Tales from the jar side: JMS, Babylon 5, and Becoming Superman
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of July 21 - 28, 2019. This week I taught an online Intro Gradle class for Gradle, Inc and worked on my Kotlin book.
I spent a fair amount of time, however, on the new J. Michael Straczynski autobiography, Becoming Superman. I've been looking forward to the release for a long time, as my wife and I have been huge Babylon 5 fans from the beginning (note that the entire series is available on Amazon Prime) and I've been following JMS (as he's known) online for years. I knew his upbringing was "troubled" to say the least, but I had no idea how bad it actually was.
A couple of quick B5 stories before I get to the bio. My son was born in 1992, but even as a toddler he understood how seriously mom and dad took the show. I remember him at age 3 wandering into the living room, seeing us and saying, "Babywon 5?" and when we nodded, wandering back out again. We were recording it (on VHS, of course), but he knew not to interrupt us while it was on the first time. This was long before pause buttons on a DVR.
At the end of the second season, the networks decided for some bizarre reason to delay the last four episodes for a few weeks. They did show them in the UK, however. I found a group online that collected the episodes on their version of video (not compatible with ours, as I recall). They then shipped the episodes to a group up in Springfield, MA that had a converter of the right type, so my wife and I drove up there for a viewing party. That's how we saw the season finale with the big Vorlon reveal before those episodes were broadcast in the US.
Finally, my sister stayed with us during the summer of 1997 when she was doing an internship in the area. We of course introduced her to our collection of B5 tapes (seasons 1 through 4 at the time), and we worked through them at a pace of two to three a night until we were caught up. That's back when a season consisted of 22 episodes, too, so it took a while.
I even had a great program on an old PC I owned at the time that replaced its normal sounds with B5 special effects. Maximizing and minimizing a window played the door opening and closing sounds, for example. I still kind of miss that.
I first "discovered" JMS back around 1992 when he started posting on Usenet, the online list of user groups that probably mostly resembles reddit these days. There was a dedicated group known as rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated, and JMS made the highly unusual move of posting there on a regular basis. No other show runner at the time probably even knew was Usenet was, much less was willing to share production details there and absorb the attendant harassment. JMS announced the initial pilot, along with lots of background information on the show, biographies of the characters, the planned five-year arc (which nobody had even considered doing at the time), and where and when to watch. At the time Star Trek: The Next Generation was winding down, and no other TV show promised to take science fiction seriously. Along with many others, I was fascinated.
As JMS explains in the book and has documented online several times before, he pitched the series to many different production companies, including Paramount, and shared the series bible with them. They seemed interested and then went silent. Then, between the airing of the Babylon 5 pilot and the start of the first season, Paramount announced Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which bore remarkable similarities to B5. That nearly killed the B5 series, but somehow it gained enough viewers to survive.
Like most B5 fans, my wife and I were pretty bitter about that. We decided not to watch DS9 after the first few episodes in response, which was rather petty. In fact, we didn't actually watch the entire run of DS9 until this year (!) when we went through them all on Netflix.
We stuck with B5 all five years, however, waiting with trepidation to see if it would be renewed each year, watching the ratings posted online, and following every post by JMS during that time. The show had its ups and downs. The writing, to be honest, was irregular. Some of the episodes were weak, but others were amazing. The sweep of the whole five-year arc was wonderful. I also became a big fan of JMS himself during that time, who went on later to write (among many other things) the Thor movie, the Sense8 series for Netflix, and both the Amazing Spiderman and Superman comic books. I still have an old, worn out Babylon 5 T-shirt from back then, along with a hat signed by JMS, the Babylon 5 Encyclopedia, a few old action figures somewhere. Most of the computers on my home network have been named after B5 planets at one time or another, including Narn, Centari, Minbar, and, of course, Z'ha'dum (famous for the quote: "if you go to Z'ha'dum, you will die" -- a good name for a server if ever there was one).
Incidentally, since nothing online is apparently ever truly gone, I found the one time I posted a question to JMS on rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated and actually got an answer, back in 1996.
So pre-ordering the JMS autobiography when it was announced was a no-brainer for me. He tried to warn us that his childhood had been a hard one, so I thought I'd taken that into account when the book arrived.
As I said, I had no idea. As he wrote in meticulous detail, JMS was an unwanted child of a violent, abusive, alcoholic father and an ex-prostitute mother, lived in abject poverty when he wasn't homeless, and grew up in a massive code of secrecy that prevented him from reaching out for help from anyone in any way. The book chronicles the major events in awful detail. I often felt while reading it that if it had been a horror novel, Stephen King would have repeatedly said, "Whoa, dude, that's way too over the top. You really need to tone it down a bit." It's hard to believe he survived, much less went on to become the intelligent, sensitive, highly successful writer he eventually became. The courage it required to break the code of silence and tell all of this publicly to an audience of millions is staggering.
Since this discussion is basically the mother of all trigger warnings, let me give you a number: 27%. That's how far you need to read into the book (according to my Kindle reader) before the horror lets up enough to believe there's at least some hope for the him. The rest is still difficult and sometimes brutal, but if you can make it through the first 27%, you'll make it the rest of the way. Fortunately, the good guys win in the end. In fact, the only real criticism I have of the book is that I could have used another 100 pages of background on B5 and some of the other shows. It almost feels like once he became successful, JMS wasn't as interested in recording the details anymore, though I'm sure that's an exaggeration.
On August 9 - 11, my wife and I are going to my first comic book convention in about 35 years, called TerrifiCon. We're going because JMS will be there, hosting a panel and signing his book (I ordered a hardcover copy just for that purpose). I expect to have maybe 30 seconds to tell him what his work has meant to me over the years. I've been thinking about that for months. I want to somehow express that I get it and that I appreciate all he's done, but obviously there's no way I'll be able to do that. I'll just have to see what happens. At the very least I hope to get a picture, which I'll post in that week's newsletter.
I'll end with this observation. I guess the real surprise for me was thinking I could read a book containing such gut-wrenching misery involving a person I care about, even if indirectly, and not have it affect me deeply. I think I'm going to be processing it all for a while. I suppose it's a good thing this book didn't come out twenty years ago, when I would have had a much tougher time handling it. Again, it's a brilliant book, but the first 27% is brutal in every sense of the word.
On to more practical matters:
I taught my customary Introduction to Gradle course online for Gradle, Inc. this week. I think attendance was up a bit this time, though I haven't confirmed the numbers. The group was a bit quieter this time, which meant I actually kept up with the questions and filled in all the answers during breaks, so that was fun. I still feel like the second day was more rushed than I'd like, so I need to find a better balance somehow.
Before the class I asked the person at Gradle arranging all this what plans they had for similar training using the Kotlin DSL, and the question seemed to take him by surprise. If that's as important to the company as I thought, maybe they'll make plans for training in the future. We'll see.
Another book I'm slowly working my way through is Range: Why Generalists Triumph In A Specialized World by David Epstein. It's very well written and I agree with a lot of what I've read so far, but there's an underlying message about how teaching, even good teaching, focuses too much on short term gains rather than long term learning. As someone who has been in that industry for years and currently teaches many very short online classes, I have a lot to say on that matter. I'll save that for an upcoming newsletter, however.
I did a "great refactoring" of my Kotlin Cookbook, extracting all the recipes into individual files and importing them into chapters. This will make it easier to move individual recipes to different chapters, which is something I'm starting to have to consider. The book has gotten to the size where the accumulated "I'll fix that later" problems are becoming overwhelming, so I've been doing some updates there as well.
Googling my book for the link at O'Reilly (given in the previous bullet) shows that there are now links available at both Amazon and Barnes and Nobel, not to mention Google BooksBarnes and NobelBarnes and Noble. I guess I really do need to deliver it now.
I've been working my way through the official tutorial on Kotlin Coroutines and Channels and they're finally starting to make sense. As I say in my talks, just because it's easy to write concurrent code doesn't make concurrency easy.
I've also decided it's worth it to go to KotlinConf this year. I saw in a tweet that they were already down to under 100 tickets available, so I decided to go ahead and register. This will be the first time in many years I've attended a conference without speaking at it, but I know I'll learn a lot. I also need the frequent flyer miles on United, and hopefully I'll have a book to sell. :)
Last week:
Introduction to Gradle online for Gradle, Inc.
Working on the Kotlin Cookbook
This week:
Lots of writing
Might attend Ben Muschko's Docker For JVM Projects online course on Safari, if I have time
No Fluff, Just Stuff event in Des Moines Friday - Sunday