A Flicker of Light

"Birds" is closed. Here's what I learned about remote lighting effects:

This is one of the effects modules. Off-the-shelf, no custom PCB, and all purchased at Adafruit:

Feather MO/RFM69 board: Arduino-compatible with an ARM Cortex processor, hosting a 900mHz packet radio (as well as power regulation, LiPo charge management, and native USB capability)

NeoPixel Jewel; seven 5050 RGBW LEDs with internal controllers so the whole thing can be run from a single data line.

And a 3xAAA battery pack with switch and "JST" connector.

These are two of the "lamps" -- rather, incense holders. After fumbling around with a couple different ideas for diffusion the final choice was surprisingly low-tech; I stuffed bubble wrap inside.

And this is the setting. A little neighborhood church, minimal lighting setup. The transmitter (all the RFM69 chips are transceivers) is wired to a matrixed keypad and, to get just a little more power, a proper antenna also sourced from Adafruit. That's one of our musicians down there; the actors were doing photos before the house opened.



Radio performance? Fine. This is the lower power version of the chip and I've verified free-air transmission of half a block. I did have problems with one of the units when it was inside a brass ball; on the final weekend I stuck the wire antenna outside the lamp and it worked flawlessly after that. I also found they dropped connection when the batteries got low.

Battery? I didn't try to program sleep mode on either CPU or radio. One unit I turned off between performances and it lasted part-way into the second weekend. Another I left on night and day and it made it through two performances. A self-test and battery monitoring (which is quite possible with the transceivers) would be a good idea moving forward.

Intensity? Not spectacular. I only had eight standard theatrical fixtures (500W range) in the show, and even with all of them on the illuminated diffusor was quite visible. But they were incapable of putting useful face light into the acting area, at least in this configuration. I'm coming around to 3-5W as the minimum for a practical lantern or flashlight prop.

Software? This was a thrown-together mess, using a combination of library examples and repurposed Holocron software.

The most successful "look" I had programmed was a flickering lamp (since these are warm-white RGBW's, green+red to get an amber and a little white to make it brighter). It is a surprisingly good flicker considering it's simplicity:

At the heart of the program is a little function that compares a target value with the old value (for each channel of the LEDs), then divides the result by a rate, giving a float value of the difference per program cycle.

Then it cycles through, again by the rate, adding or subtracting this float, arriving at a new float (aka a fractional value), and temporarily converting it to the nearing integer to send it to the LEDs.

This allows me to fade up, down, or cross-fade between static looks. It also allows animation; for that, at each completion it will fetch a new number. In the case of the lamp flicker, this number is a random(constrained) intensity and rate. So sometimes it will quickly make a small change, sometimes it will slowly make a large change, etc., etc. The result is surprisingly realistic.

    By the way. I gave the musician one of my old Arduinos to play around with.

Sad Puppies aren't much fun

Story is conflict, and the conflicts I've chosen to to focus on are those that most illuminate the cultures and history of the Late Bronze Age. This is why I'm delving into the economics and politics, but also into class, gender, and ethnicity in Late Bronze Age Crete.



Of course, like everything else in the period, information about how they perceived ethnicity is scarce and contradictory. Yes, humans have always had clans and kinships, signs and shibboleths: ways to define "us" and "other," back to when the "other" was leaving their bones in the Neander Valley. The forms in which they appear, however; the kinds of difference people focus on, the meanings they ascribe to them, and the very language used is constantly evolving.

Take the term ethnos. Appears in Homer and Herodotus, but means anything from what we might call a "race" to describing an army group. Even in the words of a single author (well, however many Homers there actually were) the scope and implications in one passage are contradicted in another.

What doesn't seem to appear is anything mapping to what we'd now call "white." Which is a subset of the idea of race, itself created largely in the 18th century and refined into a rather peculiar (and peculiarly fluid) form today.

(Here's an example of the fluidity of that barrier between "us" and "them"; when the Japanese whipped Russian butt at the Yalu River it shocked the world that a "yellow" race had triumphed in modern warfare over a "white" race -- except that the Russians were promoted to "white" for the purpose of that illustration and were otherwise seen as some kind of suspiciously swarthy people from rather too far to the East. The same goal post shifting goes on today, with parts of the Arab world enlisted when it is necessary to talk about the great accomplishments of "white" people, but otherwise barred from the borders of the "civilized" world. And I'm going to run out of scare quotes before I finish this post!)

Because of course there's an ongoing dialog. What the Mycenae thought of the Hatti, or indeed of different, err, ethnos within Mainland Greece is one thing, but where we paint lines today is visible and important and hotly debated -- and not just at the attacking edge of the Alt-Right.

It's not just shrieking idiots from Stormfront, and it isn't just another face (as it were) of the white cis male as the null condition (an attitude skewered years ago by Simone de Beauvoir, writing that when women act like people, they are accused of acting like men). Simply put, there's nary a comment when Achilles is played by Brad Pitt, but a shitstorm when he's played by David Gyasi. And that's a problem for nuanced and historical presentation.

Yeah...Hollywood does seem to whitewash roles right and left, and when they don't, they go colorblind; substituting one tone deafness for another, and still failing to realize the variety of the real world. The point I'm trying to make is that the Classical Hero, like the Roman Soldier or the Medieval Knight, seems to default to square-jawed and melanin deficient and when they diverge, audiences complain.

(Yes, yes -- there is always nuance, there is always possible rejoinder. People did comment on the whitewashing, even in earlier years. They laughed at Tony Curtis as the most Brooklyn knight in armor ever, "Yonder is da castle of my fodder," and they laughed harder when the Duke assayed the Great Khan. The counterexamples do not invalidate the trend.)




This ongoing dialog goes into some very odd places. Take the perception of age-bleached and now unpainted marble of classical statuary as being the aesthetic pinnacle intended by the classical world (or, at least, achieved.) A surprising number of people object, and yes, on aesthetic grounds I agree that the full gaudy colors seem crass to me, too. I'm comfortable with the idea of seeing Apollo in naked stone, just as I'm comfortable in reading the Illiad in English -- or for that matter getting it in colloquial modern language from a skilled story-teller. But at the same time, let's accept that there was a different intent of the original artists.

In quite another direction, there's the Dorians. Those Zeus-struck Dorians. Yeah, yeah. Classical writers described the Greeks as having several clearly distinct lines, Doric and Ionic among them (like the styles of architecture.) They seemed to know who was who, which city was Dorian and which was Ionian or...whatever the others were. Apparently most agreed the Spartans were Doric...and, yeah, that leads to problems later on as Sparta had many later admirers.

The Mycenaea, or the Hellenes as Homer would have it, get identified in Homer as Achaeans, Danaans and Argives, but he lists Dorians as among the various people of the multi-lingual Crete of Odysseus' time. But you know how the guy was with telling stories (even Homer cops to it with his "mostly lies" throwaway).

And yeah you get into the Sea People and there's a suspicious similarity between some of these names and some of the names recorded by the Pharaohs who fought them.

Anyhow, there are these distinct dialects documented in the Classical Age, as well as other cultural differences. And there's the evolution of Greek culture from the warlords of the Mycenae to the full flowering of Classical Greece. And there's origin myths as well, with the Dorians sometimes conflated with the Return of the Heracli..anyhow, the Sons of Herakles.  Among the many origins of various peoples which show up in the myths, dragon's teeth and old guys escaping from Troy included. But anyhow!

Thing is, most of the early work done by historians was textual. Even post Schliemann the text ruled. So during all the empire building of the 18th century academics are looking at all this Dorian stuff and trying to figure out how you get from loose cannons like Herakles to the Athenian Democracy, and they decided there was a Dorian Invasion. That idea simmered for a while until the next crop decided -- with no evidence at all -- that this civilizing influx could only have come from those academic's own homeland; Germany.

Hit the 1930's and that was a very popular idea indeed. At least in certain circles. But it stayed, lingering. And I won't disagree that there isn't an attraction to various Dorian theories, much as the timing invariably fails to work out (most intriguing I've seen is that Dorian maps to soldiers and workers and Ionian maps to the aristocracy, and the documented spread and retreat of the various dialects within the early classical Peloponnese is a class conflict.)



 plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose; the idea of civilization arising from Northern Europe echoes the ideas that wandered their way through Theosophy and the Pulp Magazines before showing up today on Ancient Aliens and similar shows; a mysterious source of all civilization, somewhere under the waves as Atlantis or Mu or otherwise hidden enough to permit mainstream historians to cover up the painful truth. Even when Atlantis leaves the picture and something resembling real history is still being sourced you have pundits claiming that no "non-white" race (from one of those shithole nations, one presumes) ever contributed to modern civilization. The ideas drift free like a miasma even when clipped free of their origins.

Andrew Jackson used the Mound Builder myth (aka, that Pre-Columbian white races had originally inhabited the Americas) as excuse for relocation. Not that he needed an excuse -- many didn't -- but what's notable is how few people disagreed.

And as of this year we're still seeing the ridiculous Solutrean Hypothesis rolling along, to the extreme delight of those who want to keep believing some variation of the Mound Builder myth. Why worry about tribal concerns about Bear's Ears if the people running the coal interests were here first. Even if these putative Solutrean ancestors were about as European as Temujin.

On the flip side, listen to the roaring when a reconstruction of Cheddar Man is done using genetic markers that map in modern populations to some of the variability in skin color. This is the other part of the problem; on certain subjects (say, gender representation in video games) the crazies hijack the conversation. They swarm comments and threads, they have endless energy, and their disgusting language drives other people to seek something less annoying to do.




Right, yeah, let's talk about gender. The problems I'm facing there mostly aren't stirring up external hornets. Mostly. The Mycenaean empire was a lousy place to be a woman. Out of the major empires of the Late Bronze Age they had the worst record on rights, public participation, etc., etc.

Actually, your life probably sucked who ever you were. The nobility had a cushy life but this was a warrior culture; you fought from the front. Of course death in battle was celebrated so they didn't really consider getting a spear in the gut a downside. I guess. Or you could be a rich merchant, but that is ever a precarious existence, particularly as the warfare, raids and general tumult ends the era.

And of course, don't attract the attention of any gods. That never ends well.

Oddly enough, there were pretty good legal response to rape. It's all about consent...the problem being, of course, who gets to consent. Unlike cultures where the woman suffered worst in accusations of adultery, the Mycenae apparently (from my limited reading so far) considered a wife was unable to give consent to another man. So whether secret lover or rapist he gets his head cut off. Unfortunately that same consent works for slaves; the only way to rape a slave (in the eyes of the law) is to do so without permission of his or her owner.

Slavery was a part of the Aegean cultures well through the Roman Empire. It doesn't seem to have been a major part of Bronze Age economies but it is there and, as in Classical times, there are few that speak against it. And then you have war. The llliad is full of slave-taking. The inciting incident, the whole reason Achilles is sulking in his tent, has to do with slaves. In brutal specificity, about two young women kidnapped into sexual slavery to the Hellene warlords. And, yeah, between that, the sack of Troy, and the sacrifice of Iphigenia I'd as soon drop the whole lot of these "heroes" in the Aegean.

Anyhow. I can bend things a little in polyglot, Minoan-leaning Crete, so daily life isn't quite so dismal for my heroine. Thing is, especially when things get a little more violent, the sexual threat is there. I don't have to focus on it, but it is so much a part of that world it sort of breaks the immersion not to acknowledge it.

I've also started reading on gender fluidity and cross-dressing in the Ancient world. Mostly because the obvious ruse to take when traveling with mercenaries and pirates is to go Sweet Polly Oliver. That might help the character, though, but it doesn't help the story.



It's a strange place to be. I've uploaded so much that Mycenae is what I'm ready to write about. If I were to switch gears and write about 19th-century archaeology (which I'd really love to!) I'd be back to Step One on research. But I don't know if I actually like the place.

Maybe I just have to rent a bunch of peplum movies and get into the spirit of bronze armor glinting in the Mediterranean sun. I'm hoping my planned trip to Crete -- that is, me, physically, going to the modern nation -- will inspire me.

I don't think it is The Sea Peoples any longer. I'm not sure what part they will play in the story (much less what they are). I get tempted by titles like Out of a Wine-Dark Sea but that promises more nautical activity than might actually be there. Plus Troy. And then there's A Conspiracy in Their Islands but that sounds pretentious as well as confusing and obscure (it's a quote from the Medinet Habu inscription). In the Path of Ares or The Wrath of Poseidon and even The Apple of Discord are difficult because while the characters certainly act as if the gods are real, they won't (probably) be making an appearance in the story.

At this point the titles I'm closest to wedded to are the three books; Weaver of Fates, Thief of Time, and Slayer of Gods.

Why am I so hung up on titles? Like an outline, they shape the overall conception. And you need that kind of overall grasp in order to work on the damned thing.

TheShop.Build Pre-Mortem

TechShop died without notice, leaving all the members in the lurch; instructors unpaid, people's personal equipment trapped behind locked doors, "lifetime" memberships in the tens of thousands of dollars left unhonored.

After half a year of fumbling around a fellow named Dan Rasure picked up the leases -- buildings and equipment -- and re-opened under the name "TheShop.Build," with lots of promises about improved maintenance, improved training, and above all more openness.

Dan's blog hasn't been updated since Feb 15. The member's forum stops showing activity in December, similar for the shop blog, the subforum on Reddit, etc. So much for keeping lines of communication open.*  But then, this is the guy who dreamed up "TheShop.Build" -- it's practically unsearchable, as the only way to keep from getting results on every shop ever is to constrain the search to a level of capitalization and punctuation unusual within social media.

So much for openness. But maybe there's a reason for it.

Here's a picture from the official website, one of a set which has been used for all announcements to media and blogs:

I took a site visit today. Here's what that tool actually looks like:

Okay...Lathe #2 is down for service, is listed as such in the equipment reservation calendar. It also has no sign, no tag-out, the power was still on, and according to the calendar it's been down for five weeks -- so much for Dan's written promise that tools would be returned to service within a day or two!

Now, I'm not going to fault some chipped paint and merely cosmetic rust. Someone looks to have played with the gibs recently as the backlash is minimal on the cross-feed, but at the same time - on the one working lathe -- the tailstock won't clamp down and the handwheel still has a stripped nut; basically, it shows no evidence of the tear-down and rebuild it desperately needed.

That agrees with the rest of the shop. Everything was dirty, nothing looked like it had been adjusted more than the minimum to get it working after the last crew abandoned it, and a significant amount of the support materials...hex keys, clamps, coolant bottles, parallels, even shop vacs and rags...are missing.

I'd be surprised to find there's still a maintenance contract on the laser engravers. They were dirty inside, the tables battered, grime on the ways. The electronics area has yet to be organized, with random and possibly broken gear jumbled onto shelves, not the neat little stations the lying slide show would have you believe. Heck, even half the computer stations upstairs had issues and wouldn't open.

Look, I've run a shop. I know about fair wear and tear, and I know how fast grime accumulates. This, though? This is shit.

If there was some sign they were aware it needed work...some information about what is upcoming in terms of repair and replacement...someone even in the building aside from two nice-enough lads manning the desk (I saw one other guy in the woodshop and as far as I know that was it for staff). Some, in short, COMMUNICATION.



* There is minor activity on the official Facebook page, but it is all fluff; announcements about the San Jose shop opening and advertisements for STEAM classes.

No, not that Hermione

Week is done. Did a full day at work and made it through the performance Friday and now I can sleep. More-or-less. Actually, I made a mistake on the Holocron kit I shipped earlier in the week and need to ship out a missing part. And I didn't get as far on the big project at work as I was hoping, meaning I may need to do overtime on it next week (assuming the materials arrive....!)

The show is "Conference of the Birds," a new adaptation for the stage of the epic poem written by Attar of Nishapur some time in the 12th century. Some of the stories within the story are familiar; stories of Joseph and Moses.

Because that's one of the fascinating things about the Bronze Age. The myths and stories which form the foundations of so many cultures were taking shape in the Bronze Age. Sure, they borrow from earlier tales, all the way back to the Sumerians, and the latter parts of, say, the Bible are largely informed by the Roman times in which they were codified. But the setting for so much of it is the Bronze Age.

Take the Greeks. I'm simultaneously following a podcast of the Trojan War and reading a fictionalized account of Helen's daughter -- which is to say, a story of the aftermath of that war. And, yes, Homer or the Homers built the stories we know in the forms we know around the needs of people coming out of the Greek Dark Ages, but they are set in and assume traditions of the late Bronze Age.

The Greeks lack a holy book. Pantheists anyhow, with every city having its own local deities. The stories and legends still fulfill those twin roles of origin story and moral guidance -- and none more so than the Iliad. So powerful was the influence of this text it continued on as one of the foundation texts of the Western World at the dawn of the 20th century.

Heck, even the Egyptians got in on the fun. For various reasons papyrus copies of the Book of the Dead start showing up during the New Kingdom, and perhaps in part due to having an easier script to work with, many of the stories and myths as we know them today were getting written down in the Greek era.

The foundational myths for so many cultures, coming from the other side of the lacunae of the Greek Dark Ages. Strange to think on.

Assuming Direct Control

It is tough getting home from Opening Night. Often it is such a struggle to get everything done, staving off fatigue by sheer willpower for the long weeks of build and Tech, that when the show is ready and the pressure is finally off...you discover you've got nothing left holding you up.

So "Conference of the Birds" is open. That's one more thing off the list of the six things that decided to all happen at once (among other things, had a Holocron kit to ship and a microphone rental to prep.) Unfortunately it opened Thursday. Means I still have to go to work tomorrow. Can't really relax until Saturday. Worse, I'm working the show. Means I still have to make it not just through work but through another evening performance before I can finally sleep in.



The LEDs worked...okay. I had another bug to track down in the software (annoying thing the compiler should have caught -- I overloaded an array variable, writing data into a bit of memory that hadn't been reserved for it.) Means I only got one chance to write the various "looks" in the show. They work good enough, though.

See, the typical arrangement for a theatrical lighting effect is for the scripting to happen at the lighting console. The console tells the fixture what color and how bright, and if you want something like a candle flicker you have to write a loop into the console. The things I built for this -- and the philosophy behind my "DuckLights" -- is to handle animation at the fixture itself, and use the console only to switch between pre-baked effects.

The radio link turned out to be marginal once I moved up to the lighting booth -- and stuffed the lighting modules inside closed brass containers. Bet I could improve it a lot with external antenna. Lacking that, I may try adding a ground plane to my transmitter (I really don't understand antenna design, which is why it has a simple monopole quarter-wave on it now).

The Bull and the Aten

It is decided.

It hit me as I was listening to an article about Skara Brae (a neolithic site in Orkney). There's apparently a nice virtual reconstruction available (as well as physical reconstructions of at least one building). Which led to the thought of the virtual reconstruction of Troy...one of the layers, at least. And Assassin's Creed Origins, which offers virtual tours of almost every city in Egypt. Unfortunately set at the end of the Ptolemiac Era, or about 900 years after Setne (both the real Prince Khaemweset and my own hybrid character), but the nice thing about Egypt is how incredibly stable it is.

Anyhow. In that moment it became completely clear that the depth of immersion in the research I needed was incompatible with doing it all at once. I need to divide the chore. And even more than divide scenes or places from each other, I need to be able to concentrate on one aspect of the late Bronze Age in the Near East and finish that off before moving on.

So it's going to be three books, and the first book is going to be Kes's story and will set primarily on Mycenaean Crete. Kes, a young weaver raised in a remote mountain shrine, come to the big city to make her living until she is caught up in politics of class warfare, religion and identity. And, yes...at some point she's going to have to jump over a bull.

Starting with a young person whose first struggle is with poverty is maybe not the most exciting place to start a tale that is eventually going to cover half the Bronze Age near east and witness the fall of empires. But it is Mycenae I've been studying most over the last few months and I'm best focused to continue research there. It also forms a decent approach towards the questions of the Late Bronze Age Collapse; starting at the capitol of Knossos at the height of power (and corruption and social stratification) of the Palatial society.

In Book Two I'll move to Egypt and widen the scope; the Bronze Age trade networks, the Great Powers, and some of the history, from the perspective of Setne; scholar, priest, amateur archaeologist and half-brother to the king. Who has his own solo adventure in Akhaten, and a run-in with the Notorious Paneb.

Book Three is the Sea Peoples....and Troy. And may still finish up in Scythia. I have an outline, now. It's the outline I've been trying to hammer out since September. But I didn't say it is very detailed.

But I've divided the problem. Now I just need to worry about Kes. I'm throwing her into the politics of rebellion and a bit of underground cults because I need at least 40,000 words out of her. More, if I keep Setne and the Mycenaean mercenary who still doesn't have a name are kept off-stage. On the other hand...I'd happily drop 10,000 on Ugarit or Hattusa so maybe not that big a problem...

Feathers of a Birds

I got talked into doing lights on "Conference of the Birds." And the way the timing worked out, hit just when BOTH a big project at work and a nasty cold did.

I wanted a remote controlled lighting effect and had no time...but you know, the existing Feather RFM69 board is pretty nice. USB native both for programming and HID/USB-MIDI devices. Hosted 915mHz (unlicensed band) packet radio with a hundred-meter free air range -- and ten bucks more gets you to LoRa radio chip that will get a couple kilometers with good antenna.

And went for another Adafruit product, a NeoPixel "Jewel" sporting a cluster of seven RGBW LEDs. These are those small form-factor LEDs with WS8212 chips included under the plastic so they handle stand-alone PWM, current limiting, and serial communication all by their lonesome. Even running two color channels full out, though, the full Jewel is a bit shy of the 350mA a single "1 watt" Cree will do. Still, since human perception is more-or-less power law, you'd have to throw at least 3 watts to notice an appreciable increase in brightness over what the Jewel can do.

Programming, however, has been slow. Not that it is easy to program through a sinus headache, anyhow.

First task was getting the Feather board to talk to the Arduino IDE. Patched the board definitions in no problem. Was a little slower picking the right board, as the literature wasn't always clear which was the 34u and which was the "MO" board. Exacerbated by the fact that there was in the current version some deep-buried call to a different library.

I finally figured it out by running the programmer in verbose mode and picking through the error logs, then searching archives to find the missing library.

Second task was getting the lights to light. There's an increasingly common problem with Arduino compatibles. The pin definitions in the IDE were written around the ATMega chips. When you translate to a different chip, and that different chip is on a different breakout board, you have chip pin, board pin, port number, and IO pin and they don't line up in any logical way with IDE pin. So there's a fair amount of trying out different pin numbers until the connected hardware finally responds.

And then there was testing the radios. Pretty much installed the library, loaded the demo sketches, and they seemed to run.



The next session was...slower.

I raided my parts box and I just don't have enough buttons. And Radio Shack is no more (with tech this weekend, Digikey was not an option). Fortunately I had an old matrix keypad lying around, and I found a library for it (I could roll my own software and it might have, as it ended up, taken less time).

Thing is, some of the pins are reserved for the RFM69 module, some for USB, plus some available IO pins lack the internal pull-up resistors. Meaning I was back to the soldering iron two or three times changing which pins I was using. And lots of commenting out lines and re-uploading software until I'd found what was causing it to lock up on me.

With that done, into the radio to try to get it to pass on the button ID. And that was a horrible hassle. I miss the XBee modules, even if you did have to roll out a special programer and speak AT code at them. I kept commenting out sections of code that shouldn't have done anything -- like serial print calls which just print status reports to screen -- and then finding the radio wouldn't run.

So it's a big cludge now for the radio stuff, and I really don't have time or patience to clean all that up. I still have yet to write the different "looks" I'll be switching to. Hopefully, though, I'll be able to cut and paste my own software from the Holocron and similar for that.

Man, that file must be getting clogged

I did another random Kindle search. That's the new face of self-publishing, if you don't know. Or maybe is better to call it "non-traditional publishing." But then, these days even vinyl looks to be outselling CDs...everything is digital and the whole concept of a traditionally published book is rather quaint to many people.

Anyhow, I seem to have goosed the Amazon algorithm and it is spitting out yards of similar stuff now. These are the ebook equivalents of direct-to-video movies, taken in by Kindle with essentially nothing in the way of editor or agent because, hey, electrons are cheap.

Not all of which are bad. I've gotten a good read out of several, I hasten to add. After all, the human race managed to entertain itself with story-tellers around the fire back when there wasn't a gatekeeper system that selected for only one in every thousand. I am not particularly surprised that most people who are willing to take the time to put 100,000 words down on paper in some kind of order manage to do that in a way interesting enough to spend an hour or two in reading. You have to have something more than a nebulous desire to "be a writer" in order to slog through a whole novel.

But anyhow!

The latest focus of Amazon's little elves is to show me book after book with "x crossed with y" descriptions. "Firefly meets 007!" trumpets one. "Like a cross between Star Wars and World of Warcraft!" (yeah, I made that one up.) "The Last Airbender meets Regency Romance." (Actually, that one was mine. Sort of. I actually titled my review of the first book of a not-bad fantasy series, "But everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.")

The phrase in fanfiction circles is "filing the serial numbers off." As in, you wrote a Star Trek fanfic, you thought it was a pretty good story, so you changed Kirk to a ginger named Seamus and Spock to a Martian with telepathy and the Enterprise to the Endeavor and then sent it to a publisher as an original work.

These Kindle works are leaving the metal shavings visible. The copy on the Kindle pages is, "Did you like Game of Thrones? This is exactly like it!"



Not like you couldn't tell once you opened the book. The SF field has been decrying the use of what they call "used furniture" for a long time now. Thing is, it is useful. The concept of a mobile and autonomous robot is pretty much orthogonal to how real technology has been going but it is so well established all you have to say is, "robot" (or "droid," or "android," or whatever) and the audience knows what you are describing and can get on with the story.

You don't have to go all "Ralph 124C 41+" about it explaining how, "He next saw a mobile autonomous platform with a self-contained power supply operated by onboard logic that simulated in some basic ways a human-like personality and permitted, through multiple electrical actuators and various machined joints..."

But there's used furniture, and there's used furniture. Asimov contributed something when he added the Three Laws to his robots. Others have engaged in some of the assumptions of the model to make the robots of their own stories interesting, and sometimes even unique.

The problem is the writer who just says, "robot" and moves on. In the old days, at least, they could be stealing from literature, so yes you had everything that tens of very good writers had to say about Asimov's Three Laws. You had a fair amount of thought you could draw on, I'm meaning. Now the sources are primary and visual; what robots look like (and very little of what they might be and mean and imply) in the films and computer games of the most recent couple of years.




I've argued in the past that many visual SF series turn inwards. They stop asking "what is a transporter, in terms of physics? In terms of ethics? In terms of tactics? In terms of the impact it should have had and shared with other technologies, with the society that built it?" They start asking "What happens if you try to transport someone who is already being transported? What if you turn the beam of a transporter on the transporter itself?'

It becomes entirely questions that work only within the framework of the universe. Questions that don't even make sense as questions without the heritage of established behaviors and quirks. The show begins to mine itself for ideas instead of saying anything interesting.

Far, far worse when you are writing an "original" work and you pop "transporters" in. Not the general concept, which you then flesh out with understanding of how they fit within the context of the society and technology and sciences of your fictional society. No, just (functionally) a duplicate of how it appeared in some other media, complete with all the quirks and specifics which arose not organically but from the accreted acts of scriptwriters over the years trying to patch over a plot hole or write themselves out of a corner.

The parts all...work...the way a set of mismatched plastic gears will sort of work if you slam them together and let them grind off all the excess teeth as they try to move. But at the very best, the whole story will then teeter along, able to keep the illusion up only so long as it is moving quickly.



The other interesting thing...and I could be imagining this but I have read things elsewhere that suggests I am not...is that this is part of a unique island ecosystem. The people commenting on these books seem to mostly have read these books; their experience does not range wider. The reviews appear gamed (but then, all review systems will tend to cluster towards full marks for everyone. It is the nature of the thing; over time the average rises until to be marked as less than excellent is to be marked as deeply flawed).

Still, when you get down to it, there are only so many basic stories. For all the works that really are about a philosophical idea or a scientific principle or a nifty gadget, stories move on the backs of people. And people are people. Whatever else is in the book, if it is in the popular press there are probably people working, striving, fighting, loving, and talking. A lot of talking. If you as a writer can handle the mechanics of having people interact with each other then perhaps the other stuff -- those unique insights, those teased-out bits of research, those flights of invention, are frosting.

If the people aren't good, it probably won't be fun to read. I mean you really should have interesting characters, you need dialogue that sounds good and works properly, descriptions that, well, describe. And there is a lot of nuts and bolts in doing this. In forming paragraphs, in being grammatical, in punctuating dialogue. In knowing how to employ tools to lead the eye and control the pacing.

The question is whether this bread-and-butter work -- this boiler-plate that, for all practical purposes, makes up the bulk of the wordcount and the majority of time spent by writer and editor -- is the sufficient minimum...or the minimum starting point.

The Five Feathers

I have a show coming up and it would be very nice to have some remote-controlled lights in it. These are four enclose oil lanterns. Easy enough to string a bulb into them but I don't feel like running wires all over the building so I can control them.

What I really need is my DuckLight circuit. Which I've not been working on and the turn-around from starting a CAD to finishing the software is at least three weeks. I have two.

So I've purchased several Feather boards from Adafruit. These are Arduino-compatible micros with full USB capability (and onboard LiPo management, which I may or may not be using for this project.) The version of the Feather I picked up was with the 915mHz version of the RFM69 daughterboard integrated on to it. Low BAUD packet radio in a license-free band.

The RFM69 takes more software on the host side than the XBee, which is why I started with the latter. I knew I'd have to move to a more powerful host than the ATTiny series to run them, and when I was last working on the DuckLight project I hadn't gotten into SMD yet. I still have yet to go more legs than a SOT-23 package, so that would be one more thing to have to get right the first time in order to make a three-week turn-around.

Since the Feather does HID and can answer a terminal, I should be able to set it up for software control from the laptop. I'm using them to send serial to a neopixel "Jewel" each; a cluster of 7 RGBW LEDs that between them should put out about half the wattage per channel of one of my Cree. Or about twice the wattage I run the Holocrons at. Visual intensity is of course power law so make of that what you may.

I have three days to write the software. Three working days, in which I'll be at my day job, also cleaning up some microphones for a renter, making a meeting or two, and shipping a Holocron kit out.


Boards are answering the programer now -- had some problems with board definitions and a missing library. Should probably test the neopixels next as that will give me feedback for the RF link stage of the programming.

It Takes a Village: Assassin's Creed III

I've been tempted by the Assassin's Creed series for a while. There are surprisingly few games with a historical theme, and almost none that allow you to walk among the people of that time; most are big-picture wargames.

On the downside, assassins. As in, a lot of the gameplay is stealth (not my taste) and the entire impetus of the plot is about, well, killing people. I will give it this, though; death is far from depersonalized in this game (well....at least for named characters!) The game confronts head-on the idea of ending a life, ending a story. It doesn't try to minimize the irreversible nature of what that is.