Enough About You: Let's Talk About Me

by Gary Farber

My name is Gary Farber.  You killed my father.  Some of you are familiar with me, and some are not. 

Who the hell am I?

I'm the FNG as an Obsidian Wings front-page blogger.

But!

My first appearance at Obsidian Wings was via a post by Katherine R. on December 16th, 2003, when she linked to a post of mine, and named it Post Of The Week.  This attracted my attention to Obsidian Wings, with its first set of bloggers, Moe Lane, Katherine R,  and Von.

Set the Wayback Machine, Sherman!

Katherine:

[...]

UPDATE:
5. This one is somewhat political, but I have deemed it Blog Post of the Week, so I am posting it anyway:
Amygdala, via Ted Barlow, on the War on Straw--the trend of using stupid comments by stupid political opponents of yours to prove that all your political opponents are stupid:

Sites to avoid trolling and citing: Democratic Underground; Lucianne .com; any blog's comments section.

See, it's arguing against straw because random people you've never heard of who are foaming at the mouth, scientific studies reveal, turn out not to be spokespeople for a given Party or position.

Posted by Katherine R at 01:05 PM in Nothing Else Fit

And thus my first appearance in the attached comment thread:

Thanks. You are obviously highly brilliant and perceptive and very tasty. Er, have very good taste.

I shall eagerly await the $50 you send to every Blog Post Of The Week!

Er, that's what you do, right? I'm sure I read that somewhere, and they wouldn't let it be in print if it weren't true!

(At least feel free to scroll around at my site and see if you can anything else amusing or interesting; I'm quite sure that in no time at all I can piss you off!)

And, really, thanks; nice compliment. Appreciated.

Posted by: Gary Farber | December 16, 2003 at 03:56 PM

Uhh, Gary, you do know about the $100 posting fee on Obsidian Wings?

Posted by: rilkefan | December 16, 2003 at 04:16 PM

What is Gary talking about?

Posted by: Edward | December 16, 2003 at 04:23 PM

Edward, Gary IS amygdala. See Katherine's point 5.

Posted by: rilkefan | December 16, 2003 at 04:25 PM

ahhh...thanks...

Is it a good blog?

Posted by: Edward | December 16, 2003 at 04:38 PM

[...]

"Is it a good blog?"

God, no! Don't look at it Your eyes! They'll burn!

Posted by: Gary Farber | December 16, 2003 at 10:26 PM

[....]

"Procrastination is the most noble cause there is."

Words I've dedicated my life to.

Posted by: Gary Farber | December 16, 2003 at 10:27 PM

"Is it a good blog?"

Well, it just got added to the blogroll...

Posted by: Moe Lane | December 16, 2003 at 10:36 PM

"Is it a good blog?"

Well, it has something bound to infuriate everyone for one reason or another (me with jelousy at the prodigiouness of the posting, f'rex). So I would say yes.

Posted by: angua | December 17, 2003 at 01:52 AM

All sagas have a beginning.  I started commenting on other posts here that day. 

Moe Lane linked to the same piece again that evening -- in those heroic days, Obsidian Wings averaged ten posts a day, my friends -- and added:

[...] PS Why the heck Amygdala isn't already in the blogroll I don't know either. Fixing it right now...

And within a day and a half we were already mixing genres and politics when Katherine decried using The Lord Of The Rings as a talking point:

"I'm not one of the last hopes of Middle Earth, but I play one on TV!"

Okay, can I pre-emptively call a halt to the inevitable use of the new Lord of the Rings movie to prove points about the Iraq war? Andrew Sullivan's post--which you have to scroll down a bit to get to from that link--is the first example I've seen of this for Return of the King, but I remember countless examples when The Two Towers came out last winter.  [....]

And I was responding in comments:

You are entirely correct, Katherine. It is far more compelling and convincing to stick to using Star Wars movies to make relevant analogies to the Islamist-West situation.

The mix was there from the start. 

I started blogging at my own blog, Amygdala, on December 30th, 2001, and have made 8907 posts to date. 

Prior to that, I'd been ranting the same rants, complete with extensive citations and quotes, on Usenet, to the point where I was known enough for my extensive use of search engines to fact-check that, on a few newsgroups, "farbering" became a joking way to refer to "googling."

Prior to that, I'd been writing in sf fanzines since 1971, when I was 12. 

I'll be 52 on November 5th.

I've been a very junior book editor. I've worked a lot of different jobs in my time.  I'm an sf fan, a news junkie, a history buff, a political obsessive and activist, a reading fanatic, and a writer.  I have a variety of obsessions, including with Richard Nixon.  I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat.  I wander back and forth in the byways between leftism and liberalism, depending upon what year it is, and what events I'm reacting to.

I believe in many causes, but civil liberties are a passion.

I started working in science fiction in 1974 as a slush reader for Amazing Stories and Fantastic Stories.  My first publishing job, however, was with Teen Beat magazine, and its affiliated publications.  I was 15.

I soon started working as a freelance reader, proofreader, copyeditor, copywriter, editorial assistant, and dogsbody for various mass market publishers, mostly, but not entirely, in science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

After 1978 through 1985 in Seattle, during which time I worked a mess of jobs, after The Pacific Northwest Review of Books went out of business, I returned to NYC in '86, and again freelanced,for publishers including, in no particular order, Ace, Baen, Bluejay, Avon Books, the Science Fiction Book Club, Scholastic, Berkeley Books, Tor, Penguin, Dell, and various others.

Soon I turned down offers from Jim Frenkel to be Assistant to the Publisher at Bluejay Books, from Tappan King to be Managing Editor of Twilight Zone and Night Cry magazines, and took a job working for John Douglas at Avon Books, working on not just mass market sf, fantasy, and horror, but a wide range of fiction and nonfiction, including a Vietnam War line of both nonfiction and fiction (Michael Herr's Dispatches was one of the best known of the line), the Latin American line (One Hundred Years of Solitude being the best-known), a military history line, mainstream fiction, mystery fiction, and every kind of fiction but romance and YA, and every kind of mass market nonfiction but cookbooks, business books, and sports books.

By 1988 I crashed into major clinical depression, and got myself fired.

I became active in sf fandom in 1971, age 12, doing fanzines, working on conventions, including as Director of Operations for two Worldcons and retroactive Vice-Chair of the 1978 Worldcon. I institutionalized Worldcon displays on sf fanhistory, and created the concept of the fan lounge, and the concept of a separate track of fannish programming at Worldcons, in 1977, along with doing a bazillion other things in the sf community in the Seventies and Eighties. 

I've also had lifelong major chronic depression, am diagnosed as bipolar, and believe more people should talk publically about their experiences with emotional and mental illness.

I've been twice a delegate to County Democratic Conventions, once In Washington State, and once in Colorado, and once elected to the Colorado State Democratic Assembly (the gathering of the political party, not the legislature), and as alternate delegate to State Convention.

My sense of humor runs to the extremely dry and deadpan.  I'm in a twelve-step program for the terminally sarcastic, but I slip constantly. 

I like to write about things like mirror neurons, and any and all kinds of tech and science that intrigue my lay brain.  I do it for the dopamine. 

I've been a political and news junkie ever since at least the Six Day War of 1967, and all the other events of 1967 and 1968, that got me reading the New York Times every day at the age of eight.  By 1968, I was a fanatic about knowing what was going on, and combined with my sucking every book I could out of every library I got near, my thirst to read more about what happened before that, so I could know what happened before that, so I could know what that was, was boundless.

Since then, information has been my life.  Occasionally I spit some up for others.

I'm happy to have been asked to join Obsidian Wings as a full member of the blogging team.  I hope to help the blog thrive, nurture the community, and make the debate as interesting as I can. 

Thanks for having me.

Here's what I'm looking to do with you:

 

Okay, now let's argue! 

Do we want public libraries privatized? 

[...]

“There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries,” said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company’s chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. “Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization.”

The company, known as L.S.S.I., runs 14 library systems operating 63 locations. Its basic pitch to cities is that it fixes broken libraries — more often than not by cleaning house.

“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”

All the librarians I know are lazy bums.  Sure. 

[...] "Library employees are often the most resistant to his company, said Mr. Pezzanite, a co-founder of L.S.S.I. — and, he suggested, for reasons that only reinforce the need for a new approach. “Pensions crushed General Motors, and it is crushing the governments in California,” he said. While the company says it rehires many of the municipal librarians, they must be content with a 401(k) retirement fund and no pension."

Pensions are for wimps.

Good idea?

And: Open Thread!

UPDATE, 9/27/10, 12:22 a.m.: Remember, as Batocchio reminds us in comments, it's Banned Books Week!  So ban a book this week!  No, wait, that's not how it works, is it?

UPDATE, 9/27/10, 3:33: p.m.: I've decided to try doing a daily link-dump post at my personal blog, Amygdala.  I'll simply keep updating the post throughout the day, and I'll try to do such a post most days, if I can. 

Here's the first post: I SPY WITH MY LITTLE EYE.  Check back for more links to it until the next post, after midnight.

Comments

[Gary Farber]

And, yes, I did read this.

Of course, the story is, as usual with anything that can be given a funny twist, being badly reported. UNOOSA has existed for a long time, Mazlan Othman's been head before, and the agency is about coordination of worldwide space activities, not contacting aliens.

[BenjaminTheAss]

To come full circle, ObiWi showed that LOTR analogies CAN be used for atlasing female anatomy. I think that was the first post here I ever read.

[anne]

I really miss Hilzoy. What happened, where did she go?

[Batocchio]

Well, it's about time, Gary!

Good luck with the upcoming move, by the way.

Oh, and Banned Books Week started yesterday. (I'm encouraging bloggers to post on it.)

[Gary Farber]

"I really miss Hilzoy. What happened, where did she go?"

I killed her.

[Gary Farber]

See update, Batocchio! Thanks for reminder. Talked about it on Facebook, but, well, there's no shortage of topics to blog about, that's for sure.

And, anne, we all miss Hilzoy's postings and presence terribly, and the idea of posting on the same front page she did is more than daunting. God knows I'm not a tenth the blogger she was, and ten of me couldn't replace her.

It's everyone's dream that she would return to post, not simply comment, even just on occasion.

But, hey, the current plan, last I looked, was to still add yet at least another blogger, if not more, so odds are high it will be someone who sucks less than I do.

[Gary Farber]

Hmm, algorithms to simulate emotion.

[liberal japonicus]

Here's what I'm looking to do with you:

Just to be clear, assuming you aren't one of the two labbies or the Ozzie guy, are you Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, or Larry King?

(you could the the signal source in Vega, I suppose...)

[joel hanes]

anne :

Hilzoy retired from blogging in June.

[Gary Farber]

LJ, I am a lone consciousness, listening for, and looking to, make contact.

[Gary Farber]

"(you could the the signal source in Vega, I suppose...)"

Probably closest.

[evilrooster (Abi Sutherland)]

Congratulations, Gary!

[Gary Farber]

Sullivan:

David Cole reviews two new books on the atrocities at Guantanamo, and draws out this depressing fact:

Even the physical design of the Guantánamo courtroom is shaped by the desire to conceal our own abuses. A soundproof glass wall separates the onlookers from the trial participants, so that the only way an observer can hear what is going on is through headphones with a forty-second delay. The reason, according to Denny LeBoeuf, an ACLU lawyer advising on the defense of several detainees, is “the Rule: detainees are forbidden from speaking about their torture.”

Remarkably, the US government has declared “classified” anything that the detainees say about their torture, and has required the lawyers, as a condition of access to their clients, to keep secret all details of their clients’ treatment at the hands of their interrogators. But of course, the US cannot compel the detainees themselves not to speak of the unspeakable. The only way it can keep them from telling their stories is by keeping them detained, behind bars, behind glass, silenced.

Blogging about stuff like this is also why I want to blog here and one of the things I intend to blog about. I'm not Hilzoy, and I'm not Katherine, and IANAL, but I've been a civil liberties fanatic since literal childhood, and I do what I can.

Thanks, Abi.

[Gary Farber]

I should mention that Slartibartfast was Present At The Creation, as well, as a commenter.

[Gary Farber]

And now I'm a real ObWi front pager.

[Batocchio]

Nice! Thanks for spreading the word on Banned Books Week. I just finished this year's post, and am linking folks who write posts celebrating it.

[Emma]

Hey Gary, excellent posting. Took me back to reading some of your great rants on Usenet back in the olden days. I used to cyber-stalk you round the groups because you wrote such good stuff. I found ObWi some years ago, and loved the front-pagers (mostly), but it was also an attraction that you commented here. Be well, and enjoy your blogging.

[jank_w]

Congrats on the good news Gary.

[someotherdude]

this is gonna be fun.

[Prup (aka Jim Benton)]

Congrats, you deserve it, though the revolving door there makes me hope you won't follow Hilzoy and Publius out the door.

Youe time in fandom overlaps mine. I was active in ESFA (Sam Moskowitz' old group) starting in about 1961 -- actually iot was JWC Jr. -- who I called up on a whim -- who told me about it -- and in other NYC and later Philly groups off and on until about 1972. (My name was Jim Sanders then, I changed it unofficially in 1977 and legally last year, but I mostly wrote as "Jeff Glancannon" -- and you might remember a minor feud I had with Darrell Schweitzer.)

I don't recall running into you in fanzines or in person -- the period of 1970-75 was the only time I haven't been a resident of NYC, I was in Philly and too broke to travel out of the city.

Anyway, again congrats, and isn't it amazing how much the blogosphere took from fandom without realizing it.

[Hogan]

I really miss Hilzoy. What happened, where did she go?

She sailed off to Valinor, of course. Didn't you see that season finale?

Congratulations, Gary, and best wishes from the Contra Costa County exile community.

[Slartibartfast]

ObiWi showed that LOTR analogies CAN be used for atlasing female anatomy. I think that was the first post here I ever read.

It might be amusing to speculate on what might represent the Two Towers, or the Return of the King. And Shelob.

I should mention that Slartibartfast was Present At The Creation, as well, as a commenter

Hmm. I think Tacitus.org (? I think we'd need the Wayback Machine to reproduce that) was my introduction to Internet Arguments. IIRC ObWi sprung nearly full-formed from the brow of Tacitus.

I can't make myself backspace over the preceding sentence, for some reason.

Hopefully I've improved, and possibly even mellowed, over time, in the Internet Argumentation area.

[Gary Farber]

"Prup (aka Jim Benton)"

Jeebus fcusk, you're Jim Sanders?!?!

I know you! That is, I read fanwriting by you, back in my fanzine collecting days, and much of you.

You were a FIStFAn! I started attending at Ross Chamberlain's, in 1974!

Back in the day, as a Fanoclast at the same time, I collected a complete run of Apa-F, of course, and practically everything published in NYC fandom in the Sixties, including SECRET APA of Arnie Katz's, and other private apas. So, just to utter names: Mike McInerny!

Norm J. Cascajo!

It's an effing small world.

I've been seeing you post as Prup (aka Jim Benton), and had not the faintest clue that you were Jim Sanders!

Ghu, Foo-Foo, and Roscoe fugg me.

Tom Byro is a Facebook Friend, by the way.

And, no, I don't think we ever met, at least not to be introduced.

But if you were at any of the NE circuit cons between 1975-1977, e.g., Boskone, Lunacon, Philcon, Disclave, we would have crossed paths in the halls or at a party, I should think. At the beginning of '78 I moved to Seattle, so those would have been the only years.

I never did get to attend an ESFA meeting, but I did meet SaM a few times before he left us.

[Gary Farber]

"IIRC ObWi sprung nearly full-formed from the brow of Tacitus."

Yes, obviously, although I never read Tacitus, myself. But the original ObWi directly extruded from Tacitus, and Moe was the primary blogger; he originally referred to it as "his" blog, along with his two co-bloggers.

I was never a Tacitus fan, I'm afraid. Nor has Josh Trevino been a fan of mine, so far as I know. Although he did retweet an insult of me only a few months ago, so it's good to know he remembers me.

[Gary Farber]

And I was trying to remember, Jim, if you were in TAPS, but I do recall you were in the Cult. (I was in TAPS, but only read the Cult.)

And you threatened to start Cult II, I think?

I miss Brucifer (Pelz).

[ral]

Gary, have you ever seen this t-shirt?

[Gary Farber]

Yes, because I'm on the ThinkGeek mailing list.

But there are about a zillion Princess Bride tee-shirts, as well.

At this point I'm feeling like ThinkGeek stuff is so popular now that it's practically mainstream. I ended up not wearing my "Stand Back! I'm Going To Try Science!" tee-shirt at the NASFiC because I saw two people wearing the same, and more being sold in the huckster/dealer's room.

[Gary Farber]

"http://tacitus.org is not available in the Wayback Machine."

[ral]

...zillion Princess Bride tee-shirts, as well.

Yeah, but that one made me laugh.

[Gary Farber]

I've decided I'm going to make an effort to try to do daily link-dump posts back at Amygdala.

I hope that will serve to kick-start me to begin blogging more frequently again there, however insubstantially it may be as a start, and as overflow so I won't overpost here; I can simply refer y'all to my daily link-dump post at Amydala for a variety of stuff I, at least, think interesting.

(I wouldn't expect anyone else to find more than some of it interesting.)

Seem reasonable?

ral: yup.

[Gary Farber]

I hadn't noticed before now that Jerry Doyle, the Babylon 5 actor and conservative, has Andy Olmsted's Final Post on his front page.

[Prup (aka Jim Benton)]

[My apologies to everyone else -- who will be bored by this as they are by any 'reunion' talk -- and if you want, Gary, maybe we should continue this by e-mail (jimbentn at verizon should 'net' me]

OhferKroo'ssake, Gary, you remember more about Jim Sanders than I do -- and I was him. When you started with 'you were Jim Sanders' I thought it was a leg pull, but then you started dropping names.
Mike (I keep the apartment a total mess so the narcs won't find anything) McInerney -- I helped clean out that apartment when he moved, gawdelpme, but I did inherit his yard-long hashpipe with the Amerind decorations.

Ross Chamberlain, that incredibly brilliant and gentle artist.

Tom Byro, whose wife I introduced to him -- not one of my prouder moments.

Yes i was, i think, briefly in TAPS and in the Cult -- but whenever I tried to publish I wound up to broke to follow through on it very soon, which is why i started mostly writing to others. And God was my writing awful -- it still is, but corflu was so much harder to use than backspace and delete keys.

No, never made any of those, the last con of any sort I made was a local Philly one in, I think, 1972. The only off-east Coast con I ever made was one when i went along for the ride to Cincinatti with Ted White, Dave VanArnam, and some other locals -- which is still one of the only two times I ever left the NY-Washington strip -- the other was a trip to Memphis a year after I was married -- a business trip for her, but her boss invited me along.

And to think, when i went through the legal name change, I was worried in advance that there was no way of proving I had been Jim Sanders -- fortunately it never came up, because I would have had to find a fan who remembered me, and since I didn't know you did, I would have been left with Dennis McCunney, John Boardman -- the inventor of Postal Diplomacy, and maybe Fred Lerner.

Geeeeeeshhhhhh!!!!!

[Gary Farber]

Yeah, after this, email me if you like at gary underscore farber at yahoo dot com, though I get so much spam I don't know why I bother to spell it out.

But, hey, it's my intro thread, and my past, too, so I don't mind this much public talk, though probably not much more.

In any case, among my Facebook Friends are Dennis and Tom and Ross, and Perdita B*ardman's daughter, Karina (formerly G*rsd*nsky); I'm back on the Timebinders mailing list with Ted White. Ted and I go back to the mid-Seventies, of course, and I've stayed at his house many times, co-edited The Gafiate's Intelligencer, etc.

I was in John and Perdita's house dozens of times for Lunarians and Lunacon meetings in the mid-Seventies; I grew up a few blocks away from them in Midwood, on East 10th between J and K.

Tom posts about current "FIStFA meetings" that seem to consist of 4 or so people, as outings, but was doing so as of this morning.

Ross seems to be as sweet as ever; he and Arnie and Joyce and Bill K*nkel are all in Las Vegas and have been for many years now, where they've been fanning away as ever on their fanzines. Me, I've been pretty gafiated from fanzines in the past decade, though I've been edging back into more contact in the last year.

So, email me if you want any more of this.

[Gary Farber]

My first link dump post, by the way. Get your links while they're warm! Come back often!

[Gary Farber]

A big one: Oh, my: U.S. Tries to Make It Easier to Wiretap the Internet.

[...] Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year [....]

Sputter. RTRS: 5 out of 5.

[Gary Farber]

I was going to blog about this massive new legal change being proposed on eavesdropping, but I don't think I can say much worth saying that Glenn hasn't already said.

[Catsy]

The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

HAH! Good luck with that.

[Gary Farber]

Catsy, they're saying that companies couldn't do the encrypting themselves without providing a back door; they have in mind, for instance, RIM and Blackberry. They're not saying invent a way to crack PGP, or someone else's crypto.

[hilzoy]

I'm still here, trying to get over Obama's claim that the government gets to assassinate people without the possibility of judicial review.

[Gary Farber]

Hilzoy:

I'm still here, trying to get over Obama's claim that the government gets to assassinate people without the possibility of judicial review.

Do a post on it: show us how it's done. Just one.

Be mad. Explain. No one can do that voodoo you do so well as you do.

[Gary Farber]

Add to above to Hilzoy: Pliz?

And my first day of link-dumping is done.

I hope some of you might be kind enough to check it out, and see what you think, and if I should keep trying to do that sort of thing, as time and energy and health allow.

[hilzoy]

Gary: no; it's like crack for me.

Also: I remember being asked to "replace" Katherine. The very idea terrified me. I thought: not possible. Not by me, not by anyone.

[Gary Farber]

Your crack = our education and enlightenment.

Do it for the children; think of the children!

[Gary Farber]

Besides, Hilzoy, what are your friends thinking now?

[...] Her friends are grateful to Obsidian Wings for giving her another outlet for her political opinions.

;-) ;-) ;-)

You could just do only one a month! Only one a month, and no more!

[Gary Farber]

Meanwhile: Obsidian Wings: The Next Generation?

Obsidian Wings: New Mutants?

Children Of The Obsidian Wings?

Obsidian Wings: An Ambiguous Heterotopia?