Various
So, LJ is having another permanent account sale. I'm feeling a little more cautious about LJ these days; I don't think fandom is going anywhere (I don't think it really could, or would want to in the absence of stronger provocation), but I was deeply unhappy with the way they handled the deletions. And who's to say what we'll all be doing on the Internet in five years, though I have a feeling I'll still be here. Mostly, though, I'm not getting a permanent account for the same reason I passed on the sale last time, and since the issue I have with permanent accounts isn't one I see discussed much, I thought I'd throw it out there.
LJ's paid accounts follow a pretty standard subscription software service business model. The permanent account is a one-time infusion of cash, front-loaded revenue. For about five years, LJ is making money and/or breaking even on it, assuming (and I think this is a pretty safe assumption) that most of the people who'd pay $150 for a permanent account were previously shelling out for a paid account at minimum, and probably extra icons on top of that. But at a certain point, the permanent account becomes a money loser for LJ, a group of users with money who are no longer paying yearly fees and never will again. I just wonder what might happen if/when LJ stops regarding permanent accounts as a great way to raise some cash and make users happy and starts seeing them as an albatross; they would have no motivation to offer new features to permanent account holders at that point if there is a reasonable way to segregate features by account status (something they have already done with their ad infrastructure, polling, extra icons, etc.). There's been a lot of discussion over whether having a permanent account removes your leverage in a situation like the strikethrough, but this strikes me as a much more likely situation where permanent account holders would have no leverage to complain. Granted, most of the new features LJ does roll out at this point are things I have no use for or that actively annoy me, but the cynic in me thinks that even permanent accounts will end up paying for LJ one way or another eventually. Because they're a great short-term source of revenue, but over the long haul, they don't make much business sense, and as was so vividly demonstrated recently, LJ is a business and is here to make money.
* * * * *
I am glad I'm watching the last episode of Stargate tonight with friends. I've already seen it, but still--until it airs on SciFi, there is still such a thing as a future episode of SG-1 for me; and once it does, that's the end. I wasn't kidding about the DVD movies and my elaborate coping mechanism. It has silly villains who use torches to light their spaceships, and rarely ventures outside its comfort zone--when it tries, it's usually not a good thing--but that's not really the point. It's all about the team, the perils and adventures they'll face each week and the way they do it together. I'm going to miss it fiercely.
* * * * *
My reading list for the entire spring was pathetically small; now that I'm taking the train again, I'll be able to pick up the pace and start working through the giant "to read" stack.
American Gods by Neil Gaiman:
This was my first foray into Neil Gaiman (hey, this journal says "a day late and a dollar short" for a reason) and there were two things I liked really intensely about American Gods. One was the connection Gaiman drew between the lives of the old gods, who exist only inasmuch as they are remembered, and the American immigrant experience and the process of assimilation, the way technology and popular culture have grown in the vacuum created by lost traditions. The old gods were more spiritual, rooted in the natural world, but some of them were more bloodthirsty and treacherous than any of the newer ones, and I thought there was an interesting contrast between the Internet's casual, petty, ego-driven cruelty and the sinister bargain Wednesday had struck with the town of Lakewood, and with the horrifyingly destructive battle he sought to provoke. The other intensely American element of the novel was the road trip along half-forgotten byways of the pre-freeway era, and the power and wonder of place. (And Rock City really is a very strange place; barns for miles around exhort you to SEE ROCK CITY, but nothing really prepares you for the elves, especially not when you're a fifth grader on a school field trip, walking the borderlands between a childhood steeped in fantasy and the growing adult realization that those sorts of attempts to bring fantasy into reality for your entertainment often end up looking silly and vaguely desperate.) The one element of the novel I had some problems with was Laura as Shadow's motivation; she's a device, not a character; I was never quite sure how she fit in thematically, and vaguely suspicious that she didn't because she was fashioned from cliche.
Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World):
It was probably not wise to start these books right when the release started getting crazy and I started driving to work; ten pages a night before falling asleep is not a good or speedy way to read them. But I do think I have finally found a fictional character who rivals John Crichton for sheer bad luck, twisted fate, and unlooked-for grace, and that character is Jack Shaftoe. I'm not sure if Stephenson deliberately matched his tone to the historical content, but I liked the way the rambunctuous narrative sprawl of the first book, set in a time of political and intellectual upheaval, when the characters were young and their lives and their settings fluid enough to permit outrageous coincidence, gave way to the more measured tone and careful structure of the last book, when the foundations of the modern financial system had been erected, and with it the underpinnings of modern government, and except for the manipulation of the Trial of the Pyx, the characters were less able to shape fluid circumstances, more hemmed in by solidifying institutions. Stephenson made some interesting narrative choices for his viewpoint characters, creating people who were both products of their time and outsiders looking in on particular social windows: Jack, King of the Vagabonds, and the lower classes; Eliza, clever and grasping, a survivor, but strongly ethical when she has a choice, eventually straddling aristocracy and finance; and Daniel, caught between the intellectual fever and political machinations of his more aristocratic peers and his solid Puritan connection to everyday life and the damage ideas can do to ordinary people. Stephenson also has a wonderful eye for the sorts of practical historical details that shape the setting in the reader's mind--the ideosyncracies of pre-industrial German mining operations, the complicated paths of London sewers, and above all else, the ever-present stench of human waste and sweat and rotting things in an era before public sanitation was even a twinkle in someone's eye.
The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk:
This novel is very much about the fluidity of identity; although it opens with a very concrete description of the family of Galip, the novel's protagonist, and his cousin and wife, Ruya, the narrative, interspersed with columns written by Celal, Ruya's brother, who is obsessed with identity, quickly changes into something more diffuse and meditative, as Ruya disappears and Galip questions everything he knows about Ruya and Celal, everything he knows about himself, and begins assuming Celal's identity. And woven throughout is the question of what it is to be Turkish, to live in Istanbul, straddling East and West, past and present, tentative democracy and military coup (the novel is set before the coup of 1971); the fluidity of language and the power of names; and the way we define ourselves and others through stories, especially stories about the golden eras of the past and the fallen present:
"In the poem's distant golden age, action and meaning were one and the same. Heaven was on earth, and the things we kept in our houses were one with our dreams. Those were the happy, happy days when everything we held in our hands--our tools, our cups, our dangers, our pens--was but an extension of our souls. A poet could say tree and everyone who heard him would conjure up the same perfect tree--could see the word and the tree it signified--without wasting any time on counting the leaves and branches. For words were so close to the things they described that, on mornings when the mist swept down from the mountains into the ghost villages below, poetry mixed with life and words with the objects they signified. No one waking up on misty mornings could tell their dreams apart from reality, or poems apart from life, or names apart from people. No one ever asked if a story was real, because stories were as real as the lives they described. They lived their dreams and interpreted their lives. Those were the days when faces, like everything else in the world, were so laden with meaning that even the illiterate--even the man who could not tell an alpha from a piece of fruit, an a from a hat, or an alif from a stick--could read them with ease."
I'm currently reading Barry Unsworth's The Rage of Vultures, which is also set in Istanbul, in 1908, during the last days of the Ottoman Empire, but from an outsider's perspective, the view of a British foreign service officer who is negotiating the shoals of his own empire's bureaucracy while seeing the collapse of another. It's a much different view of the city, though the sense of place is strong in both novels; the names of neighborhoods are transliterated instead of rendered using Turkish typography, the main characters are visitors, conscious that this is not really their home, but fascinated by it all the same. Unsworth has a lovely, precise economy with vocabulary that's very different from Pamuk's dreamy, lyrical style.
(And on the subject of Unsworth, if you like historical fiction, Sacred Hunger, his novel about the Atlantic slave trade, is really excellent.)
* * * * *
And since it's Friday, I will continue this blog's fine tradition of linking to random Lego creations by bringing you Lego Mos Eisley.
LJ's paid accounts follow a pretty standard subscription software service business model. The permanent account is a one-time infusion of cash, front-loaded revenue. For about five years, LJ is making money and/or breaking even on it, assuming (and I think this is a pretty safe assumption) that most of the people who'd pay $150 for a permanent account were previously shelling out for a paid account at minimum, and probably extra icons on top of that. But at a certain point, the permanent account becomes a money loser for LJ, a group of users with money who are no longer paying yearly fees and never will again. I just wonder what might happen if/when LJ stops regarding permanent accounts as a great way to raise some cash and make users happy and starts seeing them as an albatross; they would have no motivation to offer new features to permanent account holders at that point if there is a reasonable way to segregate features by account status (something they have already done with their ad infrastructure, polling, extra icons, etc.). There's been a lot of discussion over whether having a permanent account removes your leverage in a situation like the strikethrough, but this strikes me as a much more likely situation where permanent account holders would have no leverage to complain. Granted, most of the new features LJ does roll out at this point are things I have no use for or that actively annoy me, but the cynic in me thinks that even permanent accounts will end up paying for LJ one way or another eventually. Because they're a great short-term source of revenue, but over the long haul, they don't make much business sense, and as was so vividly demonstrated recently, LJ is a business and is here to make money.
* * * * *
I am glad I'm watching the last episode of Stargate tonight with friends. I've already seen it, but still--until it airs on SciFi, there is still such a thing as a future episode of SG-1 for me; and once it does, that's the end. I wasn't kidding about the DVD movies and my elaborate coping mechanism. It has silly villains who use torches to light their spaceships, and rarely ventures outside its comfort zone--when it tries, it's usually not a good thing--but that's not really the point. It's all about the team, the perils and adventures they'll face each week and the way they do it together. I'm going to miss it fiercely.
* * * * *
My reading list for the entire spring was pathetically small; now that I'm taking the train again, I'll be able to pick up the pace and start working through the giant "to read" stack.
American Gods by Neil Gaiman:
This was my first foray into Neil Gaiman (hey, this journal says "a day late and a dollar short" for a reason) and there were two things I liked really intensely about American Gods. One was the connection Gaiman drew between the lives of the old gods, who exist only inasmuch as they are remembered, and the American immigrant experience and the process of assimilation, the way technology and popular culture have grown in the vacuum created by lost traditions. The old gods were more spiritual, rooted in the natural world, but some of them were more bloodthirsty and treacherous than any of the newer ones, and I thought there was an interesting contrast between the Internet's casual, petty, ego-driven cruelty and the sinister bargain Wednesday had struck with the town of Lakewood, and with the horrifyingly destructive battle he sought to provoke. The other intensely American element of the novel was the road trip along half-forgotten byways of the pre-freeway era, and the power and wonder of place. (And Rock City really is a very strange place; barns for miles around exhort you to SEE ROCK CITY, but nothing really prepares you for the elves, especially not when you're a fifth grader on a school field trip, walking the borderlands between a childhood steeped in fantasy and the growing adult realization that those sorts of attempts to bring fantasy into reality for your entertainment often end up looking silly and vaguely desperate.) The one element of the novel I had some problems with was Laura as Shadow's motivation; she's a device, not a character; I was never quite sure how she fit in thematically, and vaguely suspicious that she didn't because she was fashioned from cliche.
Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World):
It was probably not wise to start these books right when the release started getting crazy and I started driving to work; ten pages a night before falling asleep is not a good or speedy way to read them. But I do think I have finally found a fictional character who rivals John Crichton for sheer bad luck, twisted fate, and unlooked-for grace, and that character is Jack Shaftoe. I'm not sure if Stephenson deliberately matched his tone to the historical content, but I liked the way the rambunctuous narrative sprawl of the first book, set in a time of political and intellectual upheaval, when the characters were young and their lives and their settings fluid enough to permit outrageous coincidence, gave way to the more measured tone and careful structure of the last book, when the foundations of the modern financial system had been erected, and with it the underpinnings of modern government, and except for the manipulation of the Trial of the Pyx, the characters were less able to shape fluid circumstances, more hemmed in by solidifying institutions. Stephenson made some interesting narrative choices for his viewpoint characters, creating people who were both products of their time and outsiders looking in on particular social windows: Jack, King of the Vagabonds, and the lower classes; Eliza, clever and grasping, a survivor, but strongly ethical when she has a choice, eventually straddling aristocracy and finance; and Daniel, caught between the intellectual fever and political machinations of his more aristocratic peers and his solid Puritan connection to everyday life and the damage ideas can do to ordinary people. Stephenson also has a wonderful eye for the sorts of practical historical details that shape the setting in the reader's mind--the ideosyncracies of pre-industrial German mining operations, the complicated paths of London sewers, and above all else, the ever-present stench of human waste and sweat and rotting things in an era before public sanitation was even a twinkle in someone's eye.
The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk:
This novel is very much about the fluidity of identity; although it opens with a very concrete description of the family of Galip, the novel's protagonist, and his cousin and wife, Ruya, the narrative, interspersed with columns written by Celal, Ruya's brother, who is obsessed with identity, quickly changes into something more diffuse and meditative, as Ruya disappears and Galip questions everything he knows about Ruya and Celal, everything he knows about himself, and begins assuming Celal's identity. And woven throughout is the question of what it is to be Turkish, to live in Istanbul, straddling East and West, past and present, tentative democracy and military coup (the novel is set before the coup of 1971); the fluidity of language and the power of names; and the way we define ourselves and others through stories, especially stories about the golden eras of the past and the fallen present:
"In the poem's distant golden age, action and meaning were one and the same. Heaven was on earth, and the things we kept in our houses were one with our dreams. Those were the happy, happy days when everything we held in our hands--our tools, our cups, our dangers, our pens--was but an extension of our souls. A poet could say tree and everyone who heard him would conjure up the same perfect tree--could see the word and the tree it signified--without wasting any time on counting the leaves and branches. For words were so close to the things they described that, on mornings when the mist swept down from the mountains into the ghost villages below, poetry mixed with life and words with the objects they signified. No one waking up on misty mornings could tell their dreams apart from reality, or poems apart from life, or names apart from people. No one ever asked if a story was real, because stories were as real as the lives they described. They lived their dreams and interpreted their lives. Those were the days when faces, like everything else in the world, were so laden with meaning that even the illiterate--even the man who could not tell an alpha from a piece of fruit, an a from a hat, or an alif from a stick--could read them with ease."
I'm currently reading Barry Unsworth's The Rage of Vultures, which is also set in Istanbul, in 1908, during the last days of the Ottoman Empire, but from an outsider's perspective, the view of a British foreign service officer who is negotiating the shoals of his own empire's bureaucracy while seeing the collapse of another. It's a much different view of the city, though the sense of place is strong in both novels; the names of neighborhoods are transliterated instead of rendered using Turkish typography, the main characters are visitors, conscious that this is not really their home, but fascinated by it all the same. Unsworth has a lovely, precise economy with vocabulary that's very different from Pamuk's dreamy, lyrical style.
(And on the subject of Unsworth, if you like historical fiction, Sacred Hunger, his novel about the Atlantic slave trade, is really excellent.)
* * * * *
And since it's Friday, I will continue this blog's fine tradition of linking to random Lego creations by bringing you Lego Mos Eisley.