The US Army celebrates Columbus Day with a four-day weekend, which would be a suspicious use of time if it didn’t work to my advantage.

Mostly, I’ve been up to a whole lot of relaxation. Last week my sleep schedule was getting bad to the point of inducing insanity, and it was a huge relief just to get caught up some. I visited a friend for a few hours of anime, viewed and reviewed a few series I hadn’t seen before, and read a novel or three. I’ve made fairly substantial improvements to my webcomic scraping software, such that even new comics with weird formats and multiple images per page take only a few minutes of configuration before my software can handle them correctly. The benefit of having this software is that with a local, hyperlinked copy of the comic, I don’t have to wait for the image to load. In the past, the coding time involved made this worthwhile only for comics with large archives and slow page-load times (hey megatokyo!), but it’s at this point it’s becoming worth it for pretty much any comic with more than a dozen pages of archives.

In conjunction with all this, I finally got high-speed broadband set up. I’ve had basic DSL set up for most of a month, but in this context, ‘basic’ means ‘we constrict your bandwidth to 100k/s down, or 16 simultaneous sockets open.’ It was actually the issues with concurrent connections which made it unacceptable; I torrent a lot (of completely legal stuff, of course), and even checking my email became nearly impossible due to the crazy timeouts. Now, I’ve got a 5mbps cable connection which seems to have no trouble with all the simultaneous connections I throw at it, and I am happier.

The last thing I’ve done is discover and listen to All the beatles albums ever released in the UK, sequentially, in just over an hour. This is possible through digital technology, which allows us to listen to music at eight times its natural tempo. In theory I could decompress it and chop it up and have artifacty versions of all these songs for my personal use, but in practice, that’s way too much effort; it’s not worth my time investment. What the music actually most reminds me of is when you get to the high levels in Tetris, only with demented vocalists churning along just as fast.

In other news, the internet guy finally came yesterday and hooked up my connection. I realize that broadband internet is technically a luxury and that many people around the world live happily without it. However, the same can be said of indoor plumbing. It is mandatory for my lifestyle and the maintenance of my standard of living. Getting it means that I can finally do away with trips to the metaphorical outhouse, which in literal terms mean southeastern Alabama’s public libraries. I can’t complain too much about the libraries; they do have free public internet service and a large number of books which may be checked out. However, a library which is located 20 minutes away by car and which is only open on weekdays, until 1800, does very little to quench my information thirst.

Most other things here are pretty good. My apartment is still nicely maintained, very spacious, and $200 less monthly than the government bonus for living off-base. It is also still devoid of any sort of furniture. I am told that the movers will probably deliver my stuff no later than next Monday, but there exist stories of people whose household goods did not arrive until weeks after the expected arrival date. I am hoping that I will never be able to tell one of those stories firsthand.

I called the English-speaking customer support line just now, to try to figure out the following things:
Can I change the account from the previous tenant’s name to my own?
Do I have a static IP? If not, can I upgrade the service so that I do?
What is the PPPoE authentication protocol in use? What are the authentication strings I need to use, and what format should I send them in?

I found out the following things:
I do not have a static IP, so if I want to run a webserver, I need to get one.
I cannot upgrade the service as it is not in my name.
There is absolutely no way to transfer ownership of the account; the previous tenant needs to cancel. Only after his contract is terminated can I apply for my own.
Once his contract is terminated, I will need to mail back his modem; they will get one to me at some point thereafter. They say that it usually happens within two weeks, but they can’t make any guarantees.
If I want further technical details, I will need to contact Technical Support. The customer service person gave me their number, and cheerfully informed me that they speak no English.

I’m very annoyed at this point–I’d be more than willing to hear if anyone knows any other broadband ISPs in Japan. That way, I can apply for the service, and only cancel the previous tenant’s once the new service is ready to begin. I’m torn between throwing the whole idea to the wolves, and dealing with weeks without connectivity. I suspect that in the end, I’ll just deal with the beurocracy and the net outage, and get the service I need. Still, this is extremely annoying.

It’s worth it because two people are both using Bittorrent; getting upload and download rates of over 100k/s each, without killing the bandwidth of anyone else.

That’s a tough one. I’d rather propose an alternate system, take a look at its pros and cons, compare it to our own.

Let’s start with the notion that information wants to be free, that all we really need is a fair social system to support that. Looking at history, we realize that the current paradigm, where licences to information are sold and the information itself is the property of the creator, is not the only economically viable way to deal with the problem of things easily copied. A few hundred years ago, there were two main ways to have access to a piece of art, and both of them revolved around the same idea: commissions. Either one commissioned a piece of art and became its owner once it was produced, or some organization (government, organized religion, etc.) commissioned the work and placed it in an area accessable to the public.

What happens if we apply that paradigm to the modern world? Say someone wants a piece of software. They commission a programmer or team of programmers to produce that software for them, and gain access to it. The program source then falls into the public domain. The same applies to music, with the additional benefit for musicians that they will often get paid to perform the same song(s) over and over again, live, at various locations. Authors have a similar benefit: many people prefer to hold a physical book instead of reading the same work on the screen; books could be published as normal.

The primary reason that this will work is twofold. The first is that it solves the problem that we face now, that creative people are not being properly reimbursed for their work due to piracy. This is because they are paid, up front, by the people who want the work in the first place. The second reason the system will work is that creative people will create even when they aren’t being paid for their work. This is why some filesharing networks can operate entirely legally while at the same time remaining free: musicians who want to be recognized post their own music there in the hopes that someone will download it, like the band, contribute. Artists for ages have created beautiful work which wasn’t even recognized as great until after their deaths.

Now, where does this put the individual who wants some product, but doesn’t have the money to support a (musician|programmer|artist|etc.) all by themself? A new type of organization will have to be formed, in which individuals could contribute as much money or as little as they want to efforts which when completed would benefit them. They could contribute to an individual project, song, etc., or they could contribute to a particular band or author, or they could contribute to a genre. The organization would have to collect the money and decide how to allocate it. Once a collection of people had contributed enough money to fund a requested project, the organization would directly commission a team to complete it. From the other direction, if an artist had completed a project independently, he could submit it to a review board within the organization and be paid for his efforts from miscellaneous funds within the proper genre and category, in porportion to the quality of his work. The quality of work could possibly be judged by the number of people who accessed it within a certain duration of it becoming available to the public.

Now, this would change how certain industries would work. There would be less music produced and released on a wide scale, but the average quality of music would improve. The video rental industry would essentially die, except in areas where people had poor access to broadband internet. In general, there would be less cruft in software: as everything would be open-source, there would always be large numbers of interested people monitoring large/popular projects, which tends to improve efficiency. The recording industry as exemplified by the RIAA would cease to exist.

The movie industry would be hardest hit. Even though they would still have theater ticket sales to supplement whatever money they took from the regulating organization, the cost of movie production is sufficient that it would be very difficult for a person with ambition to produce a movie to actaully have his made. However, that’s essentially the case right now; it wouldn’t change much.

The biggest problem with this system is that it’s radically different from what’s in place now, and the people and organizations with the money to influence the people with the power to actually make the changes necessary to implement it, favor the way things are running now. In essence, it will only come to being with a revolution or the creation of a new nation; neither of those seem likely or in the past have ever been comfortable. The second biggest problem is that it would restructure the economy in deep ways; people aren’t used to thinking of anything as actaully being free, and would resist the changes because they understand how things work now. However, the fact that an industry is viable or profitable now does not give it a right to continue indefinately; superior technology (or in this case, a superior understanding of the ramifications of technology) will supplant every industry eventually, causing them to become obsolete. If this isn’t allowed to happen, the manufacturers of horse-drawn wagons could have stopped Ford, or the manufacturers of gas-light paraphenelia could have shut Edison down.

This solution isn’t perfect. However, it is more fair than the one in place now.

I read incessantly. Sometimes I stop for a time because I am busy, or because there are other things on my mind, but those times never last long at all. Sometimes a day or two. More often, an hour or two.

Why do I do this? Because sometimes I find someone who has written something good. It may be a piece of prose that sings within me, causes me to see the scene as if I were watching it in a movie with a souped-up emotion track. It may be an idea so interesting that I have to sit back and just think about its ramifications for a few minutes. It may be an argument that boils my blood to the point where, after reading it twice, and then again, I have to stand up and run about the house angrily denouncing the point of view and all its fallacies to anyone who will listen. But for each of these experiences, I have to wade through mountains of lesser material. I do it gladly.

I was not one of the early adopters of the internet. I was born too late for that. But I have been playing with computers since I was tiny. Still, they were always a diversion, a platform for games, a testing ground for programs of one sort or another. It was not until late in high school, when my family got broadband, when I had the freedom to sit at the computer for hours and browse, that I really adopted the internet.

But once I found it, it was perfect. And endless repository of information, about anything I can think of. I can happily sit at the computer for hours, and hours, just following links to new and interesting parts of the internet I haven’t been to before. Sometimes I go to google and type in random words as a search, just to see what shows up. Sometimes it is interesting. Often enough, it is good.

In the past, I have called myself an information junkie. But that is not entirely accurate. For the most part, information for its own sake is not good enough. I have a book about battleships in my room at home. It is a large book, designed for the reference section in libraries, full of blueprints and tables of information. But those are not why I value the information. I value the stories. The battles fought, who won, why.

I have read a dictionary of the english language. It was terribly dry. I forced myself through it. And you know what? It wasn’t a waste. The etymologies of the words were little stories, frequent enough to entice me to keep reading, little tidbits of interesting ideas, like chocolate ships in a vast field of corn bread. Except they seemed much more in context.

I started reading through an encyclopedia soon afterwards, and I couldn’t do it. Because for every little article about something interesting, there were five huge ones filled with tables and figures that weren’t in the least bit interesting. Frankly, I could not care less if Nigeria’s coal imports steadily increased between the years 1965-1980. But I found that the articles about politicians, the articles about history, the articles about war, kept my attention quite well.

History class was still a challenge, though. There was all this attention paid to names, and dates, and places, and none at all to the history itself. I don’t have any interest or memory for the details. So I don’t know the name of the man who led an expedition to a fort which I can’t name within the Canadian border to retrieve cannon held there for General Washington to use during the siege of Boston during the Revolutionary war… but I know the story all the same. I can even tell you the name of the book I got it from. Guns for General Washington. I don’t know the author. But if you want to teach me history, I decided, don’t give me a textbook that talks about the Boston Massacre with a contemporary illustration, reprinted with permission; give me Johnny Tremain.

I think that’s the only real reason why I prefer fiction to nonfiction: the authors feel compelled to write stories, and make them interesting. Nonfiction authors seem to have a compulsion to relate the facts, as briefly and dryly as possible. For a similar reason, I prefer to stay away from most mainstream fiction, and stick toward the edge: science fiction. fantasy. anime. manga. It irks me that the most popular, the best selling fiction always seems to be either steamy romance, cheesy horror, or murder mystery. Because those genres are defined. There is nothing new to say about romance; it’s just rearranging the adjectives and pushing the envelope of popular morality a little bit farther. Horror is hard to convey because the only source of fear are the unknown and your own mortality, and it’s exceedingly difficult to find and author who conveys that fear well. And murder mysteries have the same appeal to me that solving jigsaw puzzles and mounting them does: it may give a small sense of satisfaction, but it’s time better spent elsewhere.

No, when you look for writing that makes you think, writing that has influenced the world, you have to look to the edge. 1984, Brave New World, Alas, Babylon… everyone knows of these works, yet they were all written for a niche market of science fiction writers.

That’s enough of my literary tastes. People will disagree, and neither of us is going to change your opinion for the other. I don’t hate all popular writers. I just think it’s harder to find the interesting ones. Ill give you Vonnegut as the exception who proves the rule.

I write. I despair of ever becoming as prolific a writer as Piers Anthony, as interesting as Robert Heinlein, as clever as Neal Stephenson, or as smart as Larry Niven. But I write all the same, because it’s one way in which I can contribute. I feast upon the Internet every day for interesting ideas, and I leave behind tidbits like this occasionally. Logically, there’s no way I’m putting back enough interesting writing, enough insightful art to make up for what I read. But that’s the beauty of the scheme: if thousands of people each put forward just a little bit of something they thought up and think is clever, there’s a bounty rich enough that it’s unthinkable to try to know it all. I write, I draw, I create, not because I hope that what I am producing is interesting or good now, but in the hopes that eventually I will make something that someone else will look at and say to themselves, “that is good“. I’ll never know when or if that happens, but with luck, the day will come eventually. Until then, I write. And for every word I write, I read a thousand. Otherwise, where would I get my ideas?

i hear that hegemonia is an cool new game, though certainly not to everyone’s taste. worth downloading the demo, but the demo is a very good idea before buying. in that vein, I am currently downloading the demo, though I still have over half an hour left. negligible time if i were using a 56k modem, but annoyingly long considering that i have a broadband (it’s shared, but at this time of the day i don’t think that the rest of my family is downloading anything).

in that vein, i have had an idea for a new race strategy to use in master of orion ii. i will soon test it out.

of course, moo2 conflicts horribly with win2k… my resolve is weakening not to ‘upgrade’ to xp, though in the past i have sworn i would never do this. i wish that there was a fully-featured version of wine that I could play with, but according to the website, “Wine is still under development, and it is not yet suitable for general use.” It’s something that i think i’d like to contribute to, once I’m out of school and therefore have free time to burn on an open-source coding project.

at some soon point, i will sleep