Terminally Incoherent

Let’s talk about workflows. If you are a white collar worker, chances are that you spend most of your day creating or editing digital files. Whether you are a programmer, sysadmin, accountant, salesman or a CEO, you will be spending considerable part of your day messing with data, grouped as some sort of logical entity: a document, spreadsheet, source code, etc.. Different people have different strategies and approaches for this sort of work.

For example, I have noticed that my personal workflow is very risk averse. I typically start with a git pull and ends with a git push. As I make changes to a file, I tend to save very often, which is not unusual for programming. When you write code you usually focus on small discrete, incremental changes that need to be tested in isolation. You make an edit, save the document, check if anything broke, make another change, and so on. When you finish working on a specific task or accomplish a specific goal, you commit the code encapsulating the changes into neat snapshot that could be rolled back later. Then you move on to the next thing. Multiple times per day you collect bunch of these snapshots and push them out to a remote repository.

The entire process is anchored not to the local the file system but also to a revision tracking system which provides me with backups and snapshots of my code. It is actually quite difficult for me to lose more than a few minutes of work due to a mistake or a software glitch. I always have at least 3 recent copies of the project: the working copy in storage, the local revision history, and the remote repository. More if I’m feeling adventurous, and I create feature branches which provide yet another working copy that is separate from the main one. It is a very safe way to work.

Busy CEO Workflow

This is very different from what I call the “busy CEO workflow” which starts and ends within Outlook. I was recently able to observe several people using this exact Microsoft Office driven workflow and I was baffled how risky and failure prone it was. I would never actually choose to work this way, if nothing else than to save myself the stress and preserve my own sanity.

Let me try to outline this workflow for you:

1. You start by receiving a Word/Excel document attached to an email
2. You double click on that attachment to open it
3. You laboriously make dozens of changes over the span of next 3 hours
4. When finished you hit “Save and Send” button on the toolbar
5. Outlook attaches the modified file to a new email

Note how in this particular workflow, all the work is being done almost entirely in memory. When you open a Microsoft Office document attachment from Outlook it renders it opens it directly. It probably puts a working copy somewhere in a local temp folder, but not in a way you could later track down. All the changes you add to the document may or may not be saved to that ephemeral temp file, which will go away the minute you close Outlook.

Microsoft Office does offer you a little bit of protection from glitches and software crashes in terms of the auto-recovery feature (unless of course it was switched off) which will periodically attempt to create a snapshot of your work. If the application does not close cleanly, it prompts you to recover from one of the recent snapshots. Unfortunately these backup copies are immediately deleted when the user deliberately closes application. So if you accidentally close the wrong window, you are likely to lose all the work.

The “save and send” functionality relies on a magical hand-off happening between two office applications that involves passing around references to an ephemeral, temporary file, hidden away from the user. This interaction is semi-reliable but I have seen it break in such a way that it closes the edited document and silently drops the modified file without actually ever giving the user a chance to send it.

This breakage is not an isolated fluke, by the way. The Microsoft Office interop features are known to be rather fragile. Because of their complexity Office applications often end up in weird states which may affect these sort of hand-off situations. In fact, it happened twice in a week when I was working with end users gathering specs for a project. Both times it required closing and re-opening of all Office applications to restore the functionality.

This workflow is fraught with data loss risk and has way to many points of failure:

• There is no user-accessible “work copy” of the file with recent changes
• Only life-line is the magical auto-recovery feature
• The “save” feature is not guaranteed to work all the time

You have got to admit that this is quite bad. If you are a tech savvy person, you know that this is not how one is supposed to work. You are supposed to anchor your work in the storage, not in main memory. You are supposed to save often and keep multiple copies of your work to keep track of changes. And yet, this email-to-email, in place-editing workflow is baked right into the very fabric of Microsoft office. It is easy, convenient and as such it is really appealing to the busy executives who must juggle a lot of balls in the air at all times.

No amount of user education can counteract the “common sense” logic of “if you’re not supposed to use it, then why did Microsoft include it as a feature” counter-argument. Software developers of course know that this fallacious line of reasoning: we put half-baked features into our software all the time, and we don’t always have the time or resources to work through all possible use-cases and usage scenarios. Once the feature is in production, it is hard to remove it.

So the universe is full of half-baked convenience features that don’t really work right. I imagine the “save and send” feature was intended for people who just want to fix 3 typos before approving a staff memo or a courtesy letter of some sort. But but I’ve just seen someone use it to re-write an 80 page report almost entirely, over the course of almost an entire day. That file sat there, in memory when the person took their lunch break, responded to other emails, and worked with dozen other attachments. And that’s quite scary. It is putting a lot of faith in a piece of software…

Which is something I have noticed people do. As a software engineer, the best advice I can probably give you is to never assume any software you use is reliable. It isn’t. Unless it has been developed by NASA for the explicit purpose of flying a rocket into space, then the code is probably a bug ridden mess. And even NASA fucks up every once in a while.

If you consistently lose work due to accidental clicks or software glitches, and someone told you that you can avoid it by modifying your work-flow to route around the flaws in the software, would you do it? Or would you keep your workflow and just be mad at flaky software and the IT staff’s inability to make a third party application do things it was not properly designed to do?

Is there a way to eliminate the busy CEO workflow from your organization? Can you force it out of the system via infrastructure change? Granted, trying to force out Microsoft Office from your organization would be tilting at windmills so that’s probably not a good approach. You will never convince the business folk to give up Word and Excel, but you can sometimes wean people off Outlook. Especially new generations of office workers who grew up on fast, reliable webmail interfaces with endless storage capacities tend to scoff at the very idea of a dedicated email client. And that’s actually a good thing.

For all their flaws, web-mail interfaces do one thing right: they force users to anchor their work in the file system by asking them to save attachments to disk before opening them. This may seem like a major annoyance at first, but that one extra click solves so many issues.

Thoughts? Comments? Ideas?

Back in my review of Ocean at the end of the Lane I mentioned that works of Neil Gaiman have a unique, recognizable style and mood. Gaimain is the undisputed master of mixing modern sensibilities with folk myth and magical mysticism almost creating something to a genre of its own. There is magical realism which spruces up modern tales with a dash of supernatural, and there is “Gaimanism” which swings the other way and anchors pure folklore and fantasy with a dash of reality. When people call a work “Gaimanesque” fans of his work instinctively know what to expect: a well mixed blend of old, forgotten mystical lore and something modern. Pretty Deadly by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Emma Ríos is exactly that: a Gaimanesque re-imaging and blending of a western, horror and folk tales about death and destiny.

Pretty Deadly Cover

The book’s setting is the archetypical, familiar western setting, complete with small desert towns, corrupt sheriffs, and shady saloons. But the very first pages establish that this is not a mundane western story. In this world the land is magical, and the legends are real. Folk songs and old wive’s tales are forgotten truth, and one is best to heed their warnings. In Pretty Deadly world, Death himself is a gunslinger with a horse skull instead of a face, who often meddles in the affairs of mortals. His grim rippers travel the world and do his bidding, and the only person who openly defies him is his mortal daughter Ginny. She rides the wind, and comes to the aid of those in need if they know how to summon her with a special rhyme whispered into the breeze. Like in a Neil Gaiman story, the supernatural elements are woven into the fabric of the reality of this world and inseparable from it.

Death and his captive

I would not call myself a fan of the western genre. It is not something I read or watch often, and I don’t typically seek out stories about cowboys and gunslingers. But I was enthralled and captivated by this series. If I had to give you an elevator pitch, I would probably describe Pretty Deadly as: Sandman meets Preacher, meets Dead Lands with a pinch of American Gods thrown in for a good measure.

Ginny Deathface

I keep mentioning Neil Gaiman as if it was his story but it isn’t. Even though these comparisons are meant as a positive praise (I consider myself a long time Gaiman fan) I think these comparison might be doing a disservice to the excellent writing of Kelly Sue DeConnick. This is after all, her world, and her story being brought to life by the art of Emma Ríos. Their work is not a mere imitation or emulation of that particular style. Pretty Deadly invokes Gaiman’s style, but then goes beyond and builds something new and original on top of it.

Myths and legends are real

DeConnick expertly manipulates the Western setting, playing up familiar tropes only to tear them down and brutally subvert them. Characters you have pegged as bad guys, turn out to be unexpected heroes. Those you have assumed to be good guys are shown despicable. Even the all powerful Death ends up being developed into a tragic and complex character.

But western tropes are not the only things that are being subverted here. DeConnick and Rios conspire to break all the rules, starting with unconventional and unorthodox paneling. Rios uses the panel composition to create these claustrophobic funnels that build pressure and tension, or to direct action, and caged of inset areas to inform the surrounding action. Sometimes the panels bleed into each other, other times the panel lines become part of the architecture and set design.

The most interesting feature of her art however might be how she stages her combat scenes which sets her apart from most of her peers in the industry.

Ginny vs Alice

Sarah Horrocks wrote an excellent post about this on her blog 73 and I don’t think I could do her analysis justice if I tried to paraphrase it, so I will just quote the interesting bits here:

Female warriors in comics who are depicted as fast, shifty, untouchable are inherently at a deficit in their depiction to analogous male characters–because they create two spaces within their existence: one is the space that, if only they could be caught, then they could be conquered sexually, and the other is that their movement itself is meant to create the image of the beautiful untouchable woman on a pedestal that is the problematic way some men are taught to view women outside of these action packed scenarios.

It is because of these problems that when a fight comes along, particularly in western comics, like the fight in Pretty Deadly by Ginny Deathface and Big Alice–you tend to sit up and take notice. (…)

[Ginny] is set up in the first issue as this untouchable spirit of death. She is Queen Badass. But the Porcelain doll of death archetype is immedietely subverted in her very first fight in the second issue. She is most certainly Queen Badass–but she is not untouchable. She gets cut by Big Alice in the very first attacking exchange between the two. But she takes it and just keeps coming. Ginny continually sacrifices flesh and blood for tactical ground. And what’s more the perspective of the fight, and the character design employed for both characters doesn’t allow for any sexualization of this pain. This fight is never anything about two warriors brutally going at each other, doing whatever it takes to land the killing blow. There’s no perspectives, or contortions causing the characters to vogue for the camera. No orgasmic facial contortions. (…)

You want to know why so many female characters are supporting characters at best in adventure comics–it’s because of this notion of the primacy of their beauty over the brutality of the fight. It is the built in vanity of these characters as viewed objects rather than brutal fleshed out fighters who fully accept the stakes of their choices. (…)

But here’s the thing. Flesh is flesh. Blood is blood. Whether it comes out of a woman or a man, it is still blood. Pain is equal, fighting for your life is an animalistic experience that is not in any way tied to gender.

The notion being that sacrifice of blood for a final victory would be the domain solely of men is atrocious.

For context, Horrocks is comparing and contrasting Pretty Deadly with Blade of the Immortal by Hiroaki Samura with respect to how these works depict female fighters. The entire article is worth reading, but I think the excerpt quoted above works well as a glowing recommendation of the book.

Pretty Deadly is not just a blend of western, horror and folk tale. It is a western, horror folk tale centered around strong complex women (both as protagonists and antagonists) which manages to completely avoid objectification so endemic and entrenched in the comic book medium. If that, combined with the fantastic writing and striking and unique art style is not enough to convince you to read it, I don’t know what is.

If you read only one comic book series this year, make it this one.

Don’t you hate when you find a book built around a set of very intriguing ideas only to be disappointed by its underwhelming plot and bland characters? Disappointment was exactly what I felt after reading Lary Niven’s Integral Trees and it’s sequel The Smoke Ring which in my case came bundled as a single bound volume. The setting of the novels is fantastic, imaginative and scientifically plausible even if far fetched and unusual. Actual story? Not so much…

Integral Trees Book Cover

When I review hard SF, I often loathe to give away juicy details about the setting, because discovering them is part of the joy of reading such books. I don’t really have such reservations with Integral Trees because Niven front-loads most of the hard science into a gigantic expository dump in the first few dozen pages. Everything you need to know about the setting is condensed at the beginning of the book, accompanied by helpful diagrams that help you understand it. So I don’t really feel bad for spoiling it here.

Imagine a binary solar system composed of a neutron star and a regular main phase yellow star. The neutron star has a single captured satellite, which happens to be a gas giant in an unusually low orbit just beyond it’s Roche limit. Because of the tidal forces acting on the planet in such a low orbit most of the lighter gasses from it’s atmosphere have been siphoned out into a vast gas torus surrounding the neutron star. The torus is about a million kilometers thick, and it’s dense core (known as the “Smoke Ring”) is composed almost entirely from nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen forming a breathable atmosphere. The companion yellow star provides ample sunlight allowing life to flourish and evolve within the narrow gas ring.

The Smoke Ring is essentially a world of endless sky. There is no solid ground anywhere within the ring, but water is plentiful. Of course since everything is in free-fall, it does not form lakes or rivers but rather coalesces into spherical floating globules. Most of plants and animals that inhabit the ring are free fall adapted, capable of limited flight and possess trilateral symmetry allowing them to see in all directions without repositioning. Plants, on average are fragile, spindly and tend to form dense clumps, using foliage and web-like branches for both photosynthesis and capturing and sieving up organic matter from the air, as it floats by.

Picture of the spherical plant life clumps within the smoke ring.

The one exception to this rule are the titular integral trees, which are absolutely massive. The largest of the trees grow up to about a hundred kilometers in length, and are tidally locked with respect to the neutron star. Their center of mass is located at the mid point of the trunk, and both ends terminate in a tuft of foliage. The tuft ends are typically subject to gale force winds which causes them to bend in opposite directions, giving the plants the characteristic, integral-sign shape after which they were named.

The tufts collect water and floating debris to and provide natural shelter for all kinds of smaller animals, and parasitic plants. The tidal forces create a gravity like effect, that pulls nearby objects toward the trunk. Any water that collects on the trunk is pushed towards the tufts, creating little streams and rivulets across the bark. As a result each tree is it’s own, tiny, self contained ecosystem.

This is probably why they were chosen by human colonists who discovered the torus roughly five hundred years before the events described in the books. The original settlers were mutineers who have rebelled against the oppressive totalitarian state, and escaped into the the smoke ring, and established a new civilization there. Most build communities within the tree tufts, or in the radial jungles. Because resources required to build industry (such as heavy metals) are scarce in the Smoke Ring they live simple rural lives, holding on to the few old technological gadgets they were able to preserve and keep in working condition. In most communities the post of a “Scientist” is akin to that of a shaman: a community healer and spiritual leader, who consults ancient records to get insights into the true nature of things.

The picture from the expanded cover, featuring the bending trunk of an Integral Tree.

This is a fantastic, and incredibly imaginative setting. But once you read through the first chapter, you basically know all there is to know about it, at which point you might as well just close the book and do something else. The rest of the book is just boring people, having boring adventures. The few revelations about the setting that have not been jam-packed into the introduction, are delivered in the laziest way possible. In most cases the characters simply read a paragraph of notes left behind the original settlers, and then complain that they don’t understand what it means. It is obvious that these exposition dumps are intended for the readers, since not even the tribal “Scientists” remember enough of the old science to decipher them fully.

Bland characters and less than stellar conflict and resolution are not uncommon problems in the realm of hard SF. Writers who can deliver compelling science lectures wrapped inside space adventure novels often struggle to portray believable, characters that readers can relate to. The undisputed masters of the genre however tend to be aware of this, and route around the problem. Gregg Egan for example is really good at centering his novels around some novel scientific quagmire or mystery that the characters seek to solve. Even though some of his characters may be only broad personality sketches, they become relocatable due to sharing a common goal with the readers: the need to solve and unravel the same scientific puzzle. Egan also tends to make his protagonists somewhat odd, alien or somehow exceptional and unique: they are genderless artificial intelligences, disembodied post-humans and etc.. This often tricks the readers to latch that much harder onto the few human qualities they do display.

Niven’s approach is the direct opposite of this. His characters are bland every-men, who neatly fit into a few standard archetypes they never seem to outgrow. All the interesting information in front loaded, or delivered in exposition globs, meaning he can’t trickle small revelations about the nature of the smoke ring throughout the novel. His book is constructed to rely on the strength of his characters. Unfortunately, none of them are likeable enough for one to care about their struggles.

The cultures of the Smoke Ring are also extremely rudimentary and boring. One would think that since travel is difficult, and inhabitants for different trees rarely come into contact with each other, their cultures would vary. One would think that inhabitants of a free floating spherical jungle would live a drastically different than people who inhabit the trees. But the differences between all these people are mostly superficial. They use different governing systems (some more oppressive, other more democratic) but that’s about it.

People of the Smoke Ring have no religions, no legends and no superstition. Their lives seem impossibly boring, shallow and petty. Even the one mildly interesting plot hook is completely wasted. The ancient ramjet used by the original colonists is still orbiting the gas torus. It is controlled by an AI which is still loyal to the state, and has spent the last five centuries plotting how to re-integrate the free people of the Smoke Ring back into the State. The ship and the diabolically intelligent entity that controls it are a constant threat, which never fully pays off.

The book as a whole is disappointing. A fantastic setting ruined by poor execution, bland characters and uninteresting conflict.