The Tactile Past Ep. 2 “Predictions"

 Poor Predictions and Shaky Science

Well humans are motivated in a limited number of ways but the easiest, probably, is fear. So we brush aside all the fanfare and listen intently to what scientists all over the world are saying and we believe them, yet in time, those predictions simply fail to materialize.

 

Oil

None of the predictions made in the 70’s or 80’s came to pass. The first cataclysm we could expect, we were told, was for the world to run out of oil. We’re using far too much gas for it to last very long, they said. Countries which didn't have oil panicked and started stockpiling and striking deals with shady governments to proactively head off any sudden world-running-out-of-oil scenarios and all the chaos and ruin that would bring.

Population

The next major catastrophe, we were told, was the population explosion. If things carry on like this, in the merrily exponential manner which typifies life, the world will be overrun with people and we won’t be able to feed all of them. We should expect Africa and Asia to encounter massive famines on account of all the tens of millions of people being born every day and not as many farms being made to compensate. It's strictly a numbers thing.

Mobility Tech

One good thing, they said, was that we could expect flying cars running on solar and personal jet packs and also personal bots to live our lives for us. We can spend weekends shopping for a robo-dog to go with the new robo-dog-walker that came with the flying car and on the way home, the robo-dog will solve complicated equations in loud, robotic monotones.

Sea level

The next big threat to mankind's existence, say the scientists, will be the rising sea levels owing to all the ice melting in the arctic. At this rate the polar caps will be gone in decades and every coastal city will be consumed by the ocean. Plus, the cities could sink because they're heavy.

Entertainment Tech

On the bright side.. LCD looks promising but the future is, without doubt, holograms. We’re going to have lasers everywhere showing us 3D shows in the air, or direct to our brains, and *finally* they make some half-decent sci fi using biofeedback and brain pattern recognition. Still.. 3D eh? 3D! Science fiction baby!

Nukes

Nukes. If you have nukes but never use them, that's the same as not having nukes. Why get us all excited then? Ayy.

The Tactile Past I: The Tickey

 

A "Tickey" was a 2 ½ cent coin from Rhodesia.

 I recall the pervasive parking meter. In the city, every street-level parking bay had a mechanical timer; you would feed the coins into the device, crank the handle (like a gumball machine) and it would show how much parking time you had left. When the time ran out a little red flag would swing into view, saying “EXPIRED” and attracting the meter maid, looking to fine anyone parked in an expired bay. The system today, unbelievably, is even more awkward.

What was unusual, I think, was that we had a coin specifically for this one purpose. The coin was a ‘tickey’, 2 ½ cents (formerly threepence) and it was tiny ~ so small, in fact, that they were easy to find by touch alone. Outside of parking meters, the tickey seemed to have no purpose.

 

The coins I experienced were decimal but these here show the conversion – threepence (3d) to 2 ½ cents, sixpence (6d) to 5 cents, a shilling (1/-) to 10 cents, a florin (2/-) to 20 cents and a half crown (2/6) to 25 cents. 

The largest bill in print, lol, was ten dollars, the equivalent of 20 pounds sterling.

Futurama Relationship-O-Meter

 Doing it... in the future!

Futurama's Dating Advice

When you think of Futurama's long, broken run, it was only when the show reached Hulu that one cast member was with another cast member long enough to spawn children. Amy Wong, of the Mars Wongs, somehow managed to get "reptilicus" (the spineless, cowering, weak, floppy, green, annoying alien aide to the magnificent Zapp Brannigan) to get her pregnant. 

Of all the creatures Amy could have dated... and there were many... Amy chose the most annoying, the most clueless and the most terrified gelatinous blob, by far the least useful of any character, including washbucket. So ignoring the unsightly mess that Hulu made (a celebration of trends that died 1000 years earlier), which of the characters was the most prolific at banging the other characters? Gotta be Bender, right?

 

 

You'll notice that Kif is the least popular one here, even the Professor has more luck with the women. Still, Kif joins Amy's other workplace lovers for a total of 7... good enough for third place. Joint first place is Fry and Bender with 10 lovers each, but only Amy has slept with everyone at Planet Express.

Leela bring up the rear with a disappointing 5 lovers, of which two are too brief to count, one is with a girl and the other two will sleep with anything that doesn't say no. Even worse, Zapp's paltry 3 lovers comes dangerously close to Kif's two, but at least he slept with Amy!

The lesson to learn here is this: sleep with as many people outside your work as you can, then sleep with as many people at work as you can. That's a lot of sleeping but fortunately sleeping at work is fine.

What no-one tells you about making an ebook

 

Making kindle / ebooks from Word documents

 

From 2020-2025 I wrote 3 novels, a trilogy, with some unusual formatting. Text boxes, images with captions, big text, you know, standard book fare, I thought.

Turning those docx files into .azw3 (kf8) or .epub was an absolute nightmare. In the end I had to reformat all 3 books. Here are the shortcuts I learned, that has NO online source, not even Reddit.

If you’re having conversion hassles, these points may soothe your journey.

 

So, first off, the word doc is in fact a website. You can view the website by choosing ‘Web view’

Amazon format, kf8, azw3 etc… is also a website. And epub is a website, too. Rename any epub to .zip and extract to see the site’s files: html, xml, css and jpegs.

Problem 1: Tables and floating boxes are not supported. No tables, no boxes of any kind, everything must be inline.

Problem 2: Tabs are ignored and multiple line returns are rendered as a single line return.

To create a one line gap, sometimes you have to put a white character on that line, like a period.

Problem 3: Reflow

To get a chapter to start on a fresh page, the previous chapter needs a page break. However, do not have that break as the last line on the page, it needs a gap after it.

Red- bad. Green-good.

Despite this, you’ll still get the odd blank page at the end of a chapter, but if you resize the window, that goes away. 

Problem 4: LOTS of blank pages inserted randomly. I encountered this when viewing on an actual Kindle; removing all boxes and tables etc. solved this issue.

Problem 5: Amazon Kindle Create is garbage.

You’re a lot better off making all changes in Word then converting.

Problem 6: Weird hidden shit

Word is riddled with issues regarding tracking changes, hiding things etc. Use the ‘web view’ view to iron out those foibles.

Problem 7: Styles

Everything in your Word doc needs to have a style. Ebooks love styles because everything becomes CSS. For example,don't just make some text bold but rather set it as a quick style, i.e. normal+bold, then apply the style. Styles are exerything.

Problem 8: Fonts

Th newer Kindles can read html5 but the older ones battle along without support for colour images, tables, webfonts, online libraries, local libraries, video or even a zoom function on images. Ebooks are the same, just lower resolution and elastic aspect ratio. For a consistent layout you may wish to keep with the base fonts (Arial, sans serif, Times, serif, monospace, Georgia, Tahoma, Verdana) or at least not use any weird fonts downloaded from some random site.

 

All said and done, if you have some html skills then getting the final ebook to look the way you want is fairly easy.  Editing in Calibre is exactly the same as coding a very basic site.

 

Bonus 1: Animated gifs play in the ebook, which means animation in the book… awesome.

Bonus 2: Muck about in html with outdated tags like <marquee> and get animation styles to display, mouseover events to display hidden text and all the fun stuff you don’t see in ebooks.

Haight Ashbury - The Epicentre of Hippie Counterculture

 

One Wall to Rule Them All

On the wall at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic is a mural, a sort of collage, cut ‘n pasted there by the hippies who hung out there between 1967 and 1969. It is old now, faded, marred with graffiti and other grime manifest over the last 60 years but it is still there  (and, coincidentally, at my place albeit ‘like new’)   and it has an interesting story to tell, one you won’t find anywhere else.

It was my task to recreate this mural for a TV show about serial killers – in this instance, Charles Manson. Working with very little reference, I set about making the enormous artwork in precisely the same manner as the hippies did back in 1967 – by using the free posters Bill Graham would deposit there.

Bill Graham & LSD

Bill Graham was the name on every poster which he used partly for promotion but principally to market direct to users of LSD. Bill’s formula was to host benefit events, which skirt a good deal of the bylaws, and so offered to hold benefit gigs for the clinic, where LSD and his market intersected.  The Summer of Love emerged amongst all this and the rest is history, but know that here, in this room, under this artwork, was the epicentre of Haight Ashbury and the principal role it played in the emergence of the hippie counterculture.

Bill Graham’s story you’ll find on Wikipedia, but that’s the ‘official’ story. The wealthy black man who owned the Fillmore auditorium had conservative values; Graham’s first few gigs, being benefits, made the cut but it was unlikely he would be fine with back-to-back shows from Friday noon to Monday noon, a for-profit venture which hinged on the supply of LSD and the engineering of the first large-scale counterculture in US history. Graham took the lease and then, mysteriously, the wealthy black guy was murdered! How unbelievably fortunate for Graham, and lucky too that he had the support of the LSD supply chain, which would naturally remove any hinderances to moving product in volume.

Graham gave out free posters at the gigs and naturally dropped off a stack of the things at the clinic, a marketing move. It served to attract an audience and also inform the supply chain of the sorts of numbers involved. A popular show would need a good 30,000 tabs of fresh blotter, or some 250 sheets be made available, and the clinic was the only place of central exchange.

The Clinic

The Clinic naturally didn’t describe itself as a LSD hub but as a social welfare place, something of a do-good rehab, a medical support service.  However, people like Manson, who was permanently high, hung out there pretty much because you got free acid and would meet a number of runaways, drawn to the legend of the district. He could conscript girls and have them do pretty much whatever he said; the acid was free, the concerts were free and there was no chance of getting in trouble with the law.

So the Clinic was the hub, no big whoop. Our posters on the wall tell us that Jan 1967 to Dec 1968 – those two years – were the height of the fad and the concerts outgrew the hall. Haight Ashbury became a magnet for every part-time criminal, chancer, vagrant and addict to descend in great numbers. The Clinic had to start to distance itself from the drug trade as the district started turning into slum, with all the unwanted attention this brings, so in 1969 the LSD transactions took place off premises. This marked the end of the poster series and the start of the whole thing winding down. The hippies trekked off to Woodstock and Haight Ashbury started cleaning up.

The Posters

These aren’t just any posters, they are works of art and core to the psychedelic movement in how it came to be defined. They epitomize, and illustrate, legendary artists in a unique age and gave young people a voice.