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NEWS AND VIEWS - OCTOBER 2022
WRITING NEWS I finished writing the first short story in my new Playground Noir series this month. In case you're new here, or in case you've just forgotten, this is a series of hard-boiled detective stories (but starring elementary school kids) which I've been meaning to write for several years now. The protagonist is world-weary fourth-grader Philip (Pip) Fencer, who has a knack for figuring things out (the protagonist was previously called Drew, but I decided I liked Pip better). I guess it's kind of like Encyclopedia Brown, but written in the style of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. Not that I'm as good as those guys, but that's the general idea. Anyway, this first story is called The Black Trapper Keeper. It was pretty fun to write. The second story, which I'm working on now, is called Goodbye, My Galaga; future titles will include The Long Recess, The Far Side of the Slide, The Kid with the Atomic Brain, and The Dirt Under the Monkey Bars. I was thinking these were going to be novella-length at first, but they seem to be working better as short stories, around 6,000-10,000 words each. I'm going to collect six or seven of them together and release them all in one volume. I was a little worried that I'd have a hard time writing this series, because it's unlike anything I've ever written before, but actually, I found The Black Trapper Keeper to be surprisingly easy to write. I'm also having fun with this Chandler-esque style: "I stepped into the school, the heavy smell of it hitting me like a Thunder Punch He-Man." (I should note that these stories are set in the 80's, partly because I'm more familiar with the kid culture of that decade, and partly because kids weren't quite as heavily supervised back then, which gives Pip a little more freedom to run around and solve these mysteries.) Not sure when this collection is going to be released -- maybe next summer? In the meantime, if you haven't already, you might want to check out my latest, A City Burnished Silver, or brush up on your Signalverse trivia with The Complete Guide to the Signalverse. * * * * * * * * DUMB TV'S I bought a new TV this month. My old TV was a 47-inch CCFL-backlit LG which I bought all the way back in 2009...but it was manufactured in 2008, almost fifteen years ago, which is ancient for a modern TV. It was only 1080p, and it obviously didn't have HDR or anything like that, but I was basically happy with it anyway, and I was very reluctant to buy a new TV as long as it was still working. Unfortunately, starting a few months ago, it finally started breaking down on me -- I couldn't get it to turn on half the time, and some weird discoloration started bleeding down from the top of the screen as well. So I started shopping around for a new TV. My options were limited, though, because I wanted a dumb TV, and nowadays there's almost no dumb TV's at all left on the market. There's a few obscure Chinese brands, like Sceptre, that sell dumb 4K TV's in the 43-inch to 55-inch range (here's one), but I wasn't sure about the quality of these, and also, these don't have HDR or local dimming or a lot of the other bells and whistles of most modern TV's. It looked like I was going to have to give in and buy a smart TV after all, but then I thought, "Why don't I just buy a big computer monitor?" I'd been using my old TV as a computer monitor 90% of the time anyway, so I thought this might be a good fit for me. I hit up Newegg, and found a 48-inch 4K OLED that was just barely in my price range, so I bought it. It does pretty much everything my old TV did, and it looks great besides. And best of all, it's not a smart TV! At this point you're probably wondering what I've got against smart TV's. Okay! Let me explain. 1) I don't want ads built into the main menu of my TV. 2) I don't want a TV equipped with microphones and cameras, which can be used to spy on me. 3) I don't want a TV with ACR. 4) A lot of TV's run on Android, which means you need a Google account to use them -- in some cases you can't even get past the initial startup screens unless you connect your TV to the internet and sign in to Google! Ugh! It's bad enough I have an Android phone; I don't need an Android TV, too. 5) I don't use any streaming services, and I don't intend to, so all that stuff is wasted on me. Smart TV proponents will argue that you can turn off the cameras, microphones, and ACR, or simply not connect the TV to the internet. It's true you can go into the settings and turn these things off most of the time...but how you can be sure these things really have been turned off (or that they won't be turned on again after a system update)? Do you really trust these big corporations not to do you dirty? And yeah, you can just not connect the TV to the internet, but then it's going to nag you constantly. I want a TV that displays what I tell it to display when I plug in an HDMI cable, that doesn't take snapshots of whatever I'm watching and upload it to advertisers, and that isn't constantly hoovering up all my data. I think those are pretty reasonable demands. The fact that so many people have allowed these privacy nightmares into their homes is frankly appalling to me. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M READING 
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