Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

So here's where I spend my days. Three screens, two keyboards, four phones, lots of USB connected widgets, and far too many pens...

Load the really big version and you should see that I'm relatively up to date on my email, that I'm reading LJ, there aren't enough stickers on my monitor, that I have two multi tools and a Swiss Army Knife, that I haven't changed the date on my Snufkin calendar since May, I have a very dead fish, and I like my tea in a big mug. You'll also see the foot of an Intel Bunny Person, as well as my monitor lizard. No cats, though - they seem to prefer marypcb's desk (probably because she has the window).

Back in my ecommerce consultancy days, I used to makeencourage my developers to read Scott McCloud's excellent Understanding Comics (and, later, Reinventing Comics), so that they could get their heads around the semiotics of stateless loosely-coupled user interfaces by understanding that in western comics the action happens between the panes - just like all the work happens in that gap between the screens of a web application...

Web 2.0 blows that analogy away, as we move to a more seamless, consistent web user experience with technologies like AJAX.

However I just had a revelation.

Japanese comics are like AJAX, in that everything happens in the pane as you read it...

So now I'll make my developers read Akira.

[expanding on a comment to karentraviss]

Nineteen Ninety Four was a rather fun BBC radio comedy drama that took 1984 and dumped it in a future ultra-privatised Britain, where everything was run by the Ministry of the Environment. It was witty, literate, and very very funny. It was followed up a sequel, Nineteen Ninety Eight and a couple of novels.

One of its high lights was the shoddy servant robot, The Fetcher. It wasn't very stable - and would beedle-beedle around the room, go clunk, and then announce "I've fallen over". One scene in a high class restaurant had a waiter Fetcher point out "Merde, je suis tombée!".

Now someone seems to have built one...

I've been watching a lot of films that deal with the art of the long con recently. Last night's, "Matchstick Men" managed the trick of wrapping one con inside another, while the recent "Ocean" sequence have produced some truly complex and intellectually stimulating puzzles.

It strikes me that one of the roots of SF is the puzzle story, and the long con is one of the ultimate expressions of the puzzle - one where only a handful of characters have the full picture, and one where misdirection is a key concept. In "Ocean's Twelve" the reveal sequence shows that what appeared to be a failed con was in fact part of a complex swirl of events that were actually directed at solving a puzzle that was only hinted at by the opening moments of the film.

So how can we come up with an innovative long con for SF readers? It'll need to be one that won't trip up and deliver the pay-off before the final reveal, that keeps the readers hooked, and at convincing them that they know what's really going on, while the characters do something completely unexpected - in full sight of the reader. It's something that's puzzling me - I feel there's some scope here for something that could be humorous, yet thrilling, and able to tell a story about some of the more unsavoury elements of the human condition.

I'm wondering about constructing something in the shape of the classical artefact archaeology story, using a variant of the classic gold salting scam. However, this is one where the folk running the con actually know that there are real artefacts on site, but are unable to put together the resources needed to recover them - and so run a long con that not only has to convince the marks that they want to recover the artefacts, but that once recovered they are in fact worthless, and then to hand them over to our protagonists. We can dress things up with a touch of the post-human to make things harder for the protagonists. Like the best long cons it'll need a big team of players - the key actors, and then their support infrastructure. The later is actually critical - and could make in an interesting focus for the story.

It's something that could be worth trying out. There's the prospect of constructing an appropriate milieu, as well as designing the story state machine in order to construct the appropriate loops and place the characters (both the grifters and the marks) in the right places. The trick seems to be covering up the obvious cog wheels that drive the con - perhaps by throwing in something unexpected that leaves the grifters having to improvise, or affecting the support infrastructure in the middle of the con...

Hmmm. That last one would work well in a story from the point of view of the support infrastructure folk, with the front office grifters out on the job, and the under-briefed folk at the back-end of things having to rapidly develop front-end skills in order to solve a problem...

Hmmm...

OK...

Nothing to see here...

Move along now...