Asilomar
So, I just got back from the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop, at the Asilomar Conference Center, just south of Monterey, on the Pacific coast.
I had a nice time, and gave a presentation on "The DRM Dark Age: Copy Controls and Cultural Continuity" (as well as speaking on BPDG and the LNX-BBC).
The workshop had a variety of extraordinarily geeky people and talks (sample lunch conversation: is the universe actually a computer simulation, as Wolfram and Fredkin seem to suggest?). I was given a genuine fragment of a (failed) communications satellite, not to mention some punched paper tape (by the hobbyist who'd programmed the tape with programs for controlling his serial-port-based LAN full of refurbished classic communications equipment -- such as a genuine teletype!). I heard about the adult entertainment industry, the end-to-end model, software-defined radio, how touchpads work (with a wild story about free-space capacitance), what risks beset satellites in geosynchronous orbit, the open spectrum movement, how academics might be able to break the journal publishers' hold on their research, and all sorts of anecdotes out of various eras in computing history.
I saw some really neat mechanical stuff, and also the movie Brazil, which I'd never seen before and which has got to me the most distressing movie I've ever seen. It's especially eerie if you watch it all alone after midnight in an empty hall in a house by yourself on a huge projection screen with gigantic speakers -- and then the janitors begin to enter the building and unlock the doors one by one as they work their way toward the room where you are watching the movie...
Brazil is the first movie I've seen in ages which doesn't have a happy ending. I find it surprising to see movies with even vaguely ambiguous endings, let alone endings full of pain and despair. I'm thoroughly accustomed to the Hollywood conventions in which everything is required to work out, the hero protagonist to survive and triumph, evil to be punished, and in general the old Comics Code requirements to be followed in broad outline.
And Brazil kept on having moments where it could have ended, credits could have rolled, and the happy-ending or optimistic-ending conventions could have been fulfilled. (In fact, in one scene, I was completely convinced that the movie had ended, as the camera panned upward and the scene began to fade from our view -- the triumph and union of the hero and heroine seemed complete, and maybe even secure. And here the movie suddenly began in earnest.)
It's strange that I should expect the movie format in particular to work this way. Other formats don't work this way; plays are certainly allowed to end on thoroughly sad notes:
A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head.
Go hence to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon'd, and some punishèd.
(And the tradition of plays with sad endings is centuries older yet.)
Maybe the cinematic form contributed to this, but I found Brazil harrowing and terrifying.
On our way back from Asilomar, we went through Monterey, and I got to see Cannery Row, dramatically different from what it must have been like when Steinbeck wrote about it.
