 4.  And by the way, head­ing into this econ­omy, this is an impor­tant les­son to remind myself of.
  4. I Can Run My Own Business
    Thanks to my lay­off. I learned that I do have what it takes to make it on my own, and if our health care prob­lem in this coun­try ever gets solved I will not hes­i­tate to start my own busi­ness.  Or if Sarah has a job with great ben­e­fits.  I really love work­ing for myself, even if it means 12 hour days.  The free­dom makes me so happy. And I have no trou­ble focus­ing on work while work­ing from home.
  5. I Still Want to be a Writer (Whatever That Means)
    I spent much of 2008 pretty sure that my urge to write had gone down the tubes, despite putting out quite a lot of work related to #1 above.  I didn’t write sto­ries, I stopped fol­low­ing SF news and blogs, and I stopped read­ing much SF.  But as I find myself grow­ing increas­ingly angry at the future and how it has been robbed from us by greedy bas­tards, I find once again that I have a few things I want to say.  I wrote 2 sto­ries this year, one within the last cou­ple of days (which I really need to edit and mail off tonight).  I’m hop­ing to at least dou­ble that out­put next year, and maybe, just maybe, finally start a novel.  I’m 31 years old and I have my whole career ahead of me.
  6. I Am Still in Love
    Sarah and I have had some rough times. My men­tal insta­bil­ity brought on by the death of many fam­ily mem­bers all at once nearly ruined every­thing.  But with each pass­ing year, I feel closer to her, and my love deep­ens sur­pris­ingly more.  Each time I think it doesn’t get any bet­ter, it does.  There are two dif­fer­ent kinds of love, and the first one is super­fi­cial, but more intense.  I think a lot of peo­ple get tied up in that love, in look­ing for it, and they miss out on the much more ful­fill­ing kind that only comes with time.
  7. I Am Loved
    I look at Twitter, I look at Livejournal, and I look at Facebook and I real­ize that I am a very lucky man to have the friends and fam­ily that I do. I wake up each morn­ing and see an amaz­ing per­son who any­one would say is way, way out of my league.  There are times when I feel iso­lated and alone, just a chem­i­cal imbal­ance really, but I think I have learned more in 2008 than any year before just how much peo­ple care for me, and how much I care about them in return.  I am look­ing to deepen my friend­ships and under­stand­ing of peo­ple in the com­ing year.  It will make me a bet­ter per­son in return.
  8. Change Can Happen
    I lost 70 pounds, and am mostly suc­ceed­ing at keep­ing the weight off.  We elected some­one truly new and fresh to the President of the United States.  Change does hap­pen, both within and in the world.  I can con­trol some of that.  Like our new President, I have the audac­ity to hope for a bet­ter tomor­row.  Not only that, but the deter­mi­na­tion to work for it in what­ever way I can.
  9. I Do Want to Have A Child
    I’ve been think­ing a lot about the mean­ing of life, and I think from a bio­log­i­cal stand­point, this is it.  Raising another life, another per­son into being.  That’s the point, and it should be denied to no one.  I don’t know when will be the right time, but my doubts about it have faded.  I want to be a father.  I think I’ll be a damned good one.  I’ve learned from some of the best; My father, my step­fa­ther, and my father-​​in-​​law.   Three great men.  I can’t go wrong.
  10. I Am Probably Not Going to Live Forever–But Who Cares?
    I’m slowly com­ing to terms with my own mor­tal­ity at age 31.  Maybe it’s my real­iza­tion at #9 that has begun to ease my fears which were brought on sharply by deaths in the fam­ily.  I still long for suc­cess­ful life exten­sion drugs.  I still want more time.  But I’m going to try and make the best of the time that I do have.  I’m not going to live each day like it’s my last, because that would prob­a­bly mean lay­ing in bed and wheez­ing a lot and clutch­ing at my chest.   I’m not ready to go yet, but maybe in another 100 years or so, I will be ready.  I’ll do what I can, and I’ll leave a mark on this world in ways that are almost as good as real immortality.

I hope that next year is bet­ter than the last for all of you.  I wish you all the best.  Times are hard right now, but we can make it through this together. We need to pull together as a com­mu­nity now more than ever before.  Look for those in need, and help them.  Share your pros­per­ity and it will grow in ways you never expected.  That’s what I will be try­ing to do in 2009, and I hope you will too.

New Podcast: The Girl With the Sun In Her Head

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

My story from Polyphony 4,  and one of my ear­li­est suc­cess­ful attempts at the short story (although your def­i­n­i­tion of suc­cess may vary from mine in this case), is now live as a pod­cast on PodCastle.  You can give it a lis­ten over on the PodCastle site, but if you’re into fan­tasy, you should sub­scribe to their feed.  The team over there does good work.  With this pub­li­ca­tion, I have one story left to appear on a podcast–I believe my story “Captain Bl00d’s B00ty” is sup­posed to appear on Starship Sofa at some point, although I haven’t heard any­thing about when.

Special thanks to Jay Lake and Deborah Layne for pur­chas­ing the story orig­i­nally, and again, thank you to the PodCastle staff, Anne, Rachel, et al for pick­ing it for the ‘cast.  I am grateful.

The story, by the way is inspired by the Orbital song of the same name.  I was bang­ing my head against the wall try­ing to come up with a story to write when the song came up in Winamp.  I saw the title and thought, hey, I could write a story about that Girl.    I don’t the story reads like the song, sadly.  I would be awe­some if I could make sto­ries read like songs.

I wrote a series of sto­ries with titles iden­ti­cal to songs.  Another one was Louis Jordan’s “A Chicken Ain’t Nothing But a Bird” about a south­ern family’s rooster named Scratch that was actu­ally a cock­a­trice.  Never went any­where with that one. I’m a huge fan of Lois Jordan’s music.  “Beans and Cornbread” is a clas­sic.  Never wrote a story with that title although I am tempted should I find the time.  I even have an idea of what it’s about.  Coincidentally, corn­bread is one of my favorite foods.  Nothing like some fried cat­fish and corn­bread hush pup­pies on a sum­mer night. Remind me to tell you how I feel about fish frys.  As in, ever­body get­ting together and fry­ing up a buck­et­load of fish, not some new Burger King perversity.

New Podcast: Arties Aren’t Stupid

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

My story from the excel­lent anthol­ogy Seeds of Change (edited by the Anthology God, for­merly known here as the Slush God, John Joseph Adams)  has gone live over at Escape Pod.  This is a story that was pub­lished to mixed reviews.  But I am astounded by the job that Philippa Ballantine did here.  Her read­ing was spec­tac­u­lar, and adding a New Zealander accent to the patois of the Arties made the whole thing feel more fami­lar and more exotic at once.  I fell in love with my own story, which is not easy for me.  Thank you, Philippa.  And thanks to John for buy­ing the story.

I believe that my next pod­cast appear­ance will be on Starship Sofa with “Captain Bl00d’s Booty,” a story also edited by JJA.  It’s either that or one of my ear­li­est (and most loved) sto­ries, “The Girl with the Sun in Her Head” which is with Podcastle, but I don’t know when it is sched­uled to go up.  Both should be a hoot to hear. Writing all these Roundbottom pod­casts has me think­ing a lot more about how some­thing could sound when deliv­ered by a tal­ented voice actor.  I think it’s only going to improve my writ­ing in the long run.

The New Dr. Roundbottom Podcast is Live

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Hi Folks.  After a ton of work on the part of myself, Sarah, and my sound engi­neer and good friend Nate Periat, we’ve fin­ished and posted our first Dr. Roundbottom Field Sounds pod­cast.  It’s only 5 min­utes long, so don’t hes­i­tate to just go to the site and hit play.  Please let me know what you think.  We’re very pleased with the results for our first try, and we can’t wait to do more.  I spent today get­ting ahead on next week’s entry as well.  Tomrorow, after some site updates I need to get done, I will start writ­ing the next pod­cast episode.

Let me know what you think!

Recommended: WALL-​​E

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Do you remem­ber that Disney CG film Dinosaurs? It’s orig­i­nal con­cept involved a fea­ture length movie with ani­mals that only emoted, and never spoke.  Having always been a big fan of com­puter ani­ma­tion, I was excited at the early rumors of the film.  Unfortunately, Disney execs got involved and the result was the talky-​​travesty that we even­tu­ally saw.  Okay, so maybe “trav­esty” is a strong word.  It wasn’t a bad film– It just failed to live up to it’s poten­tial as a work that stretched the bound­aries of its format.

WALL-​​E suc­ceeds in many, many ways, but the most fas­ci­nat­ing aspect for me was the extent to which Pixar relied on non­ver­bal com­mu­ni­ca­tion to con­vey the story.  I have a strong feel­ing that in prepa­ra­tion for this film, the ani­ma­tors watched reels and reels of silent com­edy films; Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin espe­cially.  Watch the move­ments of WALL-​​E, and I think you will see some of the exag­ger­ated man­ner­isms of those silent film stars.  Wall-​​E is all angles, but angles that can change their com­po­si­tion to one another, so he meets the basic prin­ci­ples of com­puter char­ac­ter ani­ma­ton estab­lished by John Lasseter so many years ago with Luxo.  He can squash and stretch.

(This review con­tains spoilers.)

Continue read­ing ›

Five reasons this book trailer rocks

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I for­get where I got this, but I think that it’s the level of qual­ity I’d like to see in more book trail­ers online:

Having Tim Curry as a nar­ra­tor is prob­a­bly out­side of the range of what we can afford as SF/​F writ­ers, but still.  Let’s go over what makes this awesome:

  1. Tight pac­ing. 2 min­utes long, and packed with infor­ma­tion.  If there’s a neg­a­tive here, some of it is too fast.  But that is prefer­able to too slow.
  2. Rapid-​​moving, well designed motion graph­ics. The move­ment is var­ied. It’s not a bunch of slow zooms or pans on a graphic like many book trail­ers I see. Stuff comes in and leaves the view at an angle.  There’s per­spec­tive.  It has a coher­ent visual style also.
  3. Illustrations! This is much eas­ier when your book has illus­tra­tions already, but maybe an invest­ment in an illus­tra­tor would increase the “stick­i­ness” of a book trailer.  It’s a visual medium, and you need some imagery to catch the eye.  Simple stock pho­tos prob­a­bly aren’t good enough. And you can only use your cover so many times.
  4. Professional nar­ra­tion, with the high­est qual­ity sound. So many book trail­ers I have seen end up sound­ing like they were recorded in a bath­tub.  PC micro­phones are a trav­esty.   Studio-​​quality audio is not cheap.  Alas.
  5. Prominently dis­played URL at the end. This isn’t a crit­i­cism of other book trail­ers as I usu­ally don’t make it to the end in other ones I have watched.  But I liked how it left you with a call to action (go to the web­site!)  I don’t know how much pro­mo­tion Lemony Snicket really needs for these books, but if I didn’t know about them already, this would have sent me run­ning to the site.

My After Effects and Premiere skills are pretty rusty, but I think I’m going to try and add them back into my skillset.  I have a voice actor stu­dio I’ve done work with in Denver at the old day job, and so I think I could prob­a­bly offer a decently afford­able, high qual­ity book trailer ser­vice.  Youtube is the third most vis­ited web­site on the web.  It’s power to bring your book before a new audi­ence is unpar­al­leled.  I’d really like to offer a ser­vice to tap into that power.

Photowalk: Coyote Ridge

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Located 15 min­utes south of Fort Collins, Coyote Ridge is a nat­ural area con­sist­ing if a cou­ple hun­dred acres of prairie. A trail runs from the road up across sev­eral ridges. Today, I walked to the base of the sec­ond ridge before com­ing back. I’ll make the full hike to the end some time in the future.

The weather today was over­cast and gloomy, so my cam­era was strain­ing with the avail­able light. Still, I took a few nice pho­tos. Here’s the walk from start to fin­ish, with nar­ra­tion and sev­en­teen pho­tos:

Continue read­ing ›