Of all the re-imaginings of Lewis Carrol’s classic, Alice In Wonderland, my favorite is a video game released in 2000 called American McGee’s Alice. The game took the Alice mythos and gave it a dark and disturbing twist.

In 2011, American McGee released a followup game: Alice – Madness Returns. Either Mr. McGee has grown less conceited or more tasteful, because he left his own name out of the game title this time.

Wonderland Revisited

Without a doubt, Wonderland is the star of the show.  The game designers definitely milked every last pixel out of the Unreal engine. The characters of the Real World are exaggerated caricatures, that made Wonderland seem more real in comparison.

Visually, the level design is beautiful, and disturbing in a good way. Highlights are the Mad Hatter’s domain, where Dormouse and March Hare have taken over and turned everything into a steampunk nightmare.

Chapter 4 has you running around a bizzare realm made of body parts. You slide down giant tongues, doorways are mouths, and hallways look like the inside of intestines, the whole level feels like playing through something from the medical channel.

Another interesting section has you entering a Japanese painting and playing a suddenly two-dimensional Alice side-scroller. There are even a couple disturbing levels where you play as (I’m not kidding) a detached doll’s head, rolling around an obstacle course.

The occasional puzzles and riddles are a fun break from exploration and fighting, but you will get bored of invisible, moving platforms and timed race games.

Characters

The characters you expect to find are there, but not in the quantity/quality you would expect. The Cheshire Cat is a mood accent, showing up to make cryptic and unhelpful remarks (in an awesome deep voice.) At one point, he actually shows up and says “Be careful, Alice.” Really? No shit. The Mad Hatter seems to waffle between friend and enemy, but the truth is, he’s just mad.

The classic characters of Wonderland get watered down with new oddities: Shambling blobs of oil wearing doll masks, Samauri Wasps, “Bitch Babys” made of doll parts, and more weirdness abound, while characters that were main staples of the Alice in Wonderland mythos hardly show up at all. The White Knight makes an appearance (as a door) long enough for you to shatter him to gain entrance to the next section. Caterpillar, Mock Turtle, Carpenter, Walrus and the Red Queen all have little more than cameos in cutscenes.

The Jabberwock doesn’t show up at all.

Not entirely sure how we missed out on Alice’s older sister, Lizzie. from the first episode… oh wait. That’s right, she didn’t have one. Oops. Not sure why Lizzy was added, because the plot didn’t require her either. Double Oops.

Gameplay

Gameplay is more or less reminiscent of Tomb Raider in terms of exploration, puzzle-solving and fighting. You jump, you shrink, you explore, you fight. Collect teeth (yes, teeth) to upgrade your weapons. Finish special side-quests to receive increased health. There are plenty of variations in gameplay, but you may still get bored of some puzzle repetitions.

The Unreal engine looks good, but glitches galore. There are plenty of places that look like you can jump to them… but you can’t. Die and retry. Other places look like you can walk to them… but you can’t. Jump over those cracks in the ground, and continue on your way. These glitches are exponentially more frustrating if you’re in a hurry, which you often are.

The controls make this game feel like it was created for a button-mashing console and converted to PC as an afterthought. Button presses will occasionally fail to register (no matter how hard you mash the button, believe me) and this will kill your timing, requiring you to experiment until you find the button timing the game engine requires. This alone will ruin the game for some, when you can’t even make a simple double-jump because the second button-press does not register… die and retry. Thankfully, “deaths” are little more than colorful setbacks as Alice explodes into a burst of butterflies, and is instantly reborn on the previous ledge. The game is autosaved at checkpoints. There is no manual game save.

When the game shifts between the real world and Wonderland, the controls change. This is an absolute Forbidden, Please God, Do Not Ever Ever Ever Do This, but they did. Why can you switch to first-person view in the real world, but not in Wonderland? Worse yet, directional controls and camera angles will change instantly in-game after certain events, even during timing tests that require the reflexes of a hummingbird on crack. At times I felt I was actually playing against the game engine instead of the game.

But the biggest buzzkill in Alice was the combat. All the fun ran out once the monsters became impossible to kill. I switched the game difficulty to Easy, and still couldn’t make it past a boss fight in chapter 2. I went online and looked up enemy weaknesses. Turns out some enemies are puzzles in themselves – some can only be attacked at a certain time during their attack sequence.  For others, you have to deflect their own attacks back at them to break their defenses before your attacks have any effect. Some enemies are immune to certain weapons unless they are a high enough level. This means that if you spend your weapon upgrade points incorrectly, you’re screwed.  (But see my game-hack solution below.)

Even with knowledge of enemy weaknesses, my fun meter with Alice still dropped to zero. I considered calling the game a loss, filing it under “Meh” and waiting for Skyrim to be released. After a few weeks on the shelf, I was torn enough that I looked for a hack or cheat code that would allow me to get past the area where I was stuck. I couldn’t find one, so I hacked the game myself.

Alice – Madness Returns Game Hacks

These hacks allowed me to have fun finishing the game, and they also helped justify my Computer Science student loans:

1 – How to Increase Weapon Damage

Open the DefaultGame.ini file at …InstallFolder\Game\Alice2\AliceGame\Config\DefaultGame.ini

Find these lines and change the end number to 100. This makes all your weapons really powerful.

• AliceWeaponDamageMultiplier[0] = 100
• AliceWeaponDamageMultiplier[1] = 100
• AliceWeaponDamageMultiplier[2] = 100
• AliceWeaponDamageMultiplier[3] = 100

2 – How to Upgrade Your Weapons For Cheap

In the same DefaultGame.ini file, find these lines and change all the end numbers to 1 as shown. This makes all your weapon upgrades really cheap, you’ll be able to instantly upgrade your weapons to the maximum level 4:

• WeaponUpgradeToLevel2XPCost[0]=1
• WeaponUpgradeToLevel2XPCost[1]=1
• WeaponUpgradeToLevel2XPCost[2]=1
• WeaponUpgradeToLevel2XPCost[3]=1
• WeaponUpgradeToLevel3XPCost[0]=1
• WeaponUpgradeToLevel3XPCost[1]=1
• WeaponUpgradeToLevel3XPCost[2]=1
• WeaponUpgradeToLevel3XPCost[3]=1
• WeaponUpgradeToLevel4XPCost[0]=1
• WeaponUpgradeToLevel4XPCost[1]=1
• WeaponUpgradeToLevel4XPCost[2]=1
• WeaponUpgradeToLevel4XPCost[3]=1

With these cheats in place, combat wasn’t a problem anymore, and I considered this upgrade an even trade for putting up with the game glitches.

The Story

The story starts in the real world, ignoring the happy ending of the first game. Alice’s family (including bonus older sister) died in a mysterious fire, and poor Alice has been in a mental institution, slowly becoming stable enough to venture outside. Disturbing hallucinations begin to crop up, as well as a cat, who leads Alice to Wonderland, where a gigantic train is heading toward the heart of Wonderland to destroy everything.

The story shifts back and forth between Wonderland and the Real world, but spends most of the time (I’d say 90% of the time) in Wonderland. Throughout Alice’s adventures, she picks up clues and cutscenes that reveal the backstory of what happened to cause Alice’s madness.

The overarching story is really a who-done-it, but don’t bother trying to solve the mystery from the clues. The story will be revealed to you through the major cutscenes of each of the five chapters of the story.

While the ending works in a technical way, it’s fairly tasteless and reminded me (in a bad way) of the movie Sucker Punch. It’s like eating an entire box of Pop Tarts for lunch – satisfying in a way, but not really.

The Short Version

In the end, Alice – Madness Returns is a flawed gem. The levels are beautiful and Wonderland is a joy to explore.  But it will take a strong love for the mythos to tolerate a weak game engine, weak game design, weak weapons, repetitive gameplay, the minimal face time / absence of staple characters, and an overarching story that involves pedophilia.

In other words, unless you’re really sold on experiencing a dark and twisted fantasy Wonderland.. you can do better. In fact, you might be better off tracking down a copy of the first American McGee’s Alice.

One more step towards SkyNet taking over the world?

Not exactly.

When the creators of the IPV4 protocol got together and decided to assign every internet-connected device a unique number, they figured 4.2 BILLION numbers would be plenty. They never thought we would hook microwaves, mobile devices and pets up to the interwebs.

Because we’re all such IP hogs, the existing system is predicted to run out of numbers sometime in 2011. Thankfully,  someone more clever than you or I decided to tack a few more numbers onto the existing schema:

While IPv4 allows 32 bits for an Internet Protocol address, and can therefore support 2³² (4,294,967,296) addresses, IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, so the new address space supports 2¹²⁸ (approximately 340 undecillion or 3.4×1038
) addresses

From https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/IPv6

I’ve never heard of an undecillion before, but it sounds like we have enough IP numbers that we can start putting RFID tags on EVERYTHING. Imagine never losing anything again? Where did all your black socks go? Just look them up on Google Maps!

Can. Not. Wait.

The only thing that disturbs me is that anyone smart enough to improve this system should be able to count from 4 to 5 without much trouble. What the hell happened to IPV5?

Test your IPV6 compatibility

If you’re the kind of person who worries about large-scale changes, there is a handy online test to check your compatibility to the new system:

Go here to test IPV6 and see if you’re ready for the change.

Do You Want Dark Fiction With That?

Of all the places to run across a cool book like “Music Legends – A Rewind on the Local Minnesota Music Scene By Martin Keller” I found it at… SuperAmerica. That’s right. The Gas Station.

I wasn’t looking for a book on Minnesota Music History…well, actually I was, but not at that particular moment in time. It was a bona fide impulse buy. If there was a XXX video starring Salma Hayek, Aishwarya Rai, and Halle Berry, I would have bought that too, but I certainly wasn’t expecting to purchase books or movies at a gas station checkout.

Pushers

Advertising people have always believed that if you could just get your product in front of every man, woman and child in the Multiverse, that $$$ is sure to follow. They don’t really care what the product is, just get it in front of the people. This is the entire philosophy behind television and radio advertisements, roadside billboards (curse them and the soulless bastard who thought them up), advertisements in bathroom stalls, and e-mail SPAM.

Had I been driving up 35W North to Tobie’s in Hinkley, MN and actually read each and every billboard on the way (A nearly impossible task, since no human being can read that much) and seen an advertisement for a book on Local Minnesota Music History, I would have done that thing people do – I would have pursed my lips, and nodded my head slightly, thinking to myself, “Kewl, I’ll have to pick that up if I see it.”

But that’s the problem – the majority of advertising requires the potential customer to actively Go Someplace Else to buy the product being advertised. The advertisement plants the “impulse buy” seed in the subconscious, and they hope that the seed takes root and grows into the action of purchase.

But now they’ve figured out a better way.

Impulse Buy, Engage!

Advertisers realized that the tiny area of real estate near the cash register sees many, many people each day. And it gets better:

• Those people are already in a store, so they are already in “gathering” mode!
• There is already a cashier in place to make the transaction, and all the necessary equipment!
• The customer already has their method of payment out, and is going to MAKE A PURCHASE!

Every obstacle between the customer purchasing the product is cut down to just the impulse. The customer only needs to reach over, pick up the product, and toss it in the cart with their existing purchase! [Editor's Note: Insert sound effect of entire excited advertising department wetting themselves here.]

Now remember, advertising people don’t really care what the product is, just get it in front of the people, right? They don’t really care if they are trying to sell a water pump for a 1996 Saturn, if they could just get their product to sit at the counter of Starbucks, IT WOULD SELL. And it probably would. So now, every single cash register in the world has just become a convenience store. Every website checkout is a potential selling ground for someone to ask, “Do you want fries with that?” or “Since you are buying a book on Equestrian Philosophy, you probably also want a Horse Calendar and a copy of ‘The Horse Whisperer’ at a reduced rate!!!” Caribou Coffee sells greeting cards. Starbucks sells CDs. McDonalds has the Redbox DVD rental, and SuperAmerica is selling books on Minnesota Music History.

Of course, these are retail chain franchises, so the store managers probably don’t have much say in the matter themselves, and probably aren’t getting much of the profit, since that is all being done at the corporate level. But for independent business owners, this could be a new form of revenue. A restaurant that carries band merch? That could happen. Hell’s Kitchen already carries their own line of clothing. It isn’t a stretch to think that they might move some stuff around to make room for some Jagged Spiral hoodies.

An Italian restaurant selling lawn care chemicals? Maybe not.

The Million Dollar Idea

The Million Dollar Idea is for a company to take over the middleman job of selling that space, just the way Clear Channel (Hiss!) sells advertising space on billboards and radio. If a company came along that walked into Dremahaven Books and said, “Hey Greg, let me have a couple inches of space here beside the cash register, and I’ll find people to lease it for a monthly fee, you just sit back, and I’ll send you a check every month…”

Well, seems to me there is a business opportunity there for someone more industrious than myself.

I shudder to think of where this road leads. I’m imagining checkout counters that look like I-35W North, or your inbox, crammed with a bunch of crap you don’t want or need, and has nothing to do with the store you are at.

During your next visit to the dentist, when you have to stand on tiptoe to see the receptionist over the ostrich waxers, keyboard warmers, and my new series of Dark Fiction stories…well, maybe then you will learn to dislike advertising people as much as I do.

In honor of the decomposing pumpkin that I shoveled off our front step this evening, I give you… Decomposing Pumpkin by Brainkrieg.

Thanks to Jess for the link…

An Apple is not Candy,

-Z

For those who don’t know about Sound Unseen, it’s a Music/Art/Film fest themed out by a slew of cool Minneapolis Artists and Venues.  Its for those people who need a damned reason to get off their ass and experience some local art. Sound Unseen 2009 runs from Sept 30th until Oct 4th.

One of the more original events that goes on during Sound Unseen is the “Rock and Bowl” where you get the chance to bowl with/against your favorite local bands.  More details (including band links) are below.

This year’s Rock and Bowl is on Monday, September 28 from 7pm -10pm at Memory Lanes in Minneapolis.

So set your Tivo up to record “Scrubs” then check the Sound Unseen website and your local news sources for more cool Sound Unseen events!

-Zero

All ages are welcome until 10pm.

Sound Unseen Music, Film and Art Festival Presents:

“ROCK AND BOWL“ – Come bowl against your favorite local bands at Memory Lanes!
2520 26th Ave S, Minneapolis, 55406
Cost: $10 – Includes Bowling and shoe rental.

John Kass will be selling records.

Reserve your spot today!  Sign up in teams of four. To do so, please email: karrie.vrabel@gmail.com

Participating Bands:

Now, Now Every Children
So It Goes
Communist Daughter
Total Babe
Switzerlind
LookBook
Gospel Gossip
Poor Weather Club
Magic Castles
Lucy Michelle and the Velvet Lapelles

$10 per person includes bowling and shoe rental.

The 2009 Minnesota Fringe Festival opens this weekend. The craziness begins on 30 July and runs until 9 August.

If you’re not familiar, the Fringe Festival is what happens when an ungodly number of indie theater productions land in town. They run all hours in all the theaters, back alleys and grocery-store produce sections in town. Its a great chance to see a wide variety of shows. In fact, the selection is almost overwhelming.

Newbies to Fringe Fest should check this handy link.

The beauty of the Fringe is that you get a lot of entertainment for your budget dollar.  Split the cost of a punch card with some friends and share – the punch card gets you into multiple shows. You’ll be surprised at how inexpensive they are.  Keep and eye out for 2-for-1 deals and discounts.

Download a pdf of the Fringe schedule here.

Fringe Fest on Twitter – Oh, and all things fringe-ish on twitter will be marked with the #mnfringe tag.

This is your chance. No excuses, get out there and  SUPPORT LOCAL ART!

Sodom, Gomorrah and Adam

I have it on good faith that the fringe show Sodom, Gomorrah and Adam will be worth attending, mostly because of the people involved instead of anything I actually know about the show, which would be about this much:

A tale of revelry and reformation: Young man recalls a lifetime of sin through rock songs. A bit like a cabaret only with more self-loathing and music created by a hybrid of Brian Wilson and Freddie Mercury.

Sodom, Gomorrah and Adam was created by Local-Mad-Evil-Genius Chris Strouth. If you don’t know about Chris, just buy me a pint or two after the show and I’ll tell you all about his lurid behavior back at Totino-Grace.

Here’s the schedule. I’ll probably hit the Saturday show and report back with a lovely review.

Sat., Aug. 1 @ 10:00 p.m.
Sun., Aug. 2 @ 5:30 p.m.
Wed., Aug. 5 @ 5:30 p.m.
Fri., Aug. 7 @ 5:30 p.m.
Sun., Aug. 9 @ 4:00 p.m.

Fringe Feedback

If you have a good/bad/indifferent experience at Fringe Fest, post it in the comments here, or on the fringe website so that others can benefit from your experience.

-Zero

In part one of this series on Audience Entitlement, we discovered that the author does not work for the audience.

In part two, I pointed out that the audience doesn’t have to take any crap from the author. (That’s what I’m here for. My amazing perception of the obvious.)

Now, let’s put these two parts together and find out, Will It Blend?

The Golden Rule

I listed “Honesty” and “Respect” as two things the audience can reasonably expect from an author. These are fluffy terms, and difficult to measure. In some cases, only the author knows if they are being honest or not. And there’s always some sum-bich who has to push the envelope. Who’s to say that intentionally leaving the third book out of a series couldn’t be Honestly and Respectfully done, if that’s the artist’s intention?

Plenty of gray area for us to all fight over, but the concept boils down to this:

Regarding the Audience/Author relationship, the best rule of thumb is The Golden Rule, which works in both directions. The author should respect the audience, and the audience should respect the author.

The Solution to Incomplete Series Malaise

Taking this discussion back to the original post by Neil Gaiman, the issue of audience entitlement was brought up regarding the phenomenon I titled “Incomplete Series Malaise”.

The problem summarized, is that the audience wants the next book in the series but the author isn’t working on it, or isn’t working on it as quickly as members of the audience would like.

For the author to simply say “I’m not your bitch” and leave it at that is disrespectful. The audience will say, “I’m not your bitch either,” and then see how many curses about you they can fit into a 140-character twitter post. Sadly this is where Mr. Gaiman left the matter hang, when I believe he is only half right.  I say that because the  solution to Incomplete Series Malaise comes in two parts:

If the audience respects the author, they won’t make demands.

When a member of the audience begins reading a series, they should not have any expectation of due dates or even of completion, except for what the author communicates. The audience can be as excited and enthusiastic as they want, and while they have every right to ask when the next book will be done, they have NO RIGHT to demand the next book in a series, or to get pissed off if it isn’t getting done when they’d like.

Audiences, if you can’t handle this, then don’t read a series until it’s complete. The author is not your bitch.

If the author respects his/her audience, he/she will tell them when the next book in the series is expected to be finished.

This is the part that I think Mr. Gaiman missed. True, the author does not work for the audience, but an author who does not at least have some respect for thieir audience doesn’t deserve one.

The wise author would have information about book release dates at a webpage/FAQ/blog post where excited fans can be directed. This is the official “I know, I got it, I already answered that, and you can find the official answer here…”

Authors, if you can’t handle this, then don’t write a series. Its disrespectful to the audience, and they are not your bitch.

And So On…

We can extend this simple solution out to ten-thousand other areas of the author/audience relationship. For example, social media responsiveness, web presence, the author’s right to privacy…

When I boil the whole thing down like this, it seems like the “Can’t we all just get along?” solution. And it is. You’d think we wouldn’t need this bit of common sense pointed out to us, but all it takes is one dickhead with a twitter account or an introverted author [Editor's Note: Aren't they all?] to ruin it for the rest of us.

So, when the inevitable happens, and you see authors/audiences getting into a pissing match, feel free to link them here for a dose of common sense.* And if you have any other applications for this bit of wisdom, feel free to leave a comment…

-Zero

*Except for me, naturally. Point me back to this post and I will totally fuck you up.

It isn’t supposed to happen like this, or so I’m told.

Back in Mar 2009, I tripped across a call for submissions to an anthology titled The Blackness Within.

The idea sounded refreshing and I needed a break from The Demonslayer’s Handbook. So, I took a week off to write up almost 5000 words, and sent it off, thinking no more about it than the fact that I should clear a virtual place for the rejection e-mail I was sure to receive.

On 2 May 2009, I discovered that I’d made the “Short List” whatever that means, and on 5 June I received the following e-mail:

‘Big Game’ is a great story, fast paced and quite different…I’d love to accept the story for inclusion in ‘The Blackness Within’.

Like I said, it’s not supposed to happen this way. The first story I’ve shown outside my circle of friends and relatives, written in a fit of spontaneity… not to mention my first submission ever… accepted?

The princely sum of 15 Pounds is probably enough to buy myself a copy of the book when it comes out, with enough left over for a lovely cuban cigar to smoke while I read it. But the real prize is that I will forevermore be able to say that Conrad Zero is a published author. (And I just might refer to myself in third person when I do it. Adds to the importance, don’t you think?)

So now, with a 100% acceptance rate, I’m terrified to ever make another submission. Don’t want to tarnish that perfect record, eh?

Meanwhile, The Blackness Within anthology should be out later this year by Apex Book Company.

Stunned,

Last week I tripped across an interesting opportunity over at Apex Book Company. (Click on their banner below to visit the site.)

On their Submissions page, they are accepting short story entries for an anthology called The Blackness Within. All stories in the anthology will involve the Celtic pig-deity, Moccus.

I know, I’ve never heard of Moccus either. Neither has the internet. It didn’t even come up on GodChecker.com so this is like some seriously under-the-underground hidden knowledge.

Or a hoax.

Either way, I found the lack of information on Moccus to be refreshing. Finally, a deity that hasn’t been analyzed from all angles and run right into the ground. Authors are given a few guidelines and a few restrictions regarding their submissions, but for the most part left alone to explore and expand on this overlooked god.

So, I cooked up a story called “Big Game.” It’s a cross between The Office (sans humor), Scary Spice (sans music) and all those Cabin-by-the-lake horror films.

I can’t print any of the story here, because the publisher is asking for FNASR (or, First North-American Serial Rights) which precludes me from releasing it before they do. But fear not, if my submission is rejected, or after the limits of the contract have expired, I’ll post the 4866 words of “Big Game” here at conradzero.com for your edification.

Harlan Ellison may be a self-important curmudgeon, but he has every right to be – his list of credits is longer than my first novel.  So he’s actually a talented and prolific self-important curmudgeon. But I absolutely adore him, and he makes a great point in this video:

Harlan hits the nail right on the head. With an aircraft carrier. But the problem is bigger than just writers in Hollywood.

The new technology gives us new opportunities. Computers and the internet allow people who have always wanted to be a musician or writer or movie producer to have their chance. Anyone with a computer and a blog is a journalist, and anyone with a computer and a soundcard is a music producer, anyone with a computer and a videocamera is a movie director.

Is this bad? No, not entirely. Anyone who wants to try their hand at an art form can and should.

Unfortunately, the new technology not only gives us new opportunities, but new difficulties as well. In this case, media created with words/audio/video and the work required to create those media are decreasing in value.

I don’t have the answer, but here are some pieces of the larger problem:

Amateurs Putting the Pros out of Work?

Most people who dabble, putter or try out any artistic field in their spare time don’t generally rely on that work as a source of income. Therefore, many amateur artists can hire themselves out for “fun” or “experience” or “exposure” but for little or no money. This undercuts professionals, people who rely on the income their skills bring in.   Service matchup websites like Odesk, Elance, and VersusMedia allow you to post and find cheap/free labor for all kinds of electronic media work. Programmers, copy editing, ghost writing, audio/video production… you name it.

If you want to read an unhinged and delusional rant about how talentless amateurs (such as myself)  are wrecking product quality, the economy, the market and pretty much everything else, check out The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen.

Foreign Labor

While this isn’t exactly the problem Harlan went on about, people who have a lower cost of living have an definite advantage in price setting.  This isn’t a new problem, companies have exported entire factories to other countries where the labor rate is lower.  But the internet moves it up to a global scale.

Look on Odesk.com and you will find writing services offered by people in foreign countries that are below the Minimum Wage here in the United States.

This undoubtedly has an impact on market prices, but it isn’t as drastic as people working for free.

Social Leverage

Sites like youtube.com make money off other people’s work. Youtube pays for the website hosting and servers, and users upload their vids for free. Let’s read that another way: The users generate the content for youtube.com for free.

There is no question that youtube captures hours of public viewing that would have otherwise been spent on cable/netflix/broadcast TV. One could see that as the public amateurs undercutting the professional market.

Flickr and Twitter are two more prime examples. Tons of info is generated for these sites, and not one of the users is being paid for their “work”.

Charity

Churches, the Salvation Army, the Goodwill, food shelves and others operate on the principal of charity.  Much like the social media sites which receive their content for free, these charities receive money, goods and services for free.

I doubt the church pays for any of its literature, brochures, fliers and other things which require a writer’s services. This is not viewed as undercutting the professional market, which could have been paid to do the job.

Other Things to Ponder

Other half-baked ideas my Inner Philosopher tossed out at me while writing this post:

• Are arts and media made up of words/audio/video worth anything at all? How about the work required to create them? Is it possible we should never have been charging for them in the first place, and only charging for physical products? See my Open Letter to Gene Simmons and the RIAA for more on this topic.
• Is it possible that the worldwide distribution of labor could create a shift in the supply/demand such that the prices will adjust themselves to a more accurate number? Perhaps we’ve been overpaying all this time, and we’re simply seeing prices un-inflate to more realistic numbers?
• Would it help if we could put a value or price on the intangible benefits offered by the job, like Exposure, Experience,  Fun, or Training? Could we standardize a system where these things were represented by an exchangeable format the way “buying power” is represented by money?
• Expanding the problem from the intellectual to the physical, what happens when robots get sophisticated enough to handle most manual labor tasks that a human can do, and start doing that labor for much less than a human could?

In Summation

I agree with Harlan Ellison that he should be paid for his work. I also agree that if Harlan wanted me to help him write his next novel for free, I certainly would. Actually, I’d help him because it would be a unique opportunity and there would likely be some exposure gained, but the point is I’d work for him for no money, and I guess I wouldn’t really care if Neil Gaiman didn’t get the job because I undercut him.

But imagine what would happen if a group of people showed up at Target and offered to stock the shelves for free? That is what’s happening in media industries right now, and it really puts a hitch in the giddy-up of the system.

Obviously I see both sides, and if there was any hope of a dark fiction author from Minneapolis solving this problem, it’s been dashed now. But if you have the solution, please post it below…  for free. I’ll take credit for your work, but think of how fun it will be for you to come up with the solution! Think of all the Exposure you’ll get!

Thanks to Michelle Raftner for the link to the Harlan Ellison vid.

Art Is Resistance
-Zero