Richard Dooling

RAPTURE FOR THE GEEKS: (RETAIL)
END-USER LICENSE AGREEMENT (EULA)

Published: October 7th, 2008

1. GRANT OF LICENSE. Richard Dooling grants you the following rights provided that you comply with all terms and conditions of this EULA:

2. INSTALLATIONS AND USE. You may install, use, access, display and read ONE COPY OF THIS BOOK on a SINGLE PERSON, such as an adult, man, woman, teenager, or other human person. This book may NOT be read by more than one person.

3. MANDATORY ACTIVATION. The license rights granted under this EULA are limited to the first thirty (30) minutes after you install the book by opening it, unless you supply information required to activate your licensed copy of the book in the manner described on this page. You may also need to reactivate the book if you modify yourself or alter your personality. For instance if you grow older and more mature, develop a mental illness, change your diet, or receive any artificial limbs or joints, pacemakers, implants, or organ transplants, then you may need to reactivate your license before you will be allowed to reaccess the book.

4. UNLICENSED USE. This book contains technological measures designed to prevent unlicensed use of the book. For instance, an embedded microchip allows the publisher to scan your retinas from time to time and make sure that it’s really YOU and ONLY YOU reading this book and not some random book pirate. Rest assured that Richard Dooling will not collect any personally identifiable information from you during this process, just blood, tissue, and bone marrow samples, which may be taken (forcefully if necessary) to determine DNA. If you are not using a licensed copy of the book, you are not allowed to read the book or read subsequent updates to the book.

5. BOOK TRANSFER. You may make a one-time permanent transfer of the book to another end-user. But after the transfer you must completely remove all knowledge about the book from the brain of the former person who read the book. If the book was so memorable that knowledge cannot be completely removed from the former person, then execute the former person using the most humane measures listed in Appendix A and mail the enclosed proof-of-execution and a notarized certificate of death (with a raised seal) to Richard Dooling at the address below.

6. TERMINATION. Without prejudice to any other rights, Richard Dooling may terminate this EULA if you fail to comply with the terms and conditions of this EULA. In such event, you must destroy all copies of the book and all of its component parts, destroy any notes you made about the book, and forget any parts of the book that you may be tempted to remember. If you find the book simply unforgettable then decapitate yourself and mail your head to Richard Dooling for a $50.00 rebate. Be sure to enclose your original sales receipt (no copies!), the bar code from the book jacket, and the enclosed rebate form, which you should take care to complete before detaching and mailing your head.

7. PROTECT YOURSELF! Read only genuine books purchased from an authorized reseller. Do not download pirated books! Anytime you read counterfeit books, you are at serious risk. In a recent study, an organization hired by Richard Dooling found that 25% of the websites offering pirated copies of books also attempted to install spyware and trojan horse programs that can compromise your operating system and make it impossible for you to properly view pornography on your computer.

Make sure your copy of Rapture For The Geeks is GENUINE! Ensure that you have easy access to book updates, sequels, second and third editions, book downloads, technical support, and special offers. Validate your copy of Rapture For The Geeks NOW with Richard Dooling’s Genuine Advantage!

Okay, now if you are sure that you have a GENUINE copy of Rapture For The Geeks, it’s probably safe to proceed.

Excerpted from Rapture For The Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ, by Richard Dooling.

Survival Of The Smartest

Will The Geeks Inherit The Earth?

Purchase From Amazon.

Your User Profile

(Excerpted from Rapture For The Geeks, by Richard Dooling.)

User, noun. The word computer professionals use when they mean “idiot.”

–Dave Barry

There are only two industries that refer to their customers as “users.”

–Edward Tufte

It’s time to launch the web browser of your imagination and surf the undiscovered future of technology, but first a few questions to assist you in formulating your user profile.

Are you addicted to your computer? To the Internet? To e-mail? To your Treo, iPhone, or CrackBerry? To computer gaming? Or maybe to computer programming? Perhaps you’re not addicted (and you don’t overeat or drink too much or take drugs), maybe you just like to configure and personalize your favorite software, until it does just what you want it to do, just the way you want it done. Do you tweak the options and widgets and custom codes on your Blogspot or your WordPress weblog for hours on end, until your little corner of the Internet is “clean” and well-designed? Have you logged onto the MySpace at 2 A.M. asking, “Help! I can’t get my marquee scroll generator to work! How can I make my table backgrounds transparent, the border invisible, my photos appear to hover, and my hyperlinks underlined and 12-point Garamond?” Are you the type who customizes menus, macros, and toolbars for hours at a time, sometimes for more hours than you’ll ever spend actually doing the task you had in mind when you started the program?

Here’s the big question: Do you ever feel that you once used computers and computer programs as tools to get a specific job done, but lately you wonder if Dave Barry was onto something when he wrote: “I am not the only person who uses his computer mainly for the purpose of diddling with his computer.”
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graphics by kevin ryan (kryan at dday dot com)

Mothers Against World of Warcraft

(Excerpted from Rapture For The Geeks, by Richard Dooling.)

Let’s say that the Singularity is really coming, and let’s say it’s powered by Moore’s Law and Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns. Call the Technological Singularity a cardinal virtue or a fatal flaw: Our reach will always exceed our grasp, and we’ll keep inventing and experimenting, until we invent our way into doom and extinction, or paradise, whichever comes first. Suppose we really are a race of technology addicts on autopilot. Assume the Singularity has all of the going for it. Suppose it’s truly an irresistible force. Are there any immovable objects in its path? Answer: What happens if Moms don’t like the Singularity?

Your lovely wife (may I pretend her name is Wilma?) is your soul mate, mother of your children, keeper of the eternal family flame, sun at the center of the domestic solar system. God couldn’t be everywhere, so He made her. It is her name on the lips and in the hearts of your children. She is the holiest creature in God’s creation. She is the one who can take the place of all others, but whose place no one else can take. “All love begins and ends here,” said Thomas Jefferson, “the keystone in the arch of matrimonial happiness.”

Wilma has but a single flaw: She has no feeling for the Singularity, nor does she care to hear a single Singularitarian word about it. Technology for Wilma means e-mail two or three times a week, exchanging photos of family and friends, a little online shopping, and a little online banking. She has no taste for machine building, conquering World of Warcraft empires, or power programming.

You and Wilma have a 13-year-old son, Will, who deeply resents his mother’s failure to appreciate his vocation in life. To Wilma, son Will is an above average student at Middlebury Middle School, associate editor of the Middlebury Mail student newspaper and member of the chess club (because Wilma forced him to select at least two extracurricular activities other than playing Magic: The Gathering after school). Wilma does not want to hear about her son’s higher calling and how he leads a double life: At the tender age of 13, Will is also a Level 60 Shaman in a World of Warcraft guild named “The League of Pain.”

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Principal photography commenced on Dolan’s Cadillac in Regina, Saskatchewan on May 26th and finished in Las Vegas in mid-July. Shooting took place in Regina and Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan and Las Vegas, Nevada.

Currently, Dolan’s is in post-production in Regina, Saskatchewan and Toronto. Nice summary here.

Anyone familiar with the Stephen King novella, Dolan’s Cadillac (from Mr King’s Nightmares And Dreamscapes collection), knows that the story belongs on the silver screen.

We are lucky to have Christian Slater, Wes Bentley, and Emmanuelle Vaugier playing the major roles. Jeff Beesley is a hot new Canadian director, working with Gerald Packer as director of photography. Screenplay by Richard Dooling, adapting Stephen King’s story.

Produced by Film Bridge International and Mind’s Eye Entertainment.

Writing in his Everybody’s Business column for the New York Times, Ben Stein wonders whether “connectedness” is even worse than just overrated:

WHAT would we do if cellphones and P.D.A.’s disappeared? We would be forced to think again. We would have to confront reality. My own life is spent mostly with men and women of business. I have been at this for a long time now, and what I have seen of the loss of solitude and dignity is terrifying among those who travel and work, or even who stay still and work. They are slaves to connectedness. Their work has become their indentured servitude. Their children and families are bound to the same devices, too . . . [more]

More of Ben Stein’s Everybody’s Business columns.

‘The Dumbest Generation’ by Mark Bauerlein - Los Angeles Times
The way Bauerlein sees it, something new and disastrous has happened to America’s youth with the arrival of the instant gratification go-go-go digital age. The result is, essentially, a collective loss of context and history, a neglect of “enduring ideas and conflicts.” Survey after painstakingly recounted survey reveals what most of us already suspect: that America’s youth know virtually nothing about history and politics. And no wonder. They have developed a “brazen disregard of books and reading.”

Writing in The Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr asks Is Google Making Us Stupid? “My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle . . . [more]

“Passing the Turing test–the holy grail of artificial intelligence (AI), whereby a human conversing with a computer can’t tell it’s not human–may now be possible in a limited way with the world’s fastest supercomputer (IBM’s Blue Gene), according to AI experts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

RPI is aiming to pass AI’s final exam this fall, by pairing the most powerful university-based supercomputing system in the world with a new multimedia group designing a holodeck, a la Star Trek.” See EETimes.com - AI researchers think ‘Rascals’ can pass Turing test.

Adam Rogers, Senior Editor at Wired, has a tribute to Gary Gygax, inventor of Dungeons & Dragons and much of the social structure of Web2, Geek Love - Sunday New York Times. Gorgeous flow chart, too!

The hoary old adage is that publishing a book is like giving birth: It takes nine months.

Nowadays, we have electronic typesetting, high-speed presses, print-on-demand, and oceans of text gushing through fiberoptic pipes onto computer screens all over the planet.

So why does it still take so long to publish a dead-tree edition?

Writing in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, Rachel Donadio explains how technology may move at the speed of light, but humans still need nine months to properly prepare, market, and distribute a book:

Technology may be speeding up the news cycle, but in publishing, things actually seem to be slowing down. Although publishers can turn an electronic file into a printed book in a matter of weeks — as they often do for hot political titles, name-brand authors or embargoed celebrity biographies likely to be leaked to the press — they usually take a year before releasing a book. Why so long? In a word, marketing.

Essay - Waiting For It - New York Times, by Rachel Donadio.

If the Singularity arrives anytime soon, perhaps super-intelligent computers will take over writing, editing and publishing.

Until then, it will take at least nine months to publish a book.

If you haven’t tried Google Book Search yet, try it out on a few of my books.

If you have the time, you can read the whole book online:

• Critical Care: A Novel, by Richard Dooling;
• White Man’s Grave: A Novel, by Richard Dooling;
• Brain Storm: A Novel, by Richard Dooling;
• Bet Your Life: A Novel, by Richard Dooling

Google’s book scanning project is controversial (see, e.g., Google’s Moonshot, by Jeffrey Toobin at The New Yorker), but a quick survey of the titles available shows that most publishers are wisely going along with the plan.

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.

–Winston Churchill

Most writers worry about rejection, not acceptance. Ray Bradbury says that the successful writer has to deal with both: “You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.”

Several articles on this site (usually in the “For Writers” section) offer advice to aspiring writers who are trying to find agents or publishers. The most common question I’m asked (after “How do I get an agent?”) is : “How many query letters should I send out?” Or, “I found an agent willing to represent me, but she has submitted my manuscript to five (or eight, or twelve) publishers, with no takers. What should I do now?”

Most writers start out asking “Is my writing any good?” but that inevitably leads to the question: “Is it good enough for me to get paid?” Literary agents are pretty good at spotting what sells, or at least what they can sell to an editor at any given time. Good agents know the marketplace. Writers, even working writers, don’t usually know what sells. Writers know how to make interesting sentences, some of which may sell, others not so much.

If you have read my advice to aspiring writers seeking tips on how to get published, then you know that I don’t subscribe to the “you can do it, just keep at it” school of mentoring. Obviously not everyone who wants to write for hire can get paid to write, just as not everyone who wants to get paid for playing baseball succeeds just by trying really hard. It’s true that hard work matters more than talent, which is fairly common, but sometimes hard work alone won’t do it.

Sometimes would-be writers seem to be asking: “How hard should I try?” Answer: Try as hard as you want to try. And don’t be afraid to quit. I’ve quit several times myself, and it always leads to something new and interesting . . . to write about. In my case, at various times, I have sworn off writing and traveled through Africa, gone to law school and become a working lawyer, and learned some computer programming. I wouldn’t trade any of those three endeavors for equal parts of writing time. Maybe I’d feel differently if I pulled down million-dollar book advances, but I doubt it. As Tom Stoppard put it: “Every exit is an entrance somewhere else.”

If you need a push before you can give yourself permission to quit, read Aspiring Writers: The Worst Advice You’ll Ever Read, by Charles Hugh Smith. Disheartening? You bet, but all it says is that if you are in the writing game for money or glory, you’ll probably break your own heart. Better to be in it because you love reading and writing. Sure it’s nice to get published, but then it starts all over again. No sooner do you get published, then you want a New York Times Review, a good one, please. Next, the bestseller list, of course. Annie Lamott talks about this when giving advice to aspiring writers:

Almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy, a hologram - it’s the eagle on your credit card that only seems to soar. What’s real is that if you do your scales every day, if you slowly try harder and harder pieces, if you listen to great musicians play music you love, you’ll get better.

–Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Or as Aristotle put it: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” Maybe it’s a bad habit? That’s up to you.

If you think writing is a waste of time unless you get paid for it, then quit right now. If you intend to write no matter what, then keep writing and keep sending your stuff off to agents, no matter how often it gets rejected. What’s to lose, except pride and postage? Collect rejection slips and be proud of them. (Almost every writer saves them; someday a literary neuro-psychologist probably will explain why.) Getting discouraged is a daily rite of passage. Take a look at Stephen King’s On Writing and his account of how he tossed his first stab at Carrie into the trash. That’s right, he threw it away. And bear in mind, dear reader, these were the days of typewriters, not computers. It was bye-bye one-and-only draft. On trash day, his wife Tabitha salvaged it and convinced Stephen to keep going and finish the thing. (See On Writing, pages 75-77.) When Doubleday bought the manuscript of Carrie for $2,500, the publisher had to send a telegram, because the Kings were living in a trailer and couldn’t afford a phone.

Consider the publishing history of Harry Potter. True, Rowling found an agent on her second try (most unusual, just ask any author), but then the manuscript was rejected by publisher after publisher: “Too strange! Too long for a children’s book! Too unbelievable! Sorcerers? Spells?” Eventually, Bloomsbury, a new publishing house at the time, bought the manuscript for roughly $5,000, and then printed 500 copies for the first run. That’s how high their expectations were.

Just recently, Catherine O’Flynn, 37, joined the likes of H. G. Wells, William Golding, Graham Greene and J. K. Rowling by finding spectacular success after a string of rejections when her mystery story What Was Lost took the First Novel prize at the Costa Book Awards (formerly known as the Whitbread Prize): Rejected author has last laugh. If you seek particulars on how many rejections are “normal” or “enough,” consult the likes of Miss Snark, always funny and a working literary agent with great advice about the marketplace and query letters (although, as of 20 May 2007, her blog appears to have gone dark).

Have a look at today’s New York Times Book Review and The Story of ‘Night’. In the late 1950s, fifteen publishers rejected Elie Wiesel’s account of his time at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, before the small firm Hill & Wang finally accepted it. You can empathize with the editors who rejected it, can’t you? “Oh, here’s a cheery, heart-warming story: ‘My time at Auschwitz.’” As of today, Night has sold 10 million copies, only 3 million of which are due to Oprah’s recent endorsement. The point isn’t that you too can sell 10 million copies of your book. Night could have sold only 5,000 copies, and it would still be a great book. The point is that you can’t steer by what the marketplace seems to think is “good” at any given moment. Editors, agents, and publishers don’t know what readers will want next. They can make educated guesses, but nobody knows until the book comes out.

An old, inside publishing joke sums it up. “We’re publishing ten books next year,” says the publisher to the business reporter, “and two of them will be bestsellers.” The reporter asks, “Which ones are the bestsellers?” The publisher replies, “We don’t know yet.”

Finally, if you get downcast (that would be the status quo), visit Literary Rejections On Display, or consider Hemingway’s enduring observation: “That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.”

Other than self-discipline, there’s no substitute for finding someone who believes in you besides your lonesome.

My wife made a crucial difference . . . . If she had suggested that the time I spent writing stories . . . in the laundry room of our rented trailer . . . was wasted time, I think a lot of the heart would have gone out of me. . . . Whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband ), I smile and think, There’s someone who knows. Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.

–Stephen King, On Writing.

See also, Good Books On Publishing and How To Query A Literary Agent.

Tim O’Reilly comments on Verizon’s latest promise to open its network to all appliances and applications in Static on the Dream Phone - New York Times

“THE Internet and the cellphone are on a collision course . . . In the future, the cellphone and similar wireless devices, not the personal computer, will be the primary interface to the cloud of information services that we now call the Internet. The demand for Internet-style applications on the phone — e-mail, maps, photo and video sharing, social networking and even Internet telephony — is exploding. More . . .Static on the Dream Phone - New York Times

Thirteen days into the Hollywood Writers’ Strike and the blogs have sprung to life with daily accounts of writers walking the lines in Los Angeles. Screenwriters John August and Craig Mazin have running accounts of what it’s like out there in the first full-scale WGA strike since 1988. According to the Los Angeles Times, negotiations are scheduled to resume on November 26th.

The LA Times also has an entire section devoted to strike coverage. Many predict that this strike will last longer than the 1988 strike (which lasted 22 weeks), because the issues are more complex, and the parties are farther apart in negotiations than they were twenty years ago: Writers Seek Bigger Slice of Half-Eaten Pie and Writers’ Strike Opens New Window On Hollywood.

Douglas McGrath’s recent article in Newsweek does an excellent job of summing up: Why We’re On Strike: A screenwriter on Hollywood’s labor pains. McGrath’s article links to this excellent YouTube video, Voices of Uncertainty, which says it all.

In the meantime, some writers have diverted their energies to bypassing the studios and doing what they do best: entertainment: “Colbert Report” Writers Parody A Greedy Producer.

Fiction

• Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson (Winner!)
• Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinski
• Varieties of Disturbance: Stories, by Lydia Davis
• Then We Came To The End, by Josua Ferris
• Like You’d Understand Anway, by Jim Shepard

Nonfiction

• Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA,, by Tim Weiner (Winner!)
• Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticat
• God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everyting, by Christopher Hitchens
• Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, by Woody Holton
• Ralph Ellison: A Biography, by Arnold Rampersad

Poetry

• Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005, by Robert Haas (Winner!)
• Magnetic North, by Linda Gregerson
• The House On Boulevard St., by David Kirby
• Old Heart: Poems, by Stanley Plumly
• Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006, by Ellen Bryant Voigt