When did Sci-Fi get so boring?

Note – this isn’t referring to the actual stories, there are plenty of good stories out there, I’m talking about the visual appeal of the sci-fi shelf in bookstores.

When I was in my teens, if I had a few minutes to spare on my way to catch the bus home from school I’d often drop into one of the bookstores I passed. I wasn’t particularly looking for something to buy, I would simply feast my eyes on the cover art on display. These were the days of Asimov, Heinlein, Doc Smith, Herbert et. al.

The covers were bright, vibrant, thought-provoking, and above all – imaginative. They begged questions – what’s happening here? Who are these people? What would it be like to live there? These images, decades later, still serve as inspiration for my own art.

Recently, I had half an hour to kill waiting for a picture frame to be put together, so I wandered across the road to a bookstore. I walked out a little while later despairing for the future of my chosen genre, because there was nothing inspiring in sight.

Most of the traditionally-published covers on show seemed to fall into one of three common groups.

Stylized to death: Maybe I’m just out of touch, but I can’t forgive what Jim Tierney did to the Dune series. He isn’t alone, though. There were other covers consisting of plain geometric shapes that IMO do nothing to entice a potential reader. Boring and pretentious.

Wishy-washy: While keeping close in appearance to traditional covers, these have had the life sucked out of them as if the artist was afraid to commit to a clear picture. Distant ships and space stations obscured in an airbrushed pastel haze. A kind of Disneyfied view of space – no hard edges or nasty harsh vacuum here!

CGI perfection: Also close to traditional, these go to the other extreme. Ships and assorted space hardware rendered too perfectly to be true. And always against the obligatory backdrop of sun peeping over the horizon of a planet. Boring and sterile.

But my biggest complaint across the board was a lack of imagination. All three groups come across as generic and dull. After the first few in each group, they all blended into each other, nothing unique or distinctive about them.

Am I just imagining it? Am I being too harsh?

Emergent intelligence and misinformation

Sometimes I see strong parallels between my own writing, and either events in the real world, or in other stories that I read. Once in a while the spooky sensation is made all the stronger when multiple parallels crop up in a short space of time.

I’ve recently finished reading Watch, a story about an intelligence that emerges spontaneously in the vast flow of information across the Internet. The fundamental basis (spontaneous emergence, and the struggle to make sense of a wider world from a perspective inside the network) is the same as in my own novel, Tiamat’s Nest.

Of course, Watch is a vastly different story from Tiamat’s Nest. In Watch, Webmind is curious, benevolent, and wants to interact with people. Tiamat, on the other hand, is secretive and malignant - if that word even applies to an intelligence that has no concept of right or wrong, only of self-preservation. Webmind actively avoids altering content on the web and works to reveal truth where it would do most good, while Tiamat’s approach is to actively manipulate information to steer public opinion and policy to her advantage.

It’s this latter aspect that brought in the other coincidental strand of thought through several news reports over a short period of time.

Despite my efforts to resist, I find myself ghoulishly drawn to news stories about Trump’s latest behavior, and to the comments sections. It’s a bit like slowing down on the highway as you pass a multi-car pile-up on the other side.

And I can’t help noticing the active misinformation that is repeated time and again, despite it being so easily debunked with the simplest of research.

While I was reading Watch, in response to reports of Trump awarding Rush Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom, an angry commenter stated that Obama gave the same medal to Bill Cosby. Setting aside the usual refusal of Trump supporters to engage the actual issue and instead deflect with “what abouts”, the claim is absurdly false! Bill Cosby was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W Bush in 2002.

The following day, again in response to criticism of Trump ordering the assassination of Iranian general Soleimani on Iraqi soil without involving Congress, trolls compared this to the action of Obama bringing down bin Laden. Obama did it, so it’s OK for Trump. Again, this ignored the checkable fact that Obama acted under a formal declaration by Congress authorizing the president to act against those who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks. This was passed in 2001, again under GWB, but was still ongoing in Obama’s time.

On a lighter note, the day after that I saw a BBC video debunking a long list of cooking hacks that look amazing but which simply don’t work. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make tempting videos of recipes that are useless in practice.

The scary thing is, outright and obvious falsehoods simply won’t die!

But of course, truth isn’t the point. The point in politics is to discredit opponents by repeating the same lie over and over until people start to believe it. That’s effectively how Tiamat in my novel steered the world into catastrophic climate change, and made people’s survival dependent on increasingly sophisticated computation to plan everyday activities around accurate predictions of extreme weather events. The point of the more mundane lies is simply to garner clicks for profit. But they are still putting out things that are not true that will nevertheless take on a life of their own.

As we head into another US election, people keep talking about voter ID and election fraud. But that is missing the point. The real war is already being fought in the news feeds and social media, framing people’s views before they even reach the ballot box.

Campaigns of misinformation are no longer mere inconveniences, they have real world and long-lasting consequences on public policy, on justice, on health and safety, and on elections. In an era when events are shaped by the loudest, most strident, best funded voices, what chance does truth have?

Captcha calamity

I never really had a problem with the old Captchas, the ones that gave you a distorted word and/or numerals to type in. They were mildly annoying, but I found them easily solvable and the goal at least was laudable.

However the move to sets of pictures with instructions to click on those that met certain criteria drove me insane. I was taken aback to realize it was four years ago that I last vented on this blog about this new torture device. I also noticed that I haven’t encountered many of these, and I realize I haven’t actually seen a Captcha of any description for quite a long time. Clearly site owners have decided this is driving their customers away.

That changed this week, when a team at work decided to use a third-party collaboration product that protects itself with a Captcha.

It was one of those picture versions. I was asked to click on everything with a fire hydrant showing. Some were obvious, but some weren’t. As always, the trouble with these things is that the pictures are so small and grainy it’s often impossible to tell what you’re actually looking at. Yes, it’s a road. I can make out houses and trees. Is that fuzzy blob a fire hydrant or a cat? Impossible to tell.

I spent five minutes of sheer frustration, failing again and again before I finally made it in. If this was a site I was visiting for personal reasons I would have given up right away, but I needed to sign on for work purposes.

Whether or not I’ll have to go through this process again next week is yet to be seen, but the experience prompted me to do some research.

It turns out that it’s not my imagination, they really have been making these things more difficult to solve. It’s the usual arms race between defenders and attackers.

What is more unsettling, though, is that we have permanently lost this particular race.

Machine learning and visual recognition systems are now so good that they can outperform people on these kinds of tasks.

In other words, the test that is supposed to prove you are a human, not a bot, can now be passed by bots better than people. In response, the designers are resorting to making them so difficult that the people they are supposed to admit can’t solve them.

Sounds like it’s time for a serious re-think!

What happened to humanity?

I was planning on lining up more posts on worldbuilding, but the last week has left me feeling like normal rational life has taken its leave of this continent.

We have a spate of bombs through the mail, and then Pittsburgh - to add to all the other mass shootings this year. But what is most sickening is that, rather than genuine calls for strength and unity and compassion, the loudest voices on both sides of the divide are racing each other to the bottom of the sewer dredging the depths for any political capital they can gain.

I think I’m going to unplug from the Internet until after November 6, because right now a large slice of humanity has lost its humanity.

BTW - comments are off, 'nuff said

Rock on, Taylor!

Some bizarre and contradictory scenes played out in the media last week.

We have Taylor Swift posting a political message to Instagram - something she rarely does:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BopoXpYnCes/?hl=en&taken-by=taylorswift

And then we have Kanye West in the Oval Office - transcript here:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/11/politics/kanye-west-oval-office/index.html

What first struck me was the blatant double standards at work in the highly-charged world today

When Taylor Swift posted her thoughts on Instagram, an angry hornet swarm of indignation buzzed into being.
“Why should the world care what a singer thinks?”
“What does she know about politics?”
“What gives her the right to voice an opinion?”
The implication is - you have no right to post this, shut up!

Let’s step past the obvious absurdity of these comments in the first place. Instagram is a social media site, along with many others. Millions of people post their thoughts to these sites every day. Who cares what you ate for breakfast? Nobody? Fair enough, but nobody castigates you for posting it. If you don’t care, shrug shoulders and move on.

The subtext seems to be, becoming a successful musician somehow cancels your right to a voice like the rest of the population.

The double standard comes into play with the sub-subtext - you’re not allowed to post something I disagree with. That same furious horde was strangely silent when Kanye West monologued in praise of Donald Trump.
Who’s he? A rapper.
Political qualifications? Zilch.
Equivalent condemnation on publicly voicing an opinion just because he’s an entertainment celebrity?
*Crickets*

Then we come to the content of their respective messages

Kanye West expressed outright and unequivocal support for Donald Trump. The message was exclusively partisan. That is his right.

In comparison, Taylor Swift did express her values and who she would be supporting in her state in the mid-terms, and she articulated her reasons clearly and succinctly. That is her right.

But beyond that, she didn’t exhort her followers to support Democrat candidates or to share her political beliefs. This was simply the lead-in to the real thrust of her post, which was an entirely non-partisan exhortation to educate yourself and vote accordingly. And, importantly, to make sure you actually do register and vote.

Why that message should attract such vitriolic condemnation escapes me.

To put it bluntly, if you have a problem with Taylor Swift’s post, then you appear to have a problem with the very foundation of democratic elections

Infinity War

We finally purchased Avengers Infinity War and sat down to watch it this weekend. The outcome left me feeling deeply dissatisfied, despite the stellar settings and special effects.

Doing some research now, I see it was originally titled Infinity War - Part 1, but sometime during production of the movie they decided to shorten the title. The former would have been more honest and would have set reasonable expectations, because as it is I was expecting a complete story with a satisfying ending like all the other Marvel movies so far.

On its own, which is the only way I knew to view it at the time, the movie does indeed conclude on a natural ending point, but in doing so it kinda breaks an essential contract of trust with the viewer.

Yes, I’m upset that some (actually a lot of) good characters die. It finished on a serious down note with the bad guy winning when you expect the good guys to win somehow. On its own, that is not a problem.

When I analyzed things after the fact from a writer’s perspective, I realized that the lack of satisfaction for me was that I spent two hours watching something that, in the end, was not a story!

I felt misled.

To me, a story involves someone reaching a goal after overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles. It involves people facing impossible choices with no good outcome, that have you biting your nails wondering which way they’ll go. It involves twists that take your breath away, wondering where the heck that came from.

The overwhelming odds were against the Avengers, not Thanos, as you would expect. He had it easy, and he succeeded. If the baddie is going to win then they need to face significant obstacles too. Yes, Thanos faced a painful choice when it came to the soul stone, but given his single-minded obsession with his quest there was never even a shadow of doubt about what he would do. And various sub-plots like dealing with the mind stone in Vision’s head were hardly obstacles or twists, they felt like artificial padding to ramp up suspense with no emotional payback at the end. The stone is exceedingly difficult to extract safely. They fail to extract it. In the real world that is all ... well, duh! But stories are supposed to take us out of the real world and deliver a satisfying emotional experience.

To summarize: The party with all the power and all the advantages methodically achieves a series of objectives and successfully reaches his final goal. That is not a story, it’s a project report.

I wanna be like yoo-oo-oo

It's a sad day when the leader of the world's second largest democracy envies a brutal dictator

Thoughts for the day

As Irma pounds its way up the Florida coast, my thoughts are with those caught up in its path.

As with all disasters like this, we see the best and the worst of people come out.

One sad story caught my eye this morning, of a city council opening up the floors of its parking lot for residents in low-lying areas to take shelter in. When they arrived, they found the space taken up by cars for sale, moved in there by an opportunistic car dealer.

This story seems to sum up the "me first" ethos that is taking over the world. All the arguments back and forth over the legality or otherwise of the car dealer's actions to me completely miss the point. The point is, in what universe does anyone think this kind of action is OK - a clear abuse of the intent behind a good gesture?

I think the real question we should be asking ourselves is - what kind of society I want to live in? What kind of values do I want to instill in my children?

Only by looking after each other as well as ourselves can we hope to stand against forces like Irma.

Liberation calamity

Has anyone out there moved away from where they grew up, leaving family and friends behind? Do you still keep an eye on local news from “the old country”? I still check out the Guernsey news from time to time because I like to keep abreast of things that affect my family and which might come up in phone conversations.

This summer, I’ve been watching an unbelievable saga unfold over the ferry service to the island.

Being a small island, air and sea links are a vital part of island life. Obviously. And the volume of traffic is too small to sustain a free-for-all competition so the passenger/vehicle route is granted to a single monopoly operator.

You’d think that the Guernsey government, which grants licenses to run the route, would want to ensure a good and reliable service on this lifeline route.

You’d think, when they put the route out to tender and sign a multi-year contract on behalf of islanders, they’d insist on a decent service with enforceable service levels.

You’d think.

You’d be wrong.

The current operator introduced a new fast ferry to the route in March, with huge fanfare and promises of “an even better” service than before, replacing two vessels with one larger boat. i.e. No backup. The story since then has been a farcical catalogue of delays and cancellations due to mechanical failures, inability to dock if even the slightest breeze is blowing from the wrong angle, inability to handle waves a fraction of the height it’s supposedly designed for (and remember, this is the English Channel we’re talking about, with winter approaching), complaints of violent see-sawing in a following sea (and suggestions from the harbor master that passengers need to “retrain their stomachs”) and challenges with loading/unloading its full load of vehicles in the scheduled turnaround times.

I can’t lay my hands on reliable statistics, but anecdotal evidence suggests it has stayed on or close to schedule on only half its crossings. The ferry was even cancelled over the Guernsey Liberation Day weekend, arguably the busiest and most significant public holiday in the island’s calendar. Just Google “Condor Liberation” for a litany of disaster.

People are naturally fed up with this, and tempers flared when the ferry was cancelled yet again leaving people stranded at Poole harbor over this weekend.

The Guernsey government’s response?

*Crickets*

Ali is planning to take a trip back there with the kids next summer for her father’s 80th birthday. The itinerary includes her parents (who live in Bristol) taking the car over on the ferry to Guernsey. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this fiasco hoping things will improve before then.

Right now, I wouldn’t trust any important trip to this ferry. Would you?

No, I'm not a robot

I've just encountered a new level in online annoyance.

The dreaded Captcha is being replaced on some blogs by an innocuous check box saying "Please prove you're not a robot".

Up to now, on blogs I've visited this simply involves clicking on the box and posting the comment. This morning's, though was different.

When I clicked on the box, up popped a new form that at first I thought was an irritating pop-up advertisement for something to do with cookery. After a few second's hunting for a way to dismiss the intrusion, I realized it was part of the verification process.

I was presented with a dozen pictures of food, and the instruction to click on all those that involved pasta or noodles. Sounds easy, except the images were too small and grainy to confidently tell in many cases what they were pictures of. I tried, but didn't find enough to satisfy the beast and it gave me a new test. Ice cream this time. This was easier because they were more obvious, but there were clear cultural assumptions at work. Who outside of North America, for example, would know that a round carton with a big "DQ" on the side needed to be clicked?

In my view, this now officially surpasses Google+ and Disqus in the "pointless ways to piss off your readers" stakes.

I can guarantee that if your blog inflicts this on me I will not be leaving a comment.

The Da Vinci Cock-Up

I don't often post opinions on books or movies, and this post will probably illustrate why, but I feel the need to let off steam.

Last night, I finally got around to watching The Da Vinci Code. I know this movie has been hyped to death, which always I try keep from negatively affecting my views, but even so I found myself mystified and deeply disappointed.

First off, the movie was supposed to be a gripping roller-coaster action movie. Sorry, but no. I'm not a big movie-goer, but I'm sure I could quickly reel off a dozen or two recent movies that blow this out the water. In fact, practically every recent adventure that comes to mind did a better job of keeping me on the edge of my seat than this one. The Da Vinci code was tolerably OK in this department, but nothing more.

Secondly, and more importantly, I felt insulted as a viewer by overt and clumsy author manipulation.

Need to build audience sympathy? Cue one character orphaned in a car crash, and the other trapped down a well as a young boy. Sympathy engaged ... check!

The trouble is that both backstories were such blatant emotional plays and neither was especially relevant to the plot. Yes, you could argue that Sophie needed to be handed to the care of her fake grandfather, but then her real grandmother pitches up near the end, so where the heck was she all these years? There are countless less intrusive ways to achieve the same ends to mentor her.

The killer for me, though, was the countless points where characters behaved in unbelievable ways just to further the plot or introduce random tension. When the air traffic controller refused to co-operate with a senior police office to track dangerous fugitives because he was "on his break", my willingness to suspend disbelief crumbled and the rest was downhill from there. The author's hand manipulating the puppet strings was visible everywhere.

On the plus side, the underlying premise of historical subterfuge and the true nature of the Holy Grail was a gem. What a pity this brilliant concept got weighed down by clumsy author intrusions.

The lessons for writing? Respect your audience's intelligence, and respect the integrity of your characters.

Shopping bags

Every Saturday, I go grocery shopping for the family for the week. I take an armful of shopping bags with me to load everything in to. These are large and sturdy cloth bags bought from the store and which have served us well for many years,

Yes, it's a greener option than getting and discarding paper or plastic bags each week, but it's also convenient. It makes everything easy to carry from the car into the house in three or four trips. I take shopping bags with me, and I expect to use them, because it makes life easier for me, the paying customer.

So why do I have a battle every week with the cashier trying to leave items out of the bags for me to carry individually? They seem to be on a mission to use as few bags as possible.

I wonder if it's in their cashier training manual, because the store offers 3 cents per bag incentive for shoppers to bring their bags in. Well, I've brought mine in and I'd like to be allowed to use them. I honestly don't care about pitiful incentives, keep those few cents if that's what you're worried about, just stop trying to make life awkward for me.

A 5lb bag of potatoes, a similar-sized bag of carrots. "Do you want those left out?" No I bloody well don't. What an asinine question. You can get both of those into one bag and still have room for other things on top.

But while you're at it, stop trying to stuff one more item on top of that already-overflowing bag, I have plenty more here. No need to overload them so that they spill their contents all over the car on the way home.

Even that family-sized carton of cereal can go in. Yes, it's pretty much the size of a bag on its own and there's not much chance of getting anything else in there, but yes, I want it in a bag. You see, rather than tucking an awkward box under my arm to carry, a bag has handles!

So don't roll your eyes at me. Have you ever shopped for a family of four? If you did, you'd know what I'm talking about.

When will we learn to get along?

Nine-year-old suspended from school 

for saying "Merry Christmas"

Traditional nativity scene
banned from park

Jesus Christ cut out of "Silent Night"

Multi-culturalism and tolerance does not mean saying "you can't" all the time and neutering your own beliefs because you're shit scared of offending some small-minded bigots.

Multi-culturalism and tolerance means saying

You can ...

And you can ...

And you can ...

And rejoicing in the richness this brings to all our lives

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Google Minus

There's a creeping infestation spreading its ugly way through the blogging world these days.

It's called Google+.

A few blogs I follow have switched over to using Google+ comments. And I have sadly stopped commenting on them.

I have two issues with Google+.

Firstly there's the way comments are shared.

Maybe I'm just out of step with the rest of the world, but if I wanted every one of my online acquaintances to know every time I speak, breath, or scratch my butt, I'd go on FaceBook.

I don't. So I don't like the way Google+ assumes you want to share everything with everyone who knows you.

When I comment on a blog, the implicit deal is that I'm sharing my comment with the blog owner and anyone else who visits that blog. In my mind, the connection and community is centred around the blog and its readership.

I might visit and comment on two entirely unrelated blogs, and to me those are two separate communities. A bit like separate conversations with different circles of people at work, at home, or in the gym.

But Google, in it's infinite wisdom, seems to have turned this on its head. The sharing of comments is now centred around me and my circles of friends. It's cut the blog and its community out of the picture, unless I want to share my comment with everyone who knows me - regardless of whether they care about the blog in question. It's as if instead of the blog being the centre of a community, the blog is now a subject of discussion about it amongst groups of strangers whispering secretively amongst themselves.

Sorry, but that to me has seriously eroded the point of blogging.

That might be tolerable, but then there's the question on online identity. I've spent years establishing myself as "Botanist" both here and in other forums. It's not that I'm strict about remaining anonymous - folks out there who know me know who I am - but I chose not to broadcast my real name everywhere I go.

Google+ has taken that choice away from me.

Sorry, but when I want to go online as my real self, I would rather it was on my terms and for reasons that make sense to me. It's not up to some faceless executive or gormless tech-head to make that choice for me.

So if I still visit you but have gone quiet on the commenting front, please know that it's not personal. It's not you, it's Google.

Word woes

As a writer, I've become more aware of the meaning of words, and the power of choosing the right word in the right place.

Words are beautiful things, so it grieves me to see words abused, and I want to draw the world's attention to the plight of the humble word in the hands of persistent abusers.

Here are some examples of my pet peeves.

Imply/infer

These are at opposite ends of the communication line - send and receive. They are totally different words, yet many people treat 'infer' as a posher-sounding substitute for 'imply'.

"Oh, no," they think to themselves, "'imply' is a nasty, blunt and common word. I'll use 'infer' instead and show how educated I am."

I'm sorry, but no! It just shows how ignorant you really are.

Deny/refute

Similar to the above. How many times do prominent figures at the heart of a breaking scandal utter those immortal words, "I absolutely refute these allegations."

No, you don't. You have not offered a shred of evidence, so you've proved nothing - which is what 'refute' means. All you've done is deny it.

But people don't want to say that, because in the popular media denial somehow implies guilt.

Should have/should of

There's no either/or here. This is an example of lazy patterns of speech finding their way into writing.

Lose/loose

This one baffles me, and yet I repeatedly see well-educated people use 'loose' when they mean 'lose'.

Leading edge/bleeding edge

When I first heard of 'bleeding edge' it was a fresh and witty play on words. Technology so innovative that it was raw and dangerous. The trouble is, so many people liked it that it got used far more than it should, and it's lost its power.

It saddens me when perfectly good phrases become worn through inappropriate over-use.

State of the art/state of the ark

Another clever play on words that has become abused, once again through ignorance or laziness. It baffles me to hear people say 'State of the ark' when they clearly don't mean something ancient and decrepit.

So, writers everywhere, rise up in defense of those poor, abused, and helpless words. What examples of abuse peeve you?

What irritates you Monday

Delores, at The Feathered Nest, decided to designate today as "What irritates you Monday." I don't know what sort of take-up she'll have with this, but I decided to give her some moral support.

As Delores says in her post, she could probably write a book about the things that irritate her. When it came to dump out a few ideas (and I do want to keep this a short post, honest) I realized I very nearly have written a book already on this blog. Several of these notes will therefore link to earlier posts for a fuller rant...

So here is a short list of things that irritate me

Skirting around the word "Christmas": Come on. Last month did we all enjoy days off for "the holiday season"? Or was it, ya know Christmas? Be proud to say it! When the heck did multiculturalism and respect for other people's beliefs turn into allowing everyone else except us to celebrate openly? Fuller rant here.

OK, full disclosure: I don't regard myself as a religious person. Spiritual in my own way, but not religious. All the same, I was brought up in a Christian society and I regard it as an important part of my cultural heritage, and it peeves me that the reason for all those colored lights and trees and decorations can't be named for fear of upsetting some precious individuals who are nevertheless freely pursuing their own beliefs.

Telemarketers: There is a special circle of hell reserved for these scourges of modern society. Fuller rant here.

Of course, telemarketing is just one facet of the capitalist dream of using every conceivable opportunity to turn people into cash donors. I despise advertising in general, and the way Big Money expects to turn everything in life into an advertising opportunity.

Climate change denial: Just one word to say here: Ostrich.

Paparazzi: Kind of up there with telemarketers, and yet another symptom of the sickness that makes it apparently OK to treat anyone out there as a cash opportunity.

Automated customer service centers: All I want is some help, to get a simple answer to a question. Why, then, do I have to joust with a mechanical voice spouting an endless list of options that never quite meet my needs? Worse still is when the machine at the other end pretends it can understand English. I usually resort to hitting zero repeatedly, or raising my voice and sounding as angry as possible until I get a human being on the line. Just when did it occur to big companies that they could get away with treating their paying customers with such open contempt? "Your call is valuable to us." Yeah, right.

Easy-open packaging: You know, those tear-off lids that won't tear off, perforations that won't perforate. This is one major aspect of bad design in general, which I also deplore. Fuller rant here.

I'm sure I could go on, but that's probably enough for one day. Please feel free to add your own favorite irritants in the comments. And go and say "Hi" to Delores too.

In praise of Stormy Rich

I don't often pay attention to, let alone blog about, things going on in the popular media, but this story grabbed me on an emotional level and refused to let go.

A teenage, straight-As student, is branded a bully and barred from the school bus for daring to stand up for a special needs child who was being bullied.

Note, this was not a thoughtless, impulsive reaction, but someone who acted after months of watching a helpless student get bullied, and after repeated calls to the bus driver and the school authorities to do something.

The story can be found here, and on many other news outlets.

Now, I've seen some of the official responses, and claims that we can't judge because we are only hearing one side of the story.

What I have seen is a brave teenager clearly distraught at what she has seen, who went well out of her way to alert the proper authorities before resorting to talking to the bullies herself.

What I have seen are pretty lame excuses by the school authorities. So, they didn't receive a complaint in person from a special needs child who was incapable of being aware that she was being bullied. Does that make it OK?

What I notably haven't seen, amidst all the limp-wristed official bluster, is:
(a) Any rebuttal of the claims that Stormy made repeated complaints on behalf of the bullied child. So, presumably they did indeed receive the complaints.
(b) Any explanation of why they refused to take action on any of those complaints.

...Especially when they were so darned quick to act on the complaints leveled by the cowardly bullies themselves.

It steams me up when those in authority pay more attention to the "rights" of wrongdoers than to those of victims or people doing the right thing.

I may never have all the facts, but I can see well enough which side is the more credible.

Well done, Stormy.

Purveyors of Preciousness

I almost forgot, I mentioned earlier that the comments on my "Origins" post sparked a couple of follow-on thoughts, and I posted one of them here. Then I read a post yesterday about how supportive the writing community is, and it reminded me of the other thought.

My writing origins were distinctly late and shaky, self-conscious and fragile. I don't think I would have carried on this long, certainly not to the point of having a fully-written novel under my belt (OK, publication is still in the mists of fantasy land, but that's another story) without the support and encouragement of other writers.

There's the personal touch of others in my critique groups, many in much the same position, struggling to polish up their creations to be aired in public. Then there are others in the blogging world, the high flyers, with significant publications to their name, who still take the time to come down to ground level and encourage the up-and-comers.

Even industry professionals often blog with advice and support for writers at all levels. There may not be the same personal interaction - these folks have followers in the thousands, after all - but the openness and welcome is the same.

Now, the strange thing is that, in contrast with my unlikely entry into writing, I was practically born with a paintbrush in my hand. Some of my earliest memories are of colouring and drawing. I remember drawing Daleks at the age of three when Dr. Who first aired on British TV.

In later years I read voraciously. It wasn't the writing I tried to emulate, however, it was the cover art.

Throughout my school years, nobody I knew drew or painted like I did. I won the art prize each year, even though I didn't take art as a subject. In retrospect, this probably pissed off the people who were studying it, and I think now it was rather unfair. Some of them were good, certainly more technically accomplished than me, they just weren't doing the kinds of work I was doing.

So imagine my delight and anticipation when I went to university, which drew together talented people from all over the country. There would be other artists there. Good artists. People I could talk to about arty things.

Does this scenario sound familiar to all you budding writers? Maybe those joining a critique group or going to a writing conference for the first time?

The trouble is, I wasn't an artist. I was a mathematician.

The fact that I drew and painted was immaterial. The fact that my friends liked what I was doing probably made it worse. Other artists, "real" artists, were unanimously snide and dismissive. I think they took the view that if a non-artist liked a painting, then clearly it wasn't art, daahhhling.

No. Art had to be obscure, deeply meaningful - but only to a self-selecting elite - and could only, ever, evuh, be done by a member of that same self-selecting elite.

So my dreams of being taken seriously by the artistic community withered. I still draw, I still paint, occasionally, but I long ago stopped trying to be taken seriously by those purveyors of preciousness. Life's too short.

Contrast this with the attitude in the writing world, where a highly respected industry professional, the formidable Janet Reid, renowned for her non-nonsense opinions, can say the following:

Make no mistake about this: if you have written and finished a novel you ARE a writer. Don't let anyone, particularly some snotty so-called publishing professional, demean this achievement. You've written a novel = you're a writer.

That is why I'm still writing.

So, what's been your experience of the writing community? And do you have other communities with which to compare and contrast?

How not to feel like a valued customer

I can't believe we are two weeks into the new year already! With Christmas out of the way, we've been on a bit of a mission to sort out a better deal for our cable and internet.

It all started when Shaw switched over to digital late last year. Our main TV in the living room was OK, we already had a digital box for it, but we also have sets in our bedroom and the playroom which lost most of their channels, including most of the kids' favourites.

Sure, we could pay extra for more digital boxes, but as customers we were offended to be asked to pay more simply to continue receiving a service that we were already paying for. We were quite happy with the old service, thank you very much.

The whole thing reeked of extortion.

So we shopped around.

OK, Ali shopped around and did all the research and phone calls. I don't really watch TV so I have no interest in this side of things.

With Telus, she priced up a package that looked like a much better service for less than we were currently paying. So we arranged a date for them to call in, and phoned up Shaw to cancel our account.

This is where things got strange.

Shaw said they didn't want to lose us as a customer and would cut us a deal. OK. What have you got? Looked at the price and it seemed at least comparable and better than what we currently had. Double-checked with Telus only to find that the price we thought we'd be paying didn't include all the equipment and so would work out more. Shaw now ahead by a whisker. Checked back with Shaw, only to find that they hadn't included everything either.

So we were being ping-ponged back between two sets of customer service departments, both claiming to want our custom, but somehow the price kept on going UP.

Ummm...if you're trying to entice someone, isn't the price supposed to go down?

In the end, thoroughly frustrated, confused, and trying to cut through all the murk of features and offers that were being dangled in front of us to cloud the true price and which, although they sounded good on paper we realised were actually of no value to us, we were at this stage...

When we did the analysis, we also realised that Shaw weren't actually cutting any kind of deal anyway. Cut away the fluff, and it all amounted to "pay us the extra like we asked you in the first place".

This does not make me feel valued.

So we will soon have a new service provider.

The "C" word

Each year, I despair at the steady elimination of the "C" word from our collective vocabulary.

I have been wished "Happy Holidays". Recently, my department held a "Winter Celebration" lunch. Everyone around me bends over backwards till they can see between their ankles to avoid the "C" word.

And I bite my tongue and go with the flow.

No longer.

Today, I got a cheerful postcard from my MP inviting me to a Town Hall meeting and wishing me, in nine different languages, "Happy Hanukkah!"

Let's be clear about one thing: I am thoroughly agnostic, so I have no axe to grind in favour of one religion over another. I also despise this timorous tippy-toe-on-eggshells-around-people's sensibilities, but, if we're going to impose politically correct blandness on the world, then let's do it equitably or not at all.

The PC brigade seems to equate multi-culturalism with "let's show how open-minded we are by kowtowing to all and sundry while suppressing our own right to our own opinions." That's bullshit. To me, multi-culturalism means understanding and tolerance of other people's cultures, and enjoying reciprocal tolerance for our own. This is a two-way street.

More to the point, although this is a politically secular country, there is a very specific reason why we traditionally have a holiday on December 25, which we should not forget. We don't mince words about celebrating Canada Day, or Labour Day, or Thanksgiving, so why does this holiday get such short shrift?

So, I am genuinely happy that someone to whom it means something would wish me a Happy Hanukkah.

In return, and in the same spirit, I unashamedly wish you all a Merry Christmas.