#still cheap by tor standards but

[mattiassamuelsson]

LMA O what a Mood t b h.

[mst3kproject]

The Ship of Monsters

Check me out, I’m being topical!  I had another review almost finished for today, but when I saw the news I knew I had to set that aside and find a movie about life on Venus.  This one is a ridiculous Mexican film starring Lorena Velazquez from Samson vs the Vampire Women (looking only slightly less like Cher) and one of those amazing cardboard robots you only get in the very worst of late 50’s and early 60’s sci-fi.

An atomic war on the planet Venus has killed off all the males, so an expedition is sent out in search of replacements, consisting of a native Venusian named Gamma, her Uranian navigator Beta, and their robot Tor.  After promising the Empress that they will bring back only the most manly of men, they wander the solar system a while collecting creatures with penises before an engine problem forces them to land on Earth.  The first human they meet there is Laureano Gomez, a singing cowboy with a well-earned reputation for telling tall tales.  One might assume one could predict the rest of the movie from there… but then Beta turns on Gamma and reveals that her true mission all along was to conquer a planet to feed the vampires of Uranus!

I gotta say… I did not see that coming.

The Ship of Monsters is supposed to be a comedy.  It’s seldom funny when it’s trying to be, although it mercifully avoids being the kind of desperately unfunny a lot of bad comedies are… possibly this is because it’s in Spanish, and by the time I’ve realized something is stupid there’s another subtitle to distract me. The jokes, such as they are, are pretty standard.  Tor the robot was created by an alien race, who were aware of Earth but never bothered exploring it because they thought the inhabitants weren’t very intelligent.  Laureano is in the habit of telling ridiculous stories to his drinking buddies, so of course when he claims the Earth is being invaded by space monsters they don’t believe him.  That sort of thing.  The movie is much funnier when it’s just showing us absurd situations, but to nobody’s surprise, The Ship of Monsters is at its funniest when it’s trying to be serious.

This hilarity comes in many forms, covering just about all the possible bases for a dirt-cheap 1960 sci-fi film.  We have spaceship sets made of cardboard, covered with buttons that don’t actually press and levers conveniently placed so people can bump into them during fight scenes.  We have Tor, with his tin can body that’s always a little dinged up but never in the same places, giving us clues as to what order the scenes might have been shot in.  He also has wiggly spring antennae and makes a little whirring noise every time he moves. We have space babes in silver bathing suits and glittery high heels.  Vampire-Beta, sporting plastic fangs that look like they came from the bottom of a cereal box, could be the female counterpart to the guy from Dracula vs Frankenstein, and the puppet used to represent her in flight is nearly as bad as the one from The Devil Bat.

The ‘monsters’ of the title are a bulging-brained Martian prince, a scaly cyclops, a spidery creature with venomous fangs, and the mobile skeleton of what appears to be a *damn worwelf (he tells us that his race has Evolved Beyond Flesh... apparently not Beyond Bones, though).  The costumes are all terrible, particularly the warwulf puppet, whose backbone extends into his mouth and who has to be carried around with his feet dangling in any shot that’s not a close-up.  It’s nice, though, that a little imagination went into them, and somebody gave a bit of thought to the idea that a monstrous appearance is relative.  The Martian tells Beta that he admires her ambition and might even marry her if she weren’t so ugly by his planet’s standards.

At the end, naturally, this alien invasion is defeated by Laureano, his twelve-year-old brother, and a cardboard robot, while Gamma just stands around and screams.  With a movie like this I expect nothing less.  The denouement contains my favourite intentional joke in the whole thing, in which Gamma stays on Earth with her True Love, and Tor the robot takes his, the Jukebox, back to Venus with him!  Tom Servo would have given a speech to congratulate the happy couple, and I can just see him breaking down into happy tears before he got five lines in.

(The wirwalf skeleton is not present at the climactic fight, by the way… no explanation is offered, and I strongly suspect that they broke the puppet trying.  I rather enjoy this omission, because it lets me imagine him getting lost or maybe buried by an enterprising dog, and finally finding his way back to the landing site only to learn that they’ve left without him.)

I called Laureano a cowboy but he only has one cow.  Her name is Lolobrijida and she is the very first time I have ever seen a movie spur a hero into action by killing his cow.  She gets a proper Teenagers from Outer Space death, with her skeleton left behind propped up by metal struts like a dinosaur in a museum!

I also called him a singing cowboy, which he is – there are several songs, including one in which he tries to explain to Gamma and Beta what ‘love’ means.  The songs have pleasant but forgettable Mexican pop melodies, and none of the lyrics make a whole lot of sense.  Being translated over-literally from Spanish probably didn’t do them any favours (my own Spanish tops out at yo no tengo dinero), but I still can’t imagine that the What Is Love song clarified anything.

Laureano himself comes across as kind of a fool, but he’s not actually a full-on idiot, which is quite important.  If he were the kind of one-dimensional ‘comedic nitwit’ embodied in characters like Dropo, or the janitor from Reptilicus, he’d be insufferable.  Laureano is no genius, but he’s got personality traits besides being stupid – he cares deeply for his little brother Chuy and for his animals, and he doesn’t treat Gamma and Beta’s appearance as two women for the price of one.  Very quickly he decides that Gamma is the one he loves, and he sticks to that, doing his best to let Beta down gently even when she offers to make him a king.  He’s also smart enough to trick Beta into dancing with him so he can steal the device she uses to control the rocket and Tor, and to listen to Gamma when she tells him about the various monsters’ weaknesses.

Gamma and Beta, on the other hand, don’t have a lot to them besides the basic fact that Gamma is the Nice One and Beta is Evil. Gamma starts out in the story with a strong sense of duty, and it’s a bit disappointing to see her abandon that because of Tru Luv.  I would have liked the ending better if she’d taken Laureano home with her so that the two of them could be the Adam and Eve of the new Venusian race.  Meanwhile, Beta shows no sign of any loyalty except to herself and her own ambition.  Her original mission, to secure Earth as a blood supply for the Uranians, falls by the wayside as she decides she’s going to conquer and rule the planet herself.

So The Ship of Monsters isn’t exactly a feminist manifesto, but neither is it complete misogynistic garbage like Project Moon Base.  The whole premise, after all, rests on a planet of women being able to develop space travel all on their own!  This is a fairly surprising plot point, because in many ‘planet of women’ movies like Fire Maidens of Outer Space or Cat Women of the Moon, the ladies need the virile Earth Men to come to them.

There’s also a little bit of actual science peeking out of the cracks.  The moment for launch of the rocket from Venus is determined by when ‘the elliptical orbits coincide’.  Launch timing is, indeed, a delicate art depending very much on what’s orbiting where. There’s also the moment when, trying to land on Earth, Gamma and Beta worry that the friction, combined with our oxygen-rich atmosphere, will set their ship on fire.  This stuff is pretty impressive coming from a time when the moon landing was still nearly a decade away.  There are even a couple of scenes in zero gravity that honestly aren’t totally terrible.  I mean, I’ve seen better, but I’ve also seen much, much worse.

There’s also one weirdly prescient moment when Laureano, telling one of his silly stories in the pub, describes being surrounded by dinosaurs – only to get a laugh a moment later when he mentions that they had beautiful plumage.  I’m not sure whether this is meant to be a joke in that Laureano is exaggerating an actual encounter with an angry bird into something more fearsome (I think we’re to assume that the whole story is totally made up), or whether it’s just supposed to be funny that Laureano thinks dinosaurs had feathers instead of scales.  Either way, it’s the equivalent of the moon Fornax in Menace from Outer Space being so reminiscent of Io.  There’s no way the writers could have known that, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

The Ship of Monsters is very cheap and very dumb, but it’s good fun for those of us who like crummy old alien invasion movies, and I recommend it to anybody in that demographic.  As for actual life on Venus… I feel like a lot of the people getting excited are too young to remember when Bill Clinton told the world that we had totally found life on Mars.  Humans have been discovering life on other planets for about two hundred years and every single one of those ‘discoveries’ has turned out to be either a mistake or an outright lie.  We have plenty enough to panic about this year without a Venusian invasion.

[kimyoonmiauthor]

Author Side--Contracts

So, as you may or may not know I submitted to a contest that had a weasel loose contract that I demanded they do better, but there were some poor suckers out there that signed their slave contract without knowing it because they didn’t study their butts off about this industry. This is why I’m going to list some basics to look for in contracts when you are signing and a few small tips I’ve learned from other professionals. Don’t always leave it up to your agent, or the editor. Read your contracts carefully and ask questions.

1. Money Flows to the author.

This is the number one rule. Never, ever pay to be published. It’s not an honor. Look up Harlan Ellison. Make them pay you for your work.

2. Term Limits on contracts

All contracts should have a term limit--meaning if they don’t publish in X amount of time, then you hold full rights to the work’s license. Also, it should be clear about the money in such a case--usually it’s the fault of them for not following the contract obligations, so you keep the money.

3. Limits on regionality

If they want a global contract, they should be paying through the nose for a global contract. They are looking at 20,000 USD at the bare minimum for a book. I’d ask 5,000 USD for a short story. If they promise to limit regionality, then it’s cheaper. You should look for the clause that says, “North American rights” “European rights” etc. Your agent is super lousy if they don’t look for this clause and miss the fact they tried to buy worldwide rights for cheap. Fire that agent if they miss a clause like that.

4. Limits on usage of work and in what media

All media, including advertising, promotion of an organization, movies, radio, audio, podcasts, derivative works, etc should be in your care. And they should pay for the extra usage of media. It’s a good idea to own derivative works like movies. Some authors do or do not give up audiobook rights.

5. Who owns the work after publication?

Is it the publisher, or is it you. It better be you. Make sure that the contract is clear on that. If they want to own the work after publication, they should pay the ghost writing fees that go with that, which should be a minimum of 20,000 USD. But make them pay for the indefinite usage of the work and all derviatives by demanding its worth and higher if at all possible.

6. Reversion clause

If you want to reprint the work, when can you do that. It should revert usually in 2-5 years, which is the standard. There are slave contracts which are longer, but anything beyond 5 years, you should be demanding extra money for. Your license. Your rules. Indefinite License is like owning the copyright to your work. Demand the cash that goes with that. (See above) Don’t ever believe the lies about “Oh, this is standard in X country”. Because it isn’t ever and I’m connected to international copyright lawyers who will say it’s bullshit for you.

7. All contracts should be clear you are an author, artist or creative

In case you have to litigate your contract, always, always indicate you are the creative/author/artist in the contract. Because the court will find you a lot more sympathetic if they repeatedly hear the word “artist”/author. This is a tip I got from a Pro Graphic designer who worked on Pan’s Labyrinth. And he’s had to litigate to get paid a few times.

8. Correct all typos and grammar mistakes in your contract and make sure they are fixed.

A misplaced comma, or a grammar error can make or break a difference in a contract for lawyers, so read the contract--every line and check for errors and notify the person before you sign that contract. It might make a difference. There are a few famous cases of misplaced commas making the difference between losing and winning money when litigated. Protect yourself.

9. Contracts should be clear on when you will get your money and how much money you will get.

For books, it’s usually 3 payments, and then royalties. Once for the advance, once for the launch, and once for official signings (IIRC).

10. Are there dibs on your next book as an author? Do you want to allow that? For which genres?

Think hard about this. Investigate the publication. Usually authors might say no to this for other genres outside of the purview of a small publication who say, publishes one genre. But they might want to still be able to look at other books you want to publish in the same genre. Sometimes it’s an imprint, such as Tor... so the big publishing house might want dibs on all your books. Work with your agent on these things.

11. For diversity authors, check cover representation and editing away from these things. Make sure it is in the contract.

From people getting burned like Ursula Le Guin... and people who tried to burn Neil Gaiman by making Anansi white... (I wish I was joking.) You absolutely can demand that they put in a diversity preservation clause into the contract with a no fault on you if you should pull out for those reasons. Make them honor your cool LGBTQIA characters without trying to make them “straighter”. Make them not make your characters white on the cover or hide their faces. Make them honor your character with mental health issues. They bought your book for the story, so make them honor that part of the story.

12. Who does the publicizing?

Is it you or a paid publicist? Who is on your support team? Can you meet them? You have a right to know who is doing the marketing for your book.

13. Who pays to send out copies of the book.

There are authors that sometimes have to buy their own book to sign copies of it, but the publisher has to pay them back. Make sure this is clear in your contract on who pays for what.

Tips:

- Everything is negotiable.

- You can always walk away and say no.

- You can ask for special provisions, just don’t be a donkey with your demands. Say if you want to take a lower advance so that the publisher will send copies to your friends and family... you could negotiate that. But don’t be like, and I want to make sure you sign me for the Late Show with John Oliver, which never has guests.

- Absolutely negotiate how the promotion schemes will work in the contract. If you want to cosplay, then state that up front. If they want you to do videos, etc, talk about it.

- There may be a clause asking you to not publicize the amount you received as an advance. Make them pay for that or twist them so you can.

Conclusion: Asking for these things won’t make you an a-hole. It will show you do care about your book and contract. There are ways to make yourself a pain, but these basics shouldn’t get eye rolls since it’s standard to ask for things like these.

[kjblynx]

I remember reading a book in game about portals and since then I’ve based my thoughts on portal use on that. Though I know it was just a reference to another popular game, I still see the use of this in-game knowledge.

“Thinking With Portals: A Memorandum”

It is not our intention to replace popular transportation methods such as ship, zeppelins, and flight-masters. These are cheap, practical, and safe methods of transportation. Portals, when used properly, are just as safe and certainly faster. HOWEVER, in practice portals have a history of being a burden on any society in which it is offered to the general public. Of all the major spells developed and maintained by the Kirin Tor (including  Polymorph), portal technology is the closest to becoming banished from anything but emergency usage.

Why all the trouble? First, Ley Lines don't grow on trees. Massive traffic through a Line from all over Azeroth wears down the infrastructure and must be periodically replaced. We charge the mage for every portal via reagent taxes, and encourage mages to pass off these charges to those using the portal. But these taxes don't even begin to cover the time cost of replacing a Line, only the materials.

Remember that a portal most used is a portal most efficient: More persons using a single portal causes no further stress to the Ley Lines, and is encouraged. A "Portalpooling" program is in the works that will give tax breaks to mages who create portals for no less than (5) persons. Read your latest issue of "Kirin Tor Monthly" to see the progress of the Portalpooling program.

Second, while a properly used portal is just as safe as your average zeppelin trip (maybe more so considering the engineering practices of goblins), an improperly used portal can potentially yield dire results. Here is a list of immutable regulations for appropriate portal usage:

Rule #1: Do not create a portal to anywhere but the designated Kirin Tor drop-off zones. The most dangerous aspect of the portal spell is its vast potential. We realize it's easy for a mage to create a door to anywhere, so our only way to combat such potentially deadly acts is to make it punishable by death. Special Issue License D-6 permits open portal usage, but is rarely issued. Speak with your local Portal Trainer about qualifying for this license.

Rule #2: Create a portal in the proper place, and use it in the proper way. Do not create a portal beneath the feet of someone. Do not linger halfway in and out of a portal. The portal is not a garbage disposal. The portal is not a shield. Do not use a portal like an umbrella, or any kind of shelter from the elements.

Do not back out of a portal after partially entering it. Do not try and "grab" the edges of the portal, either from the inside or the outside. A portal does not create "handlebars" to assist usage, and disruption of its boundaries is dangerous.

Rule #3: Never force or trick anyone to go through a portal. Not only is this a great way to lose repeat customers, it's also incredibly dangerous (See Rule #2).

Rule #4: Do not have someone who is polymorphed enter a portal. This has yet to not cause an explosion. This is also covered in "Polymorphic Rules & Regulations."

Rule #5: Do not remove the liquid filter from a portal spell. Portals innately prevent large amounts of flowing water through them so that they can be cast underwater. To allow for water elementals to use a portal, this filter can be omitted when casting. Do not omit this when underwater! We feel obligated to mention Moderately Severe Claims Disaster Case 34-zz: "The Great Lakeshire Drought & The Great Ironforge Flood of 24 A.D."

Rule #6: Standard Portal dimensions are 3 yards, 1 foot, and 3/4 inches tall, 2 yards, 8 feet, 9 and 15/16 inches wide. Double-wide portal creation requires Special Issue License G-16, and is commonly issued to mages with a clean portal record of 8 years or more. Speak with your local Portal Trainer about qualifying for this license.

<This goes on for hundreds of pages>”

[randomthoughts]

FBB 2022: I Won!

How I Won It All A part of me said it might have been luck, but the truth of the matter was that I went into the draft with three strategies:

Get steady performers over stars

Spend early because the talent pool thins out quickly

Go for Power and Speed

SOP My other standard operating procedure is to get work-horse contributors and avoid spending lots of money on stars and hyped-up prospects. I think my team reflected that with the likes of Anthony Rizzo, Cedric Mullins, Matt Chapman, and Corey Seager. Basically, get producers across all positions.

Spend Early That said, I spent $41 on Trevor Story and he missed over a third of the season and when he did play, he wasn’t all that great. Yes, had he played a full season, I project 22 HRs and 20 SBs. But that $41 was a part of my strategy to spend early to get talent. 

Power and Speed I ignored batting average and picked up Story, Rizzo, and Chapman for power. I figured Seager would hit for average and give me decent power. (He led my team in HRS, but his average was sub-par.) Ramon Laureano was a good balance of speed and power for me as he got 13 HRs and 11 SBs. 

I thought after a 30/30 season, Cedric Mullins would hit more HRs, but he delivered on speed with 34 SBs. 

Along with Mullins, both Andres Gimenez and Steven Kwan got me SBs with 20 and 19 each. 

Pre-Season Moves I was blessed to have an abundance of pitching talent going into the pre-season. That gave me some options. When I lost Matt Olson, I was forced to part with some of that talent though. I was okay with trading Triston McKenzie for Anthony Rizzo, but I still regret trading Dylan Cease for Matt Chapman, but third base talent was so thin. (In reflection, I would have been better off going for Eugenio Suarez and keeping Cease, but I won the league, so that’s what matters most.)

Reworking my Starting Rotation Revamping my Starting Rotation is becoming a regular practice for me. 

Here’s how I started the Season: SP - Alek Manoah, TOR $18 SP - Shane McClanahan, TB $5 SP - John Means, BAL $7 SP - Chris Flexen, SEA $5 SP - Corey Kluber, TB $11

Here’s my final rotation: SP - Alek Manoah, TOR $18 SP - Luis Castillo, SEA $42 SP - Lance Lynn, CHW $19 SP - Martin Perez, TEX $1 SP - Austin Voth, BAL $1 SP - Kyle Bradish, BAL $1 (NOTE: Shane McClanahan and Sonny Gray was on the IL at the end of the season.)

I had a lot of issues with my starting pitching. John Means made two starts and then went down to TJ surgery. I subbed in Matt Brash, who looked good in Spring Training. (Brash didn’t perform.)

Probably my most important pickup was Martin Perez. I usually avoid Perez like he was the plague, but he discovered some magic this season. I almost picked up another pitcher, but ran my two choices (Faedo or Perez) past the CBS Fantasy Baseball Facebook group, they recommended Perez. I’m glad I took their advice. 

When Corey Kluber went south, I picked up Austin Voth of the O’s and while he didn’t get Ks, he maintained a decent ERA. Likewise, I picked up Kyle Bradish who delivered almost identical numbers to each other. (I discovered that O’s pitchers were attractive this season because the leftfield wall was moved back in Camden Yards.) 

I made two big trades, moving Drew Rasmussen for Lance Lynn and George Kirby for Sonny Gray. If I had to do over, I would still make the Lynn trade but I would not have traded Kirby. Kirby would have been a nice cheap starting pitcher for the future, but I went for the win.

My other big move was to go all-in on Luis Castillo, who was traded by the Reds to the Mariners. I almost didn’t get him, but a procedural rule blocked another owner from getting him (who had a higher bid). This move probably switched the lead to me (the losing owner came in 3rd) or else it would have been close.

Prospects Pay Off I did well in the minor league draft and went for players that would deliver this season. While Steven Kwan doesn’t hit for power, he helped lift my BA and stole 19 bases.

Jose Miranda made a huge difference for my team. I no longer had to depend on Matt Chapman to carry the load on the hot corner.

George Kirby was carry over minor leaguer and he allowed me to trade for Sonny Gray who pitched well for me down the final stretch. 

Mistakes Were Made The above mentioned Kirby trade was one of them. Plus, the Chapman for Cease trade.

Chasing saves turned out to be a bad move. Soto held his role as closer for the Tigers, but other than Dany Jimenez getting 10 saves for me early one, I didn’t get much from Duran, Brett Martin, or Dillion Tate. 

Sticking with Vidal Brujan as a prospect was another mistake.

Spending $64 on two players who didn’t play that much could have doomed my team. Trevor Story ($41) certainly didn’t deliver on that spend. Fanmill Reyes ($23) was so bad the Guardians cut him. 

Looking at these two players and the money I spent on them and it’s a wonder I won. But I did, so I’m guessing it really wasn’t luck that I did.

I lost out on Amed Rosario because I filled my MI slots (Story, Seager, Gimenez) and thought Rasario could play the OF. (He only played 18 games in the OF in ‘21.) But on the upside, Gimenez outperformed Rosario.

Hitting MVP Corey Seager ($38) 33 HRs and 83 RBI paid off for me

My Cy Young Alek Manoah edged out Shane McClanahan, but only because McClanahan was hurt at the end of the season. 

Best Value Player Andres Gimenez ($4) 17 HRs, 69 RBI, 20 SBs (I’m hoping becomes the next Jose Ramirez.) 

Summing Up I won because I spent early and stuck with my strategy of not overspending on superstars, but instead of getting steady performers

[feshopru18]

How Your Business Can Accept Credit Cards

Paper money has a very long history at the USA. Before the Declaration of Independence has been composed, coins and invoices were quite typical from the colonies. With time, popular products such as tobacco, gold and creature skins lost out into a proven monetary system every one can agree with.

 Though maybe it does well not create the history books, we're experiencing an identical shift in favorite payment procedures. Personal tests came a few years after, however these certainly were less popular as newspaper money. It was only in 1950 a non-paper option has been introduced.

 It was promoted as"plastic money" plus it had been issued to favored clients. As most retailers didn't need the apparatus to process those trades, these certainly were just accepted in select locations. It was not until the 1980s why these cards captured on with the common American user.

 With the aid of the bank card, that has been introduced in the late 1980s, vinyl obligations outstripped newspaper payments (checks and cash ) from 2003. Six out of each retail purchases are actually made out of a credit or debit card. The amounts will be a lot more lopsided on the world wide web, where ninety per cent of purchases have been electronic.

 What is next?

 If history has taught anything, it's that older methods of accomplishing things infrequently return in to fashion. Simply speaking, there was zero reason to guess that cash will be king. If such a thing, cash keeps becoming popular daily. Little by little, we're directed toward really a cashless society. What exactly does this mean to modern companies?

 Money only associations are a dying breed. Even the tiny general shop, the neighborhood diner, or even town barbershop could have the ability to eliminate it. Afterall, their clients know that the services they feature are generally cheap. Additionally they recognize that accepting vinyl costs money. But, shoppers aren't almost as understanding once they search for higher priced products.

 Survey after survey has shown that clients expect multiple payment options once they shop at most of the stores. In addition, we understand that if their favorite payment option is denied in the registerthey nearly never come back to this shop.

 Once we said, sixty per cent of all retail purchases are made out of plastic, and each was approved Fe-Acc18 Tor Link with means of a merchant supplier. They assess the cards, collect paymentsand move funds with their customer sellers. For these critical services, they bill numerous standard fees.

 The single most crucial element in regards to fees and rates is the way the retailer takes obligations. In case he procedures plastic obligations personally, his degrees are frequently quite fair. The reason is straightforward. Individuals are not as inclined to make use of stolen credit cards personally than they're around the internet as a result of additional security measures. If a card exists, the cashier may ask to see ID or assess to determine whether the signatures match. However, an online seller does not have any security measures. Unless the card was recorded as discharged, he still has virtually (pun intended) no method of knowing if he's conducting business with the cardholder. Unsurprisingly, rates for internet sellers are higher than they have been for conventional retailers.

 Which will be the advantages?

 While it's a fact that a retailer consistently receives greater when an individual pays cash, it's likewise a fact that clients normally pay more if they cover using vinyl. The average credit card sale is currently all about twenty dollars more compared to the typical income sale. Client polls also concur that shoppers think highly of organizations offering multiple payment choices, whilst cash-only outfits are usually viewed with a jaundiced eyecatching.

 The Place to Begin?

 Even as we said, the single most essential question is the manner in which you'll soon be accepting plastic obligations. Conventional retail sellers must actually swipe by hand through some thing called a place of sale (POS) terminal. These terminals are specially made to accept both the debit and credit cards. After the client uses a bank card, then he needs to put in his trap number before the trade can be evaluated.

 On the web sellers must apply for and receive a merchant service accounts, however because they don't conduct business within the flesh, but they demonstrably don't require a point of sale terminal. All online sellers must install specialization applications termed payment gateways alternatively.

[almostentirelylost-blog]

La Forza Della Destino

Part I:  The Slacker

 That's me.  I've been slacking.  I think the last thing I wrote was about Salzburg?  That being said, I do have a lot to write about now!  So let's see, I left off in Salzburg, which would mean that the next part is Munich!

Part II:  Munich!

 What a city.  I love that city, and I will without a doubt be returning.  I don't know if I've made this clear yet or not, but I have this really terrible habit of booking my hotel/airbnb the day I'm arriving.  This entire trip has been totally spontaneous, and usually I don't decide on where to go next until the day I want to leave.  Munich was a little premeditated, just that I had a general sort of idea that I wanted to go there at some point.  So while I was on the train from Salzburg to Munich, I booked an airbnb and got a prompt message from the host; " Sorry, not expect to book tonight.  At work until 1900 ".  This meant that I wouldn't be able to drop off my luggage until later on, so I did the only reasonable thing in my situation, and got completely lost in Munich with all of my possessions on me.  There are certain folks that would murder me if they knew I did that, but they also don't have access to internet (don't tell them).  That was a grand adventure, but not nearly so bad as it might sound.  Munich is a very polite, very pretty place.  Lots of parks and open spaces with trees to sit under, grass, and even a canal that has re-routed a substantial amount of water into a park called the English Gardens.  The English Gardens will have a part to themselves later on.  I eventually decided that my feet hurt and because of that I deserved lunch and a beer.  I found those things.  Standard German fare, nothing special to report, with a half litre of Augustiner Brau.  They're everywhere, by the way, the Augustine monks.  They've seemingly monopolized the monastary based commercial brewing business.  Okay, let's see if I can remember this timeline.  Today is Thursday, the 15th of June.  I got into Munich on... the 9th of June.  Yes that's right, I got into Munich on a Friday.  Okay, so now that's all sorted, the story can go on.    The place I ate at was called Zum Durnbrau.  Standard beer hall, standard beer food, standard German social standards in that you have to talk to other people because there are only long, wooden tables with long, wooden benches.  There weren't many people there, though I did get to talking to a couple from Koln, who were interested in my t-shirt.  Well, metal discussions and beer go hand in hand like a dictatorship goes with oppression.  The point of that being that they both usually spiral downward and out of control.  One beer turned into several, three people turned into fifteen, and we had ourselves a riotous good time.  By that time I really should have been getting to my airbnb, to drop my things off at the very least.  I did no such thing, and instead continued looking for things that would be fun to see.  Altstadt Munich is super touristy, so it's hard to get out of the hordes of people, and even when you do you barely hear German.  But I wasn't really there for the people, I was there for the sake of seeing sights, and nothing better for that than ancient Catholic cathedrals.  I've been consistently visiting churches in every city I go to, and for good reasons too.  A lot of these churches are older than the USA.  You simply don't see that in the US, because it doesn't exist, because it couldn't have existed since that country is still more or less a baby on the global level.  The paintings inside are exceptionally beautiful, the organs are consistently these grand, arching masterpieces of human ingenuity, and the alters are serene, quiet and emanant of a time long past.  The Frauenkirche was no exception.  Got my sightseeing itch taken care of, sent my airbnb host a message, and went on my way.  Subways (u-bahn) are sometimes the most convoluted systems of transportation.  Effective, of course, once you figure them out and usually they're far more simple than first impressions would lead to believe.  I've gotten pretty good at them.    My host was extremely kind, and so was his girlfriend.  I don't think I could pronounce their names if my life depended on it, but that's alright.  Just a really relaxed Indian couple that were in Munich to finish their degrees.  They were astounded that I wanted to go back out, and had really only shown up to drop my luggage off, shower, and change.  Fifteen minutes later and I was back out the door, on my way to a metal bar that a friend had recommended to me.  Met some people, had some drinks, listened to some metal, and then made my merry way back to the airbnb for bed.  The next day was gonna' be a big one.  The next day was definitely a big one.  I headed back into the city and first just found myself something to eat and a bottle of juice, things to keep me going while I walked.  Then I just explored the city.  For those that don't know, Munich is host to the world's largest and most notorious beergardens, as well as Oktoberfest.  Well, not just Oktoberfest, but various other beer related parties and holidays.  So after seeing some of the major landmarks around, like the Sendlinger Tor, Das Bayerisches Hof, and the Victuals Market (Saturday morning market with everything you could possibly imagine).  The Sendlinger Tor is more or less just the ancient old gate to the city.  It's huge, it's made out of rocks, and it has something unreadable engraved on it in Latin.  Das Bayerisches Hof is now more or less a really impressive hotel, though it's been around forever too and has hosted some very prominent people (supposedly), and I'm sure has been a drunken riot at some point or another during Oktoberfest (read: every Oktoberfest).    The Victuals Market was everything from a market for locals to buy their weekly fresh produce from outlying farms, to tourists discovering the wonders of Munchener Weisswurst.  Weisswurst is a white sausage with little bits of chives (I think) in it.  I couldn't tell you how it's made, or what it's made of, but I can tell you that it's delicious, that you should peel the skin off, and that you should smother it in whole grain sweet mustard.  That's a South German delicacy.  Maybe not delicacy, but it's delicious.  I also found some Turkish Delights, which are these bizarre jelly cubes covered in powdered coconut, I don't really know anything about them, but they were stupid expensive and way too addictive.  I promise I only ate two.  Anyways, I didn't have lunch because I didn't really need to.  The Victuals Market was loaded with folks giving out samples of their wares, so I sampled my way from one end of the market to the other, and then found myself a nice tree in the English Gardens to have a nap under.  Like I said earlier, the English Gardens get a whole section to themselves.  They're meant to be various gardens all coming together as one, enormous, splendid nature park.  They do that, but the different gardens have their own personalities and people.  I really spent all afternoon just walking through these gardens.  Turns out that there's a place along one of the canals where you can surf.  You're not really supposed to, but that wasn't stopping a crowd of locals standing on either side of the canal in wet suits, waiting their turn to throw down their boards and hop on, to either flail and crash horribly, getting swept away by the current... or to find their balance and show off their skills until inevitably crashing and getting swept away by the current.  Very popular, it seemed, as they had a pretty sizable audience standing around.  I watched for a while and then moved on, my goal was to find a more secluded part of the park, and the gardens.    I found it eventually, an island on a tiny little pond covered in lilies, surrounded by rushes and flowers.  It seemed like privacy incarnate, and was, of course, locked to the public.  Turns out it was a traditional Japanese tea garden.  That sounded like my cup of tea, so I did some digging and found out how to get on that island, did it, drank some tea, wrote down a bunch of ideas for a thing I'm going to do, and inevitably got kicked out because for whatever reason I wasn't allowed to spend all day there.  That traumatized me, and maybe it was also getting late, so I went to the biggest beergarden Munich has to rehabilitate myself.  The Hirschgarten.  The scope of this thing is incredible.  It's a beergarden located firmly away from civilization (probably for good reasons) in the middle of a park, it's catered by the Augustine monks and various local food stands/restaurants.  There's also a little animal sanctuary right up against the beergarden, loaded with peacocks and deer, and other such things.  To be honest I wasn't really interested in the animals that weren't turning on a spit, sizzling and dripping, crisped to the perfect level.  Chickens in these beergardens are called Handl, with an umlaut in there somewhere, and you can either order an entire chicken or a half.  The beer is less flexible, the monks will only serve you one liter at a time and there's only one variety.  That one variety, though, comes from wooden barrels that the monks have to hammer spigots into.  Wooden hammers and everything.  I'd be willing to bet that their fermentation vessels are stainless steel just like every other brewery, though.  So, information on the Hirschgarten.  It can seat about 8,000 people, maybe more at max capacity.  The space around it has been cleared of trees, and the open fields are apparently the ideal place to play soccer and do picnic related things, and besides the monks driving around stacks of barrels with forklifts, there's no machinery to be found.  Beer is cheap, the food is very good, and apparently there's an old Bavarian hunter's club that refuses to let the old ways die out, walking around in lederhosen, wool shirts and socks, and hats with tufts of deer fur sticking out of the top.  Apparently membership requirements include being enormously fat, and world class beer drinking skills.  I talked to them for a while, even if I could barely understand what they were saying.  It was worth it just to see the physics of their moustaches up close, or lack thereof.  I'm developing a theory that extraordinary moustaches don't actually obey our world's laws of relativity and physics, but instead exist in a dimension of their own.  More on this later.  The last day in Munich was sadly, not very exciting.  Mostly just packing my stuff up, getting back to the trainstation, and finding my train to my next destination; Venice.

Part II: The Next Destination  Venice is hot, muggy, and stinky.  Those were the overbearing first impressions I got of the place.  Besides that, Italians are loud and hard to understand.  Even worse, I haven't seen so many toursist in one place before.  The main means of travel in Venice are via canals (duh), by ferry, water taxi, or gondola.  The gondoliers charge an obscene amount for their services ( 100 euros per half hour) and water taxis are only worth it if you have a group... so I forced my way onto a crowded main canal ferry.  I was staying at the Hotel Rialto, only because I had found an extraordinarly good deal on the way there, and fully intended to use that hotel room for all it was worth.  The Hotel Rialto is actually pretty nice, it's right on the main canal and also right next to the Rialto bridge, which is the biggest and most ornate bridge in the city.  All very pretty stuff, if you have the rare opportunity to actually see any of it through the suffocating masses of tourists.  Dropped off my stuff, grabbed my camera, and immediately went on adventure.  The first thing I discovered was that Venice was the most expensive city I've ever been to.  Also absolutely everything costs money.  My grandparents had warned me about that fact, but I sort of ignored them, thinking to myself, " No... that's too ridiculous, they couldn't get away with these things. ".  They do though.  At most restaurants you get charged for the placemat and silverware.  There's autograt on literally everything, including at gelato stands.  Bars charge for use of the glass  you're drinking out of.  Churches charge you just for walking through the door, museums all have guided tours where you're charged based on time, autograt is included, and you're still expected to tip the guide.  It's insane.  I made one executive decision that day; I would treat myself to one very high end dinner overlooking the lagoon, and then I would find myself a grocery store and live like a peasant for the next few days.  I had my nice dinner, and actually managed to find a place that wasn't too horrifically overpriced, the food was outstanding, the house wine would probably be a $50 + bottle in the US... I was very happy with that restaurant.  Made out like a bandit with a tab at 70 euros.    Another notable thing about Venice is that you will get lost.  There's no helping it, the streets aren't streets, they're narrow alleyways that almost feel like caves because of how the buildings lean in toward one another.  You'll run into dead ends at canals, which is great at night because there aren't streetlamps or signs saying " There's water at the bottom of these stairs you're walking down ".  I know this has a very negative tone so far but I actually really enjoyed the walking around Venice part of Venice.  I also randomly stumbled upon a supermarket sort of thing in a dark alleyway, with no signage, that was actually very cheap.  Like cheaper than most of Europe cheap.  Must be where the locals buy their groceries.  Got myself a nice Chianti, some salami, cheese, and bread ( I know, no brains and f-f-f-fava beans), and had a very romantic date with myself sitting on one of the steps looking out over that lagoon Venice is surrounded by.  It was almost even quiet...  Anyway, my visit to Venice was honestly very uneventful, mostly just because I couldn't afford the place and spent the large majority of my time wandering those pretty little alleyways and running into dead end canals.  I did watch a gondolier fall off of his boat, with tourists in it (again, they charge 100 euros per half hour).  I went to a surprisingly modestly priced Vivaldi concierto, and spent one of my nights drinking with a group of extremely opinionated Australians.  Then I left that city behind and came to Trieste, where I am now.  I enjoyed Venice, but I doubt I'll go back there.

Part III: The Seaside City Without a Beach  Trieste is a recommendation my grandmother made to me.  It's a gorgeous little city right up against the ocean (Adriatic, I think?)  It gives a very industrial impression at first, but once you get to walking it opens up into a much more old style, with regal looking buildings and wide, tree lined streets.  Unfortunately no beach, but in a way that's nice too because it keeps it from being a real tourist destination.  My airbnb was easy to find, and I was greeted by a wonderfully friendly elderly lady named Marina, and her black lab, Jack.  Jack is the namesake for their bnb (St. Jack's) and I would take him home with me if I could.  Such a good boy.  Anyways, dropped my stuff off and went to find dinner before retiring for the evening.   Dinner ended up being half the price of what I payed in Venice, and even better.  Still overlooking the sea, though with docks in the way and some sort of enormous industrial ship doing industrial things while anchored a ways off the coast.  But still, the ocean always has a certain charm to it for me, or maybe that's just because I'm not used to seeing it at all.  The next day was wonderful.  Excruciatingly hot, but still a wonderful day.  I made my way to the local castle and was very happy to find that I could really explore all of it.  Most castles have very limited access for tourists, either because they're crumbling old ruins and are dangerous, or because some historical society is doing everything they can to keep it in as good of shape as possible.  This one was both well preserved, and open enough that I was able to see all the things that I wanted to see in a castle.  I got up on the walls, took some breathtaking pictures of Trieste below me (any good castle has a commanding view of everything around it), and then went to explore the armory and the mazelike passages below the main courtyard.  It's pretty incredible how cold those lower passages get, and humid too, with water running down the walls in places and all of that old iron still in place.  Barring off certain hallways and rooms.  They'd had an exhibit too, featuring the old carvings from the castle's cathedral.  I can't imagine what these castles must of have been like in their prime, filled with people, the royalty and military stationed in their garrisons and lavish halls, the peasants milling around the courtyard trying to make appeals or selling wares.  Even in more recent times when cannons were set around the gates, ready to fire at invading forces... I love that stuff.    The cathedral there had an incredible mosaic in it too, covering the entire ceiling and most of the walls behind the altar.  I couldn't tell you what biblical scene it represented, but it was done in such a way that the afternoon sun coming through the stained windows caught the tiles perfectly, lending the altar a sparkling, ethereal quality.  Honestly would've been better if not for the massive group of German tourists milling around, talking and taking up all the space.  I spent my time there, payed my respects to the craftsmen that had likely poured their life into the art in that space, and to the old building itself.  After that I just walked.  Picked a direction and just starting walking, for the sake of seeing more of the city.  See it I did, and I also learned how truly insane these Italians are behind the wheel.  Trieste isn't quite mountainous, but it is very hilly.  So the streets are narrow and often on a pretty extreme incline with sharp turns and sudden dead ends.  Still, everyon drives at breakneck speeds, often honking as they go around corners rather than slowing down.  Streetlights seem more like suggestions than the law, and pedestrians are constantly double checking behind themselves to be sure they don't need to dive out of the way of some car or moped.    I also found my way to the Piazza Unita, which is (according to a local I asked) the biggest seaside square in Europe.  Its charm was lost on me, because most of it was occupied by construction crews setting up some sort of stage for a concert or show of some sort. All the same, nice to see, and it was nice to take a break sitting on the docks with my feet in the water.  Sadly, however, the weather was starting to turn for the worse.  It's a pretty neat thing to watch a storm rolling in over the ocean.  Pretty intimidating, honestly.  So I made my way back to the airbnb, sat down in my room to enjoy a beer and maybe write a little bit, and had a knocking at my door.  It was the other guest that was staying there at the time, a Swiss guy named Jorg.  He wanted to know if maybe he could pay me to use my cellphone so he could call a woman he was trying to woo back home!  I may or may not be a hopeless romantic, and I also love Swiss German, so I said sure thing and let him in to call her.  We ended up talking for a while after, and he invited me to go to dinner with him since he was travelling on his own as well, and wine and food is best enjoyed in company.  So we got our shit together and went for dinner, again, extremely well priced and high quality.  The neat thing about European cities is that street musicians are not only fairly common, but also usually very talented.  The old man in a suit that started playing violin in the restaurant was certainly no exception, and also the inspiration for the title of this entry.  La Forza Della Destino

  More will come soon-ish, and I'll probably upload photos when I have time to sit at a computer for a few hours and do nothing but that.  For now, adventure awaits! Happy Birthday Sophie, I hope you like your present.

[isriana]

The ps4 eso update drops tomorrow. Any advice? I am a master crafter etc and want to make my housing nonsense awesome! Also, how has it effected the game play? I stopped going for sets once I heard about the impending nerfing (the nerfening). SO EXCITED:D

Well, first of all, I highly recommend checking out ESO Fashion’s new Housing tab where they aim to provide pictures of all available furnishing items in the game. Naturally it’s still a work in progress, but that hasn’t stopped me from referring to it about ten times a day… :P Also, Deltia has listed screenshots of achievement furnishings and where to get them. More under the cut because this turned out long.

So, tips. If you intend to buy house with Crowns I’d go for the furnished one. It’s only slightly more expensive and getting all base furniture with that price is actually quite good value. The furnished places still have lots of room for other stuff (they’re really just something to get you started with), so no need to worry about not being able to decorate enough. Also, especially in the beginning accumulating furniture for your new place will most likely be very slow so if the prospect of sitting in an empty house for days frustrates you, buying at least the first place furnished might be a good idea.

You can’t buy actual furniture from standard NPC vendors. Home Goods Furnishers sell a variety of stuff, some of which are unique to that particular region (mushrooms from Stonefalls, hedges from Auridon, ivy vines from Malabal Tor, blooming crabapples from Craglorn etc.) but most of them focus on plants, trees, and some basic items. Most of them are relatively cheap, starting from 100g so it’s worth checking every zone and see what they got. Note: people will buy these items and try to sell them in guild stores ten times higher than their original price to folks who don’t know any better. So, please don’t buy some tea table for 3k when you can get that from literally any Home Good Furnisher with a hundred gold or two.

Here’s the official furnishing FAQ. To summarize: to get furniture you first need to find a recipe for the said furniture. These recipes act much like motifs in a way that you’re most likely find some random piece from desks, trunks, urns, and so on. There has been so much looting going on ever since the update, people camping on places with lots of containers and breaking into every house they can find. Hollow City is one favorite spot for farming since justice system doesn’t apply there (same goes for Cyrodiil although it being a PvP are could be a bit hazardous). Once people find more recipes they’ll eventually start showing up on Guild Traders. Just like with every new thing, prices will be ridiculous at first so wait a bit if you can. It’s been a couple of weeks now and green recipes and furniture have finally dropped to reasonable prices (around 1-5k), but it’s going to be a while until the same happens with rarer blues and purples. Just couple of days ago I saw someone trying to sell decorative sweetroll recipe with 720k. What a time to be alive.

Speaking of furniture, I hope you’ll have lots of mats because you’re definitely going to need those. Every item you craft will require at least five pieces of style material. For the first time ever I actually ran out of Nickel because it’s the requirement for every common item with no specific style (why a wax potato requires 5 pieces of nickel to make is beyond me, but that’s just the way it is), so I’d recommend you make sure you’ve got enough of that. Here’s an example of requirements for what is essentially a green quality torch:

Compare to a purple quality item requirements:

So yeah, that’s a lot of mats for one tiny item. The more elaborate they get, the more stuff they’re going to require - so be prepared for the material costs.

As you can see all items require a whole lot of new materials which you have chance to gain when harvesting nodes. Unsurprisingly, wood is needed for most pieces of furniture, so the most useful (and therefore most expensive material in guild stores) is Heartwood. It’s going to be slow work getting these mats (unless you have gold to spare and just go ahead and buy them from other players) so chances are you’ll be doing quite a bit of node farming in days to come.

About writs, then. When doing normal crafting writs you have a chance to get a master writ which gives you a quest to make some specific, usually rare item. I’ve done them everyday, and (according to my experience) if you do six writs you’ll most likely get one master writ in average. It’s not that reliable of course- there were a couple of days when I didn’t get any and then one day I got three. Each writ is worth a certain number of vouchers. Two voucher writs are more common, but I’ve seen people looking to sell writs with over 200 vouchers. A tip: when you get a master writ it will automatically open a quest window for you. If you choose “goodbye” option the writ will go to your inventory where you can inspect its worth and accept it later if you wish. This way the writ container can also be traded or deposited to your bank. If you choose to accept the quest right away you’ll be stuck with it and there’s no going back. I’d pick the “goodbye” option so you can make sure that the requested item is something you can craft in the first place.

You can get a number of things with writ vouchers such as crafting stations for your house, random purple quality furnishing recipes, Ebony motif pieces and style material and so on. Many of these are quite expensive - after two weeks I’ve managed to buy three basic crafting stations, costing 35 vouchers each. The better stuff will naturally cost hundreds, so unless you get lucky with the writs it might take quite a while to acquire them.

Ahhh, what else…? All furniture except the crown store items can be sold, traded, deposited to your bank etc. So if you buy an expensive tapestry, go place it in your house and think “meh, actually I don’t like it” you can just sell it to someone else. Thankfully anything you’ve crafted or bought from other players doesn’t bind to you - I’d be stuck with so much stuff I don’t need. :P All in all, the housing is going to take a lot of gold, tons of mats, and probably a huge chunk of your spare time if you get into it. But at the same time furnishing and decorating has been really fun. During the first week housing was the only thing most players were interested in, and the obsessive looting of containers and farming nodes still seems to be going strong.

I’m most likely forgetting something, but hopefully some of this was helpful. Most importantly, have fun with your new house! :)

[robertbryantblog]

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What Are TMT Bars and What Are the Different Types?

Being a contractor, one must be aware of the materials being used in the construction of a structure. In the olden days, houses across India were built with concrete slabs and iron rods. The rods would begin to rust soon at a very early stage, that too, quite rapidly. It used to affect the stability of the structure in the long run, which would lead to a frequent repair of the house.

Structures made using cheap and inappropriate raw material can’t survive the wrath of nature. The most common cause of structural disasters involving bridges or large buildings is often poor planning, poor quality of material used and negligence on the part of the contractors. That’s why we can’t emphasise enough the importance of excellent quality TMT steel, which hold the concrete blocks together.

What’s a TMT bar?

TMT stands for Thermo Mechanically Treated. The TMT bars have a solid outer surface and a softer core. They are corrosion resistance and especially used for residential buildings, bridges, industrial establishment and all types of concrete reinforcement purposes. TMT Bars are much superior to conventional TOR steel bars by virtue of their multiple engineering properties.

Grade of the TMT bars

TMT bars are available in 4 different grades in India – Fe415, Fe500, Fe550, and Fe600. The greater the grade, the stronger the bar. Greater grade TMT bars should be used on floors and roofs of the building. Lower grade bars can be used in the construction of balcony railings and other decorative structures.

Integrated and secondary steel producers of India

Primary steel producers

The integrated steel producers are Jindal Steel & Power Limited, JSW Steel Ltd., Tata Steel, Rathi, Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Limited (RINL), Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL). Primary steel producers convert iron ore into steel. Everything from Iron Ore mines to Steel production is done at their premises. They produce crude steel of standard specification.

Secondary steel producers

They are the mini steel plants; they make steel by melting scrap or sponge iron, sometimes a mixture of both. Secondary steel is not prime with certifications, but it is still good for many types of uses. If your job doesn’t require mill certification secondary steel can be a good choice. Ispat Industries, Essar Steel, and Lloyd Steel are the largest secondary steel producers.

The difference between primary and secondary steel

Fe415 and Fe500D TMT rebars are recommended for residential construction purpose. Most of the contractors prefer Fe500D because of its strength and ductility, which is very important because the bars will bend to a maximum extent before breaking. Primary producers use HYQST technique in order to form the right inner core which is flexible and outer core which is tough.

Secondary producers produce Fe415 although many of the producers, manufacture 500D as well. Secondary steel can be used to build flagpoles, fence posts, fence railings, poles for signs, bridge railings, culverts for roads etc. In secondary TMT rebars, there is generally no rib pattern, rib pattern helps in a strong bonding of cement.

All in all, TMT bars with high strength and corrosion resistance have made it possible for engineers across India to create structures they could not have imagined.

Source by Preethi Lalitha What Are TMT Bars and What Are the Different Types?

[adambstingus]

Bangkok: Insider Travel Guide

(CNN)So, you’re in Thailand on a mission to cram the best of Bangkok into a weekend? It’s a big task — there’s no city in the world like this one — but it can be done.

But you’re in luck. This quick guide ensures you can at least hit the highlights on your quest for the best of Bangkok.

It’s worth keeping in mind that hotel prices vary dramatically depending on the time of year. High season runs from October to April, so the best bargains can be had May to September.

Hotels

Luxury

The Siam

This stunning, antique-laced property on the Chao Praya River recalls the time of King Rama V (1853-1910), a period when Bangkok was a tranquil, smog-free riverside idyll.

Since opening in 2012 the accolades have been rolling in from travel rags around the world.

With great restaurants, a poolside bar, muay Thai gym and spa, this 39-room resort set on three acres is almost a vacation unto itself.

Though a bit of a hike from the city center, there’s a regular hotel-operated ferry that shuttles guests to the Taksin pier, where they can jump on the BTS Skytrain.

Mandarin Oriental Bangkok

This Bangkok institution is a step back to a time when luggage was carried in trunks, dinner dress was de rigueur (tropics or not) and tea on the veranda was served with a stiff G&T to ward off mosquitoes.

More than 100 years old, the Oriental’s Author’s Wing retains its magical aura with its picturesque parlors, each named for a scribe they once hosted, including the likes of Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway.

The Garden Wing offers similar heights of nostalgic luxury, while the modern River Wing and Tower have a more contemporary design.

And if it weren’t patently obvious from the never-ending stream of awards rained upon this five-star, best of Bangkok landmark, high tea in the Mandarin Oriental’s library is simply too civilized for the mere words of us regrettably non-famous authors.

St. Regis Bangkok

Nearly a quarter of the 227 guest rooms at this elegant property are suites — this should give an idea of the level of comfort to which the St. Regis aspires and generally attains.

A specialty is off-site activities geared toward “the artistic visionary, the epicurean voyager, the passionate connoisseur.”

Care for a deep-sea fishing trip with one of the hotel’s celebrated chefs?

A private Fendi shopping trip?

The hotel will arrange it.

W Hotel Bangkok

The stylish W concept remains intact at this 407-room hotel (“chili-hot nightlife” is advertised) located on Bangkok’s Embassy Row near a vibrant commercial district.

Rooms are basic but fully wired and come with good robes and a Munchie Box.

Bathrooms come with rainforest showers.

City-view room views are nice.

Mid-range

Mode Sathorn

With the opening of Mode Sathorn, Siam@Siam gets the second design hotel in its Bangkok portfolio, which the brand is somewhat predictably characterizing as “fashionable lifestyle.”

The property has 201 rooms and suites in five categories, each featuring a different design concept, plus a presidential suite on the 36th floor.

F&B offerings come in the form of three restaurants and three bars.

Theatre Bar is the standout thanks to a circular TV screen and three areas segregated by your poison of choice, be it wine, beer or cocktails.

As with its sister hotel, Mode Sathorn features a rooftop bar.

If live DJs in al fresco vogue settings aren’t your thing, Secret M has a private indoor dining cove one floor below.

Galleria 10 Hotel Bangkok

Formerly the Ramada Encore, the Galleria 10 is a 188-room, chrome-and-glass hotel with modern furnishings.

It’s geared toward “always-on-the-go” business travelers, with high-speed Internet access included in the room rate, 40-inch LCD TV with satellite channels, good-sized working areas, direct dial telephones and HDMI easy plug-in.

There are some nice outdoor spaces for drinks around the pool.

Bangkok Treehouse

Inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden,” the 12-suite Bangkok Treehouse allows guests to get back to nature in Bang Krajao, the “green lungs of Bangkok.”

Guests arrive via a dedicated shuttle boat across the Chao Phraya, disembarking onto a floating pontoon overlooked by the hotel’s gourmet organic restaurant.

Each standard suite is divided into three levels (living room, bedroom and roof deck), offering views of the surrounding river, mangroves and coconut plantations.

Inside, the rooms are comfortable and cozy, with all the expected features (TV, DVD, Wi-Fi) and optional air-conditioning.

Loy La Long

Quirky and comfy, the seven color-coded rooms at this two-story wood property on the edge of Chinatown range from a four-bedroom family dorm (guests pay per bed) to the river-view suite that allows you to wake up to the sight of barges floating past — along with the occasional roaring longtail engine.

There’s a fantastic “living room,” where guests can park on a floor cushion and watch the life on the river pass by.

Near Tha Tien Pier, Loy La Long is hidden behind a temple complex right on the edge of Chinatown.

Not easy to find, but the payoff is worth it.

Budget

Lub D

Lub D proves that being on a budget doesn’t have to mean losing out on style or location.

There are two Lub D “hostels” in Bangkok, both rocking an industrial chic design.

The original is on Decho Road, off Silom.

The newer Siam location is opposite National Stadium, close to the BTS SkyTrain and a short walk to Siam Square and the malls of Rajaprasong.

It has four-bed dorms, economy twin rooms, doubles and, our favorite, a queen-bed suite with a private bathroom and LCD TV.

The Wi-Fi is free and the beer cheap.

You won’t find those attributes in too many five-star establishments.

Dining

Nahm

Offering Thai fine dining with exquisite attention to detail, the best ingredients and authenticity, Nahm provides the best of Bangkok culinary experiences.

Head Chef David Thompson, who received a Michelin star for his London-based Thai restaurant of the same name, opened this branch in the Metropolitan Hotel in 2010.

If that doesn’t sell you, perhaps the fact it’s the only Thai restaurant to crack the top 10 of the world’s 50 best restaurants list will.

Through recipes based on archaic Siamese cookbooks and other dishes passed down in “funeral books,” you’ll receive both perfect renditions of Thai classics such as tom yum goong, as well as fresh surprises difficult to find outside the Thai home.

Issaya Siamese Club

Issaya Siamese Club is internationally acclaimed Thai chef Ian Kittichai’s first flagship Bangkok restaurant.

The menu in this beautifully restored colonial house features traditional Thai cuisine combined with modern cooking methods.

There a few misses but for the most part everything on the menu is unique, delicious and oh-so-pretty.

We recommend the banana blossom Thai salad, chili-glazed baby back ribs and massaman lamb.

Bo.Lan

Bo.Lan has been making waves in Bangkok’s culinary scene since it opened in 2009.

Serving hard-to-find Thai dishes in an upscale, hip atmosphere, the restaurant is true to Thai cuisine’s roots, yet still manages to add a special twist.

Located on Sukhumvit Soi 24, Bo.Lan stars include the smoked Chiang Mai river trout salad, green curry stuffed egg yolks and stir-fried beef with dried shrimp paste.

This place is good for a romantic dinner or a work meeting with colleagues who appreciate fine food.

For the especially ravenous, there’s a large set menu

Gaggan

Earning first place on the latest “Asia’s 50 best restaurants” list, progressive Indian restaurant Gaggan is one of the most exciting venues to arrive in Bangkok in recent years.

But don’t go into this place thinking you’re going to be enjoying the usual Indian dishes like butter chicken or mutton biryani.

El-Bulli-trained chef Gaggan Anand uses molecular technology to put a funky twist on classic dishes from his native India, rendering many of them unrecognizable while giving you that “a-ha!” moment as the connection hits your taste buds.

The best table in this two-story colonial Thai home offers a window right into the kitchen, where you can see Gaggan and his staff in action.

Culinary theater at its best.

Supanniga Eating Room

If you want more from Thai cuisine than green curry, pad Thai and papaya salad Supanniga Eating Room is a great new Bangkok option.

It’s located in a narrow, three-story Thonglor shophouse, decked out with raw cement walls, yellow booths and outdoor sofas on the top floor.

Inspired by Trat province on Thailand’s southeastern coast and the northeast Isaan region, the menu has rewards for the uninitiated.

Highlights include yam pla salid thod krob (sweet and sour salad with crispy fish) and sweet and herbal moo chor muang (fatty chunks of pork in an earthy curry of sour leaves).

Almost every dish here is colorful — yes, you’ll be taking pictures of it before you eat — and the mood is casual.

Somtum Der

At this little eatery you get personal service and authentic Isaan-style street food without the street.

The restaurant is air-conditioned, which is a good thing since dishes have plenty of spice.

Chicken, pork and seafood are grilled nicely and come with sticky rice. Veggies are fresh and crisp.

A great quick, flip-flop-friendly pit stop.

Soul Food Mahanakorn

An expat favorite, low-key lighting and wood finishing define the cozy interior of this three-floor shop house.

Soul Food Mahanakorn’s kitchen revolves around what’s fresh in the markets — seafood from Sam Yan one day or meat from Or Tor Kor another.

Healthy organic foods, such as rice, meats and some vegetables, are sourced from organic farmers in the northeast.

Recommended dishes: everything. It’s all good here.

The cocktails are fantastic, too, especially the “Bangkok Bastard,” a mojito-like drink with a Thai-style twist.

Shop houses and street food

Bangkok is famous for its street food and shop-house restaurants, which makes picking just one vendor difficult.

To experience the best of Bangkok street food, we advise hitting some of the more famous eating neighborhoods and start sampling.

Most shop houses or street vendors specialize in one dish, whether it’s duck noodles, pad Thai or red pork on rice.

Some of the best Bangkok street food zones to hit include Bang Rak (between Taksin BTS station and the junction of Charoen Krung and Silom Road), Victory Monument (BTS: Victory Monument), Soi Ari (BTS: Ari), Chinatown, Wongwian Yai and Ratchawat.

Nightlife

The Speakeasy

An upmarket bar with great views, The Speakeasy at Hotel Muse is set in a beautiful space on the 24th and 25th floors.

Designed to bring back some Prohibition Era nostalgia, it consists of two bars, a cigar lounge, private salas and a boardroo.

Sukhumvit Soi 11

In recent years, this busy Bangkok street in the city’s Nana area has been pumped full of hotels, tourist-friendly pubs, nightclubs and restaurants.

Soi 11 newcomers worth checking out include Apoteka — great live music, stiff drinks and craft beer — and Levels, an enormous, high-ceilinged room whose centerpiece is a circular, glowing bar with a jazzy LED chandelier overhead.

The latter has house-heavy DJs every night, with the occasional visiting big deal international act.

RCA

Another great place for bar hopping — if you don’t mind hanging with the under-25 set — the numerous clubs and pubs that line Royal City Avenue (taxi drivers all know it as RCA) provide a congregation point for youngsters looking to chill out.

Named for the historic American highway, Route 66 is the mother of all clubs here, where the ghetto riche and urban fab descend in throngs to dance to a variety of music.

For live music, there’s Cosmic Caf.

WTF

Curious name aside, WTF on Sukhumvit Soi 51 lives up to its multi-faceted concept of food-drink-art-friendship, attracting the city’s intellectual and creative class.

WTF is comfortably tiny, with a few tables scattered around on the first floor near a well-stocked bar, while the second floor serves as a gallery space.

Maggie Choo’s

It may be located in the basement of a hotel (accessed via a separate, dark entrance), but this speakeasy-like bar with a Shanghai opium den vibe comes with the solid pedigree of nightlife mogul Ashley Sutton.

Sutton is behind several of the city’s time warping establishments, such as Iron Fairies and Fat Gutz.

At Maggie Choo’s, you get live jazz, leather armchairs, bank vaults and Queen Victoria busts juxtaposed with cocktails, tile work, lattice and heavy wooden doors.

Beautiful women clad in cheongsams hang from swings and drape themselves across the bar.

Bangkok bars can please the eyes; here are 9 of the most stunning

Shopping

Thai fashion designers

Beyond the city’s many Louis Vuitton, Herms and other big-brand boutiques at high-end malls are some talented local designers earning global praise as well.

So where to find Thailand’s hottest young designers?

Gaysorn Plaza has popular brands like Sretsis and Issue, while celeb favorite Kloset has shops at Siam Center, Siam Paragon and CentralWorld.

To check out the designs of up-and-comer k and i, head to Zen at CentralWorld.

Jatujak Weekend Market

Bangkok’s Jatujak (or Chatuchak) Weekend Market — JJ for short — is one of the biggest in Asia. Covering 35 acres, it has thousands of vendors and attracts as many as 200,000 shoppers on weekends,

It’s the place to go for Thai handicrafts, artwork, clothing, household goods and even pets.

The downside? It’s hot. It’s crowded. And it’s easy to get lost amid the labyrinthine network of stalls.

Yet that’s why some people love it.

The rest of us avoid the madness by going early in the morning, before 9 a.m., or later in the day, at about 4 p.m.

Jatujak Weekend Market, BTS, Mo Chit station; MRT: Chatuchak Park Station

Asiatique The Riverfront

Asiatique The Riverfront is a huge shopping and entertainment complex beside Bangkok’s Chao Phraya river.

Inspired by the city’s days as a riverside trading post in the early 1900s, it resembles a traditional pier with rows of warehouses.

The restaurants and bars include a mixture of upscale bistro-style restaurants serving Thai, Japanese, French and Italian, as well as an Irish pub and a wine bar.

There’s also an outdoor, covered food court.

The best way to get there is to hop on the free shuttle boat that runs regularly from the BTS Thaksin pier.

Attractions

Ancient City

This is the only way to tour Thailand’s most significant historical sites in a day.

About a 45-minute drive from the city, this Samut Prakan attraction features replicas of dozens of major Thai landmarks, from the Grand Palace in Bangkok to the contested Preah Vihear temple on the border with Cambodia.

Given Ancient City’s size, walking isn’t recommended.

Better to rent a golf cart or a bike to cruise around the park.

Siam Niramit

A well-designed stage production featuring more than 100 performers, Siam Niramit crams seven centuries of Thai culture into a fantastic 80-minute show that’s heavy on special effects.

Shows start daily at 8 p.m. and there’s an onsite restaurant offering a fairly standard Thai buffet dinner from 5:30 p.m.

After the show, families can check out onsite attractions like elephant rides, a recreation of a traditional Thai village and other cultural displays.

Jim Thompson House

The legend of Jim Thompson is outlined in every Thailand guidebook, while the iconic brand’s products are in 13 shops around Bangkok and two factory outlets.

For the true experience, head for the historic Jim Thompson House and learn about the brand’s mysterious namesake, an American who gained worldwide recognition for rebuilding the Thai silk industry before disappearing in the Malaysian jungle in 1967.

The traditional Thai-style teak house, surrounded by plants and trees, is filled with Southeast Asian antiques that he acquired through his travels.

But don’t let us convince you of its quality.

Somerset Maugham, who dined with Thompson at this house in 1959, summed it up best: “You have not only beautiful things, but what is rare, you have arranged them with faultless taste.”

Museum of Contemporary Art

For a look at Thailand’s modern art scene, you’ll need to head out of the downtown core to Bangkok’s new Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA).

A five-story space owned by a Thai telecommunications magnate who wanted to share his huge Thai modern art collection with the masses, MOCA offers a great introduction to those who want a primer on Thailand’s art scene.

Most of the country’s leading artists of the last 50 years are represented, as well as some lesser-known greats.

Museum of Floral Culture

This is one of Bangkok’s gorgeous surprises.

The creation of Thai floral artist Sakul Intakul, the museum is for flower and nature lovers and those with an interest in Thai flower culture.

It features exhibits of important floral cultures from civilizations across Asia such as India, China, Japan, Laos and Bali/Indonesia.

It’s housed in a beautifully preserved, 100-year-old teak mansion with colonial architecture.

Lush grounds have been transformed into an impeccably landscaped Thai-meets-Zen-style garden.

Temples

As Thailand is 95 percent Buddhist, there are of course hundreds of Bangkok temples — known in Thai as “wats.”

For a look at how locals worship, head to any one of the glittering neighborhood wats, often located far down tiny sois and well out of the way of tourist traffic.

Some are actually in massive complexes filled with halls, schools and revered statues.

The three big ones on the tourist trail — the Grand Palace, Wat Po and Wat Arun — should be a best of Bangkok stop on any first-timer’s itinerary, as they are genuinely impressive and loaded with historical significance.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/bangkok-insider-travel-guide/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/178867443262

[allofbeercom]

Bangkok: Insider Travel Guide

(CNN)So, you’re in Thailand on a mission to cram the best of Bangkok into a weekend? It’s a big task — there’s no city in the world like this one — but it can be done.

But you’re in luck. This quick guide ensures you can at least hit the highlights on your quest for the best of Bangkok.

It’s worth keeping in mind that hotel prices vary dramatically depending on the time of year. High season runs from October to April, so the best bargains can be had May to September.

Hotels

Luxury

The Siam

This stunning, antique-laced property on the Chao Praya River recalls the time of King Rama V (1853-1910), a period when Bangkok was a tranquil, smog-free riverside idyll.

Since opening in 2012 the accolades have been rolling in from travel rags around the world.

With great restaurants, a poolside bar, muay Thai gym and spa, this 39-room resort set on three acres is almost a vacation unto itself.

Though a bit of a hike from the city center, there’s a regular hotel-operated ferry that shuttles guests to the Taksin pier, where they can jump on the BTS Skytrain.

Mandarin Oriental Bangkok

This Bangkok institution is a step back to a time when luggage was carried in trunks, dinner dress was de rigueur (tropics or not) and tea on the veranda was served with a stiff G&T to ward off mosquitoes.

More than 100 years old, the Oriental’s Author’s Wing retains its magical aura with its picturesque parlors, each named for a scribe they once hosted, including the likes of Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway.

The Garden Wing offers similar heights of nostalgic luxury, while the modern River Wing and Tower have a more contemporary design.

And if it weren’t patently obvious from the never-ending stream of awards rained upon this five-star, best of Bangkok landmark, high tea in the Mandarin Oriental’s library is simply too civilized for the mere words of us regrettably non-famous authors.

St. Regis Bangkok

Nearly a quarter of the 227 guest rooms at this elegant property are suites — this should give an idea of the level of comfort to which the St. Regis aspires and generally attains.

A specialty is off-site activities geared toward “the artistic visionary, the epicurean voyager, the passionate connoisseur.”

Care for a deep-sea fishing trip with one of the hotel’s celebrated chefs?

A private Fendi shopping trip?

The hotel will arrange it.

W Hotel Bangkok

The stylish W concept remains intact at this 407-room hotel (“chili-hot nightlife” is advertised) located on Bangkok’s Embassy Row near a vibrant commercial district.

Rooms are basic but fully wired and come with good robes and a Munchie Box.

Bathrooms come with rainforest showers.

City-view room views are nice.

Mid-range

Mode Sathorn

With the opening of Mode Sathorn, Siam@Siam gets the second design hotel in its Bangkok portfolio, which the brand is somewhat predictably characterizing as “fashionable lifestyle.”

The property has 201 rooms and suites in five categories, each featuring a different design concept, plus a presidential suite on the 36th floor.

F&B offerings come in the form of three restaurants and three bars.

Theatre Bar is the standout thanks to a circular TV screen and three areas segregated by your poison of choice, be it wine, beer or cocktails.

As with its sister hotel, Mode Sathorn features a rooftop bar.

If live DJs in al fresco vogue settings aren’t your thing, Secret M has a private indoor dining cove one floor below.

Galleria 10 Hotel Bangkok

Formerly the Ramada Encore, the Galleria 10 is a 188-room, chrome-and-glass hotel with modern furnishings.

It’s geared toward “always-on-the-go” business travelers, with high-speed Internet access included in the room rate, 40-inch LCD TV with satellite channels, good-sized working areas, direct dial telephones and HDMI easy plug-in.

There are some nice outdoor spaces for drinks around the pool.

Bangkok Treehouse

Inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden,” the 12-suite Bangkok Treehouse allows guests to get back to nature in Bang Krajao, the “green lungs of Bangkok.”

Guests arrive via a dedicated shuttle boat across the Chao Phraya, disembarking onto a floating pontoon overlooked by the hotel’s gourmet organic restaurant.

Each standard suite is divided into three levels (living room, bedroom and roof deck), offering views of the surrounding river, mangroves and coconut plantations.

Inside, the rooms are comfortable and cozy, with all the expected features (TV, DVD, Wi-Fi) and optional air-conditioning.

Loy La Long

Quirky and comfy, the seven color-coded rooms at this two-story wood property on the edge of Chinatown range from a four-bedroom family dorm (guests pay per bed) to the river-view suite that allows you to wake up to the sight of barges floating past — along with the occasional roaring longtail engine.

There’s a fantastic “living room,” where guests can park on a floor cushion and watch the life on the river pass by.

Near Tha Tien Pier, Loy La Long is hidden behind a temple complex right on the edge of Chinatown.

Not easy to find, but the payoff is worth it.

Budget

Lub D

Lub D proves that being on a budget doesn’t have to mean losing out on style or location.

There are two Lub D “hostels” in Bangkok, both rocking an industrial chic design.

The original is on Decho Road, off Silom.

The newer Siam location is opposite National Stadium, close to the BTS SkyTrain and a short walk to Siam Square and the malls of Rajaprasong.

It has four-bed dorms, economy twin rooms, doubles and, our favorite, a queen-bed suite with a private bathroom and LCD TV.

The Wi-Fi is free and the beer cheap.

You won’t find those attributes in too many five-star establishments.

Dining

Nahm

Offering Thai fine dining with exquisite attention to detail, the best ingredients and authenticity, Nahm provides the best of Bangkok culinary experiences.

Head Chef David Thompson, who received a Michelin star for his London-based Thai restaurant of the same name, opened this branch in the Metropolitan Hotel in 2010.

If that doesn’t sell you, perhaps the fact it’s the only Thai restaurant to crack the top 10 of the world’s 50 best restaurants list will.

Through recipes based on archaic Siamese cookbooks and other dishes passed down in “funeral books,” you’ll receive both perfect renditions of Thai classics such as tom yum goong, as well as fresh surprises difficult to find outside the Thai home.

Issaya Siamese Club

Issaya Siamese Club is internationally acclaimed Thai chef Ian Kittichai’s first flagship Bangkok restaurant.

The menu in this beautifully restored colonial house features traditional Thai cuisine combined with modern cooking methods.

There a few misses but for the most part everything on the menu is unique, delicious and oh-so-pretty.

We recommend the banana blossom Thai salad, chili-glazed baby back ribs and massaman lamb.

Bo.Lan

Bo.Lan has been making waves in Bangkok’s culinary scene since it opened in 2009.

Serving hard-to-find Thai dishes in an upscale, hip atmosphere, the restaurant is true to Thai cuisine’s roots, yet still manages to add a special twist.

Located on Sukhumvit Soi 24, Bo.Lan stars include the smoked Chiang Mai river trout salad, green curry stuffed egg yolks and stir-fried beef with dried shrimp paste.

This place is good for a romantic dinner or a work meeting with colleagues who appreciate fine food.

For the especially ravenous, there’s a large set menu

Gaggan

Earning first place on the latest “Asia’s 50 best restaurants” list, progressive Indian restaurant Gaggan is one of the most exciting venues to arrive in Bangkok in recent years.

But don’t go into this place thinking you’re going to be enjoying the usual Indian dishes like butter chicken or mutton biryani.

El-Bulli-trained chef Gaggan Anand uses molecular technology to put a funky twist on classic dishes from his native India, rendering many of them unrecognizable while giving you that “a-ha!” moment as the connection hits your taste buds.

The best table in this two-story colonial Thai home offers a window right into the kitchen, where you can see Gaggan and his staff in action.

Culinary theater at its best.

Supanniga Eating Room

If you want more from Thai cuisine than green curry, pad Thai and papaya salad Supanniga Eating Room is a great new Bangkok option.

It’s located in a narrow, three-story Thonglor shophouse, decked out with raw cement walls, yellow booths and outdoor sofas on the top floor.

Inspired by Trat province on Thailand’s southeastern coast and the northeast Isaan region, the menu has rewards for the uninitiated.

Highlights include yam pla salid thod krob (sweet and sour salad with crispy fish) and sweet and herbal moo chor muang (fatty chunks of pork in an earthy curry of sour leaves).

Almost every dish here is colorful — yes, you’ll be taking pictures of it before you eat — and the mood is casual.

Somtum Der

At this little eatery you get personal service and authentic Isaan-style street food without the street.

The restaurant is air-conditioned, which is a good thing since dishes have plenty of spice.

Chicken, pork and seafood are grilled nicely and come with sticky rice. Veggies are fresh and crisp.

A great quick, flip-flop-friendly pit stop.

Soul Food Mahanakorn

An expat favorite, low-key lighting and wood finishing define the cozy interior of this three-floor shop house.

Soul Food Mahanakorn’s kitchen revolves around what’s fresh in the markets — seafood from Sam Yan one day or meat from Or Tor Kor another.

Healthy organic foods, such as rice, meats and some vegetables, are sourced from organic farmers in the northeast.

Recommended dishes: everything. It’s all good here.

The cocktails are fantastic, too, especially the “Bangkok Bastard,” a mojito-like drink with a Thai-style twist.

Shop houses and street food

Bangkok is famous for its street food and shop-house restaurants, which makes picking just one vendor difficult.

To experience the best of Bangkok street food, we advise hitting some of the more famous eating neighborhoods and start sampling.

Most shop houses or street vendors specialize in one dish, whether it’s duck noodles, pad Thai or red pork on rice.

Some of the best Bangkok street food zones to hit include Bang Rak (between Taksin BTS station and the junction of Charoen Krung and Silom Road), Victory Monument (BTS: Victory Monument), Soi Ari (BTS: Ari), Chinatown, Wongwian Yai and Ratchawat.

Nightlife

The Speakeasy

An upmarket bar with great views, The Speakeasy at Hotel Muse is set in a beautiful space on the 24th and 25th floors.

Designed to bring back some Prohibition Era nostalgia, it consists of two bars, a cigar lounge, private salas and a boardroo.

Sukhumvit Soi 11

In recent years, this busy Bangkok street in the city’s Nana area has been pumped full of hotels, tourist-friendly pubs, nightclubs and restaurants.

Soi 11 newcomers worth checking out include Apoteka — great live music, stiff drinks and craft beer — and Levels, an enormous, high-ceilinged room whose centerpiece is a circular, glowing bar with a jazzy LED chandelier overhead.

The latter has house-heavy DJs every night, with the occasional visiting big deal international act.

RCA

Another great place for bar hopping — if you don’t mind hanging with the under-25 set — the numerous clubs and pubs that line Royal City Avenue (taxi drivers all know it as RCA) provide a congregation point for youngsters looking to chill out.

Named for the historic American highway, Route 66 is the mother of all clubs here, where the ghetto riche and urban fab descend in throngs to dance to a variety of music.

For live music, there’s Cosmic Caf.

WTF

Curious name aside, WTF on Sukhumvit Soi 51 lives up to its multi-faceted concept of food-drink-art-friendship, attracting the city’s intellectual and creative class.

WTF is comfortably tiny, with a few tables scattered around on the first floor near a well-stocked bar, while the second floor serves as a gallery space.

Maggie Choo’s

It may be located in the basement of a hotel (accessed via a separate, dark entrance), but this speakeasy-like bar with a Shanghai opium den vibe comes with the solid pedigree of nightlife mogul Ashley Sutton.

Sutton is behind several of the city’s time warping establishments, such as Iron Fairies and Fat Gutz.

At Maggie Choo’s, you get live jazz, leather armchairs, bank vaults and Queen Victoria busts juxtaposed with cocktails, tile work, lattice and heavy wooden doors.

Beautiful women clad in cheongsams hang from swings and drape themselves across the bar.

Bangkok bars can please the eyes; here are 9 of the most stunning

Shopping

Thai fashion designers

Beyond the city’s many Louis Vuitton, Herms and other big-brand boutiques at high-end malls are some talented local designers earning global praise as well.

So where to find Thailand’s hottest young designers?

Gaysorn Plaza has popular brands like Sretsis and Issue, while celeb favorite Kloset has shops at Siam Center, Siam Paragon and CentralWorld.

To check out the designs of up-and-comer k and i, head to Zen at CentralWorld.

Jatujak Weekend Market

Bangkok’s Jatujak (or Chatuchak) Weekend Market — JJ for short — is one of the biggest in Asia. Covering 35 acres, it has thousands of vendors and attracts as many as 200,000 shoppers on weekends,

It’s the place to go for Thai handicrafts, artwork, clothing, household goods and even pets.

The downside? It’s hot. It’s crowded. And it’s easy to get lost amid the labyrinthine network of stalls.

Yet that’s why some people love it.

The rest of us avoid the madness by going early in the morning, before 9 a.m., or later in the day, at about 4 p.m.

Jatujak Weekend Market, BTS, Mo Chit station; MRT: Chatuchak Park Station

Asiatique The Riverfront

Asiatique The Riverfront is a huge shopping and entertainment complex beside Bangkok’s Chao Phraya river.

Inspired by the city’s days as a riverside trading post in the early 1900s, it resembles a traditional pier with rows of warehouses.

The restaurants and bars include a mixture of upscale bistro-style restaurants serving Thai, Japanese, French and Italian, as well as an Irish pub and a wine bar.

There’s also an outdoor, covered food court.

The best way to get there is to hop on the free shuttle boat that runs regularly from the BTS Thaksin pier.

Attractions

Ancient City

This is the only way to tour Thailand’s most significant historical sites in a day.

About a 45-minute drive from the city, this Samut Prakan attraction features replicas of dozens of major Thai landmarks, from the Grand Palace in Bangkok to the contested Preah Vihear temple on the border with Cambodia.

Given Ancient City’s size, walking isn’t recommended.

Better to rent a golf cart or a bike to cruise around the park.

Siam Niramit

A well-designed stage production featuring more than 100 performers, Siam Niramit crams seven centuries of Thai culture into a fantastic 80-minute show that’s heavy on special effects.

Shows start daily at 8 p.m. and there’s an onsite restaurant offering a fairly standard Thai buffet dinner from 5:30 p.m.

After the show, families can check out onsite attractions like elephant rides, a recreation of a traditional Thai village and other cultural displays.

Jim Thompson House

The legend of Jim Thompson is outlined in every Thailand guidebook, while the iconic brand’s products are in 13 shops around Bangkok and two factory outlets.

For the true experience, head for the historic Jim Thompson House and learn about the brand’s mysterious namesake, an American who gained worldwide recognition for rebuilding the Thai silk industry before disappearing in the Malaysian jungle in 1967.

The traditional Thai-style teak house, surrounded by plants and trees, is filled with Southeast Asian antiques that he acquired through his travels.

But don’t let us convince you of its quality.

Somerset Maugham, who dined with Thompson at this house in 1959, summed it up best: “You have not only beautiful things, but what is rare, you have arranged them with faultless taste.”

Museum of Contemporary Art

For a look at Thailand’s modern art scene, you’ll need to head out of the downtown core to Bangkok’s new Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA).

A five-story space owned by a Thai telecommunications magnate who wanted to share his huge Thai modern art collection with the masses, MOCA offers a great introduction to those who want a primer on Thailand’s art scene.

Most of the country’s leading artists of the last 50 years are represented, as well as some lesser-known greats.

Museum of Floral Culture

This is one of Bangkok’s gorgeous surprises.

The creation of Thai floral artist Sakul Intakul, the museum is for flower and nature lovers and those with an interest in Thai flower culture.

It features exhibits of important floral cultures from civilizations across Asia such as India, China, Japan, Laos and Bali/Indonesia.

It’s housed in a beautifully preserved, 100-year-old teak mansion with colonial architecture.

Lush grounds have been transformed into an impeccably landscaped Thai-meets-Zen-style garden.

Temples

As Thailand is 95 percent Buddhist, there are of course hundreds of Bangkok temples — known in Thai as “wats.”

For a look at how locals worship, head to any one of the glittering neighborhood wats, often located far down tiny sois and well out of the way of tourist traffic.

Some are actually in massive complexes filled with halls, schools and revered statues.

The three big ones on the tourist trail — the Grand Palace, Wat Po and Wat Arun — should be a best of Bangkok stop on any first-timer’s itinerary, as they are genuinely impressive and loaded with historical significance.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/bangkok-insider-travel-guide/

[spynotebook]

Superman relives his exit from Krypton.

Image: Curt Swan, Frank Chiaramonte, Gaspar Saladino and Adrienne Roy (DC Comics)

When I was a kid, it seemed impossible that Superman might have any problems. Sure, he had adventures that threw setbacks in his path but he always overcame those. It wasn’t until I read Action Comics #500 that I ever thought that the Man of Steel could have the same kinds of persistent emotional vulnerabilities that normal folks deal with.

I don’t remember when I first read the “The Life Story of Superman,” by writer Martin Pasko, penciller Curt Swan, inker Frank Chiaramonte, letterer Gaspar Saladino, and colorist Adrienne Roy. However, I do remember how I first read it. That story originally appeared in Action Comics #500 in 1979 but my initial encounter with it was in a beat-up paperback titled The Superman Story. That volume was first published by Tor in 1983, which means—if I read it in that first year—I would’ve been 11 years old. The Evan of 1983 was skinny, gawky, and awkward as all hell, my introvertedness made more painful by my mother’s moving us to Long Island. Whether it was the borough of Brooklyn where I was born or the town of Hempstead that we’d just moved to, I never felt like I fit in anywhere. That’s probably why a story that showed Superman as someone who felt all alone in the cosmos hit me so hard.

“The Life Story of Superman” is exactly what it sounds like: a museum tour through the character’s fictional biography, narrated by Kal-El with highlights pegged to his coming-of-age. There’s also a standard, late-Silver-Age plot that has Lex Luthor surreptitiously planning to replace the Man of Steel with a quick-grown clone that’ll be loyal to him, but that’s not the part that I responded to as a kid. This comic was the first one to give me a sense of Superman’s emotions and, probably, the first time I experienced him as human.

Moreover, it fed into the sentimental relationship I was already subconsciously building with the character. My clearest early Superman memories are from 1978’s Superman: The Movie and I remember how reading this story helped me understand the character emotionally. I haven’t read this story in three decades but, coming back to specific moments calls up surprisingly powerful echoes. More specifically, I remember how they made me feel. The storytelling is all swollen with soap opera melodrama but there’s no denying the impact certain scenes have. Unexpected poignancy abounds through “The Life Story of Superman,” hidden in little throwaway beats.

Superman reveals that kryptonite has triggered memory loss over the years.

Image: Curt Swan, Frank Chiaramonte, letterer Gaspar Saladino and Adrienne Roy (DC Comics)

For example, Superman says years of Kryptonite exposure have eroded his ability to recall childhood memories despite having a super-brain. It’s a beat that sets up the hacked mind-prober ray that Lex will use to program his clone, but it’s also a panel that makes clear the secret toll Superman has been paying while saving the world.

Action Comics #500 boomed out in the grandiose, stentorian voice that typified the Julie Schwartz era of DC Comics. For its occasional moments of feeling staid, this comic was meant to be understood as important. Impressionable 11-year-old Evan soaked it all up, mostly because Pasko’s script is great at keeping characters’ emotions at the forefront. The scenes set on Krypton all land exceptionally well, especially the sequences centered on Jor-El and Lara’s frustration and desperation, as well as toddler Kal-El’s attachment to his pet dog Krypto. That first chapter culminates in Superman reliving his escape from an exploding Krypton as a child, and those panels hit like a hammer. That small, quiet panel of Superman shaking with silent sobs, surrounded by people who’ve shown up to celebrate an indestructible hero, is a thing of beauty.

Helplessly watching a planet and parents die all over again is too much for even a Superman to bear.

Image: Curt Swan, Frank Chiaramonte, Gaspar Saladino and Adrienne Roy (DC Comics)

If memory serves, it wasn’t until high school that I’d started to pay attention to the specific names of writers and artists who’d worked on comics I was reading. I remember thinking of penciller Curt Swan as a ham-n-egger, a dependable omnipresent machine that churned out unremarkable work. I distinctly recall that this comic started to change my perceptions of him and a long-blooming affection began. With the distance of decades, it’s easy to laugh at fraught scenes of Superman choking up and crying. But the way that Swan draws emotional reactions is forthright and guileless, and there’s a midcentury sentimentalism that seems to connect to Norman Rockwell and Leave It to Beaver. Combined with the thematic ambitions of Pasko’s script, the end product makes this comic feel like a milestone in execution—and not just because of its issue number.

Ooof. Poor Clark.

Image: Curt Swan, Frank Chiaramonte, Gaspar Saladino and Adrienne Roy (DC Comics)

I’d always had a sense of the emotional churn inside, say, Spider-Man and Batman. “The Life Story of Superman” made me start to think of the Man of Steel as someone who does just more than fly, punch, and smile. In particular, the dialogue from his reunion with Krypto is inspired and the smile that Swan draws on Superman’s face really makes it seem like he’s experiencing a moment of peak happiness.

Needy much, Lana?

Image: Curt Swan, Frank Chiaramonte, Gaspar Saladino and Adrienne Roy (DC Comics)

“The wind in your face in a way that no one else in the world can feel it...”

Image: Curt Swan, Frank Chiaramonte, Gaspar Saladino and Adrienne Roy (DC Comics)

Later, Superman explains what it meant to have Supergirl be with him on Earth and the talk of familial love leads the audience to ask the Man of Steel about his romantic life. In these scenes, we get the familiar canard that he can’t marry Lois because of how her life would be in danger. However, all the preceding emotional beats make this instance of that logic resonate more meaningfully. The story walks the reader through his loss and loneliness and, for me, it felt like he might really want and need to be with Lois, as opposed to merely enduring her marriage-crazy schemes from older stories.

That LL fetish...

Image: Curt Swan, Frank Chiaramonte, Gaspar Saladino and Adrienne Roy (DC Comics)

In an editorial letter, writer and DC’s in-house continuity cop E. Nelson Bridwell runs down major events that have happened in Action Comics and wonders about the future:

The beginning of E. Nelson Bridwell’s editorial letter in Action Comics #500.

Image: DC Comics

The end of E. Nelson Bridwell’s editorial letter in Action Comics #500.

Image: DC Comics

The 1,000th issue that Bridwell mused about just came out and the Man of Tomorrow that we have today owes a debt to the foundations laid by comics like Action Comics #500. The anniversary installment from 1979 came out long before images of Superman crying and quotes about how his feelings are his true invulnerability became latter-day clichés. He was a still a fairly static character meant to soar through done-in-one stories that would shore up a pillar of a publisher’s business. Part of that business was selling stories to be repurposed for the bookstore market. That paperback I read as a kid had no color and had skewed panels that were seemingly cut out and pasted onto a new compressed layout that did the story no favors. The cheap printing, transparent plot formula, and uptick in craft sophistication may prompt modern readers to laugh at Action Comics #500.

A scan of “The Superman Story” paperback where “The Life Story of Superman” was reprinted.

Image: Curt Swan, Frank Chiaramonte, Gaspar Saladino, and Adrienne Roy (Tor Books, via Google)

But “The Life Story of Superman” had enough energy to break through to my heart and give me the sense that Superman had a heart too, one that yearned and broke just like mine. Pasko’s writing gave me a lesson I didn’t know I needed: All the super-strength in the world doesn’t make one immune from wanting connection with others and those connections make us who we are, even if we’re Superman. Especially if we’re Superman.

[therightnewsnetwork]

Cory Doctorow’s ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communist Civilization’

Cory Doctorow, of BoingBoing and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) fame, has returned to adult fiction after a long stint in the young adult hinterlands (Little Brother, Homeland). His new novel, Walkaway (Tor), circles back to the theme of his first novel, 2003’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom: the question of what a post-scarcity world might look like. A fascinating cadre of John Galt–style opters-out form the core of the new novel, but the story is concept-driven, not character-driven.

As usual, Doctorow’s politics permeate his writing. And, as usual, they’re just heterodox enough to provide moments of delightful confirmation bias and squirm-inducing challenge for readers of nearly every ideological stripe.

Doctorow, a civil libertarian who identifies with the political left, has staked out a broad and eccentric territory for his fiction and nonfiction beats, covering topics from privacy to drones to Digital Rights Management (DRM) to open-source software creation.

The Walkaway audiobook is a particular delight, featuring guest appearances from a ramshackle celebrity cast, including Amber Benson, Justine Eyre, Amanda Palmer, and Wil Wheaton. All versions of the novel are free from distribution-restricting DRM protections. The downside is that standard providers like Audible won’t carry it.

When Doctorow stopped by Reason‘s D.C. office in April, he handed out credit card–shaped USB drives loaded with the audiobook on his way out the door. Hardcover review copies also shipped with a similarly sized multitool. These little flourishes bring readers a few inches closer to Doctorow’s subversive worldview, where it’s always possible, even admirable, to thumb your nose at the rules imposed by governments, tech companies, and just about everyone else.

Reason: Let’s talk about the word dystopia. It’s a word no one knew 10 years ago and now everyone says all the time about pretty much every novel ever. Is this a dystopia in Walkaway, or a utopia?

Doctorow: I think that we mistake the furniture for the theme. We tend to think of books in which things are in crisis as being dystopian novels. But really it’s a very hard job to write a dramatic novel—especially in the kind of pulpy science fiction tradition—in which things aren’t going wrong. So for me, the thing that cleaves a utopia from a dystopia is what [essayist and critic] Rebecca Solnit says cleaves a disaster from a catastrophe: It’s what we do when things go wrong. Do people pitch in and rise to the occasion? Or do they turn on their neighbors and eat them? That’s the dystopian vision. The most dystopian thing you can imagine is that, but for the thin veneer of civilization, it would be a bloodbath.

Is Walkaway a prequel to Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom? It seems like a similar universe. Has the political take-away that you would want people to get out of those two books shifted, either because your views have changed or because facts on the ground have changed?

I think science fiction is not predictive in any meaningful way.

It’s certainly not great at it.

We’re Texas marksmen: We fire the shotgun into the side of the barn and draw the target around the place where the pellets hit. We just ignore all those stories that never came true.

But I also think that prediction is way overrated. I like what Dante did to the fortune tellers. He put them in a pit of molten shit up to their nipples with their heads twisted around backwards, weeping into their own ass cracks for having pretended that the future was knowable. If the future is knowable then it’s inevitable. And if it’s inevitable, why are we even bothering? Why get out of bed if the future is going to happen no matter what we do? Except I guess you’re foreordained to.

I’m not a fatalist. The reason I’m an activist is because I think that the future, at least in part, is up for grabs. I think that there are great forces that produce some outcomes that are deterministic or semi-deterministic. And there are other elements that are up for grabs.

What science fiction does is not predictive, but it is sometimes diagnostic. Because across all the science fiction that has been written and is being written, and all the stuff that’s being greenlit by editors or has been greenlit by editors, and all the stuff that readers can find and raise up or ignore—there’s a kind of natural selection at work. The stuff that resonates with our aspirations and fears about technology and our futures, that stuff gets buoyed by market forces, by the marketplace of ideas, and becomes a really excellent tool for knowing what’s in the minds of the world.

So the book itself, considered on its own, is a good way to know what’s in the mind of the writer. The books that succeed tell you what’s in the mind of the world. And if there’s a lot of this stuff coming to a prominence at this moment, I think it does say something about the moment that we live in, that there’s a certain amount of pessimism. There’s a fear that we are being stampeded towards a mutually distrustful, internally divided future where we end up attacking each other rather than pulling together. I think even the most cynical person understands that if civilization collapses and you run for the hills, you aren’t going to be a part of rebuilding it. The people who are part of rebuilding are those who run to the middle and get the power plant working again, reopen the hospital, and get the water filtration plant working again.

“That kind of coordination—where at the moment that something is needed, and at the moment where it’s cheap to do it, it’s done—is characteristic of the efficient-market hypothesis. It’s characteristic of planned economy theory. It’s the thing that everyone is shooting for.”

This notion that my gain is your loss and that there’s not enough to go around, and there’s this big game of musical chairs and the chairs are being removed at speed, is a theme in a lot of the science fiction that’s prominent right now.

Walkaway is in some ways a prequel to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I certainly reread Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom with a pen and a highlighter and some post-its and made tons of notes before I started work on Walkaway, and I have a whole file of themes that I wanted to pick up.

Some of that is the understanding that I’ve come to in the 15-plus years since I wrote it. And some of it is wanting to respond back to the people who read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom as a utopia and who didn’t understand that there were dystopic elements.

It was a very mixed future. Reputation economics have the same winner-take-all problem—the Pikettian [problem that says the] rate of growth is always less than the rate of return on capital—and that produces insane runaway wealth disparity and dysfunction with misallocation of resources.

In Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, your ability to run Disney World is based on how much esteem people hold you in. And so literally you can walk in and start handing out tickets. And if the people treat your tickets as though they’re the right tickets, then you get to be the Czar of Disney World, which is the premise of the book.

Yet I’m sure you get people coming up and saying to you, “Oh my God, you basically predicted Uber’s reputational system!”

Yeah.

You weren’t alone in thinking about those reputation mechanisms as a powerful force [in the early ’00s]. Charlie Stross has a bunch of great stuff in his books about how that might look, too.

Yes. I stole it from Slashdot‘s karma [system].

Right. So it feels both normal and dystopian to people simultaneously.

But I think Uber is normal and dystopian for a lot of people, too. All the dysfunctions of Uber’s reputation economics, where it’s one-sided—I can tank your business by giving you an unfair review. You have this weird, mannered kabuki in some Ubers where people are super obsequious to try and get you to five-star them. And all of that other stuff that’s actually characteristic of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I probably did predict Uber pretty well with what would happen if there are these reputation economies, which is that you would quickly have a have and a have-not. And the haves would be able to, in a very one-sided way, allocate reputation to have-nots or take it away from them, without redress, without rule of law, without the ability to do any of the things we want currency to do. So it’s not a store of value, it’s not a unit of exchange, it’s not a measure of account. Instead this is just a pure system for allowing the powerful to exercise power over the powerless.

Isn’t the positive spin on that: Well, yeah, but the way we used to do that allocation was by punching each other in the face?

Well, that’s one of the ways we used to. I was really informed by a book by David Graeber called Debt: The First 5,000 Years, where he points out that the anthropological story that we all just used to punch each other in the face all the time doesn’t really match the evidence. That there’s certainly some places where they punched each other in the face and there’s other places where they just kind of got along. Including lots of places where they got along through having long arguments or guilting each other.

I don’t know. Kabuki for stars on the Uber app still seems better than the long arguments or the guilt.

That’s because you don’t drive Uber for a living and you’ve never had to worry that tomorrow you won’t be able to.

Talk about the quasi-anarchic properties of the universe that Walkaway exists in. What exists of the law and who are the people operating outside of it?

The mainstream Walkaway world is called Default, which is a term I stole from Burning Man. The Default world is one in which the rule of law is entirely tilted to the favor of a small cadre of super-wealthy people who have game-rigged the system. And everybody else—the 99 percent—is in this very precarious position, where some of them are needed to make the automated systems go and some of them are needed to make sure that the people who do the work don’t get too uppity, because they can always be fired. And then everyone else is kind of surplus to requirements.

And a lot of them walk away. They can [take an] escape hatch into a kind of bohemian demimonde where they move into brownfield sites left behind by toxic post-industrial implosion. They use drones to find the leftovers of the civilization that had once been there. And then they use software from the U.N. High Commission on Refugees to figure out how to recombine that to build a kind of fully automated luxury communist civilization, where you go on a scavenger hunt, you find all the stuff, and you build a huge Dr. Seussian amazing luxury hotel that anyone can stay in and that anyone can be the czar of and that anyone can contribute to. And it’s built like a wiki, where people add things and people remove things and you can see who added what and who removed what, and you can decide collectively through deliberation, and sometimes through shitty arguments, and sometimes through very reasonable arguments. One of the things that the walkaway culture aspires to is that kind of rationalist mode of argument, where we’re talking things over rigorously.

And it’s pretty stable because it turns out the Default doesn’t mind having an escape hatch. Bohemians are cute, right? I mean, there’s a reason that loads of fast-fashion places and designers go to Burning Man to make notes on what to knock off for the runway next year. Because bohemia is a cool thing to mine. Grunge went from Seattle’s seedy underground to Sears in six months. Bohemians are living labs.

But then a group of scientists who’ve been working in Default, figuring out the secrets of practical immortality for the superrich, decide that they don’t really want to be complicit in helping the human race speciate into these infinitely prolonged god-like humans while the rest of us who are just mayflies are receding in their rearview mirror.

So they engage in a Promethean act. They steal the secrets of immortality—which they, after all, discovered—and bring them to the rest of us, and then the superrich realize that they’re going to have to spend the rest of eternity with people they think of as being unworthy. And that triggers the Hellfire missiles and all-out war.

This is an analogy to open-source software development. And the phrase open source is one that people use widely to just mean “vaguely collaborative.”

Spooks use it to mean just “stuff in the newspaper.”

I know you’re a part of the open-source community. How much of this book, or your work generally, is a metaphor for that?

I’m actually working on the thing that underpins screen open-source software, which I think is like Coasian coordination.

Abundance is this triangle.

“Bohemians are cute, right?…Bohemia is a cool thing to mine. Grunge went from Seattle’s seedy underground to Sears in six months. Bohemians are living labs.”

Up here is what we want. [Economist John Maynard] Keynes wrote in 1930 that our grandchildren will struggle to fill their three-day work weeks because they will be able to produce all the things that humanity could reasonably want. And he grossly underestimated the elasticity of our demand. Now you have people like Marie Kondo making a cottage industry out of convincing us that really all we want is, like, a single smooth river rock that reminds us of our mother.

So how much you want is obviously elastic. It can go up and it can go down. And so that’s one of the parameters on abundance that we have to think about.

And then over here is how much we can make. So 3D printing, automation, all that stuff. And both of those have seen significant changes in the last couple of decades. Marketing, A/B splitting, new additive manufacturing tools, automated milling, robotics. All of those have been profound changes in our world.

But all of the real action is over in this other corner, which is logistics. And that’s getting the stuff that people want to the people who want it after you’ve made it. And figuring out how to remake it. And figuring out what happens to it when we’re done with it.

Bruce Sterling wrote this very influential essay in the mid-2000s called Shaping Things, published by MIT Press, where he posits an object called a spime. And a spime is a good that is immaterial. It exists as information until someone needs it and then it’s manufactured. But it’s designed in a way to be gracefully decomposed back into the material stream when its duty cycle is over. And its use generates data about its efficacy and ways that it can be improved, so that every time it’s made anew, it’s better.

Spimes are a really provocative answer to the question of how we can realize the Promethean project of both the heterodox right and the heterodox left: letting every peasant live like a lord. As opposed to insisting either, on the left, that every lord should be made to look like a peasant, or on the right, that lords and peasants are an inevitable fact of the world, and there will always be lords and always be peasants, and maybe we incentivize people by having that difference.

The way that we get every peasant to live like a lord on a planet that only has one planet’s worth of material is that we find better ways to connect the material that people need with the people who have it and where it is at any given moment. So rather than everybody having to own a car, we have cars that are services. But we also have completely negotiable moment-to-moment things that you might need a car for. And so when there aren’t cars available, the things that you can do instead of being in a car are brought to the fore.

Google runs this data center in Belgium in a place where two-thirds of the time it’s so cool that they don’t need the air conditioning, and the other third of the time they just turn [the data center] off. And their file system is so good at migrating data away from places that are shutting down and into places that are running that it doesn’t really matter.

A lot of places that do aluminum smelting, because it’s so energy intensive, they use aluminum smelting as a kind of battery. They say: We need to smelt so many tons of this this year, and when we have lots of solar or lots of wind or lots of tidal power, and we don’t have anything to use it for, we smelt the aluminum then, and not at the moment when other people are trying to turn on their lights or run their air conditioning or run their Google data centers.

That kind of coordination—where at the moment that something is needed, and at the moment where it’s cheap to do it, it’s done—is characteristic of the efficient-market hypothesis. It’s characteristic of planned economy theory. It’s the thing that everyone is shooting for.

The thing that free and open-source software has given us is the ability to coordinate ourselves very efficiently without having to put up with a lot of hierarchy. To be able to take things that we’ve done together, where we’ve reached a breaking point, and split them in two and have each of us pursue it in our own direction, without having to pay too high a cost or even have a lot of acrimony.

That’s the free software world I’m trying to imagine. What would it be like to build skyscrapers the way we make encyclopedias in the 21st century?

So you’re over here imagining the logistics part of the future. But we’re currently culturally perseverating over there in the manufacturing corner.

Sure.

Conservatives are doubling down on the value in work—that’s the conservative version of the panic about the robots taking our jobs. Then there’s a liberal version, which is: How will people make a living when all the jobs are automated? But why is that the thing we’re panicking about now?

Well, because I think that we tend to worry a lot about the first-order effects. And the second- and third-order effects tend to come a little too late. [Science fiction author and editor] Gardner Dozois very famously said that the job of a science fiction writer shouldn’t be to just think of the car in the movie theater and invent the drive-in, but also to infer the sexual revolution.

But I say to Gardner: Once you’ve inferred the sexual revolution, maybe you could spare a moment to think that the sexual revolution happening in cars meant that, for the first time, people had a reason to carry a government-issued ID. Which was to get laid, right? The shibboleth of “papers, please,” which historically has been a marker of the descent into totalitarian misery, became an everyday thing.

“Prediction is way overrated. I like what Dante did to the fortune tellers. He put them in a pit of molten shit…weeping into their own ass cracks for having pretended that the future was knowable.”

The database nation is the progeny of that strange moment where technology and social mores came together, thanks to movie theaters and cars and the sexual revolution, and gave us all driver’s licenses. Science fiction writers like to think past the first-order effect of what would it mean if there weren’t a lot of truck-driving jobs.

Is it fair to say that science fiction writers are doing the same thing as a good economist or a good political economist in thinking about unintended consequences?

It’s not just unintended consequences, because I think making all truck drivers into desperate xenophobic populists who vote for strongman leaders was not the intended consequence of the self-driving car project, right? And yet that’s the fear that our political moment reflects.

It’s more like the job of a science fiction writer is not to map the territory, but to point out that there’s territory to be mapped. There is a game we play when we argue about policy or tell stories, and the game is What’s in the Frame?

There’s this famous science fiction story [by Tom Godwin] called “The Cold Equations.” It’s taught in engineering schools. It’s about a spaceship pilot who’s piloting a small craft full of vaccine to a planet where there is a potentially world-killing plague. If he doesn’t get the vaccine there, everybody on the planet will die. And there is a young girl who stowed away on his ship and when he discovers her, he is aghast. Because he knows that the ship doesn’t have any extra fuel. It has no autopilot. It can only land if he pilots it. If there’s any excess weight it will crash, and everyone on the planet will die. And that’s why he has to shove that girl out the airlock.

And they spend 15 pages trying to figure out why they don’t have to shove her out the airlock. And then he shoves her out the airlock.

What’s out of the frame is that the author set up the rules of this thought experiment. And the author decided that autopilots weren’t a thing. That reserve fuel wasn’t a thing. That sending colonists with a supply of vaccine wasn’t a thing. All that stuff is out of frame.

Science fiction is about pointing out that there are things that are out of the frame [in real life] that don’t properly belong out of the frame, whose ruling out is arbitrary—or customary, which is another way of saying the same thing.

Last question: When you go to jail, what will it be for?

What will the charge be, or why will they arrest me?

You may answer either way.

I have lots of different kinds of privilege that I think have kept me reasonably out of harm’s way. Not just being, like, a white middle-class articulate dude with half a million Twitter followers. But also working at a civil liberties law firm filled with lawyers whose numbers I write on my arm before I cross borders.

You know what I worry about a lot? I’m a dirty foreigner. I’m a Canadian on a green card. And as we heard in the Supreme Court [in an April hearing about the case of a Serbian woman named Divna Maslenjak who is accused of misleading authorities on her application for asylum in the United States], it is virtually impossible to not have some way in which you are technically violating immigration rules when you are on a green card crossing borders.

The justices at the Supreme Court asked about listing known aliases: If I forget a childhood nickname, does that mean that I can be deported or jailed for immigration fraud? And the state’s position was yes; regardless of whether or not the omission is material, the act of omission itself violates the statute and qualifies you.

Given the highly arbitrary nature of borders, and the very deep antipathy towards the people who cross them from many of the people whose job it is to inspect those people who cross them, that’s the place where I have the most worry.

I don’t know what I would do if I were required [by immigration officials] to decrypt my devices. I have a certain amount of purging I do before I cross borders so I’m able to decrypt my devices if I’m made to. But then there’s this whole unknown area: What about making you log into your cloud services? And if you don’t have the password, what about calling the people who have the password and saying, “Mr. Doctorow doesn’t get out of immigration detention until you give us the password to his thing that he’s left with you for safekeeping”?

Those are unknown unknowns. It’s a complete black hole. I think by design the government has not pursued cases where those questions have come up, where it looks like the courts would find that they were acting unconstitutionally, because they want to see that ambiguity flourishing. Because they have so much leverage over you when you’re at the border that that ambiguity really works in [their] favor.

After the Muslim ban, one of the things that immediately emerged when people said, “What should you do if…?” was, nobody even knows for sure.

So now I do ridiculous things. There’s a form—I think it’s called the G-28. Border guards have discretion as to whether to allow your counsel to see you when you’re in border detention. That discretion goes away and becomes an obligation if this form has been signed and left with your lawyer before you cross the border. But it has to be on green paper.

So I have signed many copies of this and left it in our paralegal’s filing cabinet at EFF. And I always let a lawyer know before I cross, and I always let them know when I’m on the other side. And I hope that they check their phone.

If they see that many hours have gone by and they haven’t heard from me, they try to call me. And if they don’t hear from me again, they go and they get one of these green forms and they bring it down to the border to see if that’s where I am.

Maybe that’s advice for all of our readers: Get a lawyer on retainer and a lot of green paper.

Yeah. A ream of green paper. I have some leftovers. My kid drew on a lot of it but I still have some leftovers.

This interview has been edited for length, clarity, and style. For a video version, visit reason.com.

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Cory Doctorow's 'Fully Automated Luxury Communist Civilization'

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Cory Doctorow's 'Fully Automated Luxury Communist Civilization'

Cory Doctorow, of BoingBoing and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) fame, has returned to adult fiction after a long stint in the young adult hinterlands (Little Brother, Homeland). His new novel, Walkaway (Tor), circles back to the theme of his first novel, 2003’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom: the question of what a post-scarcity world might look like. A fascinating cadre of John Galt–style opters-out form the core of the new novel, but the story is concept-driven, not character-driven.

As usual, Doctorow’s politics permeate his writing. And, as usual, they’re just heterodox enough to provide moments of delightful confirmation bias and squirm-inducing challenge for readers of nearly every ideological stripe.

Doctorow, a civil libertarian who identifies with the political left, has staked out a broad and eccentric territory for his fiction and nonfiction beats, covering topics from privacy to drones to Digital Rights Management (DRM) to open-source software creation.

The Walkaway audiobook is a particular delight, featuring guest appearances from a ramshackle celebrity cast, including Amber Benson, Justine Eyre, Amanda Palmer, and Wil Wheaton. All versions of the novel are free from distribution-restricting DRM protections. The downside is that standard providers like Audible won’t carry it.

When Doctorow stopped by Reason‘s D.C. office in April, he handed out credit card–shaped USB drives loaded with the audiobook on his way out the door. Hardcover review copies also shipped with a similarly sized multitool. These little flourishes bring readers a few inches closer to Doctorow’s subversive worldview, where it’s always possible, even admirable, to thumb your nose at the rules imposed by governments, tech companies, and just about everyone else.

Reason: Let’s talk about the word dystopia. It’s a word no one knew 10 years ago and now everyone says all the time about pretty much every novel ever. Is this a dystopia in Walkaway, or a utopia?

Doctorow: I think that we mistake the furniture for the theme. We tend to think of books in which things are in crisis as being dystopian novels. But really it’s a very hard job to write a dramatic novel—especially in the kind of pulpy science fiction tradition—in which things aren’t going wrong. So for me, the thing that cleaves a utopia from a dystopia is what [essayist and critic] Rebecca Solnit says cleaves a disaster from a catastrophe: It’s what we do when things go wrong. Do people pitch in and rise to the occasion? Or do they turn on their neighbors and eat them? That’s the dystopian vision. The most dystopian thing you can imagine is that, but for the thin veneer of civilization, it would be a bloodbath.

Is Walkaway a prequel to Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom? It seems like a similar universe. Has the political take-away that you would want people to get out of those two books shifted, either because your views have changed or because facts on the ground have changed?

I think science fiction is not predictive in any meaningful way.

It’s certainly not great at it.

We’re Texas marksmen: We fire the shotgun into the side of the barn and draw the target around the place where the pellets hit. We just ignore all those stories that never came true.

But I also think that prediction is way overrated. I like what Dante did to the fortune tellers. He put them in a pit of molten shit up to their nipples with their heads twisted around backwards, weeping into their own ass cracks for having pretended that the future was knowable. If the future is knowable then it’s inevitable. And if it’s inevitable, why are we even bothering? Why get out of bed if the future is going to happen no matter what we do? Except I guess you’re foreordained to.

I’m not a fatalist. The reason I’m an activist is because I think that the future, at least in part, is up for grabs. I think that there are great forces that produce some outcomes that are deterministic or semi-deterministic. And there are other elements that are up for grabs.

What science fiction does is not predictive, but it is sometimes diagnostic. Because across all the science fiction that has been written and is being written, and all the stuff that’s being greenlit by editors or has been greenlit by editors, and all the stuff that readers can find and raise up or ignore—there’s a kind of natural selection at work. The stuff that resonates with our aspirations and fears about technology and our futures, that stuff gets buoyed by market forces, by the marketplace of ideas, and becomes a really excellent tool for knowing what’s in the minds of the world.

So the book itself, considered on its own, is a good way to know what’s in the mind of the writer. The books that succeed tell you what’s in the mind of the world. And if there’s a lot of this stuff coming to a prominence at this moment, I think it does say something about the moment that we live in, that there’s a certain amount of pessimism. There’s a fear that we are being stampeded towards a mutually distrustful, internally divided future where we end up attacking each other rather than pulling together. I think even the most cynical person understands that if civilization collapses and you run for the hills, you aren’t going to be a part of rebuilding it. The people who are part of rebuilding are those who run to the middle and get the power plant working again, reopen the hospital, and get the water filtration plant working again.

“That kind of coordination—where at the moment that something is needed, and at the moment where it’s cheap to do it, it’s done—is characteristic of the efficient-market hypothesis. It’s characteristic of planned economy theory. It’s the thing that everyone is shooting for.”

This notion that my gain is your loss and that there’s not enough to go around, and there’s this big game of musical chairs and the chairs are being removed at speed, is a theme in a lot of the science fiction that’s prominent right now.

Walkaway is in some ways a prequel to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I certainly reread Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom with a pen and a highlighter and some post-its and made tons of notes before I started work on Walkaway, and I have a whole file of themes that I wanted to pick up.

Some of that is the understanding that I’ve come to in the 15-plus years since I wrote it. And some of it is wanting to respond back to the people who read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom as a utopia and who didn’t understand that there were dystopic elements.

It was a very mixed future. Reputation economics have the same winner-take-all problem—the Pikettian [problem that says the] rate of growth is always less than the rate of return on capital—and that produces insane runaway wealth disparity and dysfunction with misallocation of resources.

In Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, your ability to run Disney World is based on how much esteem people hold you in. And so literally you can walk in and start handing out tickets. And if the people treat your tickets as though they’re the right tickets, then you get to be the Czar of Disney World, which is the premise of the book.

Yet I’m sure you get people coming up and saying to you, “Oh my God, you basically predicted Uber’s reputational system!”

Yeah.

You weren’t alone in thinking about those reputation mechanisms as a powerful force [in the early ’00s]. Charlie Stross has a bunch of great stuff in his books about how that might look, too.

Yes. I stole it from Slashdot‘s karma [system].

Right. So it feels both normal and dystopian to people simultaneously.

But I think Uber is normal and dystopian for a lot of people, too. All the dysfunctions of Uber’s reputation economics, where it’s one-sided—I can tank your business by giving you an unfair review. You have this weird, mannered kabuki in some Ubers where people are super obsequious to try and get you to five-star them. And all of that other stuff that’s actually characteristic of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I probably did predict Uber pretty well with what would happen if there are these reputation economies, which is that you would quickly have a have and a have-not. And the haves would be able to, in a very one-sided way, allocate reputation to have-nots or take it away from them, without redress, without rule of law, without the ability to do any of the things we want currency to do. So it’s not a store of value, it’s not a unit of exchange, it’s not a measure of account. Instead this is just a pure system for allowing the powerful to exercise power over the powerless.

Isn’t the positive spin on that: Well, yeah, but the way we used to do that allocation was by punching each other in the face?

Well, that’s one of the ways we used to. I was really informed by a book by David Graeber called Debt: The First 5,000 Years, where he points out that the anthropological story that we all just used to punch each other in the face all the time doesn’t really match the evidence. That there’s certainly some places where they punched each other in the face and there’s other places where they just kind of got along. Including lots of places where they got along through having long arguments or guilting each other.

I don’t know. Kabuki for stars on the Uber app still seems better than the long arguments or the guilt.

That’s because you don’t drive Uber for a living and you’ve never had to worry that tomorrow you won’t be able to.

Talk about the quasi-anarchic properties of the universe that Walkaway exists in. What exists of the law and who are the people operating outside of it?

The mainstream Walkaway world is called Default, which is a term I stole from Burning Man. The Default world is one in which the rule of law is entirely tilted to the favor of a small cadre of super-wealthy people who have game-rigged the system. And everybody else—the 99 percent—is in this very precarious position, where some of them are needed to make the automated systems go and some of them are needed to make sure that the people who do the work don’t get too uppity, because they can always be fired. And then everyone else is kind of surplus to requirements.

And a lot of them walk away. They can [take an] escape hatch into a kind of bohemian demimonde where they move into brownfield sites left behind by toxic post-industrial implosion. They use drones to find the leftovers of the civilization that had once been there. And then they use software from the U.N. High Commission on Refugees to figure out how to recombine that to build a kind of fully automated luxury communist civilization, where you go on a scavenger hunt, you find all the stuff, and you build a huge Dr. Seussian amazing luxury hotel that anyone can stay in and that anyone can be the czar of and that anyone can contribute to. And it’s built like a wiki, where people add things and people remove things and you can see who added what and who removed what, and you can decide collectively through deliberation, and sometimes through shitty arguments, and sometimes through very reasonable arguments. One of the things that the walkaway culture aspires to is that kind of rationalist mode of argument, where we’re talking things over rigorously.

And it’s pretty stable because it turns out the Default doesn’t mind having an escape hatch. Bohemians are cute, right? I mean, there’s a reason that loads of fast-fashion places and designers go to Burning Man to make notes on what to knock off for the runway next year. Because bohemia is a cool thing to mine. Grunge went from Seattle’s seedy underground to Sears in six months. Bohemians are living labs.

But then a group of scientists who’ve been working in Default, figuring out the secrets of practical immortality for the superrich, decide that they don’t really want to be complicit in helping the human race speciate into these infinitely prolonged god-like humans while the rest of us who are just mayflies are receding in their rearview mirror.

So they engage in a Promethean act. They steal the secrets of immortality—which they, after all, discovered—and bring them to the rest of us, and then the superrich realize that they’re going to have to spend the rest of eternity with people they think of as being unworthy. And that triggers the Hellfire missiles and all-out war.

This is an analogy to open-source software development. And the phrase open source is one that people use widely to just mean “vaguely collaborative.”

Spooks use it to mean just “stuff in the newspaper.”

I know you’re a part of the open-source community. How much of this book, or your work generally, is a metaphor for that?

I’m actually working on the thing that underpins screen open-source software, which I think is like Coasian coordination.

Abundance is this triangle.

“Bohemians are cute, right?…Bohemia is a cool thing to mine. Grunge went from Seattle’s seedy underground to Sears in six months. Bohemians are living labs.”

Up here is what we want. [Economist John Maynard] Keynes wrote in 1930 that our grandchildren will struggle to fill their three-day work weeks because they will be able to produce all the things that humanity could reasonably want. And he grossly underestimated the elasticity of our demand. Now you have people like Marie Kondo making a cottage industry out of convincing us that really all we want is, like, a single smooth river rock that reminds us of our mother.

So how much you want is obviously elastic. It can go up and it can go down. And so that’s one of the parameters on abundance that we have to think about.

And then over here is how much we can make. So 3D printing, automation, all that stuff. And both of those have seen significant changes in the last couple of decades. Marketing, A/B splitting, new additive manufacturing tools, automated milling, robotics. All of those have been profound changes in our world.

But all of the real action is over in this other corner, which is logistics. And that’s getting the stuff that people want to the people who want it after you’ve made it. And figuring out how to remake it. And figuring out what happens to it when we’re done with it.

Bruce Sterling wrote this very influential essay in the mid-2000s called Shaping Things, published by MIT Press, where he posits an object called a spime. And a spime is a good that is immaterial. It exists as information until someone needs it and then it’s manufactured. But it’s designed in a way to be gracefully decomposed back into the material stream when its duty cycle is over. And its use generates data about its efficacy and ways that it can be improved, so that every time it’s made anew, it’s better.

Spimes are a really provocative answer to the question of how we can realize the Promethean project of both the heterodox right and the heterodox left: letting every peasant live like a lord. As opposed to insisting either, on the left, that every lord should be made to look like a peasant, or on the right, that lords and peasants are an inevitable fact of the world, and there will always be lords and always be peasants, and maybe we incentivize people by having that difference.

The way that we get every peasant to live like a lord on a planet that only has one planet’s worth of material is that we find better ways to connect the material that people need with the people who have it and where it is at any given moment. So rather than everybody having to own a car, we have cars that are services. But we also have completely negotiable moment-to-moment things that you might need a car for. And so when there aren’t cars available, the things that you can do instead of being in a car are brought to the fore.

Google runs this data center in Belgium in a place where two-thirds of the time it’s so cool that they don’t need the air conditioning, and the other third of the time they just turn [the data center] off. And their file system is so good at migrating data away from places that are shutting down and into places that are running that it doesn’t really matter.

A lot of places that do aluminum smelting, because it’s so energy intensive, they use aluminum smelting as a kind of battery. They say: We need to smelt so many tons of this this year, and when we have lots of solar or lots of wind or lots of tidal power, and we don’t have anything to use it for, we smelt the aluminum then, and not at the moment when other people are trying to turn on their lights or run their air conditioning or run their Google data centers.

That kind of coordination—where at the moment that something is needed, and at the moment where it’s cheap to do it, it’s done—is characteristic of the efficient-market hypothesis. It’s characteristic of planned economy theory. It’s the thing that everyone is shooting for.

The thing that free and open-source software has given us is the ability to coordinate ourselves very efficiently without having to put up with a lot of hierarchy. To be able to take things that we’ve done together, where we’ve reached a breaking point, and split them in two and have each of us pursue it in our own direction, without having to pay too high a cost or even have a lot of acrimony.

That’s the free software world I’m trying to imagine. What would it be like to build skyscrapers the way we make encyclopedias in the 21st century?

So you’re over here imagining the logistics part of the future. But we’re currently culturally perseverating over there in the manufacturing corner.

Sure.

Conservatives are doubling down on the value in work—that’s the conservative version of the panic about the robots taking our jobs. Then there’s a liberal version, which is: How will people make a living when all the jobs are automated? But why is that the thing we’re panicking about now?

Well, because I think that we tend to worry a lot about the first-order effects. And the second- and third-order effects tend to come a little too late. [Science fiction author and editor] Gardner Dozois very famously said that the job of a science fiction writer shouldn’t be to just think of the car in the movie theater and invent the drive-in, but also to infer the sexual revolution.

But I say to Gardner: Once you’ve inferred the sexual revolution, maybe you could spare a moment to think that the sexual revolution happening in cars meant that, for the first time, people had a reason to carry a government-issued ID. Which was to get laid, right? The shibboleth of “papers, please,” which historically has been a marker of the descent into totalitarian misery, became an everyday thing.

“Prediction is way overrated. I like what Dante did to the fortune tellers. He put them in a pit of molten shit…weeping into their own ass cracks for having pretended that the future was knowable.”

The database nation is the progeny of that strange moment where technology and social mores came together, thanks to movie theaters and cars and the sexual revolution, and gave us all driver’s licenses. Science fiction writers like to think past the first-order effect of what would it mean if there weren’t a lot of truck-driving jobs.

Is it fair to say that science fiction writers are doing the same thing as a good economist or a good political economist in thinking about unintended consequences?

It’s not just unintended consequences, because I think making all truck drivers into desperate xenophobic populists who vote for strongman leaders was not the intended consequence of the self-driving car project, right? And yet that’s the fear that our political moment reflects.

It’s more like the job of a science fiction writer is not to map the territory, but to point out that there’s territory to be mapped. There is a game we play when we argue about policy or tell stories, and the game is What’s in the Frame?

There’s this famous science fiction story [by Tom Godwin] called “The Cold Equations.” It’s taught in engineering schools. It’s about a spaceship pilot who’s piloting a small craft full of vaccine to a planet where there is a potentially world-killing plague. If he doesn’t get the vaccine there, everybody on the planet will die. And there is a young girl who stowed away on his ship and when he discovers her, he is aghast. Because he knows that the ship doesn’t have any extra fuel. It has no autopilot. It can only land if he pilots it. If there’s any excess weight it will crash, and everyone on the planet will die. And that’s why he has to shove that girl out the airlock.

And they spend 15 pages trying to figure out why they don’t have to shove her out the airlock. And then he shoves her out the airlock.

What’s out of the frame is that the author set up the rules of this thought experiment. And the author decided that autopilots weren’t a thing. That reserve fuel wasn’t a thing. That sending colonists with a supply of vaccine wasn’t a thing. All that stuff is out of frame.

Science fiction is about pointing out that there are things that are out of the frame [in real life] that don’t properly belong out of the frame, whose ruling out is arbitrary—or customary, which is another way of saying the same thing.

Last question: When you go to jail, what will it be for?

What will the charge be, or why will they arrest me?

You may answer either way.

I have lots of different kinds of privilege that I think have kept me reasonably out of harm’s way. Not just being, like, a white middle-class articulate dude with half a million Twitter followers. But also working at a civil liberties law firm filled with lawyers whose numbers I write on my arm before I cross borders.

You know what I worry about a lot? I’m a dirty foreigner. I’m a Canadian on a green card. And as we heard in the Supreme Court [in an April hearing about the case of a Serbian woman named Divna Maslenjak who is accused of misleading authorities on her application for asylum in the United States], it is virtually impossible to not have some way in which you are technically violating immigration rules when you are on a green card crossing borders.

The justices at the Supreme Court asked about listing known aliases: If I forget a childhood nickname, does that mean that I can be deported or jailed for immigration fraud? And the state’s position was yes; regardless of whether or not the omission is material, the act of omission itself violates the statute and qualifies you.

Given the highly arbitrary nature of borders, and the very deep antipathy towards the people who cross them from many of the people whose job it is to inspect those people who cross them, that’s the place where I have the most worry.

I don’t know what I would do if I were required [by immigration officials] to decrypt my devices. I have a certain amount of purging I do before I cross borders so I’m able to decrypt my devices if I’m made to. But then there’s this whole unknown area: What about making you log into your cloud services? And if you don’t have the password, what about calling the people who have the password and saying, “Mr. Doctorow doesn’t get out of immigration detention until you give us the password to his thing that he’s left with you for safekeeping”?

Those are unknown unknowns. It’s a complete black hole. I think by design the government has not pursued cases where those questions have come up, where it looks like the courts would find that they were acting unconstitutionally, because they want to see that ambiguity flourishing. Because they have so much leverage over you when you’re at the border that that ambiguity really works in [their] favor.

After the Muslim ban, one of the things that immediately emerged when people said, “What should you do if…?” was, nobody even knows for sure.

So now I do ridiculous things. There’s a form—I think it’s called the G-28. Border guards have discretion as to whether to allow your counsel to see you when you’re in border detention. That discretion goes away and becomes an obligation if this form has been signed and left with your lawyer before you cross the border. But it has to be on green paper.

So I have signed many copies of this and left it in our paralegal’s filing cabinet at EFF. And I always let a lawyer know before I cross, and I always let them know when I’m on the other side. And I hope that they check their phone.

If they see that many hours have gone by and they haven’t heard from me, they try to call me. And if they don’t hear from me again, they go and they get one of these green forms and they bring it down to the border to see if that’s where I am.

Maybe that’s advice for all of our readers: Get a lawyer on retainer and a lot of green paper.

Yeah. A ream of green paper. I have some leftovers. My kid drew on a lot of it but I still have some leftovers.

This interview has been edited for length, clarity, and style. For a video version, visit reason.com.

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Yahoo Daily Fantasy Hockey: Monday picks

TORONTO, CANADA – MARCH 07: Tomas Tatar #21 of the Detroit Red Wings skates during an NHL game against the Toronto Maple Leafs at Air Canada Centre on March 7, 2017 in Toronto, Canada. (Photo by Vaughn Ridley/Getty Images)

By Chris Morgan

After four days of mainlining college basketball, perhaps hockey is what you need to serve as a palate cleanser. There are five NHL games Monday, and if you want to know which players you should target, or avoid, you can find that information below.

[Join a Yahoo Daily Fantasy Hockey contest now]

GOALIE

Pekka Rinne, NAS vs. ARI ($25): Rinne’s numbers are respectable this season, if nothing to write home about, with a .915 save percentage and a 2.54 GAA. The Coyotes, on the other hand, have only scored 2.34 goals per game. Nashville is also 20-8-7 at home, while Arizona is 10-20-4 on the road, so it seems like Rinne’s got an excellent chance of picking up a win. To find him at such a cheap price is a bit of a surprise, and one you should jump on.

GOALIE TO AVOID

Tuukka Rask, BOS at TOR ($35): Rask has had an up-and-down season, and he seems to be on one of his “down” swings at the moment. While he has picked up 11 wins in his last 17 games, he only has a 2.82 GAA and a .892 save percentage in that time. Toronto has scored 3.01 goals per game and notched 32.3 shots on net per contest. The Maple Leafs should keep Rask busy, and considering he’s the most expensive goalie Monday that could be a problem for fantasy player.

CENTER

Ryan Johansen, NAS vs. ARI ($16): Johansen is a prolific playmaker, as he’s notched 43 assists in 71 games. Overall, he’s tallied 55 points, including 20 on the power-play. On top of that, he has been enjoying a strong run of play, as he’s registered 15 points in his last 13 contests. The Coyotes have allowed 3.17 goals per game, and they also have the 27th-ranked penalty kill. That bodes well for Johansen.

CENTER TO AVOID

Tyler Seguin, DAL vs. SAN ($27): No knock here on Seguin, but he’s got a really tough matchup on his hands. The Sharks have allowed the second fewest goals per game (2.31) in the league, and they’ve allowed the third fewest shots on net per contest (27.6). Seguin is a pricey player and with good cause, but he’s also facing arguably the toughest matchup Monday. You’d be better off grabbing a player in a better matchup, and ideally one at a lower price point. However, even at the exact same price ($27) you can get Joe Pavelski who has a much easier matchup from the other bench, and who has been a better fantasy player as well (8.8 fantasy points per game to 8.5 for Seguin).

WING

Tomas Tatar, DET vs. BUF ($16): Tatar has enjoyed a fine stretch of play, as in his last seven games he’s notched nine points and 20 shots on goal. He’s now tallied 20 goals on the season. The Sabres have allowed a league-high 34.3 shots on net per contest, and they’ve allowed 2.83 goals per game as well. Additionally, Buffalo has the 29th-ranked penalty kill. While Tatar only has four power-play points, he has averaged 2:27 minutes per game with the extra man, so the opportunity is still there.

David Backes, BOS at TOR ($15): Toronto plays a brand of hockey that is conducive to offense for both teams. The Maple Leafs have allowed 2.86 and 32.8 shots on net per game, and that latter number is third most in the NHL. Backes has seven points in his last 12 games, and in 63 games this season he’s notched 152 shots on goal. His 9.9 shooting percentage is the second worst of his career, so perhaps he will find a little more puck luck down the stretch. Going up against Toronto could definitely help Backes on that front, and since he’s on the cheaper side of things he doesn’t need to do much to be a fantasy value.

WINGS TO AVOID

Tanner Pearson, LOS at EDM ($19): The Oilers have only allowed 2.55 goals per game and 29.8 shots on net per contest, and they’ve been even better with Cam Talbot in net, as he has a 2.35 GAA and a .921 save percentage. Pearson is having a pretty good season, but he hasn’t scored a goal in his last seven games, and Los Angeles is also the only team Monday that will be playing on the second night of a back-to-back.

Jordan Eberle, EDM vs. LOS ($18): Whether or not they will be fatigued, the fact remains Los Angeles has allowed a league low 26.0 shots on net per game. Additionally, now that the Kings have Jonathan Quick and Ben Bishop as their goaltenders, the fact they had a game Sunday becomes less of a negative factor. Eberle has only averaged 5.9 fantasy points per game, and he’s only managed three goals in his last 22 contest.

DEFENSE

Marc-Edouard Vlasic, SAN at DAL ($18): Vlasic may not be known for his offensive game, but you don’t need to be Brent Burns to have a good game against Dallas. The Stars have allowed a league-high 3.27 goals per game, and their penalty kill is the worst in the NHL. On top of that, Dallas has attempted 59.7 shots per 60 minutes, which is fifth most in the NHL. Vlasic has blocked 128 shots in 66 games, so he should be pick up fantasy points on both ends of the ice against the woeful Stars.

Ryan Ellis, NAS vs. ARI ($15): You can get excited about Roman Josi and P.K. Subban, but overlook Ellis at your own peril. He’s averaged 6.6 fantasy points per game in his own right, and he’s tallied 12 goals and 20 assists in 61 games. Ellis has averaged 24:04 of ice time per game, which is on par with the top defensemen in the league, and he’s contributed on the power play as well, where he’s notched 11 points. Arizona has given up 3.17 goals and 33.7 shots on net per game, making this a very favorable matchup for him.

DEFENSEMEN TO AVOID

Drew Doughty, LOS at EDM ($22): Doughty has averaged 6.5 fantasy points per game, which is quite good, but is a bit below the elite level for fantasy defensemen. It’s also below the aforementioned Ellis, who has a much easier matchup. Doughty, meanwhile, is tied for being the third most expensive defenseman Monday. As noted earlier, Talbot has a 2.35 GAA and a .921 save percentage for the Oilers, and the Kings will also be on the road on a second night of a back-to-back.

Jake Gardiner, TOR vs. BOS ($18): Rask may not have been up to his usual standards this season, but the Bruins have only allowed 26.6 shots on net per game, second fewest in the league. The Bruins also have the second-ranked penalty kill, and 10 of Gardiner’s 34 points have come with the extra man. Additionally, he has zero goals in his last nine games, and he’s only notched 10 shots on goal in those contests.

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