In Pursuit of Mysteries

Woo Hoo!

I almost forgot…I get to meet China Miéville tomorrow at work of all places. He’s the author of “Perdido Street Station,” “King Rat,” and, most recently, “The Scar.”

He kicks major ass even if he is a marxist bastard. (That’s a joke, folks.)

He’s doing a book signing at the University Bookstore in Seattle at 7:00 PM tomorrow and must know or be known to some people at Microsoft because he’s lecturing for an hour at 1:30 tomorrow at work.

Science Fiction and Fantasy: Against Myth (or ‘Stop The Tolkien Madness’)

Science Fiction and Fantasy are often associated with mythical thinking, good-v-evil struggles, and epic quests and narratives. I argue that such structures have become stultifying to creativity, and turn much genre fiction into a tired kind of mannerism. Tolkien’s grandchildren must be stopped.

China Mieville was born in 1972, and grew up in London, where he now lives. He has lived and worked in Egypt, Zimbabwe and Boston. He studied Social Anthropology at Cambridge, and has an MSc and PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics.

He has written several short stories and three novels, King Rat, Perdido Street Station (winner of the Arthur C Clarke and British Fantasy Awards, and currently shortlisted for a Hugo) and The Scar.

He is a political activist, having stood in the British general election.

His home page is at http://runagate-rampant.netfirms.com/

Music and such

I bought music and I will face the music…

This evening, I decided to stop by a local music store on a whim after work. On another whim, I looked under “C17H19NO3″, which was a side project of Trust Obey’s John Bergin of years ago. It was a kind of dark, ambient soundscape project. I found that he had just reissued his old CD “Terra Damnata” as a remastered double-CD set with another CD “Terra Null.” Since I trashed my copy of Terra Damnata through my own stupidity years ago and never found it on MP3, I snatched this up quick. I’m ripping copies of the CDs now and am feeling quite happy to have picked it up. It’s cool stuff. A little websearching turned up this url for the project. Bergin is the only person I know of to turn a character from an Elizabeth Hand book into a song.

John Bergin is quite the interesting artist. His original project was “Trust Obey” and he got to team up with Trent Reznor back in the day for it. After repeatedly butting heads and Reznor telling him his stuff had no commercial potential, Bergin left with his music and put it out on his own. It was reasonably popular in a small scale and Bergin liked to stick negative quotes from Reznor on stickers on his albums. Bergin did a soundtrack for the Crow comic book that was issued on a CD with the deluxe reissue a while before the movie was created. He’s also a visual artist and has at least one comic out that he’s done.

As to facing the music, tomorrow I get my annual review from my boss. Microsoft has this graded system for annual reviews where he get judged against your peers in your group and division on a curve. I have no reason to think I’ll do badly but I’m not convinced that I’ll do super well. I had about as good of a review as anyone normally gets for the last two years before this so I don’t particularly want to screw this one. Leaving that aside, how much of a bonus, pay increase and stock you get is all based on this and who doesn’t want more cash? ;-)

Starbucks!

From http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,41189,FF.html

How Much Starbucks Is Too Much?

By: Business
2.0 Staff 
Issue: July 2002

Perhaps it means
something that in San Francisco, there are now more Starbucks
outlets than publicly traded Internet companies. Everybody knows
that one day the franchise's caffeinated growth rate will have to
slow, but the numbers argue that it might not be soon.
 The Fastest-Growing Takeout Franchise
Ever

Starbucks
(SBUX)
poured its first cup of joe in 1971 and didn't open another
store for 16 years. Since then, however, it has added new
outlets faster than any other quick-service franchise, including

McDonald's (MCD).

A Latte in Every Cranny

Starbucks
is ubiquitous in some U.S. metro areas, but it's still novel in
most of the country. Morgan Stanley's Michael Sherrick estimates
that the company could more than double its U.S. outlets without
impeding growth. The "saturation point," he thinks, would be
reached at a little over three stores for every 100,000
residents nationwide.

Plenty of Room for Growth Abroad
Analysts see Starbucks's most inviting growth
opportunity in international markets. Right now the company is
eyeing Europe in particular, where you can find some of the
world's heaviest coffee drinkers but few Starbucks outlet —
yet.