Screenplay1 is still going through the review process at Zoetrope, and I have had my first proper torpedo review – a review designed almost entirely to knock the wind from your sales and sink your battleship, if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor.
I had thought that I was a pretty thick-skinned writer. I’ve written a lot professionally, and I’ve dealt with all sorts of criticism from all sorts of people, but never have I been on the receiving end of quite so much sarcasm and bile. The frustrating thing is that, amidst the 4,200 words of bitterness, I have a sneaking suspicion that there might actually be some useful nuggets of information.
Of course, the point of putting the script up for review is to get reactions from a variety of people and to actively look for weaknesses, but it’s a bit much when one has to wade through page after page of twistedness in order to find them.
I’ve had a few other reviews, including a glorious ‘10/10’ review and another 4,000+ word epic which was the most detailed and constructive review I’ve ever had. However, I’ve had to re-evaluate my opinion of my own ability to deal with criticism after the torpedo job. I had thought I was thick-skinned, but it turns out that I need to work on that whole not-giving-a-shit thing a little bit more.
In retrospect, I really don’t care what this guy thinks about my script, but it’s taken me a few days to come to that conclusion, and it will be a few days more before I can read his review without wanting to smack him. Beyond that, I need to put a bit more effort into culturing a greater degree of objectivity, so that I can read the script as others would, and hopefully see the flaws that need to be corrected before I let it loose into the big wide (unforgiving) world.
After all, t'ain’t no use tryin’ ta be a screenwriter if ya can’t take a few knocks, eh?
If you've tried emailing me using my strawberry.z address and it bounced, please send again. There appears to have been something a bit screwy with that address recently, although I have no idea what it is. I assume it's been fixed simply because it doesn't appear to be bouncing anymore.Yay for free email accounts. No, really…
I file this, laughingly, under the 'tech' category purely because I deliberately haven’t set up a ‘My computer hates me and I hate it’ category. If I did, you’d be deluged by my complaints, so I figure that it’s best we don’t go there.
Over the last few months, my computer – my ageing, greying (beiging?) Win98SE (don’t laugh!) box – has become increasingly decrepit, falling down several times a day and generally suffering from senility. Frequently it would forget where it put something and I’d lose work. More often than not, the mere act of collecting my mail would be enough to send it into a seizure.
Over the last few weeks, I have been whining about this in #joiito, and the general consensus of opinion was ‘get a mac’, advice I believe luminaries such as David Weinberger are more than familiar with. Sadly, I have not the pfennigs to get a mac, and the other advice put the fear of Windows into me. Reinstall, they said. Or worse, upgrade.
Well, upgrading is out right now. I don’t have the time or energy to learn to deal with WinXP (which surely should be called WinSpawnOfSatan), or even 2K. 98SE may be flawed, and undoubtedly it’s very flawed, but it’s not quite as flawed as my life right now, so better the devil you know.
Today, my patience finally ran out, and I decided to reinstall. I was expecting pain and suffering and wailing and crying and gnashing of teeth. In actual fact, it all went rather smoothly. The only thing that (I have so far noticed) got b0rken in the process was Norton Internet Security (Security? Ha ha ha!), which was easy enough to sort out.
There are no guarantees that this will have fixed my problem. But, well, so far so good.
Fingers crossed that the blood sacrifice (I bit my lip during the reinstall) worked.
UPDATE: So far, the only breakage has been Actinic web shop, which now no longer even opens, let alone works. *sigh* I knew I wouldn't get away with it scot free.
LATER: Palm Desktop broke too, but at least I've managed to fix that.
3 JUN: Fixed Actinic. No loss of data. Phew!
Next Sunday, 6 June, I shall be up in London again at NotCon '04. Looking forward to seeing Brewster Kahle and Cory Doctorow speak about copyright, plus there'll be lots of other goodies to enjoy.
If you're there and you spot me, please do say hello.
Just two examples that illustrate further how out-of-hand copyright law is now.
Reynolds works for the London Ambulance Service, and has just been on a course covering new treatment guidelines. He and his colleagues will, however, be getting an out-of-date version of the course handbook because the copyright holders won't allow the London Ambulance Service to edit the newest version so that it is more relevant to London.
Result: Londoners won't be getting the best health care because of copyright.
A less dramatic, but in a way more alarming example is the conversation I've just had with my Mum. She knits, and sometimes sells what she has knitted to her friends or on eBay. Today she was given a magazine with a knitting pattern for a Thomas The Tank Engine child's jumper.
“You know something about copyright,” she said. “If I knit this, will I get in trouble?”
The very fact that my Mum is worried about being sued for knitting a jumper shows how pervasive the threats of retribution from copyright holders has become. I don't believe that damage would be done to any of the Thomas The Tank Engine rights holders by the knitting of a jumper for a small child, even if it was sold on eBay. Common sense used to recognise that fact and react accordingly.
But common sense has been bludgeoned into submission by the actions of the RIAA and others who are quite happy to sue children and grandparents for the most minor infringement. Suddenly, 'Am I going to get sued for this?' is not the stupid question it would have been even a couple of years ago, because selling something on eBay immediately opens up the possibility of being tracked down and prosecuted.
Result: Copyrights are no more secure now than they were before, but people are thinking twice about engaging in previously commonplace activities.
Absence of evidence
Of course, the latter example, you could say, it's just one person. Not very important at all. Who cares if one person does or doesn't knit a jumper? But to me, the unimportance of this is exactly why it is important.
A couple of weeks ago I went to a meeting at LIFT to discuss Lawrence Lessig's lecture last Thursday. LIFT had brought together a small group of people knowledgeable about the issues covered in Free Culture (so god knows what I was doing there!), and one of the questions raised was 'Where is the evidence for the harm that Lessig discusses? Where is the mischief caused by current copyright laws?'.
The point was that there is little or no quantitative evidence of the damage done by copyright. All the evidence is anecdotal and, to some people, anecdotal material has no value and therefore cannot be cited as evidence.
Compare with something like smoking. Whenever there's a report on the news about the effects of smoking, we are bombarded with statistics: how many people die from smoking-related illnesses, how much money treating smokers costs the health service, how much it costs the economy. We see figures and from those figures we infer meaning. The harm done is not only clear, it's quantifiable.
The problem with much of the harm done by copyright is that it is 'invisible' – when someone is prevented from doing something that they otherwise would have done, it is impossible to quantify that effect. You're looking for something that's missing, but which you cannot see is missing.
When someone steals your driveway you can see what is missing because there is a big hole where your driveway once was. With the harm done by copyright, it's the equivalent not of your driveway being taken away, but of your driveway never having been paved in the first place.
The important thing about my Mum worrying about getting sued for breach of copyright is that what she wants to do is so supremely unimportant. The chances of her actually getting sued are very low. Yet for a moment there she was considering not doing something she would otherwise have done.
I wonder how many other small acts of creation are now not done because of fears over litigation? How impoverished does our culture and community have to become before the effect of widespread unimportant noncreation is noticeable? How do you quantify this? How do you prove the harm done?
I remember reading once that we humans live on a 25 hour long circadian rhythm, which we are constantly re-adjusting to fit into our 24 hour day.
Now, consider the whole time zone thing. Time zones are a real drag. I have a little clock sitting on my desk which is set to PST (-8 GMT) so that I know whether my PST friends should be in bed or not and, therefore, how much coherence I should expect from them.
(Although most of them actually live on PVT – programmer variable time – which is calculated using a complex equation combining T (local time), D (time to impending deadline) and C (volume of caffeine consumed). I've given up trying to rationalise PVT to GMT. Doesn't work.)
Anyway, the frustrating things about time zones is that the people I want to talk to are often asleep when I want to talk to them. So I'd like to propose something which would, I think, solve the problem quite elegantly.
If we reset every clock to be on the same time and we redefine a day to be 25 hours long, then everyone would be up and awake at the same time. The 25 hour long 'iDay' would 'move' in relation to the 24 hour 'natural day', and so everyone would take it in turns to be up during the night. For example, today it might be 10am and light here in the UK, and 10am and dark in San Francisco, but later on it would be the other way round.
Of course, every 25 days we'd be back where we started so we could have new 25 day iMonths. Our circadian rhythms would be happy with a 25 hour day, so it'd be easy to slip into this new system. The draw back is that we'd have 14.6 iMonths in an iYear, but I think that's a small price to pay for not having to worry about time zones anymore.
I would like to suggest that one of the new, as yet unnamed iMonths be called Suwary. I think it should be slotted in between the new iJune and iJuly. The other new iMonth could be named in a public competition, and the spare 0.6 of an iMonth would be a worldwide extra public holiday, just because I think we really do all work too hard.
So, who's with me?
Well, I'm back from London, with a throat that feels as if I've been gargling glass shards, so forgive my brevity. (Plus, my memory for lectures is crap. I tend to remember overall impressions, not individual points. It's a miracle I made it through uni, frankly.)
Lawrence Lessig was very good last night. Interesting talk, with a good few examples that I'd not come across before, including a great anti-iTunes/Pepsi ad from WhatACrappyPresent. The Q&A was good – some really astute questions. The whole thing was recorded apparently, so if I ever do get a hold of the transcription or recording, I'll post it.
Went to the reception afterwards and met Chenwei and Tian who are working on the Chinese translation of Free Culture. I was interested to discover that they use the audiobook extensively in their translation work because it's easier to translate from narration than from text. It's really cool to know that there is more to the audiobook than just entertainment value, that it's actually making life less taxing for the translators.
I also was lucky enough to meet Lessig (hmm, can I call him Larry now? 😉 ). He was very friendly and I enjoyed our short conversation, although it was difficult to really talk much with so many other people wanting to have a word. I wish I could have spent a bit longer chatting, but then, I suppose so did everyone else that spoke to him.
Anyway, Larry now has a * in the blogroll, so I'm happy. I'm hoping to collect a full set by the end of the year, you know.
