Geek As Citizen: Ties To The Community

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Saint Nicholas Charity

I’m sure you’re familiar with the issues of “techies” in San Francisco and the surrounding area. They’re supposedly obnoxious, driving up home prices, Google buses are getting a free pass and blocking traffic, the startup ideas are stupid, etc. If you haven’t heard about it . . . well I live in Silicon Valley and I hear a lot about it.

Though admittedly being south of San Francisco, some of it is probably a sort of bias – there seems to be a kind of SF/San Jose area split here.

Now there are issues of changes in San Francisco and the surrounding areas, but in reality none are as simple, clean cut, or frankly tech related as many people may think.  A lot of attempts to cover it are sadly over simplified and over generalized.  I myself have my own issues with some of what’s going on in San Francisco, but feel a lot of it is blown out of proportion – and population shifts, economic changes, and the like are part and parcel of big cities.

That being said, there’s concerns – and when you get a lot of people moving into an area there is going to be a sense of distance and alimentation. The new population could be totally great people, but they’re still outsiders – and that’s not helped when money and expense is a major issue, and even more so in this economy.

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Way With Worlds: Magic And Technology

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Magitech

[Way With Worlds appears at Seventh Sanctum at at MuseHack]

We’ve all heard the saying that goes “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” made by the incomparable Sir Arthur C. Clarke.

I would ad a corollary, especially in the worlds of world building (and perhaps in an age of mind hacking and psychological techniques, our own).  “Any sufficiently organized magic is indistinguishable from technology.”

Because when you world build, you’re getting things organized in your head to explain how they work.  In the case of Magic and Technology, they’re really the same thing most of the time. Not entirely, but mostly.

Now you may wish to argue with this, but for the sake of building a setting, magic and technology are no different.  I would state that magic and technology are the ways characters manipulate themselves and the elements of their settings to achieve results fitting a specific goal – and thus really no different.

Vaccum tubes and potions, ethereal forces and electrical energy, it’s all about Making Stuff Happen.  So for the rest of this essay, I’ll just call it MaT since I can’t figure any other word to encompass the two of them, and I won’t call it MT as it invites innumerable jokes.

As a world builder, you just have to figure out what it all means.  That’s when it gets complicated.

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Make It So: The Convention Repository

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Awhile ago I interviewed Jeremy Brett and Lauren Schiller who were working on a fandom/filk archive. Of course I recommend you go back, read it if you haven’t, then donate a lot of stuff to them. Go on. I’ll wait.

OK, so welcome back. Anyway, I figured that the benefits of this geek archiving are obvious. But just to list them for the sake of completion:

  1. We do a lot of stuff as fans, geeks, otaku.
  2. This is part of our history, our cultural history, and indeed culture history period.
  3. We should really preserve it.
  4. Are you really going to do anything with that pile of ‘zines?

This, in turn, gave me an idea of for a Make It So . . .

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