And then I fucking hated it.

I messed around on the site for about three hours, filling in an endless questionnaire (which was kind of fun) and generated the above graph. It reminded me of the time that I went for a job interview at a Subway Sandwich shop, and they tried to see if I would be a good employee by asking me multiple choice questions. Just like after that interview, by the time I finished clicking an appropriate number of questions my brain went all squishy and useless.

Then I went and drew in my notebook for twenty minutes, and I felt loads better. I cannot stress how much better this simple activity made me as opposed to my digital socialising. Crazy, right? Who knew the introverted, artistic, unadventurous person would actually enjoy doing something that didn’t involve repeatedly clicking a mouse.

In my day-to-day life, it’s very unusual for me to even see a woman under 50, let alone talk to one, so it was nice to see that the wider world still contains people my own age. But the sort of online site that involves putting up a picture of you (Facebook, Google+, and dating sites) seems to totally do my head in, and part of my continued recovery is learning to avoid what does that. Still, I did get a nifty graph out of it.

“Are you coming down the pub?”
“Be there soon. Are there any otters out tonight?”

About three weeks ago, I went to the SameAs.Us event in London, talking about art and technology. It’s taken me that long to drag my massive 2001-era scanner out of the cupboard and scan in these pictures from the event.

I solved the problem of not really being that good at paying attention to talks by doodling and sketching my way through the whole night – this also solves my problem of having to socialise with people. I just keep sketching when they declare a break for beer. It’s not that I’m shy, I’m just usually extremely worn out by getting to these events, and the evenings are my best time for drawing. I’m useless in the mornings. I usually count it as a success if I make breakfast and coffee before 1pm.

But all the interesting stuff happens in that sweet spot, of evening productivity, so I’m left with the option of becoming a weird bedroom-dwelling hermit or looking like a paint-stained freak in public. For now, I’m flying a small freak flag at some events.

The crowd was especially fun to draw, with the speaker being in the top left (Chris Thorpe of Artfinder, standing next to one of the hosts of SameAs.us, Kaitlin Thaney). Nearly everyone else was sat on the floor, so I had a good view of a wide variety of people, all sitting still. Handy stuff, if you want to do drawings of people. Even better than drawing people talking on their mobile phone – no pacing and hand gestures!

Game Dev Story is a weird one – in it, you run a small game studio, and using a small budget you create games for several consoles. The whole game is deeply steeped in the history of gaming, and operates a as sort of parody of that world – but the only thing that really made me laugh was when the new “Playstatus” console was announced.

The aim of the game is to create hit games. You do this by training up your employees, who then work hard to create a game that will get good reviews. After a certain point, you have trained your minions employees hard enough so that success is guaranteed, but the game is still somewhat enjoyable.

It’s cartoon style and lack of seriousness make Game Dev Story an OK game, but there isn’t much replayability and it’s got a few glaring errors – for instance, you can’t skip any of the repeated scenes, the grammar and spelling are weak, and there was a persistent bug in the program which ate up the memory on my iPhone.

In the end, I only deleted it because I wanted my iPhone to stop being a bit weird from low memory. I could have replayed it once more, but I’d done all the major achievements in the game, and after playing for an in-game length of twenty years a pop-up screen told me that the game had “finished” although I could keep playing if I wanted to. Uh… no. As entertaining as it was, it was not a game with the longevity or complexity that would convince me to keep going.

Mirrors Edge stands out as one of the worst games I have ever played on my iPhone. It was a terrible waste of money that gave me nothing to show for it. It was made by Electronic Arts, a game company that has existed for so long that they seem to have become a fundament of computing now.

On other gaming systems, Mirrors Edge is a considerably different beast. It won awards for its new slant on the traditional platform game, turning the familar mechanics of running/jumping into a sort of first-person-shooter parkour game. So, for the iPhone, Electronic Arts decided to strip away all the innovative bits and hand out a standard platformer.

This might not be so bad – the graphics are fairly good, and there is a story – but the problem of the touchscreen really baffled the team of programmers who put this together. Perhaps they didn’t have fingers and programmed the game with some sort of hand simulator, because I found it almost impossible to get the main character to react quickly. This was not a problem in the early levels of the game, but later levels which were harder and involved more conflict were infuriating.

I’d give this game two out of five, because it’s shiny and pretty. But it’s too short, and relies on the idea of uploading scores to F***book and Time Trials for it’s longevity. If you find both those things boring – as you should do – you should save your money and buy yourself a pint.

A few days ago, I was sitting in a cafe in Biggleswade, reading my RSS feeds, when I saw an interview with John Allison at Coilhouse. Great! I love John Allison’s webcomics work, being a late convert to Scary-Go-Round, and it’s school-age follow-up, Bad Machinery (currently running). Allison is a smart guy with a lot to say about comics, with his recent “Manifesto for UK Indie Comics in 2010” provoking fierce internet debate. Worth checking out, even if you don’t intend to ever look at another comic.

So I was interested to read what the interview with him would say. I clicked through, and…

I was bombarded with adverts for smut. Coilhouse, it seems, is on the naughty list – that ever-growing list of websites that are considered too rude or ‘adult’ for people to be allowed access to them. Instead of the interview, what I got was a portal, that said for a £5 fee I could look at some adult material. The problem is that I’m not interested in adult material; I’d like to read something that is quite clearly not adult material, but is hosted on a site that might, occasionally, have some pictures which don’t disguise the fact that (whisper it) women have nipples.

I sent an email to Three asking to be removed from the filtering list. About a week later, I got a call from a Three rep with a heavy Indian sub-continent accent, who then put me through to their “iPhone team”. There, a man with a less-heavy Indian accent tried to convince me that I wanted to pay £5 to look at smut, so I was forced to point out that as an adult I don’t need to be protected from filth. I was told by this “iPhone team expert” that my phone was advanced, and that I had advanced internet.

I got real pissed off at this point, and told him that I had one and a half degrees, and I know pretty well how the internet access works, and that I didn’t see why I should have to pay money to get access to the internet. After being on hold for a bit I was told that I would now be given “x-series silver” for free, for the rest of my contract (I asked twice if it was really free, as I was mighty suspicious) and that would allow me to look at “adult” content. I just checked and I can now access coilhouse.net.

The whole process was highly stressful and completely unnecessary. As an adult, I shouldn’t have had to opt out of any online filtering, particularly not filtering that stops me from looking at content that isn’t actually rude. It should have taken a few seconds to opt-out, but instead it took over twenty minutes with me continually having to ask to be removed from the filtering service, and continually turning down any offer of “adult services”.

This is a clear example of the type of two-tier internet that will happen if net neutrality isn’t enforced by law. The site I wanted to see wasn’t rude, or pornography, but to gain access to it I had to argue with people at my internet provider. If the UK’s current government can’t see that this is a problem now, they will only have to wait until stories like this become commonplace – because this free headache wasn’t all the trouble I went through.

Sometimes I come across something that is so far out of my experience that I am fascinated. This is a video made by “Husky”, who is internet-famous for his Starcraft 2 commentary. The piece is a parody of a Justin Bieber song.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Bieber song, nor have I played Starcraft. I’ve heard of both of these things, and poking around Husky’s back-catalogue of Youtube videos is interesting as it exposes me to a lot of expressions I’ve never heard before (rage-quit? Gibs?), but I’m not too interested in searching out the original song.

Facebook
1601 S. California Avenue
Palo Alto
CA 94304
USA
6 October 2010

Dear Facebook People,

URGENT COMPLAINT– PLEASE READ, MORE ACTION TO FOLLOW SHORTLY

1) The short version:

At least one person, if not more, is/are impersonating me on Facebook, with (a) fake profile(s) claiming my identity. Despite me repeatedly bringing this to your attention, you have taken no action to remedy the situation. And I’m getting very annoyed.

2) The full version:

This thing you hold is called a letter. This is the third time I’ve contacted you, and I’m doing so by this antiquated method because, and I realise this may shock you so brace yourself, I have no Facebook account. Which means it is nigh-on impossible for me to get in touch with you. Kudos for your Ninja avoidance strategies.

Back when you had a button allowing me to alert you to a fake profile despite not having an account myself, I contacted you that way. I was answered with a resonant silence. Subsequently, when the problem persisted, I hunted lengthily for, found and left a message on the phone number you go out of your way to hide. Absolutely nothing happened. So here we go again: third time’s a charm.

I am being imitated on Facebook. I believe the only reason anyone is bothering to do this is because I’m a novelist (published by Macmillan and Random House), a writer and broadcaster, with a minor public profile. I think there are one or two community pages about my stuff on Facebook – that of course is very flattering and nice of people to bother. The problem is that there is or are also pages by someone(s) purporting to be me. This is weird and creepy. What’s worse is I know for a fact that some readers, friends and colleagues are friending ‘China Miéville’ under the impression that it is me, and that others are wondering why ‘China Miéville’ refuses to respond to them. And I have no idea what dreadful things or ‘likes’ or ‘dislikes’ are being claimed as mine, nor what ‘I’ am saying.

I know lots of people enjoy being on Facebook. Great. More power to them. Vaya con Dios. Me, though: not my thing. I have absolutely no interest in it. I am not now nor have I ever been a Facebook member. Short of some weird Damascene moment, I will not ever join Facebook – and if that unlikely event occurs, I promise I’ll tell you immediately. In the meantime, though, as a matter of urgency, as a matter of courtesy, as a matter of decency, please respond to my repeated requests:

• Please delete all profiles claiming to be me (with or without the accent on the ‘é’ – last time I looked, I found one ‘China Mieville’, and one more accurately rendered).
• Please do not allow anyone else to impersonate me. I have neither time nor inclination to trawl your listings regularly to see if another bizarre liar has sprung up.
• And while you’re at it, please institute a system whereby those of us with the temerity not to sign up to your service can still contact you on these matters and actually get a [insert cuss-word] answer.

I appeal to you to honour your commitments to security and integrity. Of course as a multi-gajillion-dollar company I have absolutely no meaningful leverage over you at all. If David Fincher’s film doesn’t embarrass you, you’re hardly going to notice the plaintive whining of a geek like me. All I can do is go public. Which is my next plan.

I’m allowing a week for this letter to reach you by airmail, then three days for you to respond to me by phone or the email address provided. Then, if I’ve heard nothing, on 16 October 2010, I’ll send copies of this message to all the literary organizations and publications with which I have connections

…

some of the many books bloggers I know; and anyone else I can think of. I’ll encourage them all to publicise the matter. I’m tired of being impersonated, and I’m sick of you refusing to answer me.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,
China Miéville

Miéville’s an amazing writer, and I picked this story up not via my usual nerd-stops of io9.com and tor.com, but by Google Reader’s ‘explore’ feature (where I found it was featured on many blogs). I don’t think it came up via Miéville’s own site at Rejectamentalist Manifesto. I saw him talk early this year, and from what I could hear he’s not that impressed with the Internet as a whole, so I think his site is more a way of distracting people from whatever footprint he might be making online.

What it says to me is that we have identities beyond our mere physical bodies, and that it takes work to control them, and it takes more work to control them as you become more famous. An “online presence” is a sort of metallic aura, and the more we engage with the online world, the more apparent our aura becomes – but famous people, or people who have some sort of cultural cachet, like Miéville, have an aura that might be beyond their control. For instance, cat-bin lady suddenly became famous and well-known, and lost all privacy she might have had.

Miéville’s specific complaint was not that the virtual dopplegangers were passing themselves off as him, but that they were independently claiming to “like” things. Stelarc, the Australian artist who has an ear on his arm, tried to create autonomous networked copies of himself back in the early 2000s, recognising that at some point our self, our animus, would be replicated – probably imperfectly – by machine. Where this leaves the singular voice of the author, or any individual who would seek to make money from presenting a unique world-view (examples might include comedians, chess-players, and international bankers) is having to defend their uniqueness.

Unless, of course, licensed copies can be made.

This comes from a set of videos on YouTube where the soundtrack has been replaced, an idea originating on the Something Awful forums. It’s a smart idea.

(Do we need to have forums to make sense of the internet? Even the most dedicated forum has an ‘off-topic’ section, which is usually five times more interesting than the on-topic stuff.)

William Gibson, speaking in 2010