I’m not crazy about Blu-ray, so I started to think of alternative ways to deliver the 1080p version of the movie and came across these usb bracelets. When I started to think about what else you could put on it, I realized there was a connection to one of the ideas in the movie: that in 2025 the Cloud was repossessed. I like the idea that people can also use it to store their own locally owned data, as insurance against that day. Or even if nothing happens, for a time when you make the choice to get off the Cloud (or the grid) and find out that something you clicked I Agree to years ago limits that choice.

You can buy it here. More thoughts below.

There’s lots of ideas in the movie. Will the Nigerian Spam Cartel really have a military? Will a decimated Zurich make the slums of Toronto look good? For that matter, do I really believe that China will be the first world and North American become the third? I dunno! I’m not a futurist. I haven’t done a ton of economic research, but then again, it’s rare to find a person writing about zombie apocalypses who have done extensive research on disease vectors: that’s where the suspension of disbelief comes in. My role is to tease out the undercurrents of fear and anxiety that exist in our culture to explore this possible future, to populate it with people rather than graphs, to give slang and specificity to it: partially to stimulate political discussion and partially for entertainment. Science fiction can be an inoculation against the future it’s predicting. Without giving the surveillance state a name, I have no doubt that Big Brother would be watching much more closely. There’s always gonna be a mix of sincerity and satire in my stuff — but I think it’s telling that my most sincere work of science fiction, Everyone In Silico, is still inspiring awesome videos like this ten years after I released it.

The dangers of slowly consolidating power is not a very sexy battle cry. I used leaving HarperCollins as a way to discuss this issue in 2000 and have spent a fair amount of time talking about Rupert Murdoch. Of course he’s a terrible person: but he’s just a particularly egregious example of what happens when we allow unlimited consolidation to occur. These days people will bring up Murdoch to me as if finally, my nemesis has been caught: that it’s my time to pull a Malcolm X and opine that chickens have come home to roost. But to be honest I feel like he’s just so consistently outraged people by not playing nice and laying bare the unfairness of the system that he is, in a weird way, a scapegoat.

Our society has enabled Rupert by rewarding him for his unethical behavior with money and influence — the phone hacking scandal is just the most obviously evil stuff.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy he’s getting a licking. But my point is that we have to think through ways to limit consolidation of power in these internet services, because otherwise we are building a huge machine for unknown people to use. Sure it’s useful now, but a few generations down the line some equally unethical Murdoch-esque person will weasel their way into the machine’s cockpit and start wreaking havoc on the world. It’s kind of irrelevant if that person happens to be Chinese or not.

A big part of the reason I like community organizing, beyond the social and cultural aspects, is that it allows me to design systems. Beyond their cleverness and elegance, systems are great at automating routine things and I find this useful in a number of ways in my life.

When I’m working on a book, I have a number of words I write per week — 5000. I break this down further into 4 sessions of 1250 words each. Each session takes 3-4 hours. I can then schedule four 4 hour sessions a week and no longer have to think about it. I don’t waste mental energy on wondering if I’m writing enough. I know at this rate I’ll have a novel-length draft in six months. I often move the sessions around in the week, but pretty much always have my 5000 words done by the end of the week, often by Friday. I don’t presume that that particular system will work for everyone, but I do feel that some system will work for most people: and that it can allay feelings of guilt and angst. It’s a matter of designing a few and playtesting them.

If you find yourself mired in questions like “Should I even bother?” or “Am I good enough?” it’s because you’re giving yourself too much choice: if you can commit to making an overriding decision at the beginning of the project it’s easier to ignore these questions throughout the project itself. Because, let’s face it, over a six month project you’re bound to feel negative at some point and you shouldn’t let it derail you.

Veganism, for me, is a systemic approach for expressing my discomfort with the hypocritical way we love animals until they’re too delicious. Rather than making a million tiny decisions weighing the consequences of my consumer choices, I have made a single, fairly substantial one. How do you want to allocate your brain’s processing power?

I’ve talked quite a bit about how agenda books offload a lot of stress and mental energy onto a tool in Time Management for Anarchists, but that’s another system.

I imagine I’ve lost a few people already with my machine metaphors and quantification. Ah well. Some of you are saying, “Systems ARE great! Until they’re driving tanks over us?”

Of course most systems are chock full of power dynamics, but just because most computers run Windows doesn’t mean yours can’t run Linux. Autonomous systems are a way of getting shit done without a hierarchy, because the system itself has a kind of abstract authority. If you’ve built a system that has a track record of success or of producing good stuff, then people will often trust it.

Personally, I’m always uncomfortable in a role of authority, but I like helping people make stuff. I’m currently rethinking a process of gamemaking education where instead of being led by a teacher or coordinator, that role rotates from person to person with each session. The real learning comes from making the game, and to be guided away from making obvious mistakes by teachers actually deprives you of a more memorable object lesson, and sometimes deprives you of happy accidents that are creatively enriching.

I mean, when you walk you don’t think about each and every footfall, do you? You’re daydreaming, scheming, ignorant of the efficient meat machinery below your brainstem. Embrace automata!

~~~

Matt Hammill did the illustration.

Click through to see the list and Sanford Kong‘s awesome concept art. Get in touch at casting@lofiscifi.com with any questions/ideas.




Actors

• The Documentarian: An older Asian man, 40+.
• The restaurant owner: A 30+ Asian man or woman.
• The down-on-her-luck lady: A 40+ Caucasian woman.
• The high-flying businesswoman: A 30+ Asian woman.
• A well-off older gent: A 50+ man.
• Extras/Backgrounders: If you don’t fit any of these, we’d love to have you as one of the crowd of doodlefaces.

Art Dept./Crew

• Sound: if you’re available and reliable, we can train you.
• Lighting: If you like to sculpt with shadows, let us know.
• Wardrobe: Can you imagine what folks will be wearing in 2040? Know how to customize Value Village finds?
• Set dec: We have to dress up locations so they look different. Hopefully you have better ideas than “a lot of tin foil”.
• P.A.s: If you’re willing to be an extra pair of hands for the experience.

Locations
We have insurance.

• a luxury car/limo
• a bar
• a doctor’s office
• a doctor’s waiting room
• a convenience store
• a toy store

Get in touch at casting@lofiscifi.com.

In 2040, a generation of Torontonians have grown up after the economic collapse of the west. The movie consists of episodes of a documentary series popular in mainland China about the bad jobs some white people have — the plucky and resilient souls unlucky enough to be born into the slums of North America are both amusing and moving to the Chinese audience.

We’re doing auditions on Saturday, June 6, 12-4. If you’re in Toronto, please check out the roles we’re trying to fill — there’s a variety of ethnicities and ages.

We are looking for non-union actors for the following roles. If you have any questions or are interested in trying out email your details to casting@lofiscifi.com and we’ll give you the details for the auditions on Saturday, June 6, 12-4pm in Parkdale, Toronto.

Oscar is a digital janitor in his 20s/30s, and has to manually cover up logos for copyright reasons in the future’s answer to Google StreetView maps. He doesn’t really know why he’s on a show about bad jobs, because he thinks his job is pretty great — he gets to see history come alive in front of his eyes, like the garbagemen who fancy themselves like archaeologists. But the long hours and loneliness are getting to him, especially since the death of his mother.

Gary and Karen are baby-makers in their 20s/30s. They assemble robot baby dolls for the children of the wealthy in Asia. They’re so indistinguishable from real babies that the crying, diapers and feeding of a half-dozen units at once is driving the couple a little crazy and straining their relationship. Both of them are hugely overqualified for the job, but while Gary has a reasonable ten-year plan, the more ambitious Karen would do anything to be making battlebots now.

Anton and Toph are silk collectors in their 20s. Twenty years ago a herd of gigantic spiders ran amok over the eastern seaboard after a genelab outbreak, leaving behind buildings swathed in spider web silk. Although highly toxic and difficult to collect, people like Anton and Toph risk their lives to get it — it’s worth its weight in gold as an ultrastrong building material. Anton, the enthusiastic and delusional older brother, loves the idea of becoming famous for collecting the Tower silk. Toph, the more intelligent younger brother who actually does the collecting, knows it’s a deathtrap.

Serina is human spam in her 20s/30s. She makes a living by mentioning brands and products in casual conversation, and is credited based on their status and wealth. Because of the life she’s chosen, she’s disconnected from friends and family but protected by a lipstick-sized tazer and her “people” in the Nigerian cartel. A chameleon and professionally skilled at reinvention, her good humour and friendliness is only skin deep — beneath it is a cold and ruthless survivor.

Other parts

• the Documentarian, an Asian man (Mandarin speaking a plus)
• the show host, an Asian woman (Mandarin speaking a plus)
• Harry, a heavyset Caucasian in 40s/50s/60s
• Tom, an alpha male office worker in his 20s/30s
• Leo, a beta male office worker in his 20s/30s
• Avinash, an east Indian male in his 30s/40s
• Nat, a Caucasian male in his 20s/30s
• Mr. Wilson, a Caucasian male in his 40s/50s
• two eight year old boys
• two Asian men, 30s-40s
• a man in his 60s-70s

This is such an ambitious project that if you’re interested, I’m pretty sure we’ll find a part for you to play — it might be as a background extra or it might be as a Director of Photography, but you won’t know if you don’t get in touch!

On November 11th, 2020, we’ll be able to have a discussion that seems ungrateful or spiteful now: were the veterans of World War II heroes, or survivors? Is Remembrance Day actually about thinking about the specific soldiers who died, or about keeping the idea of soldiering alive?

But today, talking critically about Remembrance Day feels like spitting in the faces of the old men who sell poppy pins. These guys have every reason to believe: they have seen and sometimes done horrific things that are only redeemed by the idea that war is necessary and honourable. And for those of us who buy and wear the poppies, it’s a way to participate in history — a history that we don’t understand, but are grateful for.

I grew up feeling like that. I recited “In Flanders’ Fields” for my elementary school ceremony, and to this day it’s the only poem I know off by heart. And as a teenager the glamour and allure of soldiering hooked in deeper. The idea of being given a gun and told to kill Nazis? Exciting isn’t the word. Ecstatic is closer. To be able to unleash my rage against a clear-cut evil? Too good to be true.

Because it isn’t true, I realized as an adult. Most wars are not like the Good War: armies are weapons that often fall into the wrong hands. And even World War II, an anomaly of moral clarity, can’t be viewed in a vacuum. The Germans were primed for it, vulnerable to Hitler’s charismatic insanity, from the humiliation and punishment they received as the losers of World War I. People seem to forget that WWI was fought for relatively stupid reasons. Poppies induce forgetfulness, after all.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to draw out the opiate metaphor. I’ll leave that for the broader and more divisive debates of 2020 when we can take off the kid gloves. Today, as you go around town, squint a little and see what I see whenever I see a poppy on someone’s chest: not a flower, but a bullet wound. Because more than anything else, wars are about red holes blooming in the chests of average, well-intentioned people.

Other than actually writing, the most important thing to do as a writer is get your writing out to readers. You get feedback from readers, connect with fellow writers who share your sensibility, & you get a sense of closure that allows you to move on to your next project.

Some people think that getting published by a traditional book publisher is the only way to get your writing out to readers. There’s a real bottleneck here — even though there’s some benefit to the publishers in this circumstance, I would argue that writers don’t benefit from it, readers don’t benefit from it, and neither does our writing culture. This perception of the editor-gatekeepers just creates a tense and risk-averse climate.

So, I’m going to detour around the bottleneck and focus on the diversity of methods writers can use to get their writing out there. The ten things I list are often considered different mediums and require collaboration and/or different skillsets, but writing can be central to them.

1. ZINES

I started publishing my work almost 20 years ago, when I was 17. I photocopied my stories and rants in an independent magazine or zine and sold them at punk shows and through the mail. I moved from that to publishing short story collections and a novella, digest and saddlestitched (folded and stapled 8.5×11). It’s cheap, it’s immediate, and it’s tangible.

Quick Tips:
-there’s a vibrant, fun community: hundreds of zinemakers and zine readers meet at the annual Canzine (Oct 26th)
-print still rules: you can give a copy of your zine to someone at a party or on a bus and they can read it right away

2. BLOGS
Everybody knows about blogs at this point, and probably a lot of people who would have started zines ten years ago are blogging these days.

Quick Tips:
-the great thing is that they’re easy to start and easy to find; but almost because of that they almost have less weight. Because you have to seek zines out, and people have had to put a lot of work into them, they engender a more loyal and more responsive readership. Hypothetically, it should be much easier to get thoughtful feedback via online comments, but you’re more likely to get it in an actual postal letter.
-there’s a neat project by a local called Monster, Monkey or Spaceman? that allowed people to choose what kind of story he wrote via an online poll, which is obviously easier to do on the web.

3. WEB COMICS
While not that many people read prose fiction on the web, comics are entirely a different story. While in my opinion it’s just as good to photocopy your writing as it is to post it online, I wouldn’t say the same for comics — going online with your comic allows you to do something that’s still too costly for most indie publishers: full colour.

Quick Tips:
-you get an inkling of Ramon’s talent here in b&w but if you check out the colourful lush dreamworlds of his online comic Kukuburi you’ll be in awe
-obviously this is an easier option for you if you can draw, but there’s many examples of really popular comics that get by without drawing talent — XKCD and Dinosaur Comics are two that have cultivated huge readership on the strength of their writing, the latter by local Ryan North

4. AUDIO DRAMA
So did you ever listen to Theatre of the Mind on CHUM FM? Audio drama was really big in the ’40s and ’50s when radio was king and beyond its retro appeal has developed into an art unto itself .

Quick Tips:
-they’re easy to distribute nowadays via podcast — there’s some folks nearby that keep the oldtime spirit alive at Decoder Ring Theatre, which alternates new serials on the Red Panda, Canada’s Greatest Superhero, and Black Jack Justice, private eye
-audio drama is a great way to bring your writing to a different audiences and work with actors in a less complicated way than with…

5. LITTLE MOVIES
Making little movies is really fun — get Celtx, a free open source script writing application, pound out a five or ten minute screenplay, borrow a camera and make it happen. There’s tons of online and indie festivals that are running all the time.

Quick Tips:
-notice I say little movies — start small and make it something you can produce. I wrote and produced a lo-fi sci-fi feature last year but it was seven interconnecting shorts, so it only depended on each of the directors for 12 minutes
-writing scripts that never get made sucks, so make them scripts you can make
-having stuff online is fun, but seeing people watch your movie at a screening is even funner — try both
-but don’t go spending money on upgrading/gadgets/”enabling tech” — that’s a mug’s game. Borrow until you wear out your karma, and then barter. Every dollar you save translates into time to make stuff.

6. TEXT ADVENTURE VIDEOGAMES
Anyone out there play Zork as a kid? Or any text adventure games? Go west, Take sword? They were a type of videogame that was entirely text, and is also known as interactive fiction. IF is an amazing thing: a videogame you can make without programming or graphics skills.

Quick Tips:
-there’s a community of people who write and play these games, and they have a competition each year that often attracts more than 50 new games (one’s happening now! Download and vote!)
-and thanks to this community, there are now tools that make it possible for non-programmers to write these games, one in particular is called Inform 7
-the audience for text games is small but intense
-it’s kind of like poetry in that there’s no money in it, and the audience for it is small, but if you were affected by it in your youth you keep coming back to it — some people had a slim volume of poetry and I had The Lurking Horror

7. MUSIC
Talking about poetry, I’m not much of a fan of it except when it’s sung. My favourite poet is John K. Sampson of Winnipeg’s the Weakerthans (listen!). It’s a little extra effort, to learn how to rhyme and get an instrument, but it definitely makes poetry more accessible.

8. STREET POSTERING
I did a talk at Active Resistance, an anarchist gathering that happened in ’98, about whether it was possible to combine a political activism with science fiction writing. From that, Nalo Hopkinson, Emily Pohl-Weary, me, Renee North and David Findlay formed the Science Friction Action Heroes. We put one page stories on poles – Kensington Market 2020, Queen St. W 2020 and U of T 2020. It was a way to directly become a part of the city in a very tangible way.

9. INDEPENDENT BOOK PUBLISHING
But at this point, you might be saying to yourself, putting stories up on poles? That’s what crazy people do. Jim, I want a book. I want to hold a book in my hands that I wrote. I totally understand, I have five books myself so obviously I think it’s a good way to get your writing out there.

Quick Tips:
-I have a ton of information on every aspect of do-it-yourself publishing here and here
-My one piece of general advice to everyone publishing for the first time is to do a print run of 500 books. It’ll be tempting to do 1000 because it won’t be that much more expensive, but it’s better for your ego and the environment and your storage space not to have ten extra boxes lying around. It took me a few years to sell my first book’s print run of 500

10. CORPORATE BOOK PUBLISHING
Obviously this is an option, but I wanted to put it in is proper context among one of many way to get your writing out there. For many writers it really is a good fit — so long as you don’t feel like it’s your only option. Getting a book deal with a big publisher is like Las Vegas. For some people, Vegas is heaven. I found that although it had a few surreal charms, the legendary free food and drinks were nowhere to be found, and I don’t get excited about gambling, so I don’t think I’ll be going back any time soon… but it was good to see what it was like for myself.

And so while I don’t care about whether I’m old or not, I do care about youth subcultures. I’m a product of them, I propagate their ideas, but I am no longer young. Until recently I was correcting friends and family who were telling me that I was old that — actually — I had one more year of youth. For years I’ve been saying that 37 is officially old. Because it’s not really mid-30s, is it? It’s more… late 30s. And late 30s, let’s face it, is practically 40. Which is old.

However, I was wrong. For me, at least, 36 is old. It’s all about The Dad Voice.

We had a kid last October. At first, I confused The Dad Voice with The Paranoid Voice, the overly cautious killjoy of an inner voice I often ignore without consequence. But recently I’ve been realizing that The Dad Voice is right. Like, all the time. That little voice that says you shouldn’t leave Sidney sitting on the couch? Whoa — there she goes — caught her just in time. That voice that says maybe it’ll annoy Susan if you start moving desks around in the middle of the day, maybe you should ask her first? Yep, that was something that totally could have been avoided. That voice that says, maybe you should have some lunch before you start losing your mind?  Yes. Eating makes everything OK again.

As you see, it’s sometimes kid-related, but not always. It’s a broader shift in my mindset that’s making me more conservative.  I’ve always felt that babies are the most conservatising force on earth, in that they give you a reason to care more about security than freedom, and now I’m seeing it from the inside out.

I am already following The Dad Voice without question. Which is disturbing, but change often is. On the pro side, being well clear of the 18-34 demographic causes most ads to fall laughably short of their target. Less energy spent being infuriated means more energy to feed Sidney.

While you’re on Gamasutra you might want to read this great interview with Jon Mak, a Toronto game maker who’s EverydayShooter builds on the Japanese underground abstract shooters — it features his sweet indie rock guitar strumming against a throbbing colourfield that makes you feel more like you’re collaborating rather than conquering. He deservedly nabbed several awards at the 2007 IGF.

And if all this game writing excites ya, we’re looking for videogame and other guest articles on theculturalgutter.com, let us know if you have an idea for a genre most consider beneath consideration. We pay $50 on publication.

This dovetails nicely with my recent enjoyment of Nature’s weekly podcast. Nature is the science journal — it’s where DNA pioneers Watson and Crick published the double helix model — and I find their approach feeds my appetite perfectly. I don’t tend to like stuff explained to me by a professional explainer: it’s digested and mediated, where the Nature podcast is mostly interviews with scientists on their recent discoveries. You get their jargon, their excitement, their accents, all first hand and for the most part comprehensible even to a science ignoramus like me.

So each week for a while I’m going to write a SF story that riffs off of something I heard on this week’s podcast and post it in the comments. I’m only going to take an hour to write it, so it’ll be pretty rough, and I’ll add the mental steps that I took to get there in notes at the end in case you care. Add your links to the comments if you have creative riffs of your own off the podcast. Dance remixes, for instance. It’s dying for a dance remix for the science geek parties.