Coyote Prints

Data excavating

Thu, 10 May 2012 19:49:02 GMT

I’ve been flailing around—just mentally—for something short to write, so I’m not just beating on the novel all the time. I started a bit of a romance story not too long ago but stalled on it. (After I’d stalled I came across a similarly-premised serial by Alice Dryden—uptight “square” and hippie girl Meet Cute. My Sterling and Mahri aren’t, at least, very similar to Alice’s Roger and Peace.) So, I decided to dig into the archives. I have archives that go back a fairly long way, which leads to some interesting dilemmas around file formats. My oldest (surviving) files were written in either WordStar or Nota Bene. You haven’t heard of Nota Bene? Well, it was—and still is—a variant on XyWrite. Oh, you haven’t heard of that, either. No matter. As it turns out, the Nota Bene files are easier to deal with, for reasons I’ll come back to in a second.

Some people still maintain that WordStar—two decades after its last version shipped—remains the best word processor for writers. One of WordStar’s drawbacks, though, is that it uses a weirdo proprietary file format. Fortunately, there’s VDE, a remarkable DOS editor that, in some ways, is the closest to a “modern” WordStar that one can get.

XyWrite/Nota Bene files, though, are just plain text with markup:

«FC»STORY TITLE

Watts Martin
«FL»
«IP4,0»
    Bacon ipsum dolor sit amet frankfurter in ham aute ullamco, ut
laborum. «MDUL»Voluptate«MDNM» drumstick id cow dolore, nisi do fugiat
pork loin. Turducken velit dolore dolore deserunt, sed irure cillum
quis fugiat nostrud culpa beef ball tip exercitation. Strip steak duis
shoulder, et eiusmod enim laboris tempor short ribs nulla cillum
sausage. In meatball magna corned beef in, fugiat occaecat duis salami
pig nisi veniam short loin tail. Deserunt ex nisi ball tip cillum
jerky. Aliquip adipisicing kielbasa jowl, nostrud do occaecat ut labore 
strip steak qui.

The « » marks denote HTML-like commands. Of course, XyWrite predates Unicode, and so those guillemets use the DOS character set; instead of «FC» I see ÆFCØ in BBEdit. Oops. Even so, it proved pretty easy to write a minimalist Markdown converter with a BBEdit text factory.

This is a roundabout way of explaining why three nerdy things are Very Important to you if you’re a writer in this day and age.

Keep all non-ephemeral documents. Ephemeral documents are on the level of “pick up milk next week.” Everything else may be important, and text documents don’t take up much space. When you switch computers, zip up your document folder, give the zip file a name you’ll recognize when you see it ten years from now, and make sure the zip file is part of your backup strategy. Oh:

Have a backup strategy. You can get 500G external drives for under $90 at this point, and if you’re only interested in just backing up your documents, you can get a 16G USB flash drive for $12. My uncompressed documents folder, with nearly 14,000 items in it, is only 1.6G.

Future-proof your documents. This is the one that most of us, even us relatively nerdy types, don’t think about as much as we should. Admittedly, today that’s easier than it was in the weird old days: it’s unlikely Microsoft is going to go away any time soon, so Word seems pretty safe as a document format, right? Everything reads and writes Word format!

Except which Word format? You’d be surprised how many modern programs get glitchy when you throw them a Word 97 document rather than a Word 2007 document. When you want to open those Word 2007 documents in 2020, There Will Be Bugs—maybe even if you’re opening them in Word 2020.

Personally, I’d recommend just two file formats: one, of course, is plain text with simple markup, which is why I’m writing so much in Markdown these days. Two decades from now, those documents will still be readable and understandable in anything that can open Unicode text. The other is RTF. RTF is Word format, but expressed as—yes—plain text with markup. Arcane markup, but still markup. If those Word 97 files I still have had been saved as RTF, I could read them glitch-free now in any RTF-supporting editor.

(Since someone else will bring it up eventually if I don’t mention it, there’s also OpenOffice, which does indeed have a fully open standard and thus should theoretically be readable in perpetuity. But the OpenOffice document format is really complex compared to RTF or, of course, Markdown.)

So—did I find anything in the archives to work on? Maybe. I’d been looking for an abandoned story called “Indigo Rain,” either to see if I can resuscitate it or—more likely—to scavenge the characters from it I liked into a new piece. I’ll put it all together and read it over lunch, and see what happens.

(Originally published at Coyote Prints)

So what have you been working on?

Tue, 01 May 2012 17:13:25 GMT

This is a question I’ve been asked occasionally for a long while, usually with the implication that I don’t seem to have been doing much of anything since a flurry of small press publications through the ’90s. It doesn’t look like I have, does it? Since the original publication of Why Coyotes Howl in 2005, I’ve only had two stories published, both in 2008. (Those were “The Narrow Road in Morning Light,” in New Fables, and “Carrier,” in the Alone in the Dark anthology; they’re both in the new ebook edition of Coyotes.)

A commenter on a previous entry suggested this was because I’m too much of a perfectionist, and that—by implication—I’m sitting on stories that rational people would consider good enough. While that’s not entirely untrue, it’s a little more complicated.

I referred to the act of writing a novel as my personal Everest. Over the last ten years, I’ve made six attempts at novels, all in various states of disrepair. One was a rewrite attempt of a novel that I abandoned many years before called In Our Image. (That’s back to abandoned again.) One is a rewrite/expansion of a previously published novella some of you might have heard of in the past, “A Gift of Fire, a Gift of Blood.” Another is a rewrite/expansion of a story only those of you in my writing group might remember, a new Ranea story called “Going Concerns.” Another is an alternate earth spy story. Another involves dragons. And another is a hard science fiction piece that’s my current obsession.

The upshot of all of this is that I’ve written over 100K of words on new material—plus likely half as much beyond that in back story and research—that you haven’t seen not because of my neurotic perfectionism, but because they just ain’t done yet. Objectively, this still isn’t a whole lot of words (Kyell Gold may write about that much before breakfast most days), but it’s good for me to keep in mind when I ask myself just what I’ve been working on.

Even so, in a real sense the words I’m writing and not showing off don’t matter much. As Dan Benjamin said the other day about programming, eventually you gotta ship or get off the pot.

I don’t expect the science fiction novel to be finished for a while even if things go well, but the greatest magic of ebooks may be that novella length is suddenly acceptable. I may go back to the rewrite I was working on for “Going Concerns,” which really was too short at ~13K words, and just aim for 20K rather than 80K. And I want to get back to the new version of “Gift of Fire.” And throughout the year I’ll try to dust off other older stories and get them out either as singles or in another collection.

There are still dilemmas here—for instance, ebooks still need cover art. I got lucky with Coyotes in that it already had terrific cover art from H. “Kyoht” Luterman and purchasing extra rights to cover ebook sales was pretty cheap—yet at this point, I’ll need to sell one more book for my profits to be enough to buy both a donut and coffee. Paying for new cover art, even with the very modest rates some very good artists charge, will—well, let’s say it makes this into a labor of love, particularly since I’d be unlikely to sell a novella for more than 99¢. (Which, in turn, will probably drive me over to Smashwords rather than Lulu, since as near as I can tell Lulu’s author revenue is “80% of the cover price after we deduct 99¢ from it,” although on iBooks and the B&N store it’s just 56% of the cover price straight up—they take 20% of the remaining amount after the store takes 30%.)

(Originally published at Coyote Prints)

Why Coyotes Howl ePub

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 20:01:46 GMT

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/chipotlecoyote

Eventually, it should be pushed to the Apple and B&N store, too.

For the record, uploading to Lulu is weirdly kludgy—it required five tries to upload the cover image, even though it was in exactly the format and dimensions they wanted—and while they theoretically give you 90% rather than the 70% of Amazon and Apple, that’s 90% after they take out a “base price” of 99¢ to cover their hosting and bandwidth costs. For the record, Amazon also deducts “delivery costs” for ebooks, but they’re charging 5¢ for it.

I really hope Smashwords pulls its head out of its ass and lets authors upload natively in EPUB format. The only thing that keeps me from using them is the Microsoft Word requirement. (I not only don’t write in Word, I don’t even own Word.)

(Originally published at Coyote Prints)

Why Coyotes Howl (the return)

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:39:55 GMT

Back in the dark ages—well, 2004—I decided I’d put together a short story collection. By that time I’d had a fair number of things published in small press and fan outlets, with a few kind and personal rejections from major outlets—the most recent of which had been for the story that became the collection’s title piece, “Why Coyotes Howl,” described twice with thanks-I-think phrasing (“this story is worth publishing, just not here”). I’d debated continuing to pursue professional publication, which might net me upwards of $300 and increase my name recognition by an amount just above a rounding error. Or, I could send it to a fairly new small press publishing company started by people I’d worked with before that would have a smaller audience, but probably one more willing to fork over $16 for a fairly thin collection in trade paperback form.

So: off to Sofawolf it went, published in January 2005.

Because that was, as I said, the dark ages, Sofawolf didn’t buy electronic publishing rights—those remained with me. Over the last few months I’ve been fiddling at putting together an ebook version of the collection, using my own somewhat arcane EPUB creator, Bookbind. And, finally it’s out!

It’s only available through Amazon, as I’ve enrolled it in their “Kindle Digital Publishing Select” program as an experiment—this means it’ll be possible for Kindle owners to rent it, but Amazon gets a 90-day exclusive. After that period is over, I’ll see about selling it in other places—tentatively, I’m planning to make it available through Lulu as a DRM-free EPUB, which should work on, well, anything that accepts EPUBs (basically, everything but the Kindle). The Kindle edition is also DRM-free.

The digital edition is only $3.99. And, if you’ve read it before, there are two new stories that weren’t in the print edition, both from convention program books around 2008. (One of them, “Carrier,” was reprinted in Alone in the Dark, a 2009 horror anthology.)

If you’ve read it—in either print or digital form—I’d like to politely nudge you toward reviewing it on Amazon. Especially if you liked it, of course. So far it only has two reviews from the print edition.

Why Coyotes Howl on Amazon (UK DE FR)

(Originally published at Coyote Prints)

A reboot

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 01:22:04 GMT

If superhero film franchises can do it, why can’t I? Right then. In a sense, this is a reboot of a reboot: I had a little “IAQ,” Imaginary Asked Questions, list up here for the first entry. Witty! Except, well, not very.

In a larger sense, this is a reboot of the personal blog/journal that I’ve been writing in some form or another since (pause for frantic searching of hard drive backups to see if the files still exist anywhere) 1998. Which is kind of frightening. Originally, the journal was called “Shadowgazing,” and it was very consciously a column: I was writing for a (mostly non-existent) audience. Sometime in 2000, I moved it to LiveJournal and retitled it “Coyote Cartography.”

But, things change, and while LiveJournal isn’t a ghost town it isn’t what it once was, either. I’ve been using the journal very sporadically over the last few years, doing most of my short bits on Twitter and, since early 2011, on a Tumblr-hosted tech blog, Coyote Tracks.

“Coyote Prints” is an attempt to reinvigorate my non-tech blogging a little by focusing it on something else near to my heart: writing. When I went to college ∗cough∗ years ago, I had the intention of getting a degree in English Literature. I wanted to be a writer, dammit. I wanted to be one of those guys who merged science fiction/fantasy books with literary aspirations. I was going to be a famous novelist by 30.

Yeah, that didn’t work out too well.

I actually have had some successes over the years, attracting a small following due to publications in small presses and fanzines. As many of my stories use anthropomorphic animal characters in some manner, I’ve been a writing guest of honor at two “furry” conventions and helped with the writing track of three. (Despite all the rampant jokes about furries, it’s a fun fandom, and not much weirder than what you’d run into at an anime con.) A collection of my short stories was put out in print form by Sofawolf Press in 2005 and is still available—and is, as of today, available as a Kindle book, which I’ll write more about shortly.

But for the most part, I put my writing dreams on hold when I got into the tech world. I haven’t written much in the last decade. I’ve been trying to change that over the last few years, with only moderate success, but I’m feeling more motivated to get going—in no small part due to being a member of a writing group with a few more successful authors! My last year has been spent hammering on a novel. That’s become my personal Mount Everest—not this particular novel as much as any novel. I’ve tried writing a novel a half-dozen times before and never got more than about 30,000 words into it before giving up; my longest completed work is, well, just under 30,000 words.

The current novel, incidentally, stands at just under 29,000 words as of this writing.

Clearly, I can’t very well lecture you about how to write your own best-selling novel or how to break into high-paying short story markets. Instead, what I can do is share what I’ve learned—and am still learning—through trial and error. And, given my Internet technology background, I’m very interested in the rise of ebooks and credible self-publishing, and in the future of publishing in general.

And, those who know me also know I’m more than a little obsessive when it comes to writing tools and tech, so those subjects are likely to come up on occasion here. (For instance, I’m writing this in Markdown in Byword on a Das Keyboard. Buzzword Bingo!)

The blog, possibly

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 04:31:51 GMT

…is called “Coyote Prints,” and is running at http://cprints.ranea.org. It’s not advertised yet because I’m not actually sure I’m going to do this thing, but there’s an IAQ (Imaginary Asked Questions) up as the first post there—-which won’t be cross-posted here, since there’s not much reason to do that.

If you have any suggestions, it might be better to leave them here than over there.

A writing blog

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 03:48:48 GMT

So I’ve been thinking about starting a writing blog. I’m not sure whether it’ll be a separate thing that gets cross-posted to the LiveJournal—that was my original intent, but nothing’s set as of yet—or if I’ll just start blathering about writing exclusively on LJ.

This doesn’t mean I won’t post somewhat more personal things either way—and that I might not still post friends-only things to LJ when the desire really comes up—but it’d be a way to get the LJ somewhat kickstarted again.

I do find myself with a curious dilemma, though. I’d like to be able to talk about my writing blog on my Twitter account, as I do have a fair number of followers in the fandom. However, I also have a fair number of followers in the tech world at this point, too—other bloggers, editors in the tech press, developers. Pointing to a writing blog that is going to have clearly “furry” material in it could be… fascinatingly eyebrow-raising. That’s an argument for keeping the LiveJournal entirely separate.

Then again, I’ve been saying for years that furry fandom’s PR problems stem in part from the way furry fans who, well, aren’t the kind who create PR problems refuse to self-identify. Sam Conway appears to be pretty well known as a furry and I’m not aware of it having caused any insurmountable issues for him. And frankly, if you put the name “Watts Martin” into a web search engine, my Wikifur page is going to be among the first hits, so in a certain sense that battle is over—one might argue that it’s better that I own it.

So:

Just stay on LJ, or start a new blog and cross-post here?
Post a link to the writing blog occasionally on Twitter and hope the tech nerds don’t freak out, or find non-Twitter ways to advertise to the fans? (A second Twitter account for furry stuff is possible but that ship has kind of sailed already, given the mishmash of fans and techies already following.)
And, if I do go ahead and do this, what should I write about?

Bacon Ipsum

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 21:11:50 GMT

Sorry if anyone saw a mysterious “Bacon Ipsum” post or two in my journal for a few moments; I was testing out an old Ruby LiveJournal client that I’d written, and adapting it to be able to work with the same posting format that Octopress requires.

(Does this mean that I’m contemplating switching to a new journal engine, but want to be able to cross-post to LiveJournal with a minimum of fuss? Maaaaaybe. But we’ll see.)

At risk of being That Guy...

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 07:54:56 GMT

…so there’s this new award for anthropomorphic literature called the Cóyotl Awards, “to promote quality writing within the furry fandom.”

Cóyotl is a Nahuatl (Aztec) word for “coyote,” and the web site for the Cóyotls has a nice public domain photograph of a… hold on a moment.

This is a coyote:

This is a black-backed jackal:

And this is the animal in the Cóyotl Awards banner:

Right then.

I’m doing my best to resist pithy comments about whether this award really knows what it wants to be yet, but y’know. Ahem. And to be fair, the header image was obtained from a Flickr account in which the jackal is indeed incorrectly identified as a coyote, but if any group should have noticed that… uh, shouldn’t it be our group?

Furry Story Sites, 2011 Edition

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 01:38:47 GMT

Way back in May 2006, I wrote a little piece called “The State of the Furry Zine.” I’m informally revisiting it now.

Has the web won?

This was something I mused on back then, writing:

Whether we like it or not, print periodicals are in decline, and this trend isn’t likely to reverse. This is true for even professional magazines. Fan and “semi-pro” publications have even more motivation to move online: production cost. A 48-page photocopied fanzine with tape or comb binding will run close to $1.50 a copy just for toner and paper alone. A typical fan-level print run of 100 copies would cost more than a year’s worth of web hosting.

While this is an ongoing debate in commercial print media, where the revenue stream tends to be heavily skewed toward advertiser support rather than subscriber support, for small presses this is still basically true.

Even so, as it turns out the print world isn’t dead quite yet, even in furry fandom. Not only is Sofawolf still around, we’ve seen FurPlanet become a little publishing empire, Will Sanborn has published a few short story anthologies of his own, Bad Dog Books is still producing their Fang and Roar titles, and there are even the occasional new entrants, like Pink Fox.

Pink Fox’s Allasso is worth noting not just for being new but for being something of a hybrid: all of its content is available online for free, but you can support the endeavor by buying the printed version. If I’m reading their guidelines correctly, they’re not a paying market, but award prizes every issue, “one work per category for a $50 cash prize” between poetry, fiction, essay, art, and “experimental/other.” (Personally I’d rather they pay everyone a small amount, but that can end up getting very expensive quickly.)

But really, I’m thinking about the all-important question,

Where should I get my stuff published?

First and foremost: don’t expect to make a lot of money, but you can potentially make some money. In fact, I think the market is closer now to being an actual market–tiny though it may be–than it has at any point in the fandom’s history. If you’ve written a novel-length piece of work, or even novella-length, getting it out through FurPlanet is very viable, and Sofawolf and Bad Dog are certainly worth considering. I consider Sofawolf to have the highest quality standards of the three and also the highest production values; FurPlanet may be the lowest of the three in that regard; the quality of the printing itself is on par with the others but from all appearances they do very little editing and layout design work. I think of FP as sort of a hybrid of self-publishing and a normal press. They are selective about what they put out and, all-importantly, they’re not charging authors for the privilege of publishing with them–but you may end up doing a lot of the production/design work yourself if you go with them.

Speaking of self-publishing, the options for that are better now than they ever have been; thanks to companies like Smashwords you don’t need much more than a word processor to make ebooks (albeit often ugly ones). I’ve had a few friends and acquaintances who’ve had great success with this route–and a few who’ve had virtually no success at all. Ebooks seem to be most successful for authors who have built up an audience first, whether or not it’s through traditional publishing means. The big problem right now with ebooks, particularly in “niche” markets like furrydom, tends to be one of discoverability. (I didn’t find out that Will Sanborn had any ebooks out there until starting this article, for instance!)

One other e-caveat: one big knock against self-publishing has always been that the traditional agent-editor-publisher system, for all its faults, tends to be pretty good at keeping the truly unpublishable crap from hitting bookstore shelves, and that one bypasses the gatekeeper at one’s peril. While it’s easy to dismiss this based on all the crap that does make it to bookstore shelves, anyone who has read even a small press publisher’s “slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts will back me up when I say that we’re talking about suck at a different order of magnitude.

So, really, if you want to make even a modest amount of money you must either choose one of the print publishers or take your chances with ebooks, and your chances with ebooks will be improved if you’ve gotten at least some name recognition beforehand.

If you don’t really care about making money–if you’d just like to get your stuff out there, that brings us to

The Archive Sites

First, the obvious mea culpa: I’ve been noodling around with my own attempt at an archive site, Claw & Quill, for years. While I haven’t given up, I suspect it’s going to have to be different from what I was originally proposing for it to move forward at this point.[1] While the inestimable balinares provided some actual coding help and a few others expressed active interest, my own enthusiasm flagged considerably. The problem, bluntly, is that I knew in my heart what I was trying to do was essentially to be a story-focused version of ArtSpots, a terrific art archive site which has very few of the issues that people complain about all the time with FA and a lot of spiffy new features–but doesn’t accept writing. (Which is just fine, by the way–focus is a good thing.) We need something like that for writing, right? Right?

Well, I said it was a problem because frankly, the art-focused version of ArtSpots–i.e., ArtSpots–is a site that you are not using. Admit it. You’re not.

The problem here is, of course, the network effect, something that FurAffinity has done a great job building and maintaining. For a while I was of the opinion that FA got that way simply by being in the right place at the right time, and there’s probably something to that–but FA arguably makes it easier than any of the other sites to use the people on your watchlist as recommendation engines, and that’s by far the best way to find new art/writing that you’re going to be interested in. Go to somebody’s user page and you’re going to be able to see the last few things they’ve favorited without another click. For all of the things worth bitching about on FA, its UX design–even if it may be entirely accidental–has affordances for serendipitous discovery that I think all of its competitors are missing.

Here’s my casual and possibly unduly snarky survey of the contestants for writers.

FurAffinity

FA is often thought of as the slow idiot cousin of the archive set that we all keep using only because everybody else is using it. This is mostly true, although it’s probably not as slow in reality as it is in our heads; most pages that I’ve looked at load in 3–10 seconds, which is pretty respectable given that its pages frequently have dozens of images.

For authors, though, FA remains pretty abysmal. It still insists on only displaying thumbnail images when people browse submissions, so you must make such an image if you don’t want a generic icon; to add insult to injury, while FA displays the thumbnails at up to 300×300 px sizes at some points (if it’s your most recent submission), it will resize whatever you upload to 75×&75 and then upscale the thumbnail, the upshot being that it insists you make a cover image for your story and then insists on uglifying it. You can’t edit a story on the site, you can only upload it directly–which I don’t mind, but it can only display an uploaded story if it’s in plain text (.txt) format. As it turns out, it will interpret BBCode blocks in such a story, so you can still mark things as [I]italic[/I] and [B]bold[/B] as long as you know that. Which you probably didn’t because it’s not documented anywhere. If you upload a story in any other format, then readers get the option to download it. That’s it.

Beyond that, your control over formatting either as a reader or an author is pretty much bupkis. Readers can switch between dark grey text on a pale blue background or pale grey text on a dark blue background (go with the dark text), but in both cases you’re stuck with 10px (about 8 point) Verdana text with borders, borders everywhere. FA’s original designer apparently never met a white space he didn’t want to trap. While I wouldn’t have chosen the borders or that typeface, it’s the type size that annoys me–yes, readers can always just bump up the browser magnification, but that doesn’t excuse you from choosing sane defaults.

Having said that: we all keep using FA because everybody else is using it. Like it or not, if you want your stories to have a chance of being found by the great horde of unshampooed furries, you want them here, period.

SoFurry

During my 2006 survey SoFurry was YiffStar, and I snarkily observed:

It’s about porn. In your face, unabashed porn. Stories are categorized by the genders of the leads and tagged with keywords for fetishes for easy searching. At risk of standing on a soapbox momentarily: YiffStar is the #1 hit on Google for “furry stories.” Don’t blame the mainstream media for the “furry = fetish” image; they’re getting it from us.

At the time I wasn’t sure who ran YiffStar, either. Now I know it was Toumal, and while we don’t really know one another, I like him, and I like the ambition that I see in SoFurry. While I found the original SoFurry to have a confused user experience, the 2.0 version–still in beta–fixes most of that. Not all, but, well: beta. We’ll see how it shakes out. The site, in both standard and beta versions, can sometimes be mind-numbingly slow; I’ve seen pages regularly take 15+ seconds of loading time and one topped out at over two minutes. (Like FA, SF has the peculiar quirk of showing you diagnostic information about the time spent building each page in the footer, but the numbers there have very little to do with the time it will take your browser to actually load the page.)

Unlike FA, SF has no way to upload story files that I see but instead has a rich text editor you can cut and paste into. This is both good and bad. It’s good because if you type directly into that editor you can do anything you want, and I can convert my beloved nerdy Markdown to HTML and paste it directly into the “raw HTML” window of that editor. You can see the results with “The Narrow Road in Morning Light”; it comes out quite well.

The bad is that, well, you can do anything you want. I’ve seen stories there that wreak havoc with the site’s standard style sheets by overriding with their own hardcoded CSS styles, are full of strange Unicode errors, and very frequently have seemingly random amounts of spacing between paragraphs (and sometimes even words, which requires a peculiar talent). While I think “Narrow Road” looks pretty good, I’m a web developer; a typical user writing in a word processor may find it difficult to get their story transferred over in a way that preserves the important formatting while not screwing up the site styles.

The site style, at least in the beta, uses a sensible 15px font size. While I’m not sure I’d have chosen Trebuchet as a body typeface, for screen reading it’s effective.

You can’t browse stories by descriptions, but only by keywords. If you search for samurai you’ll find “Narrow Road,” but not if you search for hisae (the main character’s name), and as far as I can tell you can’t actually see the description I wrote for the story–which I think of as the blurb that’s supposed to entice you to click on it–without actually clicking on it. Your list of samurai stories will helpfully inform you that my story is about “Wolf, No-Yiff, Plot Development, Fantasy, Fighting, Character Development, Medieval, , …” (exactly like that, with the comma space comma space ellipsis at the end), whereas “Spread Thy Wings : The Legend of Ro…” informs you that it’s about “Demon, Feudal Japan, Story Series, Near Future, Evil, M/M, japan, naked, fight, Samurai, , …” Right then!

The emphasis on keywords sends a message–intentional or not–that SoFurry, just like its predecessor, assumes your primary interest in stories is… ah… keyword matching. Yes. Good euphemism. This euphemism is reinforced throughout the interface: you can filter new submissions on your watchlist by adult/clean rating, sexual orientation, and gender; creator profiles include sexual preference and relationship status, and you can elect to turn on the hardly euphemistic “CumCounter” to “let viewers tell you if they’ve been naughty.” Even though the YiffStar-to-SoFurry name change was made explicitly (ha!) to reduce the adults-only air, the assumption that you’re there to be titillated is woven pretty deeply into the site’s design.

Bottom line: it’s got some definite strengths compared to the competition, but be aware of its quirks, understand that the majority of your potential furry readers are still on FA whether you like it or not–and without at least a few UX changes, SF is probably going to keep its “premiere site for porn” reputation.

Also, the name gives me hives. Sorry.

Incidentally, SoFurry is the #1 hit on Google for “furry stories.”

Inkbunny

Opening in 2010, Inkbunny was born surrounded by controversy, as it shares some staff with a now-defunct “cub porn” fanzine. Combine that with FA’s (seemingly somewhat reluctant) crackdown on that particular fetish, and IB has quickly become the archive you want to go to if you want to draw or view underage furries in ways that would likely be illegal were they humans.

Inkbunny is accepting of all furries with different interests, fetishes, and philias and it does not allow discrimination against others for those interests. The site has a built in keyword blocker that allows filtering of specific types of art, in order to suit each user’s tastes.

This is part of “The Inkbunny Philosophy,” which takes the tone of a revolutionary manifesto. “People want to buy your work even if they can get it free elsewhere, and that you should not worry too much about piracy of your work,” they proclaim, with the admonition that “making a spectacle out of legal action relating to piracy is not welcome here.” Everything is welcome except for value judgements–and humans having sex with non-humans. “Human characters are permitted in stories,” their Acceptable Content Policy reads, “only so long as they are not involved in sexual situations of any kind.”[2]

IB requires you to opt-in to “adult” content viewing, and you can block certain keywords from showing up in your results. While IB has a concept of assigning content star ratings, they’re on a per-user, per-favorite basis: when you favorite something you can assign it one to three stars. But one star is still a favorite, and stars don’t affect how popular an image is. You can fairly easily find a user’s favorites, though, which gives it some of the “old-school” advantage that FA has.

On a technical level InkBunny has the most unusual presentation for stories that I’ve seen. It uses a fixed-width display, and stories are displayed in a 640×640px box with page-like margins, making them look a lot like ebooks, complete with next/previous page buttons–although the story is loaded completely, so the buttons respond instantly for paging, and you can also scroll if you prefer. The formatting of the story is entirely under your control, as far as I can tell, but its default typeface seems to be the stalwart Times New Roman at a readable size.

You can upload a Word or RTF file from your desktop and it will let users download that, but you have to create a separate BBCode version of the story in IB’s editor for the paging display–however, if you upload a Word version of the story, it will create the BBCode version initially from that. (Peculiarly, it won’t do that for an RTF version of the story.)

Browsing stories on IB, though, is poor: you get the thumbnail image, story title and author, and a few icons indicating rating (general/mature/adult), type (always “Writing - Document”) and whether a digital version is available (I presume for sale as an ebook, although I’m not sure). And that’s it. Again, we don’t seem to be able to see story descriptions until we actually click on the story.

Why does this bother me? Because blurbs are to stories what thumbnails are to images: they’re what makes you want to see the whole thing. A thumbnail of an image is the image, scaled down. That’s all you need to know whether you want to click on the image to see the full version, right? But a “thumbnail” of a story on one of these archives sites isn’t a thumbnail, it’s a cover image. On a paperback (remember those?) you turn it over to read the back cover blurb to see if it sounds interesting, right? Give us the goddamn blurbs, site designers.

Ahem.

Beyond that, IB’s interface is probably the best of the sites I’ve seen; it’s pretty easy to figure out how to do what you want to do and it can actually (gasp) search story text, not just keywords and titles. It’s very fast. The site defaults to having background art behind its main content area, which strikes me as absolutely bonkers on a site whose main content is going to be other art, but you can turn that off.

The downsides to IB are the smaller audience and, of course, the politics of porn. There will always be drama associated with this site as long as there’s substantial perception of it as The One Stop Shop For Cub Sex.

FurRag

This is pretty much the same site as it was in 2006 on the technical side. Like SoFurry 2, it uses Trebuchet as its body size, although on FR it’s a little smaller and has leading a little too tight for my tastes.

Unlike any of the other sites, FurRag understands that blurbs (story descriptions) are important and understands the concept of chapters, as well as the concept of “collections,” which can link books or stories into series. FR also displays aggregate star ratings for stories. They use TinyMCE now for editing (I don’t think they did back then). Their story entry form is ugly (I do not understand the site’s obsession with centering everything in a sea of white space), but serviceable.

Since my initial review, they’ve changed the ratings to “PG–13”, “Mature,” “Erotica” and “Private,” so I no longer have to carp about having “X”, “XXX” and “NC–17” like they used to. Now I have to carp about why there’s no “General.”

While FR comes in third in this list in terms of presentation aesthetics behind SoFurry and Inkbunny (but well ahead of FurAffinity), in many ways it’s the best site in the list for authors. Writing is their primary focus, not an afterthought, and while you can list a story with multiple genres, they don’t have the obsessiveness over categories that the other sites do. Bluntly, FurRag doesn’t make you feel like non-fetish stories are kind of out of place.

FR’s big knock, of course, is that it’s like ArtSpots: it’s a really good archive site that you still aren’t using, are you? Right. Having said that, it’s not uncommon for stories there to get several hundred views, which is frankly nothing to sneeze at. Its big advantage over the other sites is that because it is focused on writing, the community that’s developed, while small, is a community of people who are willing to read.

Anthro!

Along with Pink Fox’s magazine mentioned above, this is the only magazine-style web site that I know of doing specifically furry things. Basically, go back and re-read my original piece on that because it all still applies. Anthro is still an interesting magazine in some respects, still looks like a web site from 1997, and still tends to have a vague feeling of being a club for a small number of people.

Conclusion

First: regardless of what site or sites you use, take a few minutes to learn how to do the best formatting you can on it without overriding its native styles. My suggestion? Upload plain text with BBCode on FurAffinity, paste plain text with BBCode on Inkbunny, and paste clean, unstyled HTML on FurRag and SoFurry. (If you’re pasting in HTML generated by Microsoft Word, use the special “paste stuff from Word” button on the site’s editor toolbar.)

Presentation matters. None of these sites are really great at it, but most are serviceable. My ranking from best to worst:

Inkbunny (albeit with quirks)
SoFurry 2.0
FurRag
SoFurry 1.0
Magenta crayon on toilet paper
FurAffinity

Presentation isn’t all that matters. For all of the mostly-deserved guff FurAffinity gets, it’s got an awful lot of users, and if you’re trying to build a furry audience that’s important.

On all of these sites, your visibility–and the discoverability of your content–is pretty much directly tied to your participation. If you want more page views, there’s a straightforward formula. (You will notice I do not practice what I preach, which is why my “chipotle” FA account is essentially invisible.)

regularly add new people to your watchlist
regularly add things to your favorites
regularly leave comments
regularly add things to your gallery

While all of these sites accommodate erotic material, there’s a noticeable division between FurRag on one side and SoFurry and Inkbunny on the other. FR treats erotica as both a rating category and a genre, but there’s no implicit suggestion that erotica is the norm. But the entire user experience on SF and IB, from setting the metadata of uploaded material through browsing and searching, implicitly sends the message that if you’re not there looking for (or creating) fetish material you’re kind of a weirdo.

Also: dating site or archive? Pick one, guys.

What’s my final recommendation? I think having a presence on FA is important, whether you particularly like the site or not. Beyond that, it’s murkier. My favorite of the other three–despite the fact that I have no presence at all there (yet)–is FurRag. It’s the smallest, but it’s by far the most dedicated to writing. While SoFurry and Inkbunny are both pretty good at displaying text stories, they’re not so good for browsing, both falling back on the ol’ thumbnail grid. And–besides the notes about the erotica focus–Inkbunny in particular comes across as more art-focused, despite having the best text upload conversion. (SoFurry 2 is experimenting with ePub creation and Readability integration, a pretty clear sign that they are taking writing seriously, for which you can probably credit Alex Vance.)

Explaining how a new conception for Claw & Quill will be different is, as Alton Brown would say, another show. In part that’s because I’m still working it out myself, I’ll admit. ↩
A comment I’ve seen from Inkbunny staff confirmed my suspicion that this has to do with worries about running afoul of bestiality laws. This strongly suggests Inkbunny is taking the position that furries are a safe harbor against anti-pornography statutes–as long as none of the characters are human, laws against sexual depictions involving humans don’t apply. While I’m not a lawyer blah blah etc., I find this logic dubious. At any rate, it creates the very curious situation that–if we take their ACP strictly–my story “Travelling Music,” which might well pass muster as late-teen YA appropriate by today’s standards, is too hot for Inkbunny to handle. ↩

Huh.

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 19:19:30 GMT

So my last entry was June 11th and it begins, "I've been lax in updating this. Maybe I'll try to make this a weekly thing, but no promises."

Boy, good thing about the "no promise" part there, huh? Wow.

I'm trying to figure out when LiveJournal became--well--mostly irrelevant in my writing. In 2011 I've made only four posts, counting this one. In all of 2010, I made only 13; in 2009, 35; in 2008, 51; in 2007, 66; in 2006, 83. (Those numbers count "locked" updates, so not all of them will necessarily show up if you're bored enough to browse the archives.) In previous years I'm pretty sure I broke 100. I never used Facebook, but I think I started using Twitter as my main platform for small life updates around 2009, and in 2010 revived my "linkblog," Coyote Tracks, as a technology blog where most of my writing attention is going. While it's tiny potatoes by Big Name Blog standards, it has over 1,000 followers on Tumblr and 650 or so RSS subscribers.

I suspect at this point I should face the truth that I'm not likely to use this venue very much anymore. I don't even check my LJ "friends page" daily anymore, and I've never successfully integrated Dreamwidth, LJ's erstwhile replacement, into my browsing habits. While I appreciate the philosophy of DW's founders, in practice... well, in practice DW is where you start a blog as a quasi-political statement about how much you hated Six Apart or now hate SUP, and then cross-post to LiveJournal because you know the majority of your friends are still there. (I have exactly one friend who used to post on LJ, moved to DW and stopped cross-posting.) At this point I simply don't see DW achieving any kind of critical mass. I think that may be just fine for them; they've pretty much gone out of their way to target themselves to the ~~copyright violation~~ fan fiction community, and as long as they achieve critical mass there they'll be more than happy.

If not Dreamwidth, what does replace LJ? Personally, of course, I like Tumblr; I've seen it derided as "the dumber, naked LiveJournal," but I think that seriously underestimates how stupid a lot of LJs have historically been. Choosing a hosted blogging service by the apparent median IQ of the blogs hosted on them is going to leave you with Field Notes. Tumblr has the equivalent of a friends page, and you can choose to allow comments.

But the answer, more than likely, is "nothing." It's possible that the notion of a public journal that LiveJournal implicitly promotes is a notion that people are moving away from. Most people really don't want to share all of their life: they want to share general bits with everyone and specific bits with specific people. Some people want to just write rants; some people want to write daily or weekly columns, or to just share interesting things they've found around the net (or photos of things they've found in real life). Even though LJ was in many ways first with all that functionality, it's not really best at any of that functionality anymore. The people who can't handle having more than one site to do everything are mostly stuck in Facebook; for the rest of us, diffusing our attention across a few different places on the net turns out to be fairly easy.

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 17:25:45 GMT

As usual, I’ve been very lax in updating this. I may make an effort to start making this a weekly thing again, finally, but no promises. Here’s an overview of what’s been going on recently, at the least…

Most immediately, about two and a half weeks ago I woke up with a stiff neck. No big deal, right? Well, as the days went on, it didn’t go away, and it seemed more like a pinched nerve. Or a shoulder… thing. Then a shoulder thing that involved limited movement and excruciating pain. On Memorial Day I went to a nearby hospital for an evaluation—the walk-in clinic nearby was closed for the holiday (!)—and got the helpful diagnosis of “muscle spasms,” caused by a pulled trapezius. Okay, maybe so. But the pain didn’t really go away completely and the range of motion didn’t really come back, either. A week ago I went to a chiropractor, after doing a little bit of due diligence to find one with a fairly good reputation who focuses on what massage and skeletal manipulation could conceivably help with (i.e., back and shoulder pain) rather than sounding unduly homeopathic.

Is he helping? I’m not sure. He’s not hurting, but from all appearances I have a “frozen shoulder,” which could take months to heal.

Welcome to middle age.

Anyway, on other fronts… my contract with the startup that I went to work for in February ended at the end of April, and I still have not been paid. I knew this possibility going in—that’s what “deferred compensation” means, after all—so I’m not upset. (Which is not to say that I don’t want the money.) However, I’m firing up the engines for looking for work again, getting my resume back in order and starting a long-delayed revamp of my personal web site. I’m not really sure what I’m looking for at this point; I don’t know how much of a picky bastard I can afford to be, either. But part of me wants to be doing consulting work more than doing full-time work. I could definitely be comfortable on a lower annual income than what I made last year—again, which is not to say that I wouldn’t like to make that much or more on a regular basis, but I really do like the freedom to set my own hours and working conditions. I want to work my own way, to other people’s deadlines. (Deadlines are, I have learned, pretty necessary to me.)

A couple months ago I started trying to force myself to write at least a half-hour every day. It doesn’t matter what the writing is, but notes and research for writing doesn’t count. This has actually helped—I’ve written several vignettes and stories and gotten more regular at updating my other blog. The shoulder injury has broken my concentration on non-blog writing but I’m trying to get back on that horse, too, so to speak.

Claw & Quill is still only moving forward in fits and starts. I admit my motivation to work on it has been relatively low the last few months; I’d like to find something to relight that fire, but at this point I’m not sure there’s anyone out there actually clamoring for it. What the fandom has for showing off stories is probably in the “good enough” category, and I’ve been at a loss to define just what it is that’s going to make people want to migrate to C&Q if it were actually finished. (If you think this is a blatant call for encouragement and reassurance, you are by and large right.)

There’s a few of you who I really only keep track of through LiveJournal these days (or Dreamwidth, which I still haven’t really made the mental shift to, even though I suspect there are many of you I should actually be reading there instead of on LJ). Many of you have become almost as bad about updating as I have. Some of you have moved to Twitter—as I’ve mentioned, it’s great for small stuff—and some of you, well, I’m not sure about at all at this point, as you don’t write much here, don’t tweet much and don’t seem to ever be available on IM, which about exhausts my ability to spy on you. I hope you’re all doing well!

I tell myself I will look back at this and laugh

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 17:18:54 GMT

As some of you heard, I was laid off from my job yesterday.

Technically, I was “given notice” yesterday: I’m considered to be an employee through the end of the month and on the payroll through January 28th; while I’ve heard of better severance packages, for somebody who’s only been a company employee (as opposed to a full time contractor) for 9 months, this isn’t too bad.

On one hand, I’m not surprised. Back in October of last year, I was brought on to support a product which is going away in January—and specifically to do web development for the promotional, ordering and management web sites connected with that product. The technology from it will live on, but the web sites won’t. The last few months I’ve been working on UI implementation (not design) for a product which, I’m given to understand, my now former group won’t be responsible for permanently—I’ve been saying to people for a few months that I really couldn’t tell what I was going to be doing come January. Sometimes you feel like Chicken Little when you’re reading the writing on the wall everyone else seems to be missing, but unfortunately my track record in predicting imminent doom is fairly good. (On this job this makes me right about three things that other people apparently weren’t.)

On the other hand, I am surprised by the timing: not because it’s the holidays (companies do not tend to be sentimental), but because yesterday was literally the first day in the new office. They had spent the money to move me—and three other people in the group who were also laid off—down to this building, made us name plates and such. Whoever made the decision on which of us would go very likely wasn’t in Silicon Valley at all. My manager wasn’t informed until about 45 minutes before I was, apparently. (And yes, I believe he was pretty shocked: he’s not a good enough actor to have just been pretending to look like somebody had run over his puppy.)

The Dilbert-ness of the whole affair is the most painful aspect, in some ways. I have worked at the company’s brand new showcase Silicon Valley office—a move which in part precipitated my move down to Santa Clara a little over a month ago—for a grand total of four hours.

(I may use my badge to get into the building while it still works just to drink their free coffee, in the new coffee mug they gave me as a moving gift. If we’re all going to play Dilbert, I have a few weeks to play Wally.)

So: what happens now?

I’m not going to get back into the active job hunt until February—not that I won’t be open to something falling into my lap in January if the stars are right, of course, but I want to spend some time on personal projects. Not that I expect any of them will be income-generating, but some are long-overdue for attention and I don’t have much excuse not to attend to them now.

Part of me would like to not get back into the job hunt, at least not directly. I enjoyed my time as a freelancer in 2009, with the not-so-minor flaw that I simply wasn’t getting paid enough to match my expenses. I’m not sure I know any friends who freelance consistently who aren’t also consistently worried about scraping enough money together for ramen. I’ve worked out what I need as a reasonable minimum, and it’s a lot less than I’ve been making the last year—which is good, since that means I have enough cushion to coast without help for at least a few months.

For now, though, I’m overdue on going on a really long drive to nowhere in particular.

Fall Weather

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 03:06:47 GMT

Since I’ve lived out here, people have said that the San Francisco Bay area has little seasonal variation. To someone who’s come from the northeast United States, perhaps this is true; to someone from Florida, it certainly isn’t. The seasons here seem to come late—fall never gets underway until November. This year it came abruptly. The summer had been unseasonably cool, leading to an unusually warm October followed by a cold snap. In a single day, trees around where I live jumped from green and a little yellow to red, orange and shedding, thick drifts of brown leaves blowing across roads and gathering soggily in gutters after the rain.

At least, this happened where I live now, in Santa Clara, back in the heart of Silicon Valley. In Foster City, just 30 miles north up the peninsula, I don’t remember this happening. This may be the fault of my memory more than of Foster City—as I write this passage, I’m on a train bound for San Francisco, the same train I used to take into work at times. Right now it’s in Menlo Park and there are—well, some fall colors, although certainly not as pronounced as I saw in Santa Clara.

When I got to the peninsula it seemed much nicer than the South Bay: more urbane, with walkable downtowns and fewer chain restaurants and more history. It would be closer to hills and closer to parks. There was one right down the street!

All true. But Foster City itself had no downtown at all, and only a few restaurants (chain or otherwise). It wasn’t easy to get into the hills except for residential neighborhoods. The nicer downtowns were some distance away. Nearly all of my friends live in the South Bay, and I found myself making new ones there that I could rarely visit.

And there are no first class coffee shops anywhere between Mountain View and San Francisco. Trust me.

Don’t get me wrong; Foster City is a pleasant place. Sure, it’s aggressively nondescript in a way that only the exurbs that sprung up in the last fifteen years top (and which were the clearest sign of the recession-to-be: when people are spending $300K to live in house farms 60 miles from the metro area they work in, something’s going to give). But it had a great location and made taking a job in San Francisco a lot more bearable than it would have been if I’d stayed in San Jose.

When I first moved to California a friend complained I kept saying everything was better in Florida. I don’t think that was a fair complaint, though. I was guilty of comparing things here to what I knew in Tampa, yes—but looking back is hardly the same as wanting to go back. There are things I miss (as anyone who’s moved from a place they grew up would have) and I love my friends in Florida, but it’s never been a place I’ve pined for.

I didn’t realize until this very move, looking back on my other moves, that this is hardly new for me. I rarely think the grass is greener on the other side—the grass is greener wherever I happen to be. The SF Peninsula was clearly better than the South Bay until a month ago. Now the South Bay is clearly better than the Peninsula and I was an idiot to think otherwise. So it goes.

Today, though, is the last day that my office is in San Francisco, and while I won’t miss the commute I’ve had for the last several weeks—I’m very much looking forward to the shortest commute I’ve had in five years!—I’ll miss being in The City. After spending a year riding in four or five days a week, it’s a different place for me: less intimidatingly labyrinthine, but no less magical. There are dozens of spots from little cafes to funky neighborhoods to world-class bars that you’re unlikely to visit, or even find, unless you live or work there.

There’s a curious mental barrier between SF and the South Bay. It’s only 45 miles away from where I’m living now, which is—yes, this is a comparison to Florida—is a shorter distance than that between my college in Sarasota and the neighborhoods in Tampa I visited frequently. But SF is much harder to get into and get around in until you’re familiar with public transit. I doubt I’d been into San Francisco more than a dozen times in the seven years before I started work up by Market and Embarcadero.

So this colors this move in a strangely unexpected way. I am going to miss working downtown despite the costs involved. (Between no longer paying for monthly transit and parking passes and not having the “Financial District tax” on lunches, I’ll probably be saving upwards of $200 a month.) Yet I have a curious feeling that the South Bay is more my home than the Peninsula ever was. This has made me think—not for the first time—on just what “home” means to me. Maybe I’ll have an answer before I retire.

Another autumn, another change

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 00:02:50 GMT

It’s a rainy day here in the Bay Area. A rainy autumn day wouldn’t be worth mentioning here in the Land of Fog in previous years, but it’s taken us until mid-October to actually have a fall day. The weather’s been unusual most of this year, with a brief burst of heat to both open and close the summer. The temperature in San Francisco itself broke 90 several days, which is nearly unheard of: a hot summer day in the City is one that breaks 70.

For me personally, autumn has frequently been a time of change. It was autumn in 2002 that I moved out to California. The last few years I’ve had a change every autumn: in 2007 I moved from the South Bay up to Foster City, in 2008 I was laid off and survived (barely) on freelance income, in 2009 I got the contract—now a permanent position—with Nokia. Now in 2010, I’m moving—along with Nokia—back to the South Bay.

The new apartment is in Santa Clara, equidistant between Nokia’s new office building and the building my flatmate’s new job will be in. It’s another “luxury” complex and, yes, it’s expensive—although it’ll be $400 less than the complex we’re in now and more, well, luxurious. This is a mild letdown in some respects, in that I’d decided a while ago that Miramar would be the last apartment I lived in: I wanted the relative freedom of at least home rental, if not ownership. (My slightly facetious measure is that I want a place where I could add a subwoofer to my stereo system without fear of reprisal.) We looked at a few condos and homes, and I’m sure if we kept hunting we’d be able to find one that would be Nearly Perfect and probably for somewhat less rent money to boot—but the location of this place is honestly pretty hard to beat. Even if one or the other of us ends up with a job elsewhere in a year, a distinct possibility in our industry even in good economic times, there’s a good chance that job will be in the South Bay; this complex is not only very convenient to freeways, it’s about 2 miles from the closest Caltrain station, which makes it about as “connected” with public transit as where I live now. And while its location looks fairly isolated—two friends of mine lived in the apartment complex across the street and I didn’t think there was anything nearby but a terrible Mexican restaurant—it’s actually within short walking distance of El Camino Real and a lot of restaurants and businesses.

And it’ll be close to good coffee shops. There are things I really like about the Peninsula compared to the South Bay, but coffee is not one of them.

So. I’m not looking forward to the process of moving over the next month—it’s going to suck no matter how I slice it—but I’m looking forward to actually living there. With the exception of Duncan’s household (near where I live now!) and Kitana and roommate in Alameda, nearly everyone I know is in the South Bay, spread out from Mountain View toward the eastern foothills of San Jose. At the very least I’ll be more available for those weird spur-of-the-moment things I see people occasionally tweet about. And, once both Nokia and I are moved, trading my homeward commute of 60-90 minutes for one of 10-15 should open up the evening nicely. (Whether I take advantage of it wisely remains to be seen.)

For now, though, I’m actually down around Gilroy and it’s 5 pm, and I have work to do at home that must be done this weekend. So back in the car.

Comment screening

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 02:25:36 GMT

Because of morons who have been registering LiveJournal accounts and inexplicably bombing my older entries with Russian spam, I have had to ratchet down the comment permissiveness -- now everyone who isn't a LiveJournal "friend" will be screened. I will change it back when I can, but I've had three rounds of this now in two days.

I can't figure out the rationale, because they're not links and translations don't suggest that they're keywords. Is there some benefit to posting pointless crap in Russian on old LJ posts?

At any rate, I'm hoping that if the rationale -- assuming there is one -- involves actually being, y'know, web searchable, screening comments will do it. Otherwise I may have to make commenting friend-only.

Granted, I'm mostly writing on Coyote Tracks these days (and even that's been a bit neglected), but this still irks me on general principle.

EF16 approaching

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 18:19:32 GMT

So, I’m heading off to Eurofurence next week with jadedfox, leaving on Tuesday afternoon here and arriving Wednesday at Later Than I’d Like. (We get into Hanover at 6:30 pm.)

This is not a particularly well-planned trip; I ended up with two plane changes on the way out and a six-hour layover in Frankfurt, which irks me because I didn’t notice how long it was until after I’d bought the tickets. Otherwise, I would have just gotten train tickets to go between Frankfurt and Magdeburg, rather than waiting six hours for a brief flight to Magdeburg and then taking the train from there. The travel company tells me that if I just blow off that last segment and take the train anyway, they’ll cancel my return tickets. Lovely of them.

Also, despite talking to cheetah_spotty at Anthrocon about helping out with panels I forgot to actually, you know, write to panel coordinators to offer to help out, so the best I can do is show up at panels and be one of those annoying guys in the audience who talks too much. Yay!

Even so, I’m looking forward to the trip and seeing people I haven’t seen since, well, the last Eurofurence. I’m not sure which of my European friends and acquaintances are going to be there, honestly, but I’m sure some of you shall be.

I’ll be easy to spot, because I’m the guy who looks more or less like me.

…okay, I’ll also probably be wearing a badge or two. Look for “Chipotle.”

Oh look, a new car.

Wed, 05 May 2010 04:19:09 GMT

After eight and a half years and 192,000 miles—yes, that’s over 20K miles a year—I’d started looking about for a new car to replace my Acura RSX. As much as I liked it (and the engine still seemed to be in pretty good shape), it needed work: squeaky brakes were a must-fix and tires were due to be replaced within the year, and it had annoying and expensive non-critical problems: a blown air conditioner compressor and an ugly dent in the passenger side door. A median estimate for all that would be around $2500, notably more than the car’s actual value at this point.

I’d made a short list of cars to look at—the Ford Focus or Fusion, the Mazda 3, the Hyundai Genesis Coupe. Nothing by Honda, Toyota or Nissan particularly grabbed me this time, which surprised me. (Which isn’t to say that I’d turn down a 370Z, but it’s out of my price range.) The Hyundai appealed to me as something similar to the RSX but more powerful, with rear-wheel drive, and just an all-around great driving machine. And even less practical than the RSX. The Mazda 3 surprised me by being as interesting as it was—for what’s basically Mazda’s answer to the Accord, it’s aggressively styled, has some interesting standard electronics and even with an automatic transmission is as responsive as the stick-shift RSX. (And it’s a five-speed auto with a “manual shift” mode, to boot.)

The Ford salesman was pretty cool, managing the neat trick of seeming laid back and attentive simultaneously. He didn’t fail to close the sale—the car did. It may be that nearly nine years with a quasi-sports coupe has changed my perceptions, but the Fusion seemed to take the steering wheel and accelerator as suggestions rather than commands. It’s a distinctive ride style I imagine some people would like, to be sure, but those people are not me.

I hadn’t actually expected to buy a new car now, either way, but Mazda was offering a 0% APR deal expiring on Monday. Gnaw gnaw gnaw. So I took a deep breath, went back, signed all the papers, drove away from the dealer five minutes before they closed, and the car immediately died.

No, seriously. A mile away from the dealer the “check engine” light came on, which isn’t necessarily serious, but so did the “automatic transmission malfunction” light, which is drive to the shop now do not pass go do not collect $200 serious.

As you may guess, this caused a great deal of stress for me, and more than a little consternation at the dealership. Their service department wouldn’t re-open until Monday (yesterday). I got a loaner then—apparently a very ad hoc “don’t strand the customer” choice of cars, as they’d actually just closed when I rolled the ailing car back up—and then swapped it for a somewhat more official “drive this while we figure out what’s going on, please” loaner on Sunday.

To wrap the story up somewhat more quickly, yesterday I checked in with the service manager in the morning, who optimistically said, “It’s probably just a loose connector.” I wasn’t so sanguine, and had been preparing myself to politely but firmly suggest that perhaps they should look into getting me a different car. As it turned out, the return visit in late afternoon made that unnecessary. When I walked in, they greeted me with, “We’re getting you another car and it should be here in a couple hours.” They couldn’t determine what was wrong with the original car (“something’s wrong with the transmission”) and didn’t want the deal to be permeated with lemon scent. I’ll give them points for handling it proactively.

So, bottom line: new car. Payments for five years, but slightly less than the payments on the RSX were, and with no interest. A lot of the gadgetry that’s become standard in the last decade, too—the advancements are remarkable. I may be a nerd and post pictures later.

I’ll take it out for a long drive—well, maybe not for three weeks: this upcoming weekend is booked for Mother’s Day stuff, and the weekend after that I’m keeping open for potential visitors.

After that, though, I drive somewhere stupidly far away.

(Also: props to Menlo Mazda and Jessica, the saleswoman there who helped me out and handled what’s surely on the list of Things You Do Not Want To Go Wrong With Your Sale with grace. And, if you’re in the market for a Ford, Zach at Sunnyvale Ford gets cool points. Hopefully he won’t lose them when I say I’ve bought a Mazda elsewhere.)

Random updates

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 01:54:24 GMT

(Presented for your perusal in no particular order.)

I transitioned from being a contract employee to a direct employee of the company I’ve been working for since October. In practice this doesn’t make a huge difference in terms of my role and responsibilities (or salary), but it’s nice that they’re hoping to keep me around for a while.
I’m experimentally moving my journal back end from LiveJournal to Dreamwidth. So:
- If you’re reading my journal on LJ or at ranea.org, you shouldn’t have to do anything; if you also have a DW account and want to read me there, my username is (surprise) chipotle.
- If you want to comment on my journal, you still shouldn’t have to do anything, at least for the indefinite future. I expect to check both sites.
- Eventually, if DW works out, I may first request and then eventually require comments to be only on DW. But I’m not sure. I’d rather things be a little more of a pain in the butt for me than for you.
- Why bother doing this at all? In very short form, I don’t really trust LiveJournal’s commitment to their “old” userbase (i.e., people like me).
While this journal is probably going to remain moderately quiet, just for the occasional life update, I have a tech blog now, although it’s also something of an experiment: Coyote Tracks.
- My goal is to update it with something at least once a day and with something substantial at least once a week. It may be a little something like Daring Fireball in content mix, focusing on web stuff, Apple stuff, and publishing stuff, musings about the future of computing which will undoubtedly look ridiculous in as little as a year’s time, occasional commentary on commentary, and—the secret ingredient—cocktail recipes.
- For a “brand new blog” it got a fair amount of attention from being linked to by Marco Arment (the creator of Tumblr and the amazing Instapaper). We’ll see if that lasts.
- The URL is http://chipotle.tumblr.com/, and it should have an RSS feed and other such niceties out of the box. LJ users may add it to their friends page as “chipotle_tumble”; Dreamwidth users may add “coyotetracks_feed”. (Please note that while DW and LJ will allow you to comment on feeds, there’s no guarantee that I will see such a comment.)

A brief update

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 01:31:33 GMT

…but not as brief as a tweet.

Work has been busy the last few weeks, culminating in really busy this last week. Today was a coworker’s last day and he was trying to do a knowledge dump while we’re trying to roll out the code that he’d been working on and merge in various fixes that were being stashed away rather than checked into the source code trunk line, because the now ex-coworker was maintaining his Huge Project in trunk. (Why was he not maintaining it in his own branch? I don’t know.)

To add spice to it all, my “other job,” the contract that I started last March or so, is finally wrapping up. Sort of. This means a big push to get it running in production mode rather than development mode. So this has been eating up most of my spare cycles this week. Truthfully there are other projects I’d rather be devoting spare cycles to, but a contract is a contract and all that.

Speaking of C&Q, there will be more to report on that soon. While I can’t say that interest in it has spiked—we’re still flying very much under the radar in most places, I think—I’m getting asked about it more frequently. And there’s work, er, being worked on. (In part that’s why having the other contract pop its up head and demand work on me now now NOW! is so frustrating; there’s only a couple more hills to climb before I can start getting things into a private alpha stage.)

Anyway, on the train now heading home to do Jäger shots and collapse.

I’m kidding about the Jäger.

Probably.

The Next Thing That Comes First

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 05:24:50 GMT

Against my better judgement, I’m going to write about the iPad. It’s been long enough that everyone’s already formed an opinion, I suspect; I’m going to start off by throwing a bit of cold water on some of the opinions I’ve been seeing.

The iPad is software upgradeable. Duh, you say? Well, given how much of the sneering going on is about things that are software-based, apparently this needs to be hammered home. The iPhone didn’t even have downloadable apps when it first shipped. In fact, it’s likely the iPad software demonstrated wasn’t finished yet: the iPad home screen is unusually—some might even say suspiciously—bare, and the keyboard accessory has a mysterious unlabeled white key on it. And while Apple has dissed multitasking on the iPhone because they think it makes phones unstable, the iPad is not a phone.

The iPad is not just a “consumption” device. I understand only Apple nerds probably sat through the whole presentation, but we saw a word processor with style sheets, multi-column layout and text flow around irregular objects; a spreadsheet program with well over a hundred functions, full charting capabilities, a “flat database” functionality that the desktop version doesn’t have, and a really interesting dynamic keyboard; a full-featured presentation program that looks like it’s easily the rival of PowerPoint for creation, not mere playback; and a fairly sophisticated-looking paint program. And OmniGroup has announced they’re porting all five of their major productivity apps to the iPad. If you want to claim that you can’t imagine ever using a device with a virtual keyboard for doing “real” work, fine—but don’t assume that everyone else will come to the same decision.

Policies are like software. One of the recurring complaints is that the iPhone and iPad ecosystems are “closed,” in that you can only install software from Apple’s App Store. And the recurring response to that is to parrot Apple’s line about why that’s not such a bad thing, and to point out that the evils of this are routinely overstated for maximum dramatic effect. Only a fraction of a percentage of apps submitted fail to make it to the storefront. The problem that it’s inconsistent and poorly-defined, and this is because the review model doesn’t scale even to the point it’s at now. This can only get worse. Apple’s corporate culture is certainly one of obsessive control freakishness, but it’s not one of stupidity. There’s no guarantee that this is going to always be Apple’s policy. (It’s also worth mentioning that Mobile Safari on the iPhone supports so many HTML5 features, including local storage, that Google was actually able to re-implement Google Voice as a web app. Just saying, don’t write that power off.)

Data is not like software. I want to violently shake the “information wants to be free!” types who launch into tirades about this. The rights being managed on digital media are the rights of the copyright holders and the copyright holders on music, movies, and books are not Apple. Also, anyone who writes something that implies Apple software and devices only work with Apple-provided media needs to be face-punched. Seriously. Yes, you generally have to work with iTunes to manage content on Apple devices, but iTunes and iPods have always played unprotected MP3 and AAC audio and H.264 and MPEG4 video. Which are open standards. As in not Apple’s. Yes, it’d be great if those DivX files of the current season of “Lost” you no doubt legally acquired from BitTorrent would play on the iPod without conversion, but inconvenience is not lock-in. (They will play in iTunes, since all it needs is a plugin. And if you’d really rather jam a fondue fork up your nose rather than use iTunes, there are alternatives.)

Hatred of Apple is largely irrelevant. If the iPad concept takes off, there will be alternatives, just like there are alternatives to the iPhone. If the iPad concept doesn’t take off, there probably won’t be, but nobody outside Apple will care.

So do I think the iPad concept will take off? Yes, because I don’t think the iPad concept is “iPod Touch with a bigger screen.”

The Mac, back in 1984, was the first mass market computer with a GUI and a mouse, with windows and a desktop metaphor and an insistence on WYSIWYG everywhere. Apple had tried this before with the Apple Lisa, which was more or less just a cheaper version of the Xerox Star—cheaper being very relative, since the Lisa was around $10,000. The Mac reimplemented those ideas from the ground up and slashed the price to… well, merely high. While a few people saw it as revolutionary, a lot of people thought it was frankly nuts.

Except all the metaphors Apple was pushing won. And it did revolutionize not just the computer field, but the publishing and design fields. The Mac never set the world on fire in terms of sales, but the operating system you are using right now—whatever operating system you are using—is the way it is, at least in part, because of Apple.

And love or hate them, Apple has a track record of shoving the industry forward. In addition to all that toy GUI stuff, the Mac did everything else its own way, from using RS-422 (“LocalTalk”) serial ports and SCSI hard drive interfaces to using 3.5” floppies at a time when everybody else was still using 5.25” disks. LocalTalk never left the Mac market, but 3.5” floppies became the standard… and were still the standard when the iMac came out in 1998 and said, “Screw floppies, you don’t need ’em.” That was also met with derision, of course—as was the iMac’s cavalier dismissal of standard RS-232 serial ports, PS/2 connectors and parallel ports, eschewing it all in favor of this crazy thing nobody else was using called USB.

And now Apple is trying to shove the industry forward again. They’ve been talking about “computing appliances” for years, going back to Jef Raskin and through the Knowledge Navigator concept. And now, finally, they’ve got something they think is worth bringing to market.

If you want to write that off as rampant Apple fanboyism, so be it, but read Fraser Spiers’ “Future Shock” piece for a good explanation of why I’m making that assertion. Or to put it in a more nerdly fashion: the iPad demo probably used clips from “Star Trek” for a good reason.

This is, as someone else put it, the first incarnation of the thing in the movies. In 2007 I wrote about ubiquitous presence, a variant on ubiqitous computing—the idea that networked computers will eventually be so much with us that they fade into the background the way electricity and indoor plumbing do for us today. We’ve had “smartphones” for a few years, but the iPhone redefined the category—even if you believe (and you may be right) that the Droid or the Nexus One or something else coming out in the next year is a better smartphone.

The iPad is setting out to establish a category. It may fail; in 1999 there was an awful lot of buzz about “internet appliances” which I chiefly remember as the chimera that killed BeOS. Maybe nobody really wanted computer-as-appliance—but maybe the infrastructure just wasn’t there for that then, and maybe it is now. And in the most insanely optimistic outcome the iPod will still have all the limitations of Things That Come First. The Catch-22 is that while we can see some of the potential limitations now, we won’t really know them until we have the Things That Come Next in our hands.

I was in on the ground floor for the original introduction of microcomputers, the TRS-80s and the Apple IIs and CP/M. And honestly, that was pretty cool. I wasn’t really in on the Mac, though; I didn’t like mice or windows and I was happy with the command line. I missed that inflection point until it was quite obvious it had passed. It looks to me like this may, may, be another inflection point. If this is the next Thing That Comes First since, well, the original Mac—I think I’d like to be in on the ground floor again.

On comments about the iPad

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:55:56 GMT

What was the famous Slashdot quote about the first iPod? “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”

While I’m not going to predict the iPad will match the success of the previous iP* product lines, there’s a definite party line among the geek crowd that only fashion-conscious fanboys would ever actually buy Apple products and that whenever they introduce a new gadget it’s the Stupidest Thing Ever. If the majority of commenters on Slashdot and TechCrunch did not piss all over a new Apple product, that’s the product I’d expect was in trouble. Given how much pissing is going on around such sites over the iPad, I'm betting the thing is going to sell like crack-infused hotcakes.

Never make the mistake of assuming either of the following:

That you really know what a product you've only seen demo videos of is going to be good at. Some things look much better in demos than they really are, and some things have to actually be used to be properly evaluated.
That because ultimately a product is not good for you means that it's not good for anyone else. You are not necessarily in the median of the product's target market segment.

(N.B.: I'm not sure I'm in the iPad's target market segment. It's not designed to be a laptop replacement and I'm not sure I need another gadget about. I might rather have it than a dedicated e-book reader, all the arguments for the superiority of e-ink not withstanding, but I haven't been sold on e-book readers yet, either. So.)

A disquieting thought

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 04:17:36 GMT

So with several people making various offers to help with Claw & Quill’s programming, I’m realizing that there’s no way to avoid it—I have to play project manager. And as much as I may wish to find excuses why it isn’t necessary, I really, truly have to finish a (cue ominous organ chord) requirements document.

But it’s on the way. Really.

Still here!

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 06:43:29 GMT

Geeze, nothing for nearly a month and a half, and that shortly after a post talking about how I should write here weekly.

As a quick update—which I seriously need to get back into the habit of doing here, don’t I?—I’m heading to Florida starting this coming Friday the 18th, and will be there for a week. My new job is somewhat less crazy now than it was over much of November, but during November it was… we’ll just say really hectic.

It often seems to be the case that people get more done on personal projects when they’re getting busy with other projects, and to some degree that’s even true with me. I’ve made progress on Claw & Quill in the last two weeks or so that I’m proud of, although a lot of it’s awfully nerdy stuff at this point. I’m going to put out another quasi-call for people who are interested in helping with coding. The site’s being written in Python using the Django framework; experience with either one isn’t strictly necessary (although it’s obviously helpful). There’s also going to be call for work with Javascript and jQuery (and jQuery UI), HTML 5, and other such markup-savvy stuff. A couple people have expressed interest in the past in a general way; if you’re still interested—or have become interested since—give me an idea of what you’re actually interested in and I’ll try to bring things to a point where I can start getting people on board shortly after the holidays.

Trainspotting--and Birthdays

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:05:57 GMT

As I start this, I’m riding the BART train into work. This is a way of commuting I’m still not used to. It’s not cheap—$4.75 each way on BART plus $1 a day for parking (unless I buy a monthly parking permit, which is actually more expensive per day at $30 a month). It’s also not fast—the drive from the apartment in Foster City to the Millbrae Transit Station, the southern end of the BART line on the Peninsula, is 15 to 20 minutes and the ride on BART is 35. On the flip side, though, it’s relatively easy: obviously, on BART there’s no driving involved. And parking fees alone at my building would cost more than I’m paying for this trip.

I’ll admit that of the several commuter rail services I’ve tried in the Bay Area, BART is the best only in terms of reach. Caltrain is considerably quieter, considerably more comfortable, and considerably faster—a limited or bullet train would make the trip into San Francisco from Millbrae in under 20 minutes. And it’s no more expensive. Unfortunately, the SF Caltrain station is a mile and a half from the office, more than I’m inclined to walk. Taking MUNI from the station to the office would add another $4 per day in the commute. In theory, I could actually catch Caltrain closer to the apartment at the cost of an extra buck a day in parking, but at that point it’s become a third again as expensive, and Caltrain—as jakebe frequently has reason to complain—has the Achilles’ heel of railroad crossings, providing high potential for traffic accidents and the occasional suicide. BART is at various points a subway or an elevated track, but roads never cross it.

On the other hand: more comfortable, quieter, and—yes, when not delayed—faster. Hmm.

Anyway, this gives me something to think about: I can make a go of this kind of commuting and be moderately comfortable with it. This opens up the potential for living longer distances away from my work if I choose to, provided that both my home and my workplace are sufficiently close to rail lines. I could move back down the peninsula and take Caltrain in, or go anywhere in the East Bay that’s still on BART—although that would open up the problem I’ve written about before of being farther away than I’d want from friends. Granted, driving an hour or so each way to get somewhere on a weekend is hardly new for me, but I’ve noticed that in practice getting together with friends much past a ten-mile radius of one’s house rarely happens. Maybe one can develop a mindset of frequently pinging friends to see if they’re busy, to even (gasp) plan ahead, but by now it’s a little unlikely I’m going to change my ways, I’m afraid.

But: speaking of that, and of lack of planning ahead, I’d like to see if I can get people together for my birthday—to go out to a group-friendly restaurant, perhaps Buca di Beppo in Palo Alto. (I’m open to other suggestions; my thought is that Palo Alto isn’t too far for people from the South Bay, but isn’t as far as, well, the South Bay for anyone coming from the north or east.) Technically, my birthday is tomorrow, and while I’d normally just suggest bumping things to the next weekend, the next weekend is, well, Halloween. So. I may see if I can get people together for the next next weekend, say, Saturday November 7.