She wasn’t keen on having her picture taken and especially not on having them online, but it can’t harm her anymore. When she made the decision to stop treatment I put together an online album of the various photos we had, digital and otherwise of her and her family. For those of y’all who knew her (or not) and all y’all who have been so kind to share your sympathies today, it’s now open to view to show who she was when she was alive.
Sandra Culley 20-10-1959 – 07-11-2011
Sandra died last night, as she was holding her son’s hand, as peacefully as could be expected under the circumstances. I had seen her myself only a few hours before when she still looked as if she could last a couple more days at least. She had said to me she wished it would be all over soon, but I don’t expect she thought it would be over this soon…
I’m glad she’s no longer in pain but I wish things could’ve gone differently.
Omnitopia Dawn — Diane Duane
Omnitopia Dawn
Diane Duane
360 pages
published in 2010
Omnitopia Dawn revolves around the upcoming launch of a new extension to the world’s most popular online RPG, Omnitopia, the deadline of which is just days away. Omnitopia is so popular because it’s not just one game, but it’s like something you’d get if you’d roll World and Warcraft, City of Heroes, Second Life and every other current online game into one gigantic universum, held together by the Ring, the one place where you can move from world to world directly. It’s the brainchild of Dev Logan, the CEO and principle inventor of Omnitopia and all around nice guy, who is more interested in creating wonderful new gaming experiences than the bottom line. Which is why he split up with his old buddy Phil Sorensen, who was more interested in making money than in endlessly fiddling with the game and who is now Logan’s most bitter rival and is doing his best to ruin him.
What this reminded me of were Arthur Hailey’s business novels, like Hotel, Airport and Wheels, all of which revolved around an iconic American business in crisis and its heroic executives trying to turn it around, as well as a cast of dozens of other characters going around their daily doings. Omnitopia Dawn has the exact same plot, only this being the twentyfirst century the business in crisis is the world largest and most popular online roleplaying game. It is barely science fiction, only set a couple of years in the future (2018 if I remember correctly), with the world still recognisably our own. A bit of technological improvement, but the most futuristic gadget on display is a bog standard virtual reality system. What instead gives it a sfnal flavour are the parts of the novel set in Omnitopia itself.
The science fiction helps
Sandra is not doing well, as is to be expected, but while she’s getting weaker, there still is the possibility that she can hang on a while longer, as her stubborn body fights her will to die… Not a nice position to be in. Sadly, there isn’t much we can do to help her, other than be there.
For myself, it’s all right as long as I don’t have to think too much.
Update: forgot to mention what also helps a lot is the well wishes and sympathy you all have shown over this. Thank you.
#$@&! Negroponte
Nicholas Negroponte used to annoy me back in the nineties when I still took Wired seriously (we were all young once) when he’d bleat about his simplistic solutions to real problems in their backpages. These days he’s involved in doing crappy computers for third world countries, with the business plan there being something like
- create a new rugged tablet pc and drop them in Africa
- ????
- A whole continent achieves its true potential and becomes a free market paradise.
Jamie has the mindset behind this down pat:
Why do you want to do this? Because it’s a laptop. It will promote learning! How? Because its information technology with information in it. The child just switches on the laptop and gets the information out of it. Then it will be educated.They’ll just use it to play games. No they won’t, because it will be a special computer which won’t be able to play games. How are you going to make that work? because its new technology and new technology is flexible. Anyway, How can you deny a child a shiny new laptop, with a software package kindly provided to us by the manufacturers at only a third more than the normal retail price. What kind of progressive are you, anyway?
This is a vanity project to salve the conscience of guilty liberals, a solution in search of a problem, undertaken by people who don’t want to believe the problems their pet project is trying to solve are hard. It’s magic thinking.