The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

My friend Cory Doctorow’s new book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom has hit the bookshelves…and the Web!

Down and Out is Cory’s full novel, and it’s full of all his pet obsessions: Disneyland, technologically-enhanced humans, pop culture, audio-animatronics, online identity and reputation (the term “Whuffie”, which he uses in the novel, was originally a term he used at OpenCola as a measure of reputation or “karma”) and ad-hoc collectives of talent working together to form a whole greater than the sum its parts. Here’s the opening line:

I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the Bitchun Society, to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to realize my boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to see the death of the workplace and of work.

Here’s the quick summary:

Jules is a young man barely a century old. He’s lived long enough to see the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn ten languages and compose three symphonies…and to realize his boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World.

Disney World! The greatest artistic achievement of the long-ago twentieth century. Now in the care of a network of volunteer “ad-hocs” who keep the classic attractions running as they always have, enhanced with only the smallest high-tech touches.

Now, though, it seems the “ad hocs” are under attack. A new group has taken over the Hall of the Presidents and is replacing its venerable audioanimatronics with new, immersive direct-to-brain interfaces that give guests the illusion of being Washington, Lincoln, and all the others. For Jules, this is an attack on the artistic purity of Disney World itself. Worse: it appears this new group has had Jules killed. This upsets him. (It’s only his fourth death and revival, after all.) Now it’s war: war for the soul of the Magic Kingdom, a war of ever-shifting reputations, technical wizardry, and entirely unpredictable outcomes.

You can get the book in one of two ways:

• Hardcover. You can buy it at your local bookstore or one of the usual online suspects.
• Online, and for free! Yes, that’s right, you have Cory’s permission to download the text of the book, for free — you don’t even have to give away any personal information. He’s making it available in plain old ASCII text, HTML, printable PDF and Palm PDB formats, and without copy-protection, digital rights management or anything else that prevents you from sharing the files. Why? Because he believes — and I think that he’s right here — that file-sharing isn’t piracy, but fandom and promotion. As the computer industry’s most beloved publisher Tim O’Reilly puts it, piracy isn’t the artist’s worst enemy; obscurity is.

(The license under which Cory’s releasing electronic versions of the book is a Creative Commons license. This particular license says you must attribute the work to him, you’re free to distribute it for non-commercial purposes, and you’re not allowed to make derivative works with first getting his permission.)

And finally, a picture of the author that I took when we went to Disneyland:

Just as I was about to hit the sack, I checked up on House of Hot Sauce, my friend Sean Monkman’s blog. I know both him and his wife Keitha from our days at Queen’s University, and they’ve recently moved to Scotland. It’s one of those “let’s uproot and move somewhere different while we’re still young and not tied down to anything” things of which I wholeheartedly approve. The blog, aside from being an outlet for Sean’s wonderful creativity and spot-on pronouncements about alt-rock, is also an easy way for his friends back here in Accordion City to keep up with how he and Keitha are doing.

In his entry on New Year’s Eve, he wrote about these signs, which appeared on bus shelters all over Edinburgh before the celebrations began:

Sean — who’s an engineer by training — wondered if such a thing as “Anti-climb paint” existed, or if it was clever bit of social engineering meant to keep partygoers from climbing on top of the shelters and either wrecking them or injuring themselves. It doesn’t seem real; it sounds more like some kind of invention from the world of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash or the Disneyland-of-the-future in Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

(An aside about paint and the Magic Kingdom: when Cory and I went to Disneyland back in 2001, he told me that they paint structures such as construction walls and other things they want you to ignore a special colour called “Go Away Green”. It’s a colour that blends into the background of just about any landscape setting. It’s the next best thing to setting up one of Douglas Adams’ “Somebody Else’s Problem” fields.)

A little Googling gave me the answer — anti-climb paint actually exists! Oddly enough, just about every result was a site either based in or writing about the UK. Here’s a snippet from Decorating Direct, a UK-based firm who had the number one result:

Anti-Climb Paint is a thick, non-drying coating for parapets, downcomers, pipes, window sills, fencing and walls etc. It acts as an extremely effective deterrent to would be intruders and burglars by making surfaces virtually unclimable, whilst marking intruders hands and clothing.

The stuff is made with petroleum jelly, and isn’t supposed to dry completely for years. It’s Vaseline for buildings! It combines the worst of slippery (to prevent climbing) and sticky (to clearly mark you as the intruder).

If that weren’t enough of a security measure, certain kinds of anti-climb paint, such as Andura’s, also contain fluorescent pigments and a “secret trace element” to “enable Law Enforcement Agencies to link suspects and clothing to the scene of the crime.”

It strikes me as the perfect gift for the personality type who’s into both Martha Stewart and perimeter defense.

Here’s a little something that was going to be part of a larger blog entry. The reason for writing it has largely evaporated, but what I managed to finish stands pretty well on its own. Here you go: a little piece of AccordionGuy family history.

Have you ever taken a big, life-changing gamble?

A woman named Catherine Kelly did. She lived somewhere in Ireland in the mid-1800s, the time during which the Great Famine took place. Across Europe, blight was turning crops in the fields into a black mush. The same blight also affected people’s food stores, and those who ate that food came down with cholera and typhus. With their crops destroyed, Irish peasants had no way of paying their British and Protestant landlords and were evicted from their homes. Homeless, they crowded into workhouses, which only made the disease travel more quickly. In a five-year period, it is estimated that a million Irish died from either famine or disease.

The Famine was one of the driving forces behind the wave of immigrants to North America in the 1800s. Catherine’s older sister, a woman whose name I forget, had booked passage on a ship bound for New York City, home of Ellis Island, the port of entry for immigrants from Europe. Catherine accompanied her sister to the port city of Liverpool. When the sisters arrived there, the elder, struck with before-the-fact homesickness and the enormity of her decision — it was likely that she would never see her family or her homeland again — backed out. Her ticket became available.

I don’t know if there’s any written record — a letter or a diary — that explains the details of what happened. The story, as it was told me to me, was that Catherine took a big life-changing gamble. Now that her older sister was not going to America but had a paid-for ticket, she went in her place.

She was expecting to return home after seeing Big Sis off, so she couldn’t have had much time to decide to go in her place. I can only imagine her weighing the pros and cons of taking the ticket. Staying in Ireland meant risking a slow and painful death either by starvation or one of those horrible 19th century diseases. Going to America meant going alone – and forever — to a strange land where she knew no one.

Things for Catherine, I’m told, ended happily. She landed safely in the United States at Ellis Island, and from there she somehow ended up in Ohio where she met and married a man by the name of O’Hara. They had a large family together, and although life was sometimes hard, it was good.

You might wonder why I would know a story about a woman born almost two hundred years ago and half a world away. The answer is simple: she’s my great-great grandmother.

Not only do I have the number one Google entry for “stagette”, I also have the number one entry for “breast scarves”. There’s nothing like a link from the Reverse Cowgirl to get a lot of attention. Thanks, Ms. Cowgirl!

I’ve received a fair number of emails asking where these scarves can be bought. I’ve sent email to the friend who sent me the pictures, and hopefully I’ll hear back soon.

Just in case you hadn’t noticed, my other more tech-oriented blog, The Happiest Geek on Earth, is back on active duty.

This is just another reminder to nominate The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century for the Third Annual Weblog Awards.

C’mon, folks, haven’t I been really entertaining and informative? Has any other blog given you this in 2002?:

• Has Doc Searls ever compiled an amusing list of what he did over the past 14 New Year’s Eves, covering the globe from Toronto to Halifax to New York to San Francisco to Prague to Manila? Nope.
• Have either Moxie or The Reverse Cowgirl ever accidentally become a go-go dancer? (Hmmm…actually, I’d like to see that…)
• Have the guys from Little Green Footballs or Steven den Beste ever had to avoid the body cavity search room at U.S. Customs, armed only with quick wit and an accordion? (I know that some people would like to see them try and fail…)
• Has James Lileks ever gone on a date that led to a job?
• Would diveintomark take the unpopular (that is, conservative) side of the World Youth Day argument?
• Has Davezilla ever appeared on Canada’s music video station?
• Who else has written on all sorts of topics, covering suits, getting fired, taking chances, trash-talking accountants, know-nothing demonstrating, literal interpretations of the Bible and banks?
• And finally, did the guy who swept last year’s awards, Wil Wheaton, ever get picked up by a limo full of women on a stagette? Well, did you, Mr. Acting Ensign of the U.S.S. flippin’ Enterprise? Did you…punk?

And I did it all for you.

So please…won’t you nominate me? Perhaps for Best Canadian Weblog, Most Humorous Weblog, Best-Kept-Secret Weblog or dare I even dream…(cue Dr. Evil awed voice) Weblog of the Year?

Remember, folks, if I get into the running, I will run a story I’ve been holding back for just such an occasion: my worst dates ever! Worthy of at least one FOX movie of the week, I tell you!

Do me this favour, willya? You know I’ll give back twice the love I get.

This weekend, as part of a housemate-bonding experience, I participated in…

…in…

Oh crap, it’s just too embarassing.

Oh yeah, I have no shame. Never mind.

Anyhow, it was a…sigh…Dungeons and Dragons game.

I can’t remember which one of my housemates suggested the game, but if it’s a way to get Kenji to participate more in house stuff, why not? Prior to living here, he lived in shared-accomodation arrangements where he was just occupying a room and paying rent. We don’t do that here in Big Trouble in Little China; I prefer a more family-like setting rather than being people who’ve just grouped under one roof to cut down expenses. So D&D it was.

D&D has undergone some changes since last I played it, and I’m not talking about the rules of the game. I’m talking about the demographic fo the players. In my day, it was strictly the province of the boys from the AV squad and computer room at school; these days, people from grade school to senior citizens play it, and a surprising number of women do. My ex-girlfriend, among them, and she wasn’t your stereotypical geek girl. At a party held by my hippie-chick friend Margaret, a number of comely twenty-something women were discussing their characters, and I think Paul was getting aroused by the conversation. I guess it shouldn’t come off as too surprising — just take a look at the Silver Snail, Toronto’s premier comic book store (and falling distance from my house) and you’ll find a healthy number of women among the customers.

But enough justification. This was full-on geek central.

The original plan was for the house crew — me, Kenji and Paul — and a couple of Kenji’s friends to play, with Paul as DM, but as soon as Chris and Rob — heard, they wanted in. Rob ended up not being able to make it, but Chris showed, with a bag full of D&D dice.

“They have 30-sided dice now?” I said, marveling at his green crystal plastic polyhedron. Damn, I’ve been seriously Rip van Winkled.

Kenji’s friends Will and Simon brought their own dice too. Simon brought his copy of the Player’s Handbook, third edition. Paul owns the core set of books, the Dungeon Master’s Guide, Player’s Handbook and Monster Manual. All third edition, with a number of siginificant changes to the rules since my days of the first edition.

I pulled out my original copy of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, first edition, its cover showing the cheesily painted demon battling the hapless adventure party. “This is the real shit, yo!” I told them. “Old school, boyeeeee!”

Kenji played a fighter/rogue (a “rogue” is what a “thief” is now called), Simon and Will were rangers, Chris was a wizard, and I played a cleric named Gregor Samsa. If any of them got the Kafka reference, they didn’t say anything. Illiterate barabrians. I tried to use my Jesus figure (“with gliding action!”) as a game token, but he was a bit too big. I ended up using a button that read “Overthrow the DJ”.

The party ended up being robbed by a highwayman, mind-controlled by a high-level wizard, and nearly killed off twice by some pretty well-armed gnolls. Gregor Samsa did a lot of ass-kicking and ass-saving — he’s the padre who’s one bad madre. We’d have had an easier time if some of us — no names — hadn’t decided to run off in the other direction, thinking “I can take these guys myself!” Kenji’s character always got critically wounded in the first round of battle; a lot of the time we’d tease him by asking if he could do something a little more useful than just lie there and bleed. At the end of the session, the party barely survived, but netted enough experience to go up to the next level. Eat your heart out, Frodo Baggins!

I think I can live with the stigma of playing this infernal game every now and again. After all, what’s the worst that can happen?