Things I've Forgotten To Say

Over the past little while, there have been things I've forgotten to say or include in posts. Frequently, this has to do with getting interrupted while I'm writing and losing whatever I was thinking about. Probably, most of these things were of no great import, but, sometimes, they are.

One of the things I forgot was supposed to go into my A to Z posts. When my wife brought this to my attention, I was already past where it would have logically fit within the letters, so I had planned to work it in at another spot. But I forgot. And, then, I was going to work it in at the end, but I forgot. And, then, I was going to put it into my reflections post, but I saw that article about the bionic eyes and got all excited about that, and, guess what, I forgot. This is why when I go to the grocery store only needing three things, I come back with only two of them. Actually, often that's because of the "Can I haves" from my daughter. Having to say "no" 30 times during a 15 minute trip into the store can make you forget anything.

But I digress...

Every year at Christmas, we watch Scrooged. That may be my wife's favorite movie. I'm sure that's not what she would say, but we've seen that more than anything else my wife would claim as her favorite, so I'm just declaring it her favorite. So! My wife's favorite movie is Scrooged, and we watch that every year at Christmas. [Aren't you glad we got that all cleared up? Boy, I am!]

In the movie there's this bit where the out-of-touch president of the TV station is telling Bill Murray's character that they need to have television for cats and dogs. They also need to work things into regular programming to get those same cats and dogs hooked on TV. You know, like a detective show where the cop dangles a piece of string as his "thing." This whole thing, to put into a modern perspective, is meant to show how ludicrous and absurd the 1% can be with their time and money. This guy was into cats, so he wanted television for his cats, and, since he owned the TV station, he was gonna make that happen. No matter how stupid the idea.

And, see, that's the thing: it is a stupid idea.

It's a stupid idea that has, now, become a reality. I give you DogTV! Seriously. I don't care how much science has been put into it, and they claim there has been a lot of science put into it, it's insane. I mean, I love my dog (you remember her, right?),

I even let her lick my face (was that too much?), but she's a dog! Dogs are supposed to lick faces. They are not supposed to watch TV. If dogs were supposed to watch TV, they would have grown thumbs and invented it for themselves. Heck, we did invent TV, and I don't even think we should be watching it. Which is why we just get static on ours.

Anyway... just another example of fiction being turned into reality. Even if it is a dumb one.

The other big thing I meant to mention is something that leads into something else. Not that it was supposed to, originally, but it's going to now.

I just did a review on A Thread of Grace and, really, Mary Doria Russel in general. Okay, really, it was about The Sparrow, which I'm still looking for so that I can re-read it (and that's a big deal as some of you may have picked up), but I didn't just read that one. The Sparrow, aside from winning a bunch of awards (like the Arthur C. Clarke Award), was Russel's first novel. Yes, it was her first novel. I don't mean first published, just her first.

Modern, conventional wisdom tells us that first novels are no good. First novels are for practice. First novels are to get your foot in the door and all that other... stuff that they say. Modern, conventional wisdom is often just wrong. Say it with me: it's wrong!

I'm not saying that that means that a first novel is one's best novel, I'm just saying that, often, the first is the best. Orson Welles knew it. He made Citizen Kane and said everything he did after that would be downhill. He wasn't wrong. In fact, some people have written just the one and stopped. But the one was great. Gone With the Wind. To Kill a Mockingbird (and Harper Lee was somewhat pressured to write more books, but she refused, because she knew she could never surpass the one she did write). And, even though Richard Adams has continued to write, he's never done anything better than Watership Down.

Okay, what I'm really saying is that you shouldn't listen too hard to what "conventional wisdom" tells you. Conventional wisdom is not, usually, wisdom; usually, it's just dumb things people say to each other to make each other feel better. What I am saying is that you should believe in yourself and your work and do the best you can.

Don't listen to agents. Don't listen to publishers. Don't listen to your crit partners. Only you know the story you want to write. No one else, just you. You work on it, mold it, smash it, cut it, build it, believe in it, until you, only you, after having read it 20 times or 45 times or however many times that you've read it until you're sick of it, can read it and say, "Hey, I like this. This is good. I would read this." When you have something that you would read, that you would flip through at the bookstore and think, "hey, this sounds interesting," that you would pick up and buy, well... don't worry about the rest.

You want to know a secret? Agents don't know. Publishers don't even know. Heck, the public doesn't even know. You just do the best you can. You figure out what you want, what you need, from writing, and you work toward that. Sure, I know for a lot of you that means the validation of being traditionally published, so that means working with agents and publishers and jumping through hoops and all of that, but like I said way back in this post, you have to figure out what you want. If what you want doesn't require traditional publishing, then don't go that route (really, go back and read that post (you can even still comment on it, if you want to) if you want the full discussion).

>steps off of soapbox< (who put that there, anyway?)

Look, all I'm trying to say is don't let people get you down by telling you things that aren't necessarily true. Things like "it's only your first novel, so it can't be any good." Go look at a list of first novels by many famous authors (or only novels), and you'll often find that those first novels stand out among their work. You'll find just as many who had awful first novels and kept getting better and better. Just don't think that because it's your first it can't be any good.

Personally, I like my first novel, The House on the Corner (which I reviewed here). It's good. I've read it... many times, now, and I still enjoy it (and I had a whole class of 6th graders (and the teacher) laughing during chapter 19 this morning). But it's not The Sparrow, or Neormancer, or Citizen Kane (although it has been compared with The Sorcerer's Stone by more than one person), and I hope I get better. In fact, I plan to.

I suppose what all of this boils down to is this:
Believe in yourself.
Not in any New Age way or belief that believing in yourself will bring you everything you could hope for. It won't. Don't let anyone fool you. However, believing in yourself, that you can do it, is the only way that you will keep working at it. No one else can give that to you, but plenty of people can take it away. If you let them. So don't. Believe in yourself, believe that you can make it happen, work to make that come true.

The A to Z of Fiction to Reality: the Yeast-Beast Machine

First of all, yes, that just sounds gross. It does. Sorry for that. And, I would bet, you are all wondering what that is (well, maybe not Rusty, since he seems to have read all the sci-fi authors whose names start with the letter "B"). But before I get to that, I'm going to jump back to a very famous guy in this series, Isaac Asimov.

In Asimov's book, The Caves of Steel (1953 (as a serial)), as I've said before, the whole planet is just one big city. Being one big city, there's not a lot of land left outside the city and certainly not enough to grow enough food to feed the entire world. Instead of growing crops and raising livestock, the food is grown hydroponically. I'm wishing I had a better memory of what it was exactly (or had the book where I could get to it (but it's in a box somewhere in the garage)), but it was some kind of protein that could be flavored in a variety of ways and formed the basis for the standard diet of the people of Earth. It was food grown in a vat.

I don't really know if this idea precedes Asimov or not, but it was certainly picked up by other sci-fi authors.

In 1963, H. Beam Piper used the idea in his novel Space Viking. The space ships contain hydroponic carniculture vats in which they grow some sort of meat or meat substitute. Protein nonetheless.

In 1970, Frank Herbert's novel Whipping Star introduced us to pseudoflesh.

Even Neuromancer (William Gibson) mentions some sort of meat vats (although, I'm not remembering the details).

The term Yeast-Beast was introduced in David Brin's 1994 short story, "NatuLife." The Yeast-Beast is the device that produces the vat grown meat.

And, yes, I know all of this sounds really gross. Growing meat in a bathtub. Blech.

But!

In vitro meat has been being developed for a couple of decades now. And it was NASA that began the research as a possibility as a source of protein for long-term space voyages. It's also called hydroponic (there's that word again) meat, vat-grown meat, and victimless meat.

The first edible meat was actually produced over a decade ago, and, as of 2008, scientists claim the technology has developed to the point that it's ready to be made available commercially. The only real issue? People are turned off by the idea of eating meat grown in a vat. Well, that, and it's still expensive. Right now, bathtub meat would cost you more than animal meat, but, with the right backing, that might not stay true for very long. And being able to grow meat for consumption in developing nations could save a lot of lives. Currently, there are more than 30 laboratories around the world working on the development of in vitro meat.

As of February of this year, the first hamburger was made from vat grown meat. One of the biggest differences that vat grown meat could have for us is in time: It takes about two years to grow a cow big enough to slaughter to make that hamburger; you can make that same meat in just six weeks in a vat.

They do, however, say there's a slight issue with texture, but they're working on it.



Bonus "Y": Youth Eternal

Yeah, yeah, I know, we've been looking and looking for this for centuries. More than centuries. It's another of those staples of fiction and science fiction, and I'm not even going to go into all of that. I just want to say one thing about it, really:

Many scientists (geneticists) believe that this generation (my generation) will be the last generation on Earth that has to die. They're fairly certain they've identified the gene that causes aging, and they think they can figure out how to turn it off. If they can do that, no one would ever need to die of old age or old age related issues ever again. It's kind of a scary concept. With as many people as we already have on the planet, can you imagine what it would be like if no one ever died?

The A to Z of Fiction to Reality: Virtual Reality

Back in the mid-80's, on a trip to (the one, true) Six Flags, I had my first encounter with virtual reality. They had a station set up where you could experience it yourself for the low, low price of $10 (or something like that). You put on a set of VR goggles, walked on a treadmill, and shot at things. What made it interesting is that they had a monitor set up so that other people could see what you were seeing. There were obstacles that you had to dodge; some of them would fly out at you suddenly, so it was amusing to watch as the people doing the simulation would duck and, um, sometimes, actually fall down because they were caught off guard by something. I didn't actually do the thing, because I didn't want to spend $10 on something that lasted two minutes, but I had a couple of friends who did; one of them even did it twice. They were very impressed and said it felt like they were right there with things flying at their heads. It was, of course, the '80s when the idea of virtual reality really leaped into popular awareness. Right along with the personal computer. Of course, back in the '80s, we all thought we'd be in a virtual world by this point.

But how far back does virtual reality go?

Well, that's an interesting question, and I'm going to answer it from two perspectives:

First, in the 1950s, Morton Heilig decided that going to the theater should  be a fully immersive experience. He began working on his Sensorama which finally came out in 1962. The only piece ever produced was of the viewer riding the streets of Brooklyn on a motorcycle. It was much more than 3D, also providing the vibrations of the motorcycle, the wind on the face, and the smells of the street as the viewer "rode" along. However, the cost of producing the 3D films was just too high, and the Sensorama failed to catch on.

But what we think of as virtual reality really was a product of the '80s and stemmed almost solely from the work of Jaron Lanier. He founded VPL Research in 1985, which is the company that produced the famous goggles and gloves that we all think of when we think of VR.

The biggest issue with VR at the moment is that it's actually much more advanced than we realize. Quite advanced, in fact, within the medical field and the military. I suppose the high cost of VR systems is still keeping it out of the consumer market.

Except in one thing... the building of virtual worlds. The video game industry has become adept at creating worlds, and there have been some amazing strides in that area in recent years. The one I think is the most important is the development of the virtual world in The Force Unleashed. It's the first game world to apply "real" physics to the environment rather than just having the same programmed response every time. Here's a short video that talks about it a bit (although this one is not as good at explaining the significance of what they're doing as the couple I saw back when the game was first coming out, but I couldn't find those):


Some of this technology is related to the stuff ILM developed for Peter Jackson for The Lord of the Rings so that the armies would behave... well, autonomously instead of having groups of soldiers all doing the same thing.

So that's kind of where we are, right now, but from where did all of this come from from a fiction standpoint?

For that, we're going to go back to 1935 and the short story "Pygmalion's Spectacles" by Stanley Weinbaum. In the story, a professor has invented a pair of goggles that allows you to experience a movie as if you were in the movie including interacting with the characters. How familiar does that sound?

Remember Stanislaw Lem (from this post)? Well, in 1960, he had a short story, "IJON TICHY'S MEMORIES," in which a scientist creates an entire virtual world (and, evidently, traps people within it). Trapped in this virtual world is another scientist who creates a virtual world. Yes, within the first one.

And, of course, there's William Gibson with Neuromancer, which I find to be less of virtual reality, as such, and more just a visual representation of cyberspace, even if it is a virtual world.

We also have to jump right back to this post about Snow Crash.

In movies, we have Tron and The Matrix as two of the best examples of virtual reality in fiction.

For me, there was Tad Williams' Otherland series. Virtual reality is to the point where people have jacks implanted in the base of their skulls so that they can plug directly into the virtual network and experience everything by having their brains directly stimulated. It's interesting, though, in that during the course of the books, he shows us how the technology evolved in the world he created. What's interesting is that some of our newest advances in virtual reality have an eerie resemblance to antiquated VR tech in his books.

Here's what it comes down to for me:
When VR becomes a thing that people can enter into and experience as if it was real life, people will not want to leave it. There are already issues with people and the virtual worlds they already have access to, and these worlds are not... well, we don't experience them as if they are happening to us. But there have been cases of child neglect and abuse from parents becoming too immersed in these worlds. There have been cases of people going without food or water to the point of death. And these are just worlds that you experience through a keyboard. Imagine what it will be like when you can have full sensory input. Feel things. Smell things. Even taste things. And it can be better than your life in the "real" world.

Of all things I've talked about in this series, this is the one that I find the scariest. I think we're closer to realizing this one than many of the others. And, more than any of the others, this is the one into which we will go voluntarily.

[Oh, and I did some more digging, and I found the other videos I was talking about.]

The A to Z of Fiction to Reality: the Internet and the Invisibility Cloak

Today, you get a double dose of incredible science that has come from fiction. Why? Because I just couldn't make up my mind between the two. Not the things themselves necessarily, but they stories behind them.

First, the Internet:

Not to get too detailed, but Internet research goes back into the 1960s. However, it wasn't until the '80s that it really began to develop. Before people really knew about it, it was already becoming a huge Idea in science fiction. William Gibson latched onto it so early that his ideas about what the Internet would or could become in such works as "Johnny Mnemonic" and Neuromancer are completely indistinguishable from the development of the actual technology to such an extent that he's often credited with the actual Idea for the Internet. It's impossible to distinguish how much of an impact his early writings may have had on the development of something that was barely even begun, so there may be truth in that. We also have to acknowledge the movie WarGames (1983) which is the first movie to really put the Internet in our faces (as well as AI (see this post)).

That movie gave my mother nightmares for weeks.

But let's take a step back... back to the end of the 19th century and a man by the name of Samuel Clemens. Clemens was fascinated with science and technology. He even wrote a novel about time travelling and was great friends with Nikola Tesla. The two spent great amounts of time together in Tesla's lab. Of course, Clemens is better known to us as Mark Twain.

In 1898, Twain wrote a story called "From the 'London Times' of 1904" in which he has a device called the telelectroscope. The device is based on the telephone, which was still a new thing and fairly rare, and allowed the user to view and interact with people all over the world. The Internet. In fact, the telelectroscope made the daily doings of the globe "visible to everybody, and audibly discussable, too, by witnesses separated by [any amount of distance]." That sounds a lot like facebook and skype and... well, any number of other things.

So... yeah... Mark Twain dreamed up the Internet and social media. And he hung out with Tesla. We really don't know what all Tesla was into, but Twain wrote a story about time travel. It makes you wonder how he might have had an idea about the Internet. Just sayin'.

And, now, the invisibility cloak:

After flight, invisibility may be man's longest running fascination. To be unseen. From a literary standpoint, we can look (again) to H. G. Wells. The Invisible Man (1897) takes a remarkably scientific stance in its approach to making a man invisible. There is no "magic potion" here, just optics research that results in a man being made to be invisible. With disastrous results. The end of the 19th century seems to be full of warnings about messing with science that isn't really understood. [Except for Twain's Internet story. In that one, technology is used to solve a murder.]

Invisibility and the quest for invisibility was a familiar theme throughout the 20th century in both literature and science. It includes, but is not limited to, the One Ring in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, any number of super hero stories and movies, and, recently, Harry Potter. In the Harry Potter, invisibility takes the form of an invisibility cloak.

And how cool is that? Because, unlike flight, anyone can use an invisibility cloak. No skill involved.

So... science has been looking at ways to make things invisible for a while now. Since World War II, at least. We can make objects (like airplanes) mostly invisible to radar and other light waves not in the visible spectrum, but who cares if a plane doesn't show up on radar if I can still see it with my eyes, right? There have been attempts at things that are like invisibility, but most of these are just fancy ways of camouflaging things.

Like the one they are really excited about right now:
It involves using crystals. Two crystals working together can cause the light to split and... well, it's not important. Here's what they can do with it, right now: the can make an ant or a grain of sand invisible. Basically, with this technique, the thing being made invisible is only limited to the size of the crystals being worked with. And they think they can make bigger crystals. The problem? You can see the crystals! What's the point of that, I, again, ask. What good does it do to conceal something if you know there's something concealed? You may as well throw a blanket over it.

Speaking of which...

There is another method being worked on, and, supposedly, the Idea for this one was inspired directly from Harry Potter (I couldn't find the original article I read about it, though, so I can't confirm that). Basically, someone said, "Why not make it like a cloak?" And they started trying to figure out a way to do that.

What they came up with is carbon nanotubes. These are strands of carbon tubing about the width of a hair. The thing about carbon is that it cools very rapidly but also conducts heat extraordinarily well. The tiles on the bottom of the space shuttles were made of something similar to this, and I've personally witnessed one being heated until it was glowing red and been invited to touch it as soon as the heat source was removed. Cool (yes, it was cool, but the tile was also cool to the touch just moments after being heated by a blow torch). Anyway, they have these carbon nanotubes that are very similar to thread. When heat is passed through them, they undergo something similar to heat waves rising off of hot sand in the desert and become invisible. Like this:

They can't sustain it for more than a few moments, at present, but it's a step. And it's a pretty cool step if you ask me.

The Wrong Answer To The Right Question

There was an interesting article, last week, in the Guardian all about whether writers can survive without publishers. Or, more specifically, the advances that they pay. If you want, you can read the article here, but I'll give you the short, sweet version in case you don't want to. Ewan Morrison, the author of the article, says, "Writing, as a profession, will cease to exist." There you have it. The summary of the article. Let me explain.

No one can deny that digital publishing is changing the industry. Morrison speculates that ebooks and e-publishing (Now, tell me, why is "e-publishing" hyphenated while "ebooks" is not. That seems unfair to me.) will bring about the end of paper books within the next 25 years. I'd have a hard time trying to argue that with him. Although I believe there will always be a demand for paper books, the expense required to produce them is going to become high enough that the average person will not be able to afford them, at least, new ones, and, for all practical purposes, bring about the demise of paper books as a "thing." Oh, well... it will save some trees, at least. I suppose, I will have to be happy with that. [However, there's a whole aspect of the ease with which censorship will be possible that I am completely uncomfortable with, but that is a topic for another time.]

This shift from the physical to the digital brings with it a price. The price of "free." There's a lot of controversy around this statement, but you can't really argue with it. Already, we're seeing the advent of the $0.99 ebook. Sure, for the most part, it's first timers just trying to get someone, anyone, to buy their book, but it causes a domino effect and the gradual de-valuing of the art form as a whole. People begin to expect that the value of a book is only $1, and, so, will not pay more than that. There's not a lot of room between $1 and free. Again, we're in a situation were the publisher (Amazon with the Kindle or B&N with the Nook) makes a ton of money selling millions of these $1 books but the individual authors making very little. Morrison goes into all of this in more depth, but, the end result, will be the degrading of quality in published materials and the loss of the "professional writer" from culture.

Of course, his premise is that the "professional writer" lives off the advances that the publisher pays for work that is not, yet, produced. Basically, author goes to publisher, "I want to write a book" and publisher responds, "Okay, here's some money. Go do that." While I don't disagree that this does fit the definition of a professional writer, this seems to be his only definition of a professional writer. I think that most people that make a living as a writer (writing is their profession and they make enough from it to be considered a "living wage") would not agree that this scenario holds true for them. However, Morrison seems to be saying that this is the only way that quality writing happens. It takes the publisher there to support the writer during the writing phase to enable works of quality to come into being. Therefore, if traditional publishers die, so, then, will professional writers and the quality works they produce.

Morrison is asking a valid question in all of this, "Can writers survive without publishers?" Or "Can the profession of writing survive without publishers?" His answer is "no," and he ends his article with a sort of call to arms for writers and publishers to band together and support each other and see the other through these, oh, so difficult times. Only together will writing prevail!

I'm not sure, exactly, which planet Morrison is living on, though. Or, maybe, I'm just not sure what floor he's living on. His supposition is incorrect on so many levels, I hardly know where to begin. Just to start off, though, the idea that a writer can only do his job if there is a publisher there to give him an advance is laughable. Yes, there are some writers that live that way. The elite writers. And the money is paid to them to lock them into a contract with  the publisher so that they won't go somewhere else. It works more like an incentive. At some point, Morrison says that a writer can't live off of royalties alone (the advance is a requirement), but that makes me think he doesn't understand what an "advance" is. It's an advance against royalties. Technically, when living off of an advance, the writer is, indeed, living off of royalties. They're just royalties he hasn't earned, yet.

Here's the thing: no publisher gives someone who has never written a book an advance in  the hopes that they will, in fact, write a book. The writer has to show, first, that he can, indeed, write said book. Yes, the writer has to in some way provide a living for himself during this time period, but, if the writer writes, and the book sells, the writer earns royalties and can concentrate on more writing. And here's where the advance comes in: if the publisher thinks, based on previous performance, "hey, this guy might actually make us some money," they will offer the writer an advance. This serves to allow the writer to focus more on the writing, but it, more importantly (for the publisher), keeps the writer from taking his book off to some other publisher to make the money for someone else. The writer sacrifices that amount of the royalties that come after the book is written making him dependent on the next advance. Do you see the problem here?

Just to make it clear, though, most books (and when I say most, I mean nearly all (more than 9 out of 10)) do not earn back their advance (or sell through their first print run) making it much more difficult to get a second advance. So, really, when Morrison talks about how the professional writer is dependent upon the publisher for advances in order to do his job, he is clearly only talking about the writing "elite."

Which brings us to our second problem: Morrison's supposition that only the writing "elite" can turn out quality material. I'm going to have to actually say that the exact opposite is true. At least, in most cases.

For example, William Gibson. I hate to pick on him, but I'm going to do it anyway. Neuromancer, his best and most significant work was his first novel. The novel he wrote when he was still struggling to become a professional writer. The novel that was written without the huge "elite" advance. Gibson, now being one of the writing elite, can command huge advances, because his name being on a book will cause a stir and create sales. However, Pattern Recognition, while interesting enough to keep me going, never reached a real climax and just, sort of, ended. I was left completely unsatisfied. For some reason, I picked up Spook Country anyway. I barely managed to make myself finish that one. And I haven't bothered with Zero History at all, even though I like the title. Clearly, the introduction of an advance has allowed Gibson to spend years working on individual books, but it has not increased the quality of his work. Based on the moanings I've heard, I would say the same is true for George R. R.

And there's David Eddings, whom I love. Well, used to love. The Belgariad is one of my favorite fantasy series ever. The only thing better is Tolkien. It was the series that made Eddings' career. Not his first work, but it may as well have been. Everything that came after, all the books that came with the big advances, are lesser works. To the extent that I had to quit reading him, because everything was the same, but not as good, as Belgariad.

I could go on... I mean, there's Watership Down, the first book by Richard Adams, and one of the greatest books ever written. Have you even heard of anything he wrote after that? There are more than a few. Anyway, I could go on (and on), but I'm sure you're getting the picture. The picture that it does not, in fact, take an advance from a publisher to enable a writer to create quality work or even create at all. Rowling did create Harry Potter in the midst of poverty and living on welfare.

Not to mention that Tolkien was never what one could consider a professional writer. He was a professor. Writing was just this thing he did after he went home from work.

Still... Morrison is not wrong about his assessment that people will come to expect their books for as close to free as possible. You can look at the music business and the movie industry for evidence of this. It takes low prices to have any chance of combating piracy, and even that doesn't really work. The only real solution to piracy is offering everything up for free. So how is a writer to live if people expect that the writer's work shouldn't have to be paid for?

That's the real dilemma we're facing. Not "can writers survive without publishers?" but "can writers survive in a world of valueless art?" There are answers to this, though. One of those will answers will have to include an awareness from people that artists (writers, musicians, whatever) deserve to be supported in their work. That they provide something of value and deserve not just recognition but the ability to sustain themselves by providing that value to people. Right now, we are still caught up in the super star mentality that has evolved through  the world of the corporate machine, and we see these people as undeserving of our support because they already have the big bucks, but that attitude will change. I think. I hope.

I'm also certain that advertising will play some part in a writer's ability to provide himself a livelihood. Advertising is increasingly the way everything online supports itself. And everything points to a future where we are even more inundated by advertising than we are now. But there are other options, too, like the way some established authors are, basically, drawing their advance from the people. "Pay me to write my book." Once they have achieved whatever payment they're looking for, they release the book for free. And, I'm sure, other options will evolve as time goes on.

The one thing I am sure of is that story telling won't pass from existence, although I do wonder if it will change form, but that's a topic for another time...