Maybe this is just artistic maturity, I don’t know.  Buy this album.  Seriously.  Songs like “Beggar Who Gives Alms” will change the way you think about Christian music.  “Cathedral Made of People” is like a punch to the base of your skull (but in a good way).  It reminds me of a funky blend of Supernatural era dc Talk and Edge’s sonic riffs on The Unforgettable Fire.

Buy this album.  I mean it.

If you need something more convincing than my raving fanboy incoherency, there’s a splendid review in Christianity Today and an even better one from John Wofford at Soul-Audio.  (I’m also glad to see that someone other than me hears the Unforgettable Fire vibe on this record.)

I’ve believed for the last few years that downhere is the single most-overlooked band in the Christian contemporary market.  I still can’t even fathom this.  I can’t.  It makes me angry just to think about it.

If Ending is Beginning doesn’t finally grab people’s attention, I am giving up on our culture and concluding beyond all reasonable doubt that the world is full of idiots.  You don’t want that, and I don’t want to have to move into a musty cave and spend the rest of my life ranting bitterly about the decline of Western Civilization.

So do us both a favor:  Buy this album.

(I don’t know how long this will be up, but if you want a preview, you can hear a full album stream at http://www.jesusfreakhideout.com/features/listeningparty4.asp.)

Today we hear ebook publishers tell each other and anyone who’ll listen that the barrier to ebooks is screen resolution. It’s bollocks, and so is the whole sermonette about how nice a book looks on your bookcase and how nice it smells and how easy it is to slip into the tub. These are obvious and untrue things, like the idea that radio will catch on once they figure out how to sell you hotdogs during the intermission, or that movies will really hit their stride when we can figure out how to bring the actors out for an encore when the film’s run out. Or that what the Protestant Reformation really needs is Luther Bibles with facsimile illumination in the margin and a rent-a-priest to read aloud from your personal Word of God.

New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at.

Books are good at being paperwhite, highresolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list.

The only really successful epublishing — I mean, hundreds of thousands, millions of copies distributed and read — is the bookwarez scene, where scanned-and-OCR’d books are distributed on the darknet. The only legit publishers with any success at epublishing are the ones whose books cross the Internet without technological fetter: publishers like Baen Books and my own, Tor, who are making some or all of their catalogs available in ASCII and HTML and PDF.

The hardware-dependent ebooks, the DRM use-and-copy-restricted ebooks, they’re cratering. Sales measured in the tens, sometimes the hundreds. Science fiction is a niche business, but when you’re selling copies by the ten, that’s not even a business, it’s a hobby.

Every one of you has been riding a curve where you read more and more words off of more and more screens every day through most of your professional careers. It’s zero-sum: you’ve also been reading fewer words off of fewer pages as time went by: the dinosauric executive who prints his email and dictates a reply to his secretary is info-roadkill.

Today, at this very second, people read words off of screens for every hour that they can find. Your kids stare at their Game Boys until their eyes fall out. Euroteens ring doorbells with their hypertrophied, SMS-twitching thumbs instead of their index fingers.

Paper books are the packaging that books come in. Cheap printer-binderies, like the Internet Bookmobile that can produce a full-bleed, four-color, glossy cover, printed spine, perfect-bound book in ten minutes for a dollar are the future of paper books: when you need an instance of a paper book, you generate one, or part of one, and pitch it out when you’re done. I landed at SEATAC on Monday and burned a couple CDs from my music collection to listen to in the rental car. When I drop the car off, I’ll leave them behind. Who needs ’em?

Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we’ve changed copyright. Copyright isn’t an ethical proposition, it’s a utilitarian one. There’s nothing moral about paying a composer tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there’s nothing immoral about not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie off your TV. They’re just the best way of balancing out so that people’s physical property rights in their VCRs and phonographs are respected and so that creators get enough of a dangling carrot to go on making shows and music and books and paintings.

– Cory Doctorow, Content, Microsoft Research DMR Talk

I want you to understand conceptually what I’ve just done here:  I’ve just proven Cory’s point. He made his book available in a digital format.  I read it.  I found something he said that made me sit up and go, “Holy Crap!  That’s brilliant!”

I wanted to share it.

I copy/pasted the bit that really knocked me out so I could share it with my friends.

Now you’ve read something of Cory’s, too — something you probably wouldn’t have read otherwise (despite the fact that I just strongly recommended this book to you like all of two hours ago.  What?  You thought I didn’t see you blowing me off?).

Cory wins, because now some of you — or even better, some random recipient audience I didn’t even intend, but who will end up here through random Googlization — will be interested enough to search out more.  A smaller portion of you will go to Amazon or your local bookseller and buy Content because you’ve been intrigued by what you read here — most of whom, I dare say, haven’t ever heard of Cory Doctorow until this moment.  (In other words, you can’t be a customer for an artist you’ve never heard of.  As Cory has famously said over and over again, the greatest threat to artists isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.)  Others will have the name “Cory Doctorow” dumped deep into the recesses of your brain, and 3, 5 or 10 years from now, you’ll stumble across one of his books in a bookstore and think, “I know that name from somewhere.  Maybe I’ll give this book a try.”

Cory also wins because of the simple fact that his ideas propagate. Propagation, whether it be biologically or ideologically, is always teh win.

Even more importantly, I win because I read something really cool and got to share it without having to spend four hours of my life copying it by hand out of a print book or an hour typing it into an e-mail and forwarding it to a bunch of poor shlubs.  Cool stuff is only worth knowing if you can share it with your friends.  Cool stuff is (mostly) only worth sharing if you don’t have to spend hours and hours duplicating someone else’s work just to get it out there.

You win because you’ve just been exposed to a cool idea that might never have crossed your threshold except that all down the line, the ability to reproduce this idea in its exact form (without typo-festing, summarizing or otherwise garbling the original content) was made simple and accessible by people who didn’t need to be control freaks about format.  People who decided that the most important thing was to get the information out there, and trust that they’d be clever enough to find a way to monetize it later rather than relying on old models that actually would have impeded communication in this exact case to put pennies in their pockets.

So there.

Or both.  I can’t decide.

Anyway, in the little time you (may) have left, you owe it to yourself to check out Cory Doctorow’s new Creative Commons release, Content.  From Cory’s blargh:

Hailed by Bruce Sterling as “a political activist, gizmo freak, junk collector, programmer, entrepreneur, and all-around Renaissance geek,” the Internet’s favorite high-tech culture maven is celebrated with the first collection of his infamous articles, essays, and polemics. Irreverently championing free speech and universal access to information—even if it’s just a free download of the newest Britney Spears MP3—he leads off with a mutinous talk given at Microsoft on digital rights management, insisting that they stop treating their customers as criminals. Readers will discover how America chose Happy Meal toys over copyright, why Facebook is taking a faceplant, how the Internet is basically just a giant Xerox machine, why Wikipedia is a poor cousin of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and how to enjoy free e-books. Practicing what he preaches, all of the author’s books, including this one, are simultaneously released in print and on the Internet under Creative Commons licenses that encourage their reuse and sharing. He argues persuasively that this practice has considerably increased his sales by enlisting readers to promote his work. Accessible to geeks and nontechies alike, this is a timely collection from an author who effortlessly surfs the zeitgeist while always generating his own wave.

Direct link to download page here.

Editorial Aside:  Though the above is the “official”/back-cover copy on Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future, I actually prefer Cory’s riff on what this collection is about:

In it are 28 essays about everything from copyright and DRM to the layout of phone-keypads, the fallacy of the semantic web, the nature of futurism, the necessity of privacy in a digital world, the reason to love Wikipedia, the miracle of fanfic, and many other subjects. The book sports a very fine Introduction by John Perry Barlow, and was designed by typography legend John D Berry.

I’m especially chuffed about John’s superb design, because I’m giving the whole electronic text away in the hopes of selling more printed objects, and the fact that this is one of the best-looking books I’ve ever read really makes the case for owning the p-book as well as the e-book (there’s an essay on this subject in the book, too, natch).

This book may very well change your life, or at least what’s left of it.  So get it now before time runs out.  Cory is chuffed.  You should be, too.  I am, and I haven’t even read it yet.

Chuffed, I say.

(And if you like Cory’s work as much as I do, really do please give at least a little thought to donating toward the cause or buying a print copy.  Authors have to eat, too.  And if you’re going to buy this one, you might as well buy Little Brother, too, though Cory will let you download that one for free, also.  Good stuff.)

That’s it.  I’ve gotta run.  Chuff to do before the world ends.

D.

I made this comment a couple of places yesterday, but I’ll make it again:  For some bizarre reason, I never expected Google not to fix it.  This is a strange sort of consumer currency for me.  In essence, I have this completely naive trust in Google (‘cuz they’re not evil) that they want to do the right sorts of things, and if they do the wrong sorts of things, if you point it out to them, they’ll fix it.

Which is a really bizarre way to think about a multi-billion dollar American corporation, especially when I can’t really put my finger on a specific reason why I would give them such blind trust.

On tor.com yesterday, I actually said:

Honestly, I suspect the EULA is like documentation — most developers don’t really think about it until very late in the process (if at all). If most developers are like the ones in my shop, they think of the EULA as something on a tick-off list (17. Add the latest EULA template to the install package.) and expect that the lawyers have handled the details.

Which *might* seem really shoddy to me until I realize that I’ve never read all the provisions of a Creative Commons license, either. I know what it’s supposed to do, but I haven’t studied all the stuff in there — and yet, it functions essentially as a EULA for text I produce and release to the web.

Certainly, somebody at Google dropped the ball, but since I’ve been known to drop the ball in the same way (especially when rushing out a release to meet an arbitrary deadline), I can’t crucify them for it.

Seriously, how odd is that attitude?  If Johnson & Johnson made a similar gaffe, segments of our society would be all over them asking how such a massive corporation with so many smart employees could let such a blatant error slip through the cracks.  And we’d all quietly snigger at their stupidity.

And yet, and yet, and yet, Google is just a bunch of guys (& gals) making stuff, and who’s perfect all the time, right?

I actually prefer this attitude to the one I hold to “traditional” American corporations like J&J.  It makes me happier to not constantly worry about how a major corporation is screwing me over (frex:  Shrink Ray Consumables, which is the sort of behavior we expect most of the time).  I just wonder why Google gets a benefit of the doubt in my own mind that I don’t pass along to any other company of similar stature.  Why do I feel like, deep down, Google has my best interest at heart, when the truth is that what I represent to them as an internet user is data-mining cash.

In essence, does Google benefit from their Web 2.0 business model (i.e., here’s stome stuff for free…except it really isn’t free, because we’re going to use the content/data/trends you generate using this tool to make money somewhere else).  Is it because I don’t feel like a direct consumer of Google services that I don’t get to treat them like a Johnson & Johnson?  Am I not as critical because I feel like I’m getting something for free?

Why do I trust you, Google?

I’ve got to send props to Cubicle Buddy Grant for pointing out to me the new online repository for the Codex Sinaiticus.  What is the Codex Sinaiticus, you ask?

To WikiQuote:

Codex Sinaiticus (London, Brit. Libr., Add. 43725; Gregory-Aland nº א (Aleph) or 01, Soden δ 2) is a 4th century uncial manuscript of the Greek Bible, written between 330–350. While it originally contained the whole of both Testaments, only portions of the Greek Old Testament or Septuagint survive, along with a complete New Testament, the Epistle of Barnabas, and portions of The Shepherd of Hermas (suggesting that the latter two may have been considered part of Biblical canon by the editors of the codex^[1]). Along with Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most valuable manuscripts for textual criticism of the Greek New Testament, as well as the Septuagint. It is the only uncial manuscript with the complete text of the New Testament, and the only manuscript of the New Testament written in four columns per page.

So here’s the skinny:  Profs David Parker, Dr Peter Robinson and Dr Scot McKendrick were tasked with re-assembling (virtually) the known pieces of the Codex Sinaiticus from its literary/political diaspora (assuming that four locations — the British Library, St. Catherine’s Monastery of Sinai, Leipzig University Library, and  the Russian National Library — counts as a diaspora).

From an ancient manuscripts standpoint, I’m told that this is a huge deal, because normally getting a close look at these sorts of materials requires lots of frequent flier miles, a fortune in white cotton gloves, more visa stamps than you can shake a stylus at, and a whole lifetime’s worth of political hand-shaking and ingratiating just to get ogle privileges.  (And not being an ancient manuscripts scholar, I’m almost 100% certain that I’m making this portion of the achievement sound much less impressive and correspondingly tedious than it actually is.)

Some Queries

And while that’s fascinating and butt-loaded with scholarly intrigue and all, I’m much more impressed with the technology (and the the thought that preceded the technology) behind it.  In short, the problem with ancient manuscripts — no matter how efficiently they’re stored — is that they’re all rotting away.  Some faster than others.  The interwebs, essentially a ginormous library with infinite shelf space and perfect climate control mechanisms, present an interesting short- to medium- term solution to the problem of primary source decomposition.

In short, take the putrefacting pages of said manuscript, image them with the highest definition camera you can get your grubby mits on, and preserve them for posterity…at least until you realize you might have backed Betamax.

And that’s the problem with curating online/digital Treasures of Western Civilization. There’s only one Codex Sinaiticus, and it isn’t going to last forever.  So someone has got to ask how we’re going to preserve it once the true primary source document ceases to exist.  This is where the puzzle gets interesting to me (and where the fact that they actually got this project done enters the realm of the amazing).  Ancient manuscript scholarship (even ancient manuscript biblical scholarship) being what it is, what you’ve got is a massively important and ultimately finite cultural resource — one of the core sources from which all modern biblical translations are created — which maybe half a dozen people a year need to study for serious academic work, so your audience is minute in the extreme.  Plain translations as a preservative mechanism are straight out, because you can’t translate — even word-for-word literally — without making inevitable editorial decisions.  A project like this can’t just duplicate in another media, it has to replicate it if the process is going to be of any lasting value.

Some Context

So let me ask you, when was the last time you fired up Zork from  5 1/4″ floppies on your XP or Vista machine? Or even better, how often are you still annihilating the world in Nuclear War on your fancy-schmancy Amiga?

(And don’t even say the word emulator to me.  That’s either completely beside the point or exactly my point, I haven’t decided which.)

The point is that technology changes.  We all know this.  Tech changes and we buy new stuff.  It’s the American Way.

Tommy Lee Jones alluded to this phenomenon Men in Black when he was showing off the cool alien media storage innovation to a newbie Will Smith and made the wry observation that he’d have to buy the White Album again.

That’s the way tech works.  Somebody creates a new platform.  It’s outrageously expensive.  People adopt it, price goes down, the tech becomes ubiquitous, and the paradigm shifts.

As with Zork, this presents problems for the digital curation of ancient manuscripts.  The tech you pick for media storage today is very likely to be obsolete in ten years.  In twenty years, people might not even have the equipment around anymore to leverage your media.  And when your potential long-term audience is a half-dozen tweedy academics a year, the chances that someone will save the hardware/software combination necessary to access the media or that some do-goodnik hacker will throw together an emulator to port your old media into a new-fangled environment shrinks dramatically.

Some Application

Nevertheless, I’m irrationally fond of this series of manuscripts because they marked various educational points along the road of my writing development.  Even mistakes are signposts.  Series of mistakes are even more meaningful.  A whole trilogy of questionable creative decisions is akin to stealing fire from the gods.

Call of the Master was originally composed on a battered old IBM PS/2 using the now-defunct word processing software DisplayWrite 4, which saved documents in the now equally-defunct DCA format.  When my PS/2 gave up the ghost, I got a generic Windows 3.1 machine and converted CotM to another word processing format…the name/type I no longer recall.  This torturous process (defying even the most outrageous logic of human communication) made the manuscript even more horrible by inserting huge chunks of white space and arcane line breaks into the mess of text.

A short time later, I upgraded to one of the early iterations of MS Word…only to find that I couldn’t convert this now-forgotten format into a format MS Word could read.  So I had to print the whole thing out (anomolous page/line breaks notwithstanding) and type the whole thing up again from scratch.

Inevitably, I made a great many editorial changes between the printed text and the new digital version (and in the process, making it even more horrible, if that can be believed).  Nothing ruins truly abominable material like good editing.

Here’s my point:  The original source material, as it was initially written and edited in DW4 has been completely lost.  I couldn’t recreate it if I tried (or if I wanted to).  All I’ve got is a manuscript that’s eight or ten iterations beyond the original.

And I dutifully upgrade this document (now in .docx format) with each new generation of word processing software.

I do this with all of my writing files, though my preferred format these days is RTF.  It’s how I preserve my literary output.  I use RTF because it seems to be the most readily port-able format available (with the exception of plain text, obviously, but plain text presents its own host of issues with formatting and readability).

The end result is that I’ve got some really creaky manuscripts loaded with MS Word cruft from generation after generation of format conversion.  The consequence is that each time I convert it again, MS Word freaks out and tries desperately to make sense of underlying code structures from previous (poorly implemented) software iterations into the new word processing environment.  Admittedly, much of this cruft is from questionable document formatting decisions I’ve made (or equally poorly implemented), but cruft is cruft, and it will eventually render my manuscripts un-convertable.

Which means I’ll have to type them up from scratch again.  And I will undoubtedly made editorial changes along the way (because that’s what writers do).  And just like that, the original documents will be lost.

Sort of makes you wish for some old school cuneiform tablets, eh?  At least Hammurabi didn’t have to worry about version control.

Some Final Points

And chances are that in ten years, all of those formats will be obsolete.  In ten years, we might not even be using HTML anymore.  In ten years, it’s almost certain that this blog will no longer exist, and likely WordPress right along with it.

A veritable (or is that virtual?) ton of original blog content will be lost to the aether.  Most of it won’t matter, of course, but I don’t envy the task of early-22nd century historians attempting to document this historical period of digital content creation.

Even digital media rots when the mechanisms/software for interpreting it disappear.

Or as a relatively recent iteration of the Codex Sinaiticus puts it:

• One of my favorite CCM bands – downhere – is offering their most recent album, Wide-Eyed and Mystified, as a free download for the month of June.  I like this offering quite a bit because of its increasingly sophisticated and full sound, but still prefer their self-titled debut CD.  As always, Marc Martel’s distinctive vocals sound incredible.

• Fellow cube dork Grant sent me a great link to the Weezer song “Pork and Beans” under the e-mail subject line The Internets Asplode, which was pure genius — much like the video.  In essence, if there’s been a YouTube meme in the last 3-5 years, Weezer paid homage to it.  Absolutely brilliant stuff.

• This song was stuck in my head last week.  Thank God, the internets saved me from a potentially catastrophic unsatisfied aural redux of the mid-1980′s.  Believe it or not, when I was 14, I thought Kool & the Gang constituted “hard rock”.  I led a very sheltered childhood.

• Speaking of classic CCM, I was fascinated to discover that Undercover has a web site, though the band has been functionally defunct for something like 20 years.  Boys and Girls Renounce the World may be one of the most ground breaking and under-appreciated CCM albums in history.  I honestly believe that.  Now if I could just find a copy of it.  For an example of what I’m talking about, check here, here, here & especially here.

• And actually on topic, my favorite Erica sent me a David Pogue piece from the NYT that actually talks about the dynamics of putting books on the internets and reader opinions on what it means, how it works (or should work) and the sorts of services that people are gravitating toward.  Perhaps Pogue’s most astute observation was that he was starting to understand the plight of the record companies.   Let’s hope that he reasons out a solution to digital copy protocols better than they did.

That ought to keep you busy for the rest of the work day.

I’ve mentioned before that I have an unhealthy fixation with sports text simulations (and in particular, one baseball simulation league, though I am frequently the absolute suck and/or the Master of Fail).  In fact, even as I type this, I am eagerly anticipating the release of the 2008 version of Out of the Park Baseball.

For those of you who might be baffled by the concept of text simulation glee, I humbly submit this article.

Thoughtful, sexy and always bringing me back for one more year.  Apparently I like my video gaming experience just like I like my womens.

I hope you enjoyed it.  Or will enjoy it if you’re reading on the archive site.

What that means is that I’m updating the sidebar on the left to include download links for the next project, 12 Steps.  This has already been discussed in an earlier post, so if you missed it, shame on you.  It was very moving, and I’m still feeling rather emotional about it.  Volunteers to hold me through this difficult time should apply via e-mail with a photo.

So, expect some changes over the next couple of days as I do away with the Agnosis chapter navigation and get my document formats set up for easy sharing and posting.

I’m both excited and terrified about posting 12 Steps.  By the end, you’ll know way more about how my personal psychology works than I ever wanted anyone to know.

A couple of things going on here:  I’m pretty nervous about 12 Steps as a piece of writing.  Honestly, I’ve never been completely happy with it.  It’s a great deal more autobiographical than most of my work, and I feel like there are too many places where I hewed too closely to “what was real” rather than “what makes the best story”, and the narrative suffers as a result.  The problem with pseudo-autobiography is that it’s difficult to tell when you’re explaining for the sake of storytelling and when you’re over-explaining because you’re trying to nail actual details in a significant manner…and so too often, you end up under-explaining and flattening out the narrative universe.

It’s complicated.  And in some ways, I feel like I settled for verbalizing a psychological state rather than telling a compelling story.  I guess that means I wrote it primarily for myself as a cathartic exercise rather than writing for an audience, and the results, as expected, are mixed.  At least, that’s the way I feel about it.  Somewhat surprisingly, it’s also the story that many of my readers have found to be the most compelling.  I can’t tell if that’s because my perspective on it is so different that I can’t see its merits clearly, or because most of my readers are not science fiction junkies like I am, so my SF work just leaves them cold.

Anyway, here’s what you should know going in:  when I was in college, I spent five years working the night shift at a drug rehab facility.  For most of that time, it was just me, working alone and twiddling my thumbs through the long hours of the night.  I dealt with lots of interesting people.  Lots of drunk people.  Lots of suicidal people.  Lots of seriously mentally ill people.  The experience took a significant toll on my compassion reserves.  I think it’s fair to say in retrospect that I burned out about three years into that job, but kept at it because I was a poor college student trying to support a family while I was in school, and because I’m naturally stubborn.

I’m not sure that I ultimately am very happy with the impact this had on my personality, even ten years later.  I wrote 12 Steps in the last month on the job, as I was getting ready to start my first adult career.  It was my way of wrapping up a chapter in my life.

I recently learned that one of the off-stage characters, who was largely responsible for some of the core anecdotes around which the narrative is built, passed away.  He died drunk and seriously mentally ill, just as he had lived, and in some way, this lessens me.  It reminds me unpleasantly of my own mortality.

Make no mistake:  12 Steps is an unpleasant story.  I’m not particularly fond of the protagonist, even though I know he is/was me.  I don’t approve of the way he thinks, of some of the things he does, of his cynical worldview…though all of those things are true.  Or at least true for me.  They’re the truth of my experience.

And as with most pseudo-autobiography, some bits are factually correct.  Some are complete fictions.  Some are the experiences of co-workers that I’ve stolen because their stories were interesting or resonated with me or simply got at the kernal of truth I was looking to portray better than my own stories.

In all cases, names have been changed to protect the innocent.  If, you know, you can call any of us innocent.

And I am so pissed off, I’m almost shaking. I’m outraged. I feel emotionally violated.

Wait, let’s step back for a moment. I should put all of my cards on the table here. I first read The Mist in the King collection Skeleton Crew when I was 14. It was one of those formative experiences for me. I mean, that story just lit me up. It terrified me. It broke me out in a cold sweat. It rubbed right up against massive Lovecraftian themes without beating you over the head with them. It was, to me, everything a good story should be. David Drayton was an iconic everyman hero just trying to save his son and preserve his sanity as the world spiraled horribly and inexplicably out of control.

That was the linchpin, his insurmountable love for his young son. Drayton refused to fail in the face of the unexplainable because his son depended on him.

And what I loved the most — what has stuck with me to this day — is that King respected his readers enough to recognize our emotional attachment to the characters and do a very un-King-like thing: he left us with the illusion of hope at the end.

He honored the contract with the reader. He brought us full circle through horror and back to a tantalizing sense of normal in a way that left us satisfied with the experience.

(I’m working very hard here not to spoil either the original story or the abortion that is Frank Darabont’s movie. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can get a synopsis of the original here. Spoilers for the movie are here. )

Now that you know why I’m so invested here, let me tell you this: I really enjoyed 98% of this movie. Darabont handled the improbable King-isms in an impressively credible way. Thomas Jane was dead on as David Drayton. And I even enjoyed Marcia Gay Harden‘s convincing performance as the religiously nutty Mrs. Carmody. (Why do I say this when so many other on-line folks have caterwauled incessantly about the over-the-top Old Testament fire-and-brimstone angle? Because as I watched the movie, she pissed me off. I couldn’t wait for some unholy abomination to eat her, someone to shoot her –anything, I didn’t care, as long as she got some brutal comeuppance. If you can illicit that response in a role that is essentially a crossbreed between a strawman and a cardboard cutout villian, you’ve done your job. But I digress.)

Don’t get me wrong: there are moments that are startlingly amateurish. There are times that this feels less like a feature film than a Made for TV movie (including commercial-ready fades), but overall, this is probably one of the finest recent adaptations of a King story that I’ve seen. It’s no Misery, and certainly not in the same league as The Shining or Stand by Me, but it’s workmanlike and adequate. Like most successful King adaptations, it achieves believability (and avoids the usual King-retelling blunder of collapsing into an almost self-mocking bathos [ref., The Langoliers]) by hewing close to King’s story without trying to translate the rhythm of his writing directly onto the screen.

King is a master of dialogue and setting. The problem is that King’s settings are almost always slightly askew. Language that feels true in his text (and in his context) frequently sounds stupid when spoken, because the language is such an essential component of the King-iverse to which we’ve been invited. Because much of King’s horror is psychological, we’re treated to an almost madness inducing litany of unfiltered inner monologue. Makes sense in text. Not so much in a visual medium.

But that’s all really beside the point here.

The point is that Darabont ruins an otherwise enjoyable movie by inserting his own stupidly morbid ending. I have no idea what he was aiming for. Really. I’ve looked at it from a dozen angles trying to find a justification for the cheap thrill he foists off on us as a climax, and he ends up ruining the entire film.

Because he broke the contract. He broke the trust of the viewer.

Not just because of the ending, but because there was no justification for it. There was no compelling reason that makes the ending look like an inevitable conclusion.

(Screw it. Here’s the spoiler.

In the story, David, his son and at least one other survivor — I’m a bit hazy on who makes it in the original, but anyway — make their getaway in David’s car. The story ends with them driving down a deserted highway to points south in order to escape the monster ridden mist. As the story ends, they’re rolling through radio static trying to find a signal — a destination that will give them hope. They catch one word: Providence. You don’t know if they’ll make it there, but at least they have that hope. NB: my memory might also be hazy on Providence. It’s been more than 20 years.

In the movie, David, son, chick-interest a couple of other random characters drive south on a deserted highway until they run out of gas. They have a gun. There are five of them, but only four bullets. David has promised his son he won’t let the mosters get him. So he shoots everyone but himself. Thirty seconds later, the mist clears and the army shows up.)

That’s why I’m pissed off. The main character murdered his son for a cheap, morbid directorial thrill. Murdered his son, for Christ’s sake! Look, if bloodthirsty monsters are pulling people from the vehicle and devouring them in front of David’s eyes, and with his last human effort, he squeezes off a round to spare his son from a horrible death — I might have been able to buy that. Gimme a fade to black, a gut-wrenching scream, cue the soundtrack. Maybe. I’ll be frustrated, possibly even a little disappointed. I’d possibly feel a bit ripped off.

But this was just ludicrous. It was like some kind of sick, sadistic voyeurism. I don’t know that I can even put into words how ham handed Darabont’s treatment of this episode was.

And then the army appearing thirty seconds later was just a fucking insult. An insult to my intelligence. An insult to the character. An insult to the story.

I’ll even set aside that it’s a fundamental betrayal of the tenor of King’s original work, though that pisses me off, too. But that annoyance only exists because the rest of the movie feels so true to the original.

Most of all, it was an insult to the contract between the storyteller and the audience. We trusted Darabont to treat us with respect and dignity. To tell us a story that made sense within the constraints of the universe he was portraying. To portray characters realistically and convincingly, and then to have those characters behave in ways that reflected what we had been taught to believe was true about them as people.

Darabon threw all of that away for one last and ultimately hollow shock.

And that, in my opinion, is the greatest sin a storyteller can commit.