Apparently the Last Veridian Note was fifteen years ago?
Wow! Turns out today is the 15th anniversary of the Last Viridian Note. The Viridian Design Movement was one of those fun early web things where Bruce Sterling & company dressed up climate change activism as a design movement. It was a very late-90s “ha ha only serious” thing. It all seems a little bit precious now, in retrospect, but mostly that’s because it was a movement populated entirely by people who hadn’t lived through the first decades of the 21st century yet.
But also this was 6 years before the phrase “grim meathook future” emerged; everyone could sense that the future was coming in fast and would be very different that anyone could predict1. The veridians, at least, saw it coming and tried to redirect some of the energy in a positive direction, rather than lie back and accept it, or figure out how to use it to get rich. The positive side to all that stuff I was griping about WIRED yesterday2.
Anyway, I was super into it. It was always out on the fringe of the fringe, and so after Sterling wrapped up the party in ’08 it seems to have vanished from the discussion. I myself never would have remembered if it hadn’t been referenced in the “this day in history” section of today’s pluralistic.
The Last Note was really Sterling wrapping up everything he’s learned about how to live in current era. While the rest of the “Viridian thing” has floated back into the mists of the “Old Internet”, this essay is something I find myself coming back to every few years.
You should go read the whole thing! But a few pull quotes;
This tends to be the bit people quote if they do:
You will need to divide your current possessions into four major categories.
- Beautiful things.
- Emotionally important things.
- Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function.
- Everything else.
“Everything else" will be by far the largest category. Anything you have not touched, or seen, or thought about in a year – this very likely belongs in "everything else."
You should document these things. Take their pictures, their identifying makers' marks, barcodes, whatever, so that you can get them off eBay or Amazon if, for some weird reason, you ever need them again. Store those digital pictures somewhere safe – along with all your other increasingly valuable, life-central digital data. Back them up both onsite and offsite.
Then remove them from your time and space. "Everything else" should not be in your immediate environment, sucking up your energy and reducing your opportunities. It should become a fond memory, or become reduced to data.
But my favorite bit is this, which I quoted almost word-for-word when I handed my teenager her first Swiss Army Knife at her birthday:
I strongly recommend that you carry a multitool. There are dozens of species of these remarkable devices now, and for good reason. Do not show them off in a beltpack, because this marks you as a poorly-socialized geek. Keep your multitool hidden in the same discreet way that you would any other set of keys.
That's because a multitool IS a set of keys. It's a set of possible creative interventions in your immediate material environment. That is why you want a multitool. They are empowering.
A multitool changes your perceptions of the world. Since you lack your previous untooled learned-helplessness, you will slowly find yourself becoming more capable and more observant. If you have pocket-scissors, you will notice loose threads; if you have a small knife you will notice bad packaging; if you have a file you will notice flashing, metallic burrs, and bad joinery. If you have tweezers you can help injured children, while if you have a pen, you will take notes. Tools in your space, saving your time. A multitool is a design education.
As a further important development, you will become known to your friends and colleagues as someone who is capable, useful and resourceful, rather than someone who is helpless, frustrated and visibly lacking in options. You should aspire to this better condition.
And that’s really the whole thing wrapped up: be someone who is capable, useful and resourceful, rather than someone who is helpless, frustrated and visibly lacking in options.
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As a total aside, I first saw the phrase in something Warren Ellis wrote, probably whichever of his newsletters was running in ’05. I had forgotten, or just mashed up in my head, that the phrase was coined by Joshua Ellis, no relation. But I digress.
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Of course, it was more important to keep an ironic distance than let anything think you were sincere or earnest, so….
Saturday Linkblog, books-from-the-internet edition
A couple of newsletters I devoured over the last few years have book versions out. Let me recommend them to you!
50 Years of Text Games
Over 2021, Aaron Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games covered the history of text computer games every week, covering 1971 to 2020, one game per year. The central conceit of only covering one game per year let him slide past some of the more well known titles and concentrate on the most interesting or notable. It was great—well written, deeply researched. (If I’m totally honest, it was the kind of project a version of me from a past life would have liked to have written, but I never would have done this good a job, and now I get to enjoy it without the work). I thought I was pretty well educated about text games, but there were a startling number of titles that I had never heard of.
After the newsletter ended, they did a kickstarter to print a deluxe book version, which I backed instantly. The resulting print edition turned out better than I ever expected, an absolutely gorgeous book with all the content from the web version with additional content, illustrations, amazing layout. Despite having already read most of it in email form, I drank my copy the book down as soon as it arrived.
I clearly wasn’t the only one that thought so, because the kickstarter-funded print run sold out essentially instantly. As such, I’ve been hesitant to enthuse about it to people since there wasn’t a way to, you know, actually get the book.
However! There’s now a new print-on-demand version of the book in both paperback and hardback. Now that it’s permanently back in print, I can say without hesitation that if the subject if even remotely interesting to you, go get yourself a copy. It’s spectacular.
Dracula Daily
Then, one of the delights of 2022 was Dracula Daily. The premise here was delightfully simple: reformat the content of Bram Stoker’s Dracula into an email newsletter. The novel’s epistolary format meant that it was already composed of letters and diary entries with dates, so the newsletter sent out the entries for a given day from the novel on the day they “happened”, from May to November. The resulting newsletter recontextualized the novel in a fun new way; now we were all getting emails from our internet buddy Johnathan Harker as he got deeper into trouble in eastern europe.
This really popped over the course of the summer of ’22, and a whole chunk of the internet turned into a free-wheeling book club. The slow burn created by getting updates “as they happened” gave the internet plenty of space for reactions, art, commentary of all kinds.
As someone who had read the book years before, it was so much fun watching people who only knew about Dracula via various movie adaptations, or just through cultural osmosis, discover how fun and weird and textured the actual book is compared to the things it inspired. There are almost too many examples to list, but particular highlights for me were watching—Tumblr especially—discover the full-bodied love story between Johnathan Harker and Mina Murray (who, as one person put it, are borderline feral for each other,) as well as getting to watch everyone meet “the cowboy who kills Dracula”.
Those two especially were fun considering there’s an entire generation who learned about Dracula from the Gary Oldman version, which is mostly a great movie, but is interested in very different things than the book is. The cowboy is there, but not nearly as critical a role. I mean, the movie keeps the assortment of “handsome suitors”, and casting “the Dread Pirate Roberts”, “Withnail”, and “the Rocketeer” to play them is genius, but they mostly take a back seat to Silence of the Lambs, which is too bad.
My least favorite part of the movie, though, is that it drains all the color out John & Mina’s romance so that there’s room for Gary Oldman to hiss “I’ve crossed oceans of time to find you,” which is a great line, but Harker should have been the one to say it.
As an aside, neither Winona Rider or Keanu Reeves do the best work of their careers in that movie, to say the least, which is funny, because if you made a Dracula movie starring them today, that would be the greatest movie ever made.
Continuing into the weeds here, there’s an entire media studies thesis to be written about movie adaptations using Dracula as the case study. My favorite personally is the original Christopher Lee / Peter Cushing version, because it takes a long an involved novel, and strips it down to an incredibly tight 80 minute thriller where Saruman and Grand Moff Tarkin spark off each other in the cheapest sets Hammer Films could build. It jettisons almost everything other than “professor vs vampire” and comes out aces. But it’s the complete opposite of a movie where Dracula is stabbed by a cowboy.
(And as long as I’m ranting about Dracula-inspired media with reduced cowboy content, because Quincy Morris is clearly my favorite character in the book, this was also my big problem with D&D’s Ravenloft. It kept the gothic horror props (and the racism,) but stripped out everything fun: the love story, the cowboy, the insane asylum, the boat trip. The last quarter of the book is one of the best “D&D Party goes on a rampage” books ever written, and Ravenloft doesn’t seem to have noticed, because it wanted to plop the castle down in the vaguely medieval default D&D setting, with some generic Victorian-esque angst, and Strahd is less Dracula than Lestat wearing a Dracula costume, because the nineties. I always wanted to run a version of that campaign where the vampire was the evil wanna-be supervillan of the book, and the player characters had revolvers, since it’s set during–and I’m using a technical historian term here—cowboy times. My take was more “PCs stealing candlesticks to melt them down and coat their bullets with silver”, and less “oh, isn’t the vampire handsome”.)
But! I digress. Getting back out of the ditch and on topic: It turns out that Dracula Daily has now also become a book! Snark about how it was already a book before Dracula Daily happened, the book edition keeps the strictly chronological order of the newsletter (as opposed to the novel’s slightly out-of-order structure), and includes some of the greatest hits from the internet as commentary in the margins.
The book is good, but not great. I was delighted to see many of the comments I remember from last summer in the book, but there just aren’t enough. The format of the book has extra wide pages, with the text of Dracula on the inner-most 2/3s of the page, and then an outer column of text and art from the internet commenting on that page. (A very Edward Tufte layout, which also appealed to me.)
But page after page is just empty, and then at the start of a new day there will be a single tweet, and then another several pages of nothing. he selections that made it in are all great, but Twitter and Tumblr were both brimming with Dracula content last summer, and it’s incredibly disappointing there isn’t more of it preserved here, especially as Twitter rots away.
So this is a partial recommendation. If nothing else I was happy to throw the price of the book at the people who did the work to make it happen for free last summer. (And it includes the joke describing Harker in Dracula’s castle as “taking a tour of the red flag factory”, which I’ve been quoting constantly for a year now.)