SO! Here’s to writing about writing! More generally, about life:

Every discipline or craft in which I’ve ever participated, I’ve found that there is a divide between the “doing” and the “creating” professions. In music, there are composers and there are performers. In development, there are architects and then front-line developers who implement architecture. In my comics, there are scriptwriters, and then those who draw the thoughts of the script. To extend that to film, there are the screenwriters, and then the entire crew of people who make these thoughts a reality. The only strange place I’ve found a difference is in writing. And by writing, I mean the profession of the written word, such as the medium of novels, journalism, and etc.

In all of these cases, the final product is essentially a polished version of exactly what sprung from the mind of the writer. Stop and think about this for just a moment: whatever end-user ends up consuming the product of the writer turns up seeing the medium exactly as it left the hands and mind of the author.

To me, this is vastly interesting. I think being a good composer tends to be all about creating something that a performer can realistically perform, or a computer is capable of producing in an audible format. The final medium is not in the liner notes of your album or the notes you pass out to concert-goers: it’s the raw audio data you create.  In scriptwriting, you must create something an artist or a crew or a troupe of stage actors can realistically perform. In that way, you are limited. As an author: your world is unlimited. Setting your piece in a fictional world composed entirely of fictional materials that don’t exist in the natural spectra of our world? No problem, just explain that to your reader.

And therein lies the rub. Can your reader really conceptualize a world in which the only physical matter is actually a made-up equivalent to their own universe? If they can, do they care?

We arrive now at the second act: we have discovered the problem, now we must develop the tools to encounter and ultimately defeat it. (The meta in this blog is heavy: I warned you by title only).

Before I begin, I must address the tools themselves. Technology has provided us a set of implements beyond what we originally thought possible, giving us the ability to explore vast depths of history and culture and technique without even leaving our home. With that being said, there’s always something to be said about the value of the old tools. For the sake of ease, let’s discuss an analog.

My brother gave me a classy old-fashioned shaving kit for Christmas. I now am the proud owner of a set of arcane and ancient shaving implements. Rather than a straight razor (he’s not a sadist, after all), he gave me a “safety razor,” a shaving bowl, a shaving soap container, and a set that contains all of the individual pieces. It’s not nearly as fast or “efficient” of a shaving toolset as a can of Edge(TM)  and a three-blade razor. It takes a great deal more time and care to work the process, but in the end, I feel much cleaner and the shave is always a great deal smoother. This wasn’t the case for the first two weeks: I cut myself and missed large spots at a time. I think this applies to writing. Even though I have a great deal of tools at my fingertips, the ones I find the most powerful are in fact the most simple.

I’ve spent some time writing in a leatherbound journal in my office, which gives me the pretentious feeling of being some sort of aristocrat in bygone times, but additionally gives me the gift/curse of being forced to move at a much slower and more intentional pace.

What am I trying to prove with this massive nonsensical rant?  That the tools you will find most valuable are not in fact the most mechanically advantageous: they are the ones that free you from the fears of creative freedom by providing the most carefully constrained creative limitations. Working within a framework binds you to a medium, a genre or perhaps even a universe with built-in rules and a pre-existing narrative from which to build your story.

This is incredibly important in the medium of writing because of the following fact: your art is your word. That’s it. You’re not creating  three-dimensional world on Digital Light Projection with 8.1 surround-sound. You are combining a series of words into a story, and the only thing between the very raw and symbolistic integrity of those words and their actual comprehension by a reader  is the understanding of the very same reader.

This poses a different, but no less challenging conflict. If you are writing a story that must be told in 16:9 anamorphic widescreen, you are careful to think of the interactions of character so that people can understand them even if the wide parts of the letterbox have been cut off. In the same way, if you are writing about a universe with a completely fictionalized set of rules and ideals, you must put the understanding of the reader into consideration when you create.  Did you use too many words they didn’t understand at the beginning? If you did, were you sure to explain each and every one somewhere before the first half of the book, so they’re not just dropping out and saying “this is something weird and foreign and I don’t care”? If so, are you sure to use those words again, so they don’t just end up occupying some vacant lexicon in the reader’s mind?

Therefore, I posit the following theory: the doer in this medium still exists. It’s the reader. In order for your universe to work, in order for your theories to come to some kind of rational, emotional fruition, the reader must invest some kind of energy or effort. They have to make some kind of logical leap, or at the very least, allow themselves to temporarily be transported to whatever dream world of magic or mystery you have created for them. You need them to meet you (at the very least) halfway. That being said: are you (the writer in this hypothetical question) investing enough effort to get to the halfway point?

I think this rumination has led me to the following conclusion: I must proceed (with the most simple and familiar tools) to relate my fictional universe in  a way that matters to the reader. Not only in a way that engages them, but in a way that compels them to continue. I doubt this diatribe would work, but it’s helping me to form the philosophy on my way to the other aforementioned goals.

Anonymous, the upcoming election, Arab Spring, LulzSec,AntiSec, SOPA, PIPA, Occupy Wall Street… just as one thing fades something else comes back up, and I’m starting to realize they are all threads of the same complex and interwoven cloth. If you get the chance, try to read Quinn Norton’s eloquent and careful analysis of Anonymous available on Wired.com (this link will show all posts tagged anonymous 2011, and you’ll find some other stuff in there as well : http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/tag/anonymous-2011/ ).

Typically when it comes to these kind of things, I find myself very much in the place of South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who posit the viewpoint of the boys: “this is pretty f*cked up right here.” When pressed for their opinion on most issues, they’ll give you the same spiel: there are two diametrically opposed sides, and both are completely wrong. A majority of people find themselves caught in the middle, and the only voice of reason is to say “alright, let’s stop fighting and use a little common sense here.”

As far as Occupy Wall Street, I found myself at first completely behind the movement. I’ve literally spoken for years about the need for a vigorous and effective series of protests to protest the problems in this country. I didn’t care which problems were picked; honestly there are too many from which to choose. My only view was that the government of this nation had become simultaneously too powerful and too apathetic. It was at once applying policies with strict vengeance and ignoring its own rulings to let things slide. My conspiracy-theorist friends were all too quick to point out that this has always been the way. Those in power don’t care for the wellfare of the common man and woman, they only care for the ones who can get/keep them elected. Those friends started making me also realize that the protesters bore a lot of similarities to the people who I derided the most: hipsters. Perhaps I was wrong to jump behind this hive-mind of anti-conformity, mainly due to the fact it was in fact another “ironic” expression of conformity itself. Maybe the arguments were valid, but how much impact can drum circles and camping around things really have? Why was this so different from the Tea Party, and how was it being derided by so many people and vilified? Maybe I was wrong, these people actually deserved derision for the fact they were just complaining instead of going back to work.

So in the end, I found myself where I belong: in the middle. How did I get here? By deriding the hypocrisy of both sides, as a typical pretentious ass might. I saw some of my friends saying “this is ridiculous, my father/uncle/cousin is thriving because of all of their hard work in this economy. They work ninety hour weeks and already pay way too much in taxes, you protesting asshats need to go to work.” Then, I saw some of them saying “just got back from another set of interviews. Been trying for over a year to get work and haven’t even gotten a callback yet. Why can’t anyone with a degree in modern interpretations of renaissance art get work around here?”

After striking my head repeatedly on the desk I realized the problem. As with all of the different movements and events of the past year, I find myself questioning not the sincerity of the members, but their willful ignorance of the facts.

If your father is working ninety hour weeks as a small business owner, he’s not in the crosshairs of these people. He probably doesn’t even pay the so-called “millionaire” tax because he makes less than the cutoff point after all your business expenses and losses are paid. The people in the crosshairs for these protesters and activists are the ones who climbed to the top positions of these financial companies, and made incredibly short-sighted decisions based on the rationale that when the bubble burst, they’d have enough money to ride out the wave of water that drowned everyone beneath them. If you are a small business owner, there’s no way you’re standing on enough shoulders for that to even BEGIN to describe you.

If you can’t get a job in underwater basket-weaving, thus paying off your $40,000 student debt, it seems like you made a series of bad decisions before you came to your current predicament. You probably had absolutely no interest in researching the future of the field that you went into, you just did what your parents told you. And now, you’re probably blaming them for putting you through college (co-signing those massive loans) and sleeping on their couch while you refuse to work at a McDonald’s in order to help pay the bills.

That’s the derision speaking, so I’ll let the cynic go for awhile and come back with the optimist. Your father is probably scared about his company being taxed. He’s probably terrified that the government is going to do even more to curtail his rights as a business owner, and do things that make owning and operating a business (which in all rights should be seen as a service to this country as being willing to create jobs) more impossible. If you haven’t gotten a job in your field, you probably actually DID research before you chose your path, and at the time (before the bubble burst) you actually had a job lined up and were ready to go. You probably don’t have time to work at McDonald’s because you’re spending all your time trying to interview for jobs that can support you in your own place and allow you to live up to the dreams you had as a student.

And that’s when it hit me: this world is different. No, it’s not just a different job market than it was when our parents got out of school (which it is). It’s not just a world in which technology has brought greater power and freedom to the individual than ever before (which it has). It’s a world in which all of these things have happened at such a break-neck speed there is absolutely nothing to hold on to. People, as a rule, will polarize in times of crisis. They’ll fall behind ideals and supporters. Immediately after a catastrophic event, people begin to find who to blame. Soon after, camps of “us” and “them” form. And this is exactly what’s happening, and has been happening for the last twenty years.

I can only speak for the last twenty-eight years to which I’ve been a witness, and more specifically the last twenty I was intelligent enough to understand at least the mood that pervaded our culture. As brought up before in my analogy to South Park, two sides emerge, and begin trying to polarize the masses to them. It is only the sensible people who refuse to be pulled into a camp for the betterment of one of the sides. Anyone who gives you an ultimatum (you’re for us or you’re against us) has absolutely no respect for your decision. You’re a tool to them, or you’re an obstacle. And this is the underlying problem.

People are not obstacles, and we are certainly not tools to be used by others. There was perhaps a time in my life that I counted myself among the Machiavelians who would argue that humans are a resource to be utilized in a war of life or commerce. But after seeing the daily struggles, triumphs, and failures of my fellow humans, I arrive at only one conclusion: the only thing that is valuable, if anything has value, is life.

Rather than bore you with a thousand anecdotes (which are ultimately symptoms) of this particular problem, I’ll just bring up one example that has colored my entire understanding of this situation.

There was a man who lost his job due to the company closing its doors. He had been smart, planned for prolonged unemployment, and saved enough money to live off of savings (including his mortgage payments) for upwards of three months. So, as a responsible citizen, father, and homeowner, he called the bank to ask what he should do to make sure he didn’t lose his home. They told him to request an option to change his terms via certified mail. Again, a responsible man, he notified his bank via certified letter that he had lost his job and would be searching for a new one, but in the meantime may need to defer some of the cost of his home, perhaps paying the principle and electing to pay into the escrow towards the end of the year, or temporarily modify the terms of his loan based on his current equity. He was five years into a fifteen year note, so he had a fair amount paid, and had never missed a payment. The bank responded with a foreclosure notice. According to them, the terms of his loan stipulated he maintain employment. Upon further research, that was never the case, it was only a question of whether he could pay the bills, which he was sure he could do for at least a few months before even having to miss a single payment. The bank’s response? “Take it up with your congressman.”

You see, this man had an FHA loan, and as part of a government financing program, they pushed the responsibility to the government. So of course, he did his best to find out what options he had in civil court and with lawmakers. They told him to talk to his bank.

This is one story, there are literally millions of people who have had this exact same experience. I’m not saying I know what the solution is, but this is clearly a man who was responsible and did everything he could to make things work. He was reasonable and measured and did everything you are told you’re supposed to do, and in the end he wound up with nothing. When he went to the occupy protests with his two kids, it was because they had been kicked out of their home and had nowhere else to go. Burning through his savings to keep his kids clothed and fed, he ended up having to unload them on relatives and live out of a tent while he “took it up with his congressman.”

I realize this is only one story out of the millions out there. Some people are protesting on the street because they made bad decisions. Some of them have much more compelling stories. But in the end, this man is just one of millions, and so am I. His story is just another one in the pile of stories, and mine could be too. I pay all my bills on time, I don’t buy things I don’t need, I try to invest for my future. But tomorrow I could be on the street because of circumstances completely beyond my control, and that doesn’t just scare me, that pisses me off.

I don’t care if you agree with the protesters. I don’t care if you think they are completely ignorant or if you think they personify everything that’s great about this country. No matter your feelings about them, they are people. Some were duped by a system that didn’t care about them. Some of them ended up making human mistakes and are being punished for the rest of their lives for it. And some of them did everything they were supposed to do, and are still turned out on the street for it. And I think that’s a problem. They, and we, are continuing to pay for crimes we did not commit. This has to stop.

I don’t remember if my first lie was one that I told myself in order to turn my back yard into a forgotten realm of magic and wonder, or if it was one I told my mother to turn a broken lamp into my brother’s problem. But as long as I can remember, I’ve made things up and shared them.

There are times when this attribute was beneficial: creative writing was a breeze for me, and I remember the end of my fifth grade year, kids volunteered to read their stories to the class. We were running out of time and the teacher called for one more. I was in an awkward stage and didn’t volunteer for much of anything –let alone something that would put me at the notice of everyone around me– but my classmates begged me to read my story aloud. They later told me they loved the way I was able to keep their attention and make them laugh. My teacher said as long as I’d bothered writing it, I might as well share it. For better or worse, I remembered that the rest of my life.

There were times that this habit was dangerous: I’d think of an interesting story that seemed plausible, and use it in conversation when I had nothing to say.  A friend knew how to do some task like juggle chainsaws, a relative once saw a bear. Inevitably, I’d paint myself in a corner and people would think I was crazy. The simple fact of the matter was that I lived a pretty boring life. I played sports and rode my bike, like most boys. I watched TV and played video games, like most kids of the early 90s. I had nothing to tell them they didn’t already know. So, I made stuff up.

I think my parents and teachers just assumed I’d outgrow it. I’d discover girls (which I already had) or end up taking up a hobby (I had many) and forget all about that strange phase of my life where I claimed to see commercials that never existed and re-examined past events of my life with a revisionist view. Obviously, I didn’t.

For the most part, people stopped noticing. I grew wise enough not to tell enough stories for people to notice they were complete bull, and my actual life experiences started to fill in the gaps in my imagination. I began to write stories down, filling notebooks with confusing epics featuring more characters than a phonebook. At one point I wrote a design document for a roleplaying game that in its raw text format was at least five hundred pages. It was almost a compulsion. I’d like to say this all just stopped one day, that I could remember the exact moment it halted. But I don’t.

I’ve pointed to events in my life, mostly of rejection (being placed last in competitions where I knew the winners had plagiarized entire pages/being shot down for a writing team without the teacher even reading my submission) that lead to my eventual abandonment of the pursuit of storytelling. Looking back, I’m sure those were just events in a gradual shift in the way I saw things. I became a musician, italicized for emphasis. That was my identity, and it made me genuinely happy. I would listen to music I loved and get goosebumps. I would stay up all night working on music and then wake up the next morning not being able to wait to do it again. I would play my favorite video games and movies on infinite loop: waiting for that perfect moment when the hero triumphs and the music rises to a crescendo. I was like an addict seeking a fix, but it never ran out and I never came down.

You may have seen the obvious trend here; but I didn’t. I was still writing stories, and living through them. A rich multimedia narrative was what drew me to music, to video games, to film. This was not a problem for me at the time. It kept me vitalized, and it kept me going through two years of ups and downs in high school. Having been a big fish in a small pond, it was hard to compete with kids in other schools, and I practiced for hours a day to keep up. Great band directors and family kept me encouraged, and I kept my head down and ignored the fear. When I went to college, I experienced four years of being thrown into the ocean. I laughed at the time I used to only spend three hours a day practicing one instrument. Because of financial issues, I also had to work and keep my grades up for scholarships. But I never wavered, because my love of telling stories through my music kept me alive. I think my best teacher in composition was the one who told me that everything he taught me was just a series of skills, and he’d only be grading me on how hard I worked to apply them. My aesthetic, my style, was not up for grading.

This was the best and worst thing that could have happened to me.

As it turns out, the field of Music Composition in its current state tends to look down on the concept of “narrative.” Storytelling, specifically programmatic music, was a prominent feature of music of the 19th century. The 20th century was about pushing music to its logical and emotional limits. There were two major camps at North Texas, one that pushed the more “Performance Art” nature of modern music, and one that pushed the much more cerebral “Who Cares if You Listen (look up Milton Babbitt, who just died this year, if you don’t know that phrase)”  way of thinking. In both of these cases, plot and story were considered pointless and overdone. Music was not about telling a story. If it was, it was about telling a very abstract and complex story that was less about the common archetypes of the everyman or the battle between good and evil and more about pressing societal commentary and political issues. Fortunately, most teachers were able to separate this opinion from the grades, and I made it through one of the hardest music programs in the country With Honors in four years. When I tell people this, they either act like it was the most incredible achievement possible, or they think I’m awarding myself a medal for putting my shoes on. Very few seem to see the truth, which is that it was just an inevitable step in the process of becoming who I am today.

Wait, I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

Before I graduated, I spent a lot of time in discussions with a variety of my teachers, trying to decide my next steps. Most of them told me I’d be a great composition professor, because of how open-minded and patient I was, both things that are in short supply in higher education in the creative fields. But, they were always quick to point out that I’d have to “play ball” in most grad schools in order to get a degree,  and spend most of my time avoiding any form of narrative. When I eventually was able to teach, I’d likely have to do that as well. Add to that the fact the fact they more or less told me I wouldn’t be accepted to the grad school there, which meant moving across the country. With my wife still in school, it seemed like a bad deal, and I began to re-examine my path. I decided that grad school was still an option, but it would make more sense if I went into Creative Writing, since narrative was the focus I had originally wanted. So, I took the ACT, polished up some of my latest stories, and got set on my path again.

I scored in the 98th percentile on the verbal portion, and got the highest possible score on the writing. I was entering with a 3.6 GPA. I was sure that I’d finally found my true calling.  What happened next was almost ironic given the past experiences. Almost.

I made it into the grad school on my grades alone, but the Creative Writing department had to approve me as a student. I got a very basic, formal letter stating that I did not have the right pre-requisites to enter. I scratched my head fairly hard, as I had tested out of the 12 hours required before my first day of college with the AP system. I was certain it was a mixup. For days, I got the runaround from everyone in the administration system. Finally, the head advisor of the creative writing graduate department wrote me a personal e-mail. Because it was so nice, I’ll share it here (name removed as I didn’t ask for permission to post this… yet).

Thanks for getting in touch — I apologize for not getting back to you right away, but as it’s midterm time, other things are currently competing for my attention.
Your AP credits do count — they are included on your undergrad transcript. In this case, it turns out that the number of hours wasn’t the issue; if you didn’t meet the number of hours, we would’ve stipulated in your acceptance letter that you take some leveling courses here.  The “minimum requirements” referred to the letter are rather vague, but as with all MA applicants in creative writing, the decision came down to the quality of your writing sample.  This is not a judgment on your ability to write, necessarily.  Rather, it’s whether or not the C.W. faculty felt they could, as a group, provide the kind of feedback you need based on the writing sample you submitted.
You have two options, as I see it.  One is to find another program where people whose work you desire to emulate are teaching; the other is to take undergrad writing classes here and get some feedback on your work and then apply to the program again.  Either is fine — or perhaps you may decide that more school is entirely superfluous, and that you should just go ahead and keep forging on to greatness without an advanced degree; that’s how Colson Whitehead, Thomas Pynchon and Terry Pratchett and many other people have done it, and there’s no reason you can’t do it too.

Huh. I very quickly learned through talking to the faculty that every one of them writes non-fiction as a career, and in most cases write for newspapers. Most are critics. Not a single one considered fiction to be their primary skillset, or even one that was close to the top of their interests.

Narrative was pretty much outlawed at UNT, it would seem. But, reading this letter, I realized something. I hadn’t yet read Stephen King’s On Writing (get it and read it now if you plan on doing any professional writing), but I knew that most writers whose work I enjoyed had spent a majority of their early years working dead-end jobs to make ends meet while scribbling away in their off-hours. I knew that Khaled Houssini had worked a full-time job as a physician while scraping together enough time to also write The Kite Runner. I’d later find out that Stephen King worked part-time as a teacher and part-time cleaning clothes while he was working on his first manuscripts. I knew that JK Rowling had spent every waking hour between being a single mother and working multiple jobs writing every little bit of story she could. It all hit me at once.

The problem was never anyone else, or their opinion of narrative. The problem was me.

I was afraid. Afraid of failure, perhaps. Afraid of hard work, maybe. But afraid of facing myself and being truly honest after a lifetime of making crap up to justify who I was? Definitely.

So, like any good obsessive-compulsive, I went to work. I wrote a manuscript for a book, based on a suggestion my wife made. I wrote in the mornings before work, and then immediately after getting home from work. In less than a month, I’d written 66,975 words. My wife was the best encouragement I could have asked for. She begged me for each chapter and I’d leave a cliffhanger at the end of each one to keep her wanting the next. Might as well share it, right?

After a month of this, I was positive my hard work was about to pay off somewhere.

So, I showed it to a friend, who was very interested in what I had done. This friend gave me some great feedback, and was excited about the prospect, but said he was afraid some of it sounded familiar.

A large block of ice clotted the bile in my stomach. I knew it. I’d somehow ripped off someone I’d read. I’ve spent thousands of hours reading, playing video games, watching movies and TV shows, absorbing narrative and plot like a greedy sponge. I must have somehow accidentally re-applied what I learned, a phenomenon known as cryptomnesia: “a forgotten memory returns without it being recognised as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original (from Wikipedia).”

The truth was much, much worse.

Once he finally tracked it down, he gave me the name of the book and the author. I won’t share it here, but it’s an author I despise. I’ve attempted to read her books (since then, at the time I didn’t know anything other than her name), and failed to get even halfway through a volume before feeling dirty and uncomfortable. My main character’s name was almost the same as hers. The city it took place in was the same. The overall genre of the story was the same (although comparing the two is a lot like comparing Blade Runner and Spy Kids… and I mean that in no way of making myself look cooler).

The hilarious thing? I didn’t know any of these details before I started. I still didn’t know them up until my friend informed me of the existence of the person and her books. It was dumb chance.

Finally, after accepting my destiny as a storyteller and pushing myself to write the story, I had committed the worst possible writing foible imaginable. I had made my work seem like a knock-off of someone else. All of the elements of the plot were completely different, but to summarize the “gist” of the story on a dust jacket, it’d sound similar enough that no agent would take it seriously. Something cracked.

I couldn’t write. I couldn’t tell stories. I buried myself in my work, learning the deepest meanings of programming and math theory that I had no business understanding as a so-called writer or musician. I wrote complex algorithms that solved a problem and didn’t even come close to explaining a story. I took a job where my creative abilities were not necessary. We had writers for documentation, and all of our design had been done for us. I was, for lack of a better word, a complete code monkey.

There are worse things to be in life, and it was at this job that I learned a lot about myself and about the world. I got paid a decent wage and I worked my 8 hours a day and then went home to work on my house. Life was simple. But I was missing something.

Soon enough, I found myself falling back on strange habits. I told lies and half-truths. I made up stories that never happened. I wrote iambic pentameter into comments in the code. Some part of me was screaming to get out. Finally, adding insult to injury, a family tragedy happened. I won’t go into detail here, but I’ll simply say that we lost someone very important to us, and the circumstances made us all doubt ourselves and our relationships with each other.

I’d like to say my wife handled it like a slap in the face, but it was more like a metamorphosis. For months, she was inconsolable and unreachable. She was in her cocoon, and no one could get her out. Then, one day, she burst forth with a simple realization: I am an artist.

You see, like me, she’d spent a large part of her life making compromises. She wanted to draw, color, paint, and create visual things for a living, but everyone told her it was a pipe dream. Never mind that she was talented or that she had a great work ethic– it was impossible. So, she fell back on her other skills. She was also very organized and had a gift at understanding human anatomy (part of the reason she was so good at figure drawing). Health seemed like a natural fit, so she’d gone into the health field. When her job wasn’t as satisfying as she’d hoped, she went back to school to learn other ways of providing health as a nurse. When this didn’t go the way she wanted, she went back to become a teacher, possibly teaching art so she could still have that part of her life, but knew that teachers were always in demand.

In a life-shattering moment, she realized all of these were a shell that she’d wrapped herself with. They were ideas and concepts, they had nothing to do with her or what she wanted to do with her life. And when it was all stripped away, she stood there naked and beautiful like a butterfly, and said simply: “I am an artist.”

I’m sure you’re seeing it again, in the way I see the world. I may be a programmer most of the time. I may be an IT guy when folks at work need me to fix their computer. I may be a musician on the weekends and when I find friends to jam with. But ultimately? I’m a storyteller. I just needed a goody story to wake me up.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been trying to write more. I finally finished a very long blog post about insurance yesterday, which was droll and wonderful and you should read it here . I have been working on another project together with my wife, and a third project which may be an undertaking I do alone for a long period of time. A friend of mine asked me to write some music for a video game he’d made. Okay, I’m a story-teller. I found out he was making one and I begged to write the music for it. But my point is that I’m creating again.

Not necessarily for a living. Honestly, maybe that’s the problem I’ve had from the start. Once you start doing things in order to feed your family, it becomes hard to find yourself in them, unless you’re lucky enough to be able to create whatever you want as opposed to having people dictate that for you. Something my wife told me has changed my life forever. I told her that a lot of writers say writing is a basic human skill that most people will eventually learn in their life. The only thing that makes a writer different is that they can’t stop writing. She said, “Well, then you should write that down. Write everything down. You don’t have to show it to people, or try to sell it, but at least you’ll have it written down somewhere, and that should be enough.”

Thus, this post.

Because honestly, I was going to write it somewhere. I might as well share it.

[The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes;

Let’s set aside the fact this is about regulating commerce between individual states and not about micro-managing the economy (and while we’re at it, ignore the implications that Indian tribes are sovereign nations within the nation and therefore not subject to federal jurisdiction), and look at the underlying issue.

Insurance != Healthcare

For the last 10 years of this debate, I’ve been hearing that access to the very best healthcare in the world is a basic human right. Or that the need for healthcare is the responsibility of the government. Or that it is part of our social contract that we the governed are protected by our government from sickness as well as foreign invasion. These are all valid arguments and although I disagree with some of them, I’m not going to address my opinion. I’ll simply state the following: even if you can prove all of these are true, we are still faced with the issue that insurance, not healthcare is the driving factor here.

The typical model by which insurance works is that an entity (let’s call them, for the sake of clarity, Scrooge) agrees to provide you with funds should you so need them. You pay them a premium, which is guaranteed money from you to Scrooge regardless of if you ever need it. At some point, if you do need it, they will pay for a portion of the benefit, based on a variety of models (some in which they pay a percentage and you pay the rest, some in which one of the parties pays a flat fee and the other covers the rest, etc).

This system works great for things like homes, where you are covered in case of a major catastrophe. This also helps the people who own a majority of your home (the bank, who we shall call The Other Scrooge). As a further analogy, it works great for cars (again, securing the interests of The Other Scrooge that provided your financing for the car). But what happens if people are using the benefits more than they pay for their premiums, and Scrooge can’t make a profit?

Well, this is typically fixed in the market by two things: basic supply and demand influence the value of the premium, and the pool of insured people/homes/cars consists of people who over-use and people who under-use their benefits. This means that for an insurance company to be successful, they either have to gouge on their premiums, or they have to have enough good drivers/sturdy homes/health nuts to offset all of the horrendous drivers/dilapidated shacks/chronic smokers.

This makes sense, but the real problem we see is when we try to apply the business model of the car and the home to the body.

All insurance != Same

There are some major issues with this analogy. First off, let’s talk about the underlying issue of the current debate: the mandated coverage. In the case of homes, the insurance is mandated because someone else owns your home and wants to protect their investment. If you DON’T have insurance, they WON’T continue to allow you to live in their house while you pay for it. In most states, you may also face fees from the state/local government because they might take on additional liability on your home: if someone breaks their ankle at your house and tries to sue you, the state ends up having to deal with a lengthy battle if your insurance doesn’t just foot the bill. Same thing more or less goes for cars, except states also tend to have a minimum liability requirement as opposed to The Other Scrooge, who will require you to have extended coverage while you pay for your car. In both cases, if you don’t pay up, you lose your home or your car. So how does that work for health insurance? Not very well, actually.

Assume that for some reason we’ve passed the full measure of the mandate, and now people are required to pay for insurance. Let’s talk about a majority of the cases we will have when this comes to pass: people don’t have it because they can’t afford it. In most cases, it will be either because they are unemployed, they make too little, or their employer doesn’t subsidize enough of the cost for them to afford it. In most cases, it’ll be a combination of these factors. If you are still making payments on a car, and drop your insurance, The Other Scrooge just takes your car back. Simple. If you are free and clear on your title, but drop your insurance, the state or local government will most likely charge you some fees or give you some tickets. Barring that, they may eventually confiscate your car. If you don’t pay your health insurance, the government doesn’t really have a means other than fining or jailing you. What else would they do, shoot you? And then who would pay your insurance? So, we have an issue where a (presumably) healthy person is now required to pay for a service they can’t afford, and feel that they don’t need, or else they’ll be fined. Most likely, they will be fined a great deal of money (more than whatever the current premiums are) in order for the government to make it seem like a better deal to just pay the premiums. The government tends to forget that a lot of people, when given an ultimatum, will pick C; they will refuse to get insurance, and do everything they can to avoid being caught. Sure it’s risky, but so is running around without health insurance in case of an emergency.

Let’s talk about the industries themselves. For homes, cars, and bodies, there are a number of different levels of problems that you will have to deal with. With homes, you may have a leak in your roof. In most cases, it will need to be patched, so your insurance will pay for a roofer to patch the hole in your roof. There is an entire industry of competing roofers, and they will most likely fight over who gets the contract, and so the cost will not be inexpensive, but it will be regulated by what the market is willing to pay. Some people may not even use their insurance for this if it’s cheap enough. Contrast that with the potential for your foundation to crack. In this case, you will be in a much more dire situation, as your home will eventually be completely uninhabitable, whereas the leak was mostly bearable. This is an adamant MUST FIX NOW situation, and depending on your insurance carrier, you may have to be out a great deal of money for it. But with the potential risk for this happening, how could you NOT have insurance? This makes sense, because the needs are balanced against the risks, and you end up getting what you pay for. There are also additional home warranties you can purchase for an annual fee that will cover things like your air conditioner, toilets, pipes, and other things that are gaps in your home insurance. These are almost always optional, but the market exists for them.

Let’s continue this analogy into cars. Again, there are a variety of tiers of issues that will arise, but for the most part, you have two levels: basic maintenance/overall repairs, and much more catastrophic events. A third level would be accidents or events outside of normal wear and tear. The way it works now is that you need to get an oil change, or a belt swapped out, or tires rotated every so often. This is expected and recommended maintenance, and an entire industry of “quick lube” style shops exists to support it. The cost is usually relatively low, and if you keep it up, your car will last longer. Almost no car insurance companies will pay for this. You can get an additional warranties, as you did with homes, but they are more for the second tier: large mechanical failures. Say for whatever reason you blow a gasket, or throw a piston: your car is now a paperweight. Or maybe in the case of a gasket, it’s still a car, but it acts more like an angry squid spewing its ink all over your driveway. Insurance sometimes covers this, but in most cases you have to have relatively good comprehensive insurance to cover issues like these. For the most part, insurance covers the third tier: accidents. Because car accidents happen so much more often than hurricanes or trees growing into your foundation, car insurance is a lot more specific about covering your car in these events. In most cases, it just makes more sense to have the insurance so that you don’t end up having to pay a large sum of money for the mistakes of someone else who wasn’t paying attention.

Continuing this analogy to the human body is where we see a further set of complications. Where we had about two tiers of issues with homes and three tiers with cars, now we’re talking about thousands of potential ranges of costs for health issues. Let’s discuss them in detail.

Although it’s advised to go ahead and get a checkup and some routine tests done every year, a majority of people simply don’t do it. This would be like the maintenance on a car, perhaps. But you may not get a booster shot or something that is quantifiable: you may just have your doctor tell you nothing is wrong, and send you home. This makes people feel as though it’s a much worse investment: they pay for an office visit, and they didn’t really get anything except a little peace of mind. Naturally, a lot of people just don’t do it. This has been mitigated by the free market in a number of ways, specifically “urgent care centers” that usually staff a greater deal of nurses and mid-level providers (Nurse Practitioners and Physician’s Assistants) in order to reduce their overhead. They often allow web-checkins and other methods to keep the rate of rotation as high as possible, ensuring a steady flow of customers. They also take your insurance, but they tend to cost less than a visit to the emergency room, and in some cases will even give you a discount if you don’t have insurance. They also treat another tier of health problems, which include flu, strep throat, minor fractures, and other accidental injuries. But there are a host of other potential tiers of “maintenance” care. For example, pelvic exams, cancer screenings, optical screenings, dentist exams, etc. There is also the issue of the diseases these screenings find: such as cancer or an auto-immune disease that will take months/years to treat. Perhaps you suffered a previous injury and now you need surgery to fix it. Or you get in an accident and need a limb removed or you’ll have a lethal infection. The important thing to note: insurance is required to pay for almost every level of this. Why? Because healthcare is expensive.

Finally, we’re finding the disease!

As we already discussed, insurance as a model works because the pool of people who pay for it is made up of those who over-use their benefits, and those who under-use their benefits. Healthcare is not the same thing as insurance (as we have already discussed) because each of the very very many different sectors of it are controlled by a different set of circumstances. Cancer is a disease which has no real “cure,” it is simply treated by (ironically) removing the symptomatic issues. Because of this, trillions of dollars a year worldwide go into research on how to treat the underlying causes of the disease. In some cases, these are administered as test trials. In other cases, people are given treatments that are additionally expensive, mainly because we’ve only just started to understand what cancer even is. In the case of auto-immune diseases, there are often no real “cures,” but only treatments which suppress your immune system (thus opening you up to a host of ailments from which your immune system was designed to protect you). The underlying symptom which has caused the “treatment” of insurance to be applied is that healthcare is expensive. This means that insurance is required in order to pay for the most basic healthcare. So has this solved the problem? No, now insurance is too expensive too!

The underlying disease in this problem is not the cost of healthcare. That’s a symptom. The disease is multi-faceted and sneaky, and we can see by looking carefully that it’s coming from all of the problems we just mentioned. So let’s break it down and discuss each one.

Medicine has changed

A lot of people balk when we talk about changing the way that our system is understood: it’s worked so well for us for years! Doctors have always been the ones that treated every single ailment you could imagine, and they used to just charge a bill you could pay with cash!  Well, that’s true.

In the middle of the 20th century or so, the pace of medical discovery and the ability to apply it hit a sort of even keel. Doctors were able to prescribe antibiotics and apply basic principles of science in order to cure a large portion of ills, from the cough to broken ankles with relative ease. The industrialization of our nation thanks to supporting World War II had created an entire industry ready to manufacture medical supplies and laboratory equipment that even rural doctors could afford. Things were working well. But let’s discuss some changes since then.

1) When is the last time you saw a doctor take a house call? For that matter, when is the last time your doctor filled your full prescription right there in the office without requiring you to drive across town to a chain-owned pharmacy? The industry has changed.

2) When is the last time you heard someone prescribe bed rest to cure a sinus infection? The over-prescription of antibiotics and steroids has led to a whole new era of mutated diseases, and doctors would be considered incompetent if they didn’t provide you the very best antibiotics and steroids… thus causing your disease to mutate further.

3) Speaking of incompetence, how many stories do you hear about your grandparents suing a doctor who botched a surgery? In most cases, it was assumed they did what they could, and then they moved on. A combination of entitlement culture and the rise of malpractice insurance (yet another treatment of a symptom) have led to a greatly increased risk of involving the law. And speaking of the law…

4) How many times have you had your medical provider and your insurance provider agree on the cost of something? In most cases, the bill goes out and comes back multiple times before it’s settled. In most cases, the hospital over-bills because they know insurance is paying, and the insurance tries to underpay in order to offset their losses and try to make up a profit on the backs of the people who are paying full premiums and never use their benefits.

So, in the interest of not just pointing out problems, but providing more solutions, I’ll go into some ideas.

Treat the disease!

Medicine is expensive. This is true for a lot of reasons. Costs are determined by a cluster of industries, including pharmaceuticals, biomedical research, insurance, and educational institutions. New treatments are discovered, and the cost of those treatments goes into paying for the research for them. Insurance companies are determining different treatments and discovering how to pay for them, and as they do, they have to price protectively in order to pay for them. Medicare and Medicaid have negotiated remarkably low settlements with hospitals in order to keep their costs down, but the hospitals are offsetting those costs by overbilling people on private insurance.  So let’s discuss each problem.

Regulate commerce

The main argument that we’ve seen in the press regarding the authority of the government to require health insurance is the concept that they are entitled to regulate commerce. Commerce is defined as “an interchange of goods or commodities, especially on a large scale between different countries (foreign commerce) or between different parts of the same country (domestic commerce).” In this case, the good or service in question is healthcare, or the exchange of money for goods (drugs, treatments) and services (diagnosis, rendering of treatments). Insurance is a completely separate issue, in which money is exchanged for a service (much more money in the case of an emergency or the need for that money to be used). So, the government is trying to regulate insurance, but not trying very hard to regulate medicine. Therein lies the problem.

In a free market, the value of goods and services are determined by the cost that people are willing to pay for them. Once people stop paying the market value of a good, its value decreases. This makes a lot of sense in most cases, but the underlying problem here? People will always pay for medicine when they need it. Sure, if you need a basic checkup or a physical, you might shop around. You might look and see which doctor is willing to take a little less money from you. If you have an expensive surgery that can wait a few months, you might see if flying out of the country or going to a different state will save you some money. And in these cases, the market value of the goods may go down, if enough people are also willing to do the same thing. But how many times have you been driven to the hospital with severe abdominal pain, been admitted, and then told the doctor “you know what? You charge too much for appendectomies. I’m going to drive across town and get it taken care of over there.”

As a husband who just dealt with a wife going through that exact same instance, I promise you that was the very last thing on either of our minds. All we wanted was for her to be okay, because that’s all that mattered. Money was the very least important thing on our minds, and to be honest I’m proud that it was the last thing on my mind, because it means my priorities aren’t as messed up as I thought they were.

So, how do we protect ourselves from being completely gouged by the hospital for that good or service? The government’s ability to regulate commerce is designed EXACTLY for this instance. I am in a place where the hospital (through no fault of their own) can potential commit fraud by convincing me that a good or service is worth a great deal more than it is, by making me think I have limited options. In this case, I do have limited options, and my absolute terror at losing my wife motivates me to pay any cost needed. I’m under duress, and in no shape to find a good bargain on the cost of the care. My bill for the procedure ended up being in excess of $34,000. Because I had just started a new job, my old insurance had expired, and my new insurance had not yet started. This was an oversight on the part of myself and my company, but as it turned out, I was eligible for COBRA. All the same, I eventually got the bill for the procedure before everything was sorted out, and they had said “oh, you’re not insured? Let’s apply some discounts.”

It went to four thousand dollars. That means they were willing to mark up the cost of their medical care almost ten times because they assumed an insurance provider was going to pay it. Let’s assume for a second that they were being completely genuine, and that was simply the cost of the medical care. They were willing to have me pay 11% of the total bill, meaning that the cost would be offset and an 89% share of that bill would be subsidized by someone else who had insurance. This is clearly broken.

Where does the cost come from?

The bills for medical care include a variety of categories. In most cases, you’re not really paying someone to apply a damp cloth to your head, you can do that at home. You’re paying for someone with ten or more years of specialized education and more years of experience to diagnose that you need a damp cloth applied to your head to treat your fever. That means the final cost to you includes

• The cost of undergrad and medical school for a medical provider
• The cost of transportation for that medical provider to and from their office/hospital
• The pharmaceutical company who makes the dampco(tm) brand damp cloths charges for that product. Their cost comes from years of research and the cost to manufacture the cloth
• The cost of transporting those medical supplies to the office/hospital
• The overhead cost of keeping the office/hospital running and deffered to you
• Taxes that all parties paid, now deferred to you (either directly via sales tax or indirectly by a small markup of your bill to cover expenses)

This, no matter how loony it may seem, is a gross oversimplification of the breakdown of the cost. So ultimately, we need to attack the problem on all levels.

Break it down

Due to the increasing cost of being a doctor (medical school, malpractice insurance, learning or paying medical billers to deal with the insurance companies), enrollment in medical school at the Doctor level has gone down, and enrollment for mid-level practitioners (Nurse Practitioners, Physician’s assistants) has gone up. The economic crisis has also affected every sector of the economy, but the two areas that always need more employees are healthcare and law enforcement/emergency services. So, the influx of people flooding into the medical field with less expensive degrees has become a boon that we need to capitalize on right now.

In most cases, the experience and specialized skillset of a doctor is a very specific tool. This is pretty well understood in certain parts of the medical community, such as surgery. A surgeon usually even specializes in specific areas of the body. Therefore, we don’t ask a cardiac surgeon to provide hernia screenings to the football team that just had to do their annual checkup. Yet hospitals often have an internal medical specialist –who is capable of diagnosing the most rare and confusing series of symptoms available– grab someone’s crotch and ask them to turn their head and cough. As I said before, we’re getting better about this. We have urgent care centers and “minute clinics” across the country that mainly employ mid and lower-level practitioners, who make a very fair wage (and in some cases, better than they would find at a place where expensive doctors take most of the budget). But we need to break this up even more.

There are instances in which people routinely go to a free clinic simply because they cannot afford top-level medical care and fear they may have some infectious disease. In these cases, people should be encouraged to seek the non-specific care of urgent cares centers, with the understanding that they will only be charged a basic diagnostic fee. Our system now puts a huge amount of liability on individual providers, regardless of their area of specialty. In my theoretical world, someone who just has the sniffles from working a blue-collar job out in the rain should be able to pay for a treatment with their blue-collar paycheck before it evolves into pneumonia (which would be substantially more expensive, and hard to afford on almost any salary). In addition, our idea before was that insurance is really for dire circumstances. In this example, the standard treatment would be inexpensive because so many people seek it out and pay for it on a regular basis out of pocket that it has become more affordable, and in the event of a catastrophe, emergency insurance to cover the more dangerous ills would be cheaper because the insurance company is not footing the bill for everyone’s maintenance care on a regular basis.

Are these concepts complex and intricate? Not on the surface, granted. But over time, there will inevitably be overlap and confusion that results in these disparate medical disciplines requiring overlap: but let’s allow that to happen. Open up sub-specialties in urgent care and the ability for people without hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt treat the most basic symptoms, and know the proper process for elevating the system further.

Finally, I wouldn’t be a programmer if I didn’t say…

The primary method of cutting cost, risk, and complications from almost every aspect of modern life has been done with the help of automation. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched House and thought “this list of symptoms is so specific, it would have popped up so easily in a progressively more narrow search of indexed symptoms…” I am very aware that diagnostic programs and other medical devices are becoming available which help to reduce the risk and cost of procedures, and in some cases the machines themselves are new and expensive enough that they end up having the opposite effect. This is obviously another market problem: the very best technology in the medical field is manufactured by a monopoly that has very little competition from competing firms due to close relationships with both government regulators and the health industry’s insurance counterparts. How do you untangle that mess of cords without breaking something? Very simple: lower the barrier to entry and allow the market to become flooded with every possible level of development. Open-source projects will appear overnight as side projects for bored geeks, medical technology grad students will have entire systems built to prepare for a dissertation; the world will open up overnight. It’s just (once again, here’s the disease) just too damn expensive to get your foot in the door right now. If enough people were doing it, and enough approval was passed to get out of the way of these innovators, there would be boundless innovation. And with our economy the way it is right now, how many out-of-work people would be willing to take on these new entrepreneurship opportunities they’d always wanted to now that they have no other options? I’d say most of them, if not a large enough sum of them to make it worthwhile.

So, what about the symptoms?

In conclusion, the disease is not being adequately treated by the application of insurance, but are the symptoms? How are health numbers now in the US and would they stand to improve or decrease as these policies and philosophies were implemented?

Well, the statistics are pretty clearly showing one major trend: inconsistency. Rather than posting infographics and charts, I’ll simply link you to CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. As technology improves, the amount of people able to have access to it is declining. As the nation slips further into debt, so too do our large private medical institutions. In most of these cases, the local and national government would step into to fill the gaps, but budget shortfalls in every revenue area have cut what little spare budget was available for such things. The symptoms are being treated, but the treatment is costing us exponentially more every year. Once we run out of money, the treatment goes away too, and then we’re left with nothing. If nothing else, this underscores our need to get the system back in order.

Stay tuned for my next blog post, in which I’ll discuss how treating the symptoms of the problems in programming and web development solutions lead to even more measurably terrible results.

It used to be that you protected your e-mail address as though it were the most secretive information in the universe, next to the last four digits of your social and your weight (and/or age, depending on your gender and personality). But, just like the last four digits of your social, your weight, your age, and even probably about how much money you make, your info is all over the freaking place. But this isn’t just the case on e-mail, it is the case with blogs, forums, and any form of communication which would ever require a turing test. As of right now, I have about 200 comments on my blog, and only 4 of them are legitimate. So how did people fight this?

1. Obfuscate your e-mail address like name (at) domain (dot) com.
2. Turn off comments on your blog.
3. Employ a site admin, moderator, or other full/part-time culler of the wheat from the chaff (or the spam from the real meat, whichever analogy fits your dietary restrictions best).
4. Use the aforementioned turing test anywhere that allows human input.
5. Automation.

The problem we have with every one of these is that they are all treatments for symptoms of an underlying disease. As far as which of these symptom treatments works best?
The shortest and last one, of course! The 200 comments on my blog, around 190ish of which are marked spam, were filtered by a plug-in most wordpressers know as Akismet. My public e-mail (nathan@nathanstpierre.com, btw) is in no way obfuscated or filtered, because it goes through g-mail, which has (as far as I’ve seen) the most intricate spam filtering system available to a public mail system. As Mr. Doctorow so intellectually pointed out, these systems exist for exactly this reason, so why not utilize them?

That being said : I still think the underlying disease goes untreated. Unfortunately, this disease is the same one that ruined the old-school forums, social media (MySpace whores anyone?), and even legitimate community tools (buy something from someone who’s not a Nigerian in Craig’s List. I dare you.). It is the chief weakness and strength of the Internet: freedom. The freedom of an open and endless system is that you end up ultimately having to be at the mercy of the demographic that utilizes it.

Great examples of the successes of this philosophy include Open Source (none of us is as smart as all of us), Wikipedia (the nice people who care will ultimately win out over the jerks, because they are not doing the easy thing, they’re doing the thing they care about). The failures of this freedom are pretty much the inverse: Reporting of false information on national TV thanks to the Bogus Blogosphere, entire systems being overrun by spammers (Google groups anyone?) and so forth. So is there a cure?

In the spirit of presenting a solution rather than a problem, I suggest a change. Not a change in software or business models, a change in philosophy. We once thought the internet was too massive and too free to infringe upon, but YouTube shattered that preconception to me when they freaking scanned a video for copyrighted material. Could software ultimately determine what’s spam and what’s legit and be a part of every ISP’s basic network protocol, insta-deleting anything that clutters their domains with horrendous spam? Potentially. But should it?

Honestly that kind of big brother dystopia –which would likely lead to my favorite cyberpunk plots being possible– makes me think that’s the more mechanical answer, which completely ignores the spirit of the issue, which is a cultural question. The culture of the internet has become beneficial to spam.

But this is a blog about web development! you say? How does being a hippie and talking about working for a new society help anything?

Well, algorithms are great, but as Google is finding out, they’re not the answer to everything (or what we call a silver bullet). For more information on an example where someone gamed Google’s algorithm in a seriously negative manner, check out the story of DecorMyEyes. To summarize: a shady businessman discovered that Google ranks things based on how often people mention your site, along with certain search terms. So he discovered that people blasting him on a thousand ripoff sites about his failure to manage their (insert glasses brand name here) order the correct way, would cause his site to show up first for someone looking for (insert brand name here) and/or “glasses.” Google’s response? Essentially, change the algorithm (to see their actual response read here).

… in the last few days we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience. The algorithm we incorporated into our search rankings represents an initial solution to this issue, and Google users are now getting a better experience as a result.

Is this a good solution? Honestly, it’s probably the best solution given the situation. They explain this in the article, but they point out that just blocking this person or using sentiment analysis (filter of good vs. bad reviews) could cause the inverse problem to happen: game the system and post a million bad reviews of Best Buy and suddenly they never show up in Google searches for Best Buy.

But what’s happened pretty recently with them and Microsoft’s Bing makes me think the algorithm isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.
If you haven’t heard the latest news, check out this article from Seattle’s own KIRO TV. Essentially, Google set up a “honeypot” by putting out some completely random result sets for random character searches, and Bing turned up the same results. Now unless they figured out how to steal one of the most carefully guarded algorithms in the tech industry, I highly doubt this would happen as a freak accident. It’s pretty clear Microsoft is doing something sketchy. Whether they are or not, let’s say someone at some point did. This would prove my point: the world ultimately doesn’t care whose algorithm it is. If you can steal it, where’s the incentive not to?

So we come back to the issue: the culture of spam. As YouTube discovered (I’m sure through Google’s technology), there are ways to automatically figure these things out. As I said before, it was probably the best of the options we have at the moment, but we honestly need to find a better way to approach this. For this, I go back to what I mentioned earlier: f*cking Wikipedia and open-source: how do they work?

They work by having the appropriate balance of resources, both personnel and technology. Enough coders are willing to clone your git repository of a new build and try to break it. This is hard and challenging. This scares off spammers, who will try to take the easiest and possibly fastest route through the maze to the cheese. People who are earnestly devoted to a cause will always inevitably find a way over people who are lazily employing practices that work by gaming systems. Why?

Ask the Russians, who spent the entire cold war stealing and duplicating western technology to master and decrypt it just in time to be three generations behind their innovating enemies. The Black Sunday Kill is a better example of this in action in the technology world.

So ultimately, what is the exact mechanism by which we can make search engines, blogs, e-mail and so forth unspammable? I don’t know. Not that I’m incapable of figuring that out, I think someone at less than my skill level can easily figure this out given enough incentive (usually motivation like anger and resources like free time). But the ultimate solution will be counter-acting the current disease: spammers are making money.

Every one of the ads you get that advertise “A bigger Pen15″ makes money, because someone who got that e-mail sent money to someone. Every time a Nigerian princess is ransomed in your e-mail, some gallant fellow cashed out his 401(k) to save her. That one man’s $5,000 is worth orders of magnitude more than the cost of sending out those spams mails, which could vary from a few hundred dollars for millions of e-mails to a dollar for thousands (depending on the location of the servers and the botnet being used). There are lots of resources that discuss this, but my favorite right now is the HowStuffWorks explanation.

So the solution seems simple enough, just keep them from making money! But how do we approach this?

Well, we’ve tried education on massive scale: from teaching your grandparents not to click on spam to educating your children through computer literacy about scamming. We’ve tried blocking those parts of the internet from people to protect them from themselves. We’ve tried spam-blockers, captchas, and every automation system possible. But these ALL address the symptoms. Even trying to legislate against spam has ended up being a pipe dream (and honestly legislation just makes breaking laws more fun for those who’d want to do that in the first place). My proposed solution at this moment?

Make them pay.

Legislation proposes fines, but the problem with legislation is it’s only justifiable if we can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that suspected perpetrators are in fact perpetrators. I say, we employ the same annoying bastard tactics that we saw in use against the enemies of Julian Assange. Will it be easy? HELL NO.

As we all know, spammers utilize botnets and hordes of zombies, so tracking down all of those spam-emails will most likely lead you to victims instead of perpetrators. On top of this, they often launch attacks such as DDoS or ping-storms to people who attempt to track them down. But these are issues we can address. When these hackers take over a computer, they always leave a back door in order to access it for their various uses. They even come with a kill switch so that they can revert the server/computer/device so others can’t use their system against them. Most of these systems are freely available, and finding the kill switch is just a matter of knowing which attack was launched against your site. They hide their location and just send an anonymous text or e-mail or packet of data to the zombie herd… which makes for a perfectly good honeypot. Intentionally leave a site open to RFI attack, for example, and then monitor any packets that come into the system. When one does, you can find the source. Most likely, it’ll be from behind a series of hops, firewalls, and other zombies, but now you at least know where that came from. Repeat this process enough times, and you find the root. At the very list, you can sniff out the net and either selectively block it, or keep a database of ip addresses logged with what software compromised them so when you find a killswitch, you have somewhere to attack.

Granted these are all ideas off the top of my head, but I’m only one man. And none of us is as smart as all of us, so let’s do this. Let’s get pissed, let’s get serious, and let’s change the culture of spam. Honestly, I think it’s about time the white hats did something other than just turn up their noses at software piracy. And I’m ready to help.

So far, I’m amazed at how well I’ve kept up with all of these things. And the reason, I’ve realized, is because I’ve been truthfully, brutally honest with myself. I haven’t been as honest with everyone else, so I’ve decided to start sharing this stuff on the most public and potentially embarrassing place possible: the internet.

In the last couple of months, I’ve:

1. worked out at least three times a week, in some cases five
2. lost about fourteen pounds
3. quit my job (because I realized I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do and accepted a job closer to where I wanted to be)
4. written three short stories, over thirty poems, three pieces of music
5. practiced piano, bass, guitar, and tin whistle

In spite of all of this: I feel like I have not yet come close to the spirit of my resolution. Why?

I have lacked honesty. I have lacked truth and the ability to express it in my personal and professional lives. Recently, I read an interview with Francis Ford Coppola, and it’s been running through my mind a great deal in the past couple of days. He said two things that really struck me, so I’ll just quote them both and then go into why they’re so important to this realization.

In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve given to your children, inside and outside of the industry?
Always make your work be personal.

And, you never have to lie. If you lie, you will only trip yourself up. You will always get caught in a lie. It is very important for an artist not to lie, and most important is not to lie to yourself. There are some questions that are inappropriate to ask, and rather than lie, I will not answer them because it’s not a question I accept. So many times we are asked things in our work or in life that you want to lie, and all you have to do is say, “No, that is an improper question.”

I wake up some mornings and wonder where I am, or more importantly how the hell I got here. I graduated one of the hardest music composition programs in the country in four years with honors and no debt, and I was so completely sure throughout that time that I would be destined for musical greatness that I never really paused to think about what that even meant. I saw myself living in a loft in the city with nothing but my bass to keep me company, hunched over scores, or perhaps against the glow of a flickering crt monitor plugged into a desktop on its last legs as I struggled to create my true art.

And here I am, sitting comfortably in a suede chair in the living room of my two-story home, staring at an embarrassingly expensive gaming laptop and writing about my wasted potential. I have become a parody of myself, and I couldn’t figure out why for the longest time.

Now don’t get the wrong impression, I’m not wealthy; I’m barely living paycheck to paycheck against a mountain of student and personal debt, some of which I inherited from my wife, some of which I racked up before I was responsible enough to not live above my means. I have this house because of a government tax credit and a loan from my parents, and I am on this laptop because my company was willing to finance it for a year with no interest for me. As a matter of fact, this comfy sofa is a hand-down from my parents (it didn’t go with their new wood floor). BUT: I write code for 8+ hours a day, most of which thus far powers completely deprecated and inefficient systems in an industry I simply have very little to no interest in (disclaimer : anyone who works for any successful company in any industry knows their app is a kludge, and it’s probably a very profitable kludge). Anyone who knew me from sophomore year of high school to my graduation from UNT would be amazed that I haven’t spontaneously combusted in irony, or that the word “sellout” is not branded to my forehead.

But now I have to step back and realize exactly what has happened and who I’ve become. I’m actually sitting here, for real, and I can actually see and feel all of these things: so this is not the illusion. The dream of working on movie scores or video game music and being a respected musician was the lie. My true art would be laughed out of Hollywood or any “serious” game industry professional’s office. Why? Because it’s not honest.

I think the problem never had to do with me not having the skills or dedication. My ultimate, stinky, sweaty fear under all of those pretty and dressed up excuses was that I would be bound to a lose/lose conundrum. Either I would suffer for an eternity for no ultimate success or reason, or I would be vastly successful and hate myself for what I had allowed myself to become. I would have twisted the thing that has inspired my deepest reserves of personal passion and dedication into some kind of commercialized monstrosity in order to survive to make more, or I’d starve to death (which when you’re married is actually killing two people, more if you have kids). And then it struck me: this sudden clarity came from my personal dedication to this new resolution.

I was honest with myself about my weight. I didn’t feel attractive, healthy, or energetic any more. Being married, you stop worrying about attracting the opposite sex nearly as much, but deep down you’re the same insecure squirming kid you were in the seventh grade, hoping that no one noticed you just pick a wedgie. And how better to better myself than to devote my time and energy to honestly doing the things I’d always wanted to do? I bought a heavy bag (which I’ve wanted since I saw Rocky as a kid), started hitting the gym and the exercise bike and I’ve felt leagues better because I finally told myself the freaking TRUTH: Nathan, you’re a fatass. Do something about it.

I was honest with myself about my career. I got praise at almost every review, and was constantly being told by my co-workers that my input was needed and valued on almost every aspect of development. They told me that I was being considered for a senior position, to be a decision-maker on the system, and I was amazed at how much that failed to inspire me. I finally was honest with myself and asked a very important question: if you work these sixty hour weeks for another year and make it to a senior developer position are you still going to be in the same incredibly restrictive industry, doing business logic that makes people fall asleep when you explain what you do for a living? Being brutally honest, I said yes. So when a friend said his company was looking to fill a designer/front-end developer job, I had to admit it was time to make a change. A terrifying and potentially disastrous (for me) change. And I did.

I was honest with myself about my talent. I told myself for so long that I simply didn’t have the time to work on new designs, write new stories and songs, and practice one of the more than ten instruments I have lying around in the house. I would pine for the opportunity to go and play them or sit down and write, and every time I would stare at a blank screen or just noodle around with songs I’d played a thousand times, and went back to playing video games or watching TV, letting my mind wander to things that were in no way constructive or helpful. For this, I have to thank my wife, who is now living her dream. I was playing a really hard guitar song on Rock Band 3 and said “I wish I had the real guitar controller… or even better that I was just playing guitar right now.” She looked at me as though I had been replaced by some kind of 50s sci-fi monster and said “then… go play your guitar.”

She has said something similar to me for years, but sitting at her computer with her tablet in her lap working on a commission made me realize: 1) Holy shit. 2) I’m an idiot.

So most importantly, I got really honest with myself about my life. No, it’s not going to be easy. No, it’s not going to be cheap, and it’s not going to be fast. But I’m going to start working on myself a lot more aggressively. I’m going to start being the man I want to be, one step at a time. And the most important step, right here and right now, is being absolutely, breathtakingly, irrevocably honest with myself and everyone else. Da Vinci had Pope Alexander VI’s son, and various other patrons to pay his bills as he created everything he ever wanted to. Charles Ives sold insurance to finance his career and support his family. I can’t compare myself to such legends of the things I respect, at least not if I’m being honest with myself.

But maybe in a few years, I can say I even came close to that. Being honest, I may fail. I may end up fading into obscurity like everyone else who wanted to make their mark on the world. But being honest: I’m okay with that. At the very very least, I’m going to try. I’m never going to stop trying. Being honest with myself, I may not always rise to that challenge, I may have to put off this nebulous dream for years at a time. But living with purpose is a full-time job, and sometimes you need weekends off.

A child laughs somewhere off to his right and he snaps his head immediately to the source. Four children in new Christmas sweaters are throwing back and forth a shiny new ball with some kind of lights and whistles on it. They run back and forth between two yards, and he can’t help but smile. It happens before he realizes it. The world shifts and he falls backwards into a memory.

The sky was the silver of late February, and a dozen puffs of warm breath filled the air with thin wisps of vapor. He idly shifted his weight from foot to foot, trying to keep his legs warm in the chill. The team captains looked back and forth between he and his ten and eleven-year-old fellows, all eagerly bouncing in anticipation. He kept his eyes down, trying not to seem too eager, knowing he wouldn’t be the first picked. “Walker,” said one of the captains. “Eric,” said the second one almost instantly. The two boys joined their friends. “Adam,” said the first. The second waited for a few seconds before saying “Kirk.” He grunted, knowing his time would be soon. But it continued in this fashion, each successive pick sounding less and less enthusiastic to be added to that team, until finally it was down to him and one other boy. “Don’t pick him,” Walker said to one of the captains. “He can sprint okay, but he’ll be tired in five minutes.” “Typical fat kid,” the other one returned. He looked down.

The road was rushing by, the cracks in the concrete slipping beneath his feet like a pattern of cracking late winter ice on a lake. Shaking his head, he looks back up. A beeping sound had been exploding from his wrist, and he isn’t sure how long he’d been ignoring it. Looking down, his heart rate monitor whines of a drastic increase in pulse and drop in oxygen. Breathe, he says to himself. Left, two three, right two three. Pretend, two three, ignore two three. No, he says to himself. Don’t run away: run towards. He looks up, seeing his garage only another hundred meters or so away. Spotting a ninety pound punching bag hanging from the ceiling of his garage, a flush of anger suddenly wells up inside of him. Taking a deep breath, he leans forward slightly, pushing his legs up higher and extending them further, landing on his toes with each stride. Trees on the streetside whoosh as he runs by them. He feels the heat of his body focusing deep in his chest and rising, and he sprints hard towards the bag. Left, two three, right, two three. Rage, two three, pain, two three. The world disappears in a cloud of red haze.

He narrowly ducked the blow, glancing it somewhere on his cheek. The blonde-headed boy in front of him was a good foot taller, although they were around the same age. Blondie laughed as he rained blows down, not bothering with form or technique. The towheaded assailant knew that his enemy could never get inside his reach if he just kept swinging. He felt more than heard a muffled din of shouts and cat-calls around him, blending in slowly with the sound of the blood pounding in his ears. Another blow came down, but he ducked into it, multiplying the impact. The scene was replaced by a high-pitched squeal and the flash of a million tiny multi-colored lights. Shaking his head and looking up, the rage in his body congealed into a solid ball, and then suddenly there was silence. The world was still, the slight brush of warm Texas summer air blew in his hair, and he saw something he hadn’t before. A shard of what could be fear glinted in the tall boy’s bright blue eyes. With absolute calm and no sense of urgency, he shifted his weight over the front leg, whizzing by a sloppily laid jab. Using the gathered potential energy in his leg, he pushed his entire weight upwards. His arm was already curled beneath him from the earlier blow, and he pushed it up, gathering with him the energy of his shoulder and waist. When the blow connected to the boy’s chin, a satisfying crack resounded, and the blow followed through well over the height of the boy. He was vaguely aware that both his feet had left the ground, and he calmly readied himself for a landing. When he struck the earth, the silence was still there, and dozens of eyes were on fixed mutely upon him. Rather than the pure rage or random sense of calm he had felt, now a sudden wave of shame and remorse covered him. Had he been wrong to fight back? A slow and steady clap began to resound in the group, and cheers rose up. He looked down at the blonde boy, who had bitten his tongue on the uppercut, and was fighting back tears as blood drizzled from his mouth. This wasn’t revenge, this was just sad. The sudden urge to run overcame him, and he accepted it. He shoved through the crowd and ran until his lungs filled with acid, tearing at each breath.

His hands are sore beneath two layers of handwraps, and he can feel blood welling up somewhere in the palm his right hand. The rage was gone, at some point replaced by a slow and steady sense only that he was punching. Each blow lands on the bag in a rhythmic thud, and he is at once alerted to the fact that his entire upper body is numb. He takes a deep breath, and blood rushes into his ears and his arms. In, jab cross, out, duck hook. Before he has time to question how long he’s been landing blows on the quivering mass of nylon, a screeching alarm sounds. Five minutes are up. Is that the third round? The fifth? He can’t remember. It doesn’t matter: this is his last one. Suddenly, he is painfully aware of how heavy his body has become from fatigue, sweat, and spent emotion. He unlatches the bag from the ceiling and heaves it to its resting place on the wall with a grunt. He plods slowly into the house, closing the garage behind him. He barely hears something over the groan of the door as it closes.

“What?” he asks.

“How was it?” he hears his wife as she comes around the corner. She wears a bright pink robe he bought her for their second anniversary, and she’s sipping on a hot chocolate from a machine she got for Christmas. He hears the rattle of his dog’s collar as he runs in from the den with a stuffed gingerbread man in his mouth. He smiles as he kneels to pet the dog, rubbing beneath his chin.

“Keep breathing, and you’ll finish eventually,” he finally answers his wife.

Confused, she cocks her head a bit to the side with a smile. “So… it went well?” she asks.

“It is now,” he stood with a smile, bringing her in for a one-armed hug. She responds with a grunt and pushes his sweaty form away with a laugh.

“You smell awful!” she chuckles. He keeps pulling her in.

“Just breathe, it’ll finish eventually.”

He smiles, and she lets him hug her a bit before insisting he run upstairs to the shower. As he mounts the stairs two at a time, he breathes on each step. Smile, two three, peace two three.

Why?

The issue I’ve found myself combating for the last few months is that I haven’t been able to find inspiration to write blogs or work with individual new concepts, and I figured forcing myself to go forward with one would help me grow beyond my current skillset, both in web development and writing. I also needed to work hard to get my skills up in Search Engine optimization, installing Google Analytics and coming up with some new ways of generating traffic. I’d also like to experiment with bringing in some ad revenue, and the best way to do that is to guarantee that you have certain types of traffic, and a new web design can get just that.

How

Overall, at the very basic level, this blog is about dividing my interests into three main categories: music, web development, and writing. I tend to get the most visits for these three topics, and they happen to be my favorite three things to blog about, so it works out doubly in my favor. There will still be rants about politics, philosophy and so forth… but they will not be the primary focus of my blog. Most individual posts in those categories will be organized using tags, and that will allow people to find things that specifically interest them, either by using the tag cloud on the right side bar or by searching for those tags specifically.

What?

This template was built using an html5 template that I developed myself. It validates (as much as you can validate html5) using the html5 validator on validator.nu. It uses a very minimal number of image resources in order to load more quickly and accessibly for most browsers (four images for the nav, one for my portrait, one for twitter and one for rss, and the background). These images are available on all pages so they maximize the cached amount of resources, and I use CSS3 gradients with solid colors and filter gradients as fallbacks. The widths of the site are dynamic, so it loads comfortably in a large variety of resolutions. I have tested it all the way up to 2400 pixels wide and all the way down to my G1′s 640 pixels at wide resolution.

Conclusion

So take a look around, see if you find anything interesting! If you do, comment on it. If you don’t, send me an e-mail or comment on something to let me know you’d like to see more!

Lord of the Rings Online (which recently went free to play, so go check it out if you have a second) has a surprisingly interesting music system. You can play instruments in-game by equipping an appropriate instrument and then doing one of two things. You can bind certain keys on the keyboard (or mouse, gamepad, etc) to certain notes, and then when you enter music mode, your character will play those notes. The other way is that you can load .abc files up from a command-line-like interface (/play filename.abc).

There are certainly some interesting things to say about it, so I’ll break my comments up into pros and cons.

Pros

• The system allows you to synchronize with other players and play music together. The fundamental mechanism of this relies on you both having either the same text file or text files that were designed to be parts for each other. ABC Notation utilizes a key and time signature at the beginning of the file, so these must be the same in order to work.
• It actually stays pretty faithful to a lot of the conventions of the (admittedly) limited ABC system, including chords, multiple layers of moving parts, and transposition.
• There are a lot of tools out there ready-made to bind midi inputs to key binds, which allows you to plug in any midi controller that you’re comfortable with and start playing. This overcomes the limitations of “nth-key” rollover on your standard computer keyboard.
• Sites like The Fat Lute exist to make a much more interesting set of repertoire available to the LOTRO player.
• Little eighth notes float up above your player as you play, and follow a slightly curved path. The notes are colored based on your instrument. This could have been cooler if they changed color based on your note or moved slower or faster, but it’s still a neat effect, and it makes it obvious when someone is spamming some pop song in a public space.
• As hinted before, you can hear player music, which can be adjusted with the volume sliders. This is very handy, especially with pick-up-groups of people who choose to randomly play the Ghostbusters theme on bagpipes every time the group stops moving.

Cons

• Some of the instruments (mostly the wind ones) are HORRENDOUSLY out of tune. At first, I thought they were trying to mimic the conventions of Just Intonation which would keep a pretty good historical perspective. This is unfortunately not the case, it seems like it just gets more out of tune the further you stray from C-4 or C-3 (depending on the instrument). This leads me to believe they employ an erroneous method of re-sampling, or they are using a limited number of samples stretched over a long range, or both.
• There is no real standardization for drum notation in ABC, which is remarked on in the drums section of The Fat Lute. A drum standardization project is supposedly in the works, but I haven’t seen any progress on it in years.
• They attempt to account for lag, but all of the processes by which they do it cause some serious issues. Turning off quantization makes the system more responsive, but also makes it all but impossible to synchronize with other players. Using the in-game synchronized .abc performance is the only way to make it work, and that has a series of limitations.

Conclusion

Honestly, I really enjoy the fact they included this feature. My main curiosity is why they didn’t use a more standardized system like MIDI. That would be incredibly easy to supplement with any number of instruments via simple soundfonts, and there are already a HUGE number of libraries in place to utilize both of these sytems.

In the end, the game is full of stuff that most MMOs don’t bother to try, and I think that is really boosted by the Tolkien setting. But like most other games, the developers made decisions most likely based on what was easiest or most cost-effective to utilize.

The dew-laden grass grunched softly beneath their assorted boots, solarets, shoes, and even a bare pair of feet wrapped lightly in cured silk, and they hunched down as they moved. The orc would have heard these various sounds, if not for the sound of the hilt of his axe striking the ground as he idly jostled it in boredom. The party froze, holding their breath as a solitary figure broke from the group and creeped ahead. In one sudden movement, Sarith was behind the green-skinned monstrosity, daggers buried to their hilts in the space between his helm and the back of his breastplate. With a muted gurgle, he fell to the ground. Giving a silent signal to continue, he faded back into the shadows, and the party continued.

The sound of bubbling lava crested up over the ridge, and the sound of gravel falling was the first and most obvious signal that they had reached the edge of the pit. Suddenly, an orchestra of feral grunts rose up from the pit.

“Damnation. We’re spotted,” hissed Kolthax from beneath seven feet of steel-plated armor. Pulling his shield from one shoulder and his blade from his hip, he burst into a slow trot. “Charge!” he yelled in a guttural barbarian yawp. Naethan’s lute already in hand, his fingers flew to the right notes, and suddenly the entire group of five brave warriors was running at an impossible speed thanks to his song, flying down the crest of the pit as their blades met with Orc steel and flesh. Hooting and shouting, they all praised Naethan’s leadership, that he was able to find this place, and keep everyone together in light of the insane melee. It was barely organized chaos, and it was beautiful. The beauty was broken instantly.

“NATHAN!” a shrill female voice from the other side of the house exclaimed. “GET DOWN HERE RIGHT NOW!”

“Damnation,” he whispered. Typing as fast as he could, he tried to apologize to his friends, making up some lie about the wife or being paged or something, it didn’t matter anyway. “Hang on, mom!” he yelled.

The rest of the party hurled insults and apologies, not necessarily in that order. Kolthax sent a private message: “Mom yelling at you?”

“Yup,” he typed back. He had barely hit enter when he was already running down the stairs, awkwardly stepping over a chihuahua, a guitar, and two towels as he went. As he hit the bottom steps, he realized the sky outside was the red and purple of late evening. Had he been gone that long?

“What are you doing up there?” she demanded.

“I’m raiding, mom” he sheepishly explained. She shot him a quizzical look, then shook her head.

“What is this?” she asked, holding up a towel. He hung his head in shame.

“Looks like a towel, ma,” he said, idly rubbing the back of his neck.

“It is a towel. Does it go on the floor?” she asked.

“No, it goes in a hamper. I’m sorry, I just got–” he started.

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t get this. Why can’t you do this?” she insisted. His voice was hoarse as he grasped awkwardly for a response. Did he really need a reason?

“I guess I’m just dumb?” he offered.

“Don’t feel sorry for yourself,” she instantly scolded. There was something between anger and remorse in her voice.

“Wouldn’t feeling sorry for myself be more like, ‘why are you yelling at poor old me’, not ‘why am I so stupid’?” he asked. Her eyes narrowed in what he could only assume was rage, but might have been thoughtful rage.

“It doesn’t matter. If it were a snake, it would have bit you when you walked by it. I thought you were getting better about this!” she screamed. Nathan wondered why everything is a snake in these conversations, and why the snakes would bite him instead of just letting him by.

“Look, I am getting better–” he began.

“So if I go upstairs, I won’t find two towels on the floor?” she said as she started up the stairs.

“No, wait. I might have left one out there,” he offered, too late. She was going up the stairs. Head hanging low, he followed her up. Each step brought him further into the upper floor, and he was further away from Naethan with each plod on the carpet. One day, he would be the bard with the skills to inspire nations. But not today. He patiently lowered his head and continued to trudge up the steps. The lights upstairs were off, and the evening light from the windows faded into darkness…

The sky was pitch black, obscured by clouds that covered the night stars. They moved rapidly in the broken sky of the Outlands. Solwyn’s metal-covered charger whinnied as it worked a spot of the road with its front paws. “Easy girl,” he said with a smile.

“That’s no way to talk to a lady,” Daenalyn said, the silent paws of her Nightsaber mount coming to a gentle stop next to him.

“You know I was talking to my horse,” Solwyn chuckled. Daenalyn smirked in response, tossing her strangely azure hair.

“Where to?” she asked. Solwyn opened his journal with a heavily gauntleted fist and flipped a few pages.

“Due north, there’s a Horde settlement nearby but we need to drop off these plans to the men at the nearby camp,” he said with quiet authority. They both smiled and Daenalyn broke into a gallop on her mount, leaving Solwyn in the dust. Hastily throwing his journal aside, he grinned as he pulled back on the reins of his charger. “Ha!” he shouted, giving chase.

They swerved in and out of hills and trenches in the broken desert landscape, leaping and dodging as they went. He glowed with both holy power and leadership, and he was in his element. He leapt at the sound of a chirping bird.

“Honey, it’s the phone,” Danielle said from across the room. Nathan shook his head to free his ears from the headphones, and reached down to grab his cell phone, couching it against his shoulder so he could continue playing as he spoke.

“Y’ello, this is Nathan,” he said with a smile.

“Hey man, did you ever hear back about the hall director job?” the voice on the other end asked. Nathan’s shoulders fell, and he typed a quick apology, he had to take this call in the other room. Danielle understood.

“No, I haven’t heard anything yet. Do you know what’s up?” he whispered as he went to the only other room in their tiny five-hundred square foot apartment.

“I’m sorry man,” the friend on the other end said. “The offers have all been made. Who did you interview with?” Nathan’s shoulders somehow fell further as he closed the door behind him.

“Never got an interview. That’s weird,” Nathan responded. His voice was obviously haunted by an air of shattered spirit.

“Look, I don’t know what happened. Everyone I’ve talked to said they were just waiting for your paperwork. Maybe it got lost,” the voice said.

“Yeah, I guess that’s true.” Nathan sat down on the mattress that was laid out on the floor for a bed.

“What are you going to do?” the voice asked.

“I don’t know. Everyone told me I was a shoo-in for this. I’m–” he began, but his voice cracked. “I’m too tired to think about it. There’s a midnight to eight AM job that’s open at one of the halls.”

“Oh. Well that could be cool,” the voice said cheerfully. “That gives you time to work on your music, right?”

Nathan sighed. “Yeah, that’s true.” Solwyn was riding his horse faster and faster away, and the aura of leadership and honor went with him. The slam of hooves against the ground faded slowly away, to be replaced by a gentle tapping sound…

In the distance, a wolf howled mournfully at the moon, and the steady chop of axes on wood filled the Chetwood night air. Narenath sat on a rock, his harp in his lap as he absently plucked the strings. His long hair tousled softly by the night wind, he rocked back and forth gently with it as he absently pressed the strings, his eyes closing as he let the music pull him away into the Middle-Earth night wind. He didn’t notice the crunching sound as a Champion ran along the road in front of him. After a few paces, he turned around and returned, sitting down before him to listen. The sound of the man’s whisper broke Narenath from his reverie.

“That’s great,” he said, admiration clear in his voice. Narenath jolted a bit, then chuckled as he thanked the stranger. He continued playing, and the man just sat there listening. After a few moments, he was jolted again, but this time by an alert of “out of character” speech. “Is that a script or something?” a video gamer somewhere was asking Nathan.

“No, I just have my midi keyboard hooked up to the game,” Nathan typed back.

“Wow, so I’m just listening to you perform live?” he asked. Nathan shrugged, but Narenath just stood there dumbly.

“I guess you are,” he said with a smile. He added a smiley emoticon for good measure.

“I could listen to that all day,” the stranger said. That suddenly reminded Nathan of something, and he checked his clock.

“I’d love to entertain that, friend, but I need to go pick up the wife. We’re meeting some friends for a movie,” he typed back. Disappointed, the stranger stood.

“Thanks for the tune,” he typed. Then his character waved and he ran away.

As Nathan reached down with his mouse and clicked the logout button, he smiled a bit. With a slight grunt, he rose from his seat and went to the door. Pulling on his jacket and walking away from the computer, he could feel Narenath’s eyes on his back, watching him go. Nathan was sad, but he smiled, because he knew that Narenath was realizing that he would never be Nathan.