Uncanny

I flew to LA last weekend. This is how I did it:





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There's this thing called the Uncanny Valley. It's not really a valley, though. It's not really a place. It's a reaction. Or a feeling. Or something.

It's this: when we make simulated people, we get close, and then we get closer, and then we get closer, but we never quite make a completely accurate simulation of a person. And it freaks us the fuck out.

That's the technical slash academic way of referring to how we react. "Freaks us the fuck out."

Like, robots. And computer-animated people. They start to look like us. They get close to looking like us. And the moment they start to look close-but-no-cigar close to us, we start to stop being sympathetic to them. In our positive feelings to things that appear like us, there is a sudden dip. A valley.

The sense we have is called "the uncanny."

While I was in LA, I went up to Santa Monica, to the beach, where I walked in the surf, and went up to the pier. During my walk in the surf, I had a strange emotional reaction. I couldn't quite figure out what was going on.

It wasn't a sense of the uncanny. It was kind of the opposite. I felt like I was in a familiar place, but that this familiar place was "correct," whereas the place that put this place in my head as a familiar place was "incorrect." Close-but-no-cigar incorrect.

I stood with my camera, and took a spin, and filmed the beach. And a police vehicle drove by. And I felt like stealing it.

And I figured it out.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has a beach location that is, holy hell, an uncanny version of the actual Santa Monica beach. The simulated beach prepared me for the real one, but prepared me in such a way that I had this odd, sympathetic reaction to the real place that included a retroactively "uncanny" experience; all the hours I've spent playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas were suddenly loaded with a new sensation.

Is this a "canny" hill?

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There is a new Happy Cobra Book. It is called Young Revolutionaries. It features Chelsea Martin, Catherine Lacey, and Ellen Kennedy.

(Chelsea and Ellen: yours are on their way. I am finishing up the printing, and sewing them together in my off hours.)

If you want copies, you should get them from the authors. I will be sending almost all of the 50 copies to them.

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Also, I'm pleased to have discovered this iMeem embedding function. And so, the Mother.Fucking Gaslamp Killer:



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UPDATE:

Go here to watch Shane Jones read my piece from NO COLONY.

And then BUY NO COLONY, a bad ass journal of new, odd writing.

And then buy Shane's book I Will Unfold You With My Hairy Hands.