Wax Banks

The world has turned and left me here.

Most recent comment on the endless Family Guy thread (bonus: check out agi and GoDaddy justifiably dissing me in the comments, before the teenagers arrive):

family guys ok if they werent so offensive its no perfect or even good but its just for killling time most episodes arent roflol funny but just haha funny except some parts where its just so random its hilarious. its better that they arent as offensive as south park cause they retain more fans this way by not scaring em all of....

but he what do i know im just some 15yearold reading an interesting disscussion im not however much into tv as i enjoy books cause i likem more uknow cause im kind of a book worm and btw im a boy

OK, typos, so what. But 'roflol'? 'its just for killing time'? 'just so random its hilarious'? 'retain more fans this way'? 'IM KIND OF A BOOK WORM AND BTW IM A BOY'?!@#@$!

My empathy falls apart here. I don't know how to put myself into this book worm's shoes, I don't know what it would be like to have this particular arrangement of knowledge at age 15. I don't know what kind of relationship a person has to text, who grows up communicating in that form of writing. Something appears to be impossible forever. Waaah, waaah, waaah.

No blogs for one week - maybe 'til Columbus Day.

Self-preservation. Nail-related anxiety might be stemming partly from pointless online bickering. See y'all soonish.

programmers: capsule history of the internet.

[Additional Fixing You magique. Forgive me.]

prior to the advent of the digital american online there wasn't all that much to do; you'd watch a tv show on your actual tv, for instance, and the absence of spoiler websites meant you didn't know what was going to happen until you saw the actual show, which is stupid - how do you know you want to see the show without knowing how it ends, what the online encyclopedia 2.0 says it means, what kind of numbers the tv-industry professional webblogger/marketers think this "skein" will garner? in the holy name of american christ what is a "skein"? also newspapers were hand-delivered to the doors of hardworking organization men and their nuclear families by pauper children, selfish malnourished little jerks who'd come around every couple of weeks begging for money. "please sir, i have nothing to eat!" "leave me alone, {charming ethnic slur}, my atlantic-salmon-and-liquid-gold smoothie is getting cold." you remember what it was like: it was like we were on top of the world where we belonged. there was little to do, nothing to say (except, sternly, to the paperboy), and you didn't have an audience of several dozen strangers from the web-based online community webblogs to share your well-formed important opinions with. so you kept them entirely to yourself; it's not like you can talk to your family about that shit.

(do you remember the time little beauregard chased the paperboy all the way back to his "home" under I-45? we thought we'd die laughing! apparently the paperboy, too, was afraid he would perish.)

Music, networks.

[From a larger thing.]

Barbershop singers use consistent mouth shapes in order that each singer's notes will resonate in the bodies of the other singers, so that the gigantic closing cadences that symbolize barbershop music are produced not by each singer swelling his volume but by the sound multiplying in the group. Great improv does the same - it gains in intensity, complicates and variegates its focus, without any player getting louder or faster or playing additional notes. It allows each player to multiply rather than sum the other players' suggested meanings. Which is just Metcalfe's Law of networks (the value of a computer network increases as the square of the number of connected nodes) applied to creativity, and is a semi-technical way of expressing that one person speaking is just one voice, but one person listening is a machine for processing every other voice. The value of a network increases as the number of listeners talking back. Which is by the way why sites like Wikipedia are so exciting in theory and so disappointing in practice - tons of speakers, few listeners.

[And of course...]

[Plus if you haven't read Zhan's increasingly powerful and true comments on the run of illustrated posts, wonders await.]

Gametime, combat styles, and the unfortunate choice of the phrase 'to hit.'

[Even more D&D nerdery! More abstract than the last few, and a little polemical in tone. Enjoy, the like four readers who are into this stuff.]

It's not good to think too hard about the 'simulation' side of D&D's combat system. It's not a simulation, it's an abstract tabletop combat game. Remember, a round of combat in D&D 4e nominally represents six seconds of gametime - meaning a 'hit' means not a single blow but a debilitating advantage, a net infliction of pain and constraint on the other guy. Enough wounds to matter. (You can imagine, within the D&D combat subgame, wearing down a creature without drawing blood and then finishing it off with a single swordthrust.) If you don't get hit in melee combat it's still reasonable to assume that the other guy dinged your armor or nicked your earlobe. It just didn't cost you combat effectiveness.

Failure on a 'to hit' roll doesn't mean you don't hit, it means you don't overpower. A hit isn't a hit.

Which is to say, if you're up for a while against an opponent you can't seem to hit - but keep coming close, missing by 1 or 2 on the dice every time - it's reasonable for you and the DM to roleplay some kind of combat engagement or harrassment short of lasting damage. The combat is still a good one, still worthwhile for both opponents, even - especially - if no one's able to get through.

Orcus isn't impressed by your level 4 rogue, of course, but if a level 25 character couldn't actually damage the demon prince, Orcus can't simply ignore him either. Gametime and campaign time are screwy; you could theoretically advance to level 30 in a few months of gametime, though that's bad campaign/adventure structure. A character who's been around the bend, though, and adventured for years of gametime, should be worth paying attention to even if he's numerically inferior. The player's skill should matter as well. That's where the narrative demands of campaigning supersede the numerical constraints of D&D's combat subgame, which after all isn't a simulation so much as (Final) Fantasy Chess.

This is to say, however, that the D&D combat subgame is adaptable to a whole host of cinematic/literary combat styles. Psionic combat doesn't draw blood, it weakens the mind; hit points are a measure of emotional resistance. Swashbuckling swordfights might treat hit points as momentum and combat awareness - at 0HP you simply look away at the wrong moment and get skewered, or bashed, or sliced. In the latter case, D&D 4e's 'healing surges' represent steeling one's resolve, restoring focus; in psionics they might mean a moment's meditation (a la Qui-Gonn behind the laser barrier, in Episode One of that silly fantasy trilogy) or the recitation of a focusing koan/mantra. A medieval knight's 'healing surge' might be nothing more than the rallying recitation of the maiden's name for which he fights, and hit points might represent for him a failure of faith which makes combat impossible (and so he 'lays down his burdens' and aborts his quest - at which point living is pointless).

Gametime being malleable and 4e's health mechanics abstract, it's up to the players and DM to decide exactly what flavour the combat subgame should have. This raises a question: if the flavour pushes certain mechanics into nonsense, should the mechanics be modified or jettisoned? My sense is that the answer's always YES: this is one way the 'old school' ideal of 'rulings not rules' is not only compatible with 4e but secretly essential to it. The combat system is very specific and heavy on physical/spatial mechanics - shifting, opportunity attacks, ZOC's, forced movement, combat advantage, etc. - but many of those mechanics are wholly arbitrary (diagonal movement equals lateral movement? What now?!) and should be rigidly enforced only to the extent that they make for better, more evocative roleplaying experiences. Time in the game is a consensual hallucination; we measure it in rounds. Space is as well; we measure it in squares. But squares and rounds are devices. As long as the players and the DM are working within the same frame of reference - and rulings don't take make gameplay impossible or even prohibitively frustrating - 4e players are as free to ditch the rules as 0e grognards.

But a generation raised on video games isn't likely to see it that way right off.

Which is why 'old school' players should be reaching out to 4e players and saying 'You've got your mechanics - have you tried playing in this style within that system? Did you know there's a decades-old rule system built around this style of consensual social adjudication?' Then there's the matter of the 0e/1e rules shortcomings, starting with their style - but that's not for today, thanks.

Many modern Mac users never open up the Terminal app, so they never see their machine from the command line's perspective. Alas. That doesn't mean it isn't there, that they can't modify their machine using text commands and dotfiles and Perl scripts - it just means they're benefitting from the system's power and interface refinement without availing themselves of its mechanisms of customization. Same system, less tinkering.

'Old school' roleplayer types seem to see 0e-style games as UNIX systems (huh, fancy that), infinitely customizable and charmingly baroque/forbidding/ugly; and they depict D&D 4e as the equivalent of a Windows box.

But that's to misunderstand computability and interface design: 4e isn't a Windows box; it works cleanly and with little fuss every time, and is constructed to make system-wrecking oddities unlikely or easily fixable. Naw, baby, 4e is a Mac. Nice interface promising a clean, very consistent experience with pretty colours, and the motherfucker's running a decades-old BSD operating system underneath - which you can dive into whenever you'd like. Most users won't, because they don't need to. But that says nothing about the system and a lot about its users. (And if the system is increasingly popular, this comes to say something about all users - mere humans in other words.)

When they wanna get nasty with the single-use command line apps, the 4e kids won't need a new system. And they sure as hell won't need to go back to an older one. They'll do what the previous generation did and learn a little bit of puts 'Hello world' (or the equivalent in your fetish-language of choice), and then they'll start showing the old fellas a thing or two.

And the best of the old fellas will love it, and no one's party will be cancelled. Nice.

22,727,000.

That's how many iPods Apple sold during last three months of 2008.

Think on it a while. Oh, and: 4,363,000 iPhones. Ridiculous.

From something else.

The ne plus ultra of wisdomless data in hipster tech culture may be the ascendant 'lifehacking' fetish, whose enthusiasts labour under the charming misapprehension that downloading neat-o Macintosh utilities amounts to meaningfully improving not the trappings of one's work environment but the very substance of one's life itself. These 'lifehacker' types write blog posts back and forth in a genially subliterary language full of debased tech terminology, pimping single-function shareware apps and Sweet! Sweet! Deals! on startlingly expensive yuppie lifestyle items to - remember - improve the 'quality' of readers' lives. Self-described 'customization freaks,' these bloggers and their readers pass off (and ingest) linkwhoring and free publicity as enlightened self-improvement - as if someone watched the seminal, widely-misunderstood film Fight Club, heard Edward Norton's self-satisfied/disgusted monologue about 'single-serving food, single-serving friends,' decided WOW, THE WORLD DEFINITELY NEEDS MORE OF THOSE, and went off and invented the absolute antithesis of all that the film stands for, times several million pageviews a year.

The single most important criticism of 'Internet culture' ever delivered consists of the next five lines of that very scene:

'That's clever.'

'Thank you.'

'How's that working out for you?'

'What.'

'Being clever.'

Which (cleverness) brings us back to Merlin Mann...

Dustin Wax: kill yourself.

If you're going to write a post called 'The Value of Writing Well,' and then self-pimp it in a 'Best Lifehacks of 2008'(!!) post, please for god's sake make sure you don't blurb it as follows:

Iprove your writing skills to make yourself a better thinker, a more compelling speaker, and all-around better person.

Of course it's possible that I've missed some online revolution in Writing Well, and 'Iprove' is actually some Information Age term meaning 'ROCK AWESOME' but a verb.

I finally experienced Dr. Horrible as an allegory for the end of the Hollywood studio system.

Oh my god. Fantastic. The whole second half can be heard as a spoof of blog triumphalism, the first half as a satirical look at the media landscape c.2007.

Well you know what's coming, Reader(s): A GODDAMN BLOG POST.

My means are limited,
wa.

Old-school D&D, UNIX, and geek/hacker culture(s).

A lot of the appeal of OD&D (Original Dungeons and Dragons, Gary Gygax's 'little brown books') is the very thing that makes it unfashionable today: it's rules-light, essentially mapping wargame rules onto a shared imagined terrain - a 'multiuser consensual hallucination' if you will - and calling upon the DM (Dungeon Master, formerly 'referee') to make judgment calls whenever story progress is up in the air. Indeed, OD&D was a 'story game' only in the most basic sense; really it was a very, very flimsy (but coherent and evocative) fantasy-combat simulation with a built-in language for treating noncombat encounters. It was initially domain-agnostic, but the flavour of the original game came from Gygax's home campaign (Greyhawk).

In other words: The original Dungeons & Dragons was a compact, opinionated application with generic output and a decent API, with rich but idiosyncratic documentation for anyone who wanted to use it to develop domain-specific languages.

In yet other words, D&D used to be like a UNIX app.

Nowadays D&D is quite different from when it began: the text is less idiosyncratic and flavourful, the rules far cleaner and more robust (though not without errors, e.g. in the muddled 'skill challenge' system), the plugin architecture (the system of classes, races, and character-power progressions) more consistent and far easier for enterprising players (home developers) to use. The default setting is no setting at all; there's no personality to the generic D&D world beyond 'Go! Fight! We have magic! Everyone wants to kill everyone else. There are no guns yet.' Of course players are expected to develop their own materials to expand the game at home - but contemporary D&D culture, as it manifests online and in the official materials provided by publisher Wizards of the Coast, is about optimization and extensive mechanics, rather than metagame storytelling and freeform exploration.

(The game's dungeon designs have always been soporific: geometrical, planar, like the floors of a castle underground - which was in fact Gygax's original dungeon conception. But in a game built around miniatures and combat, as today's D&D is, the map is the outer limit on the richness of the setting - it is the territory it purports to describe. As the game initially moved away from miniatures, though, it treated dungeon maps as...maps. Both approaches have their advantages.)

This isn't to say roleplaying and storytelling with the new system are impossible - of course not! Far from it. But the original game was, quite by accident it seems, productively, generatively incomplete: its initial limitations birthed a culture of resistance and improvisation, and a style of play that today's more detailed, more mathematically coherent game mechanics attempt with mixed success to regulate back into existence.

The third, inner term here is obviously video games. I talked about those recently in the context of D&D's level of abstraction and the hidden attraction of fantasy roleplaying. That article illuminates this one, I think.

Of course one big reason old-school D&D appeals so strongly to nostalgic gamers today is nothing more than timing: they got into it when people get into things, during their lonely childhoods, and it recalibrated their expectations. Fine. Here's another reason: OD&D felt (feels) like it was aimed at adults ('For 3 or More Adults, Ages 10 and Up'!!), while the modern game is marketed to tweens, adolescents, and young adults raised on trading card games (like WotC's Magic: The Gathering) and video games. It's...unliterary.

It's possible to code up your own MUD/MOO, or even a shared online graphical space like EverQuest or World of Warcraft. No one does; there are fine worlds available. That's not unexpected, but isn't it a little sad?

The cover of the 1st edition Advanced D&D Players Handbook shows a band of thieves stealing jewels from the eye of a great demon idol. The latest incarnation of that volume (4th edition, released a few months ago) shows two big fighter types looking out at the reader, 'poised for battle.' Cover changes don't mean much, but they don't mean nothing either. You might say the difference between the two is this: D&D 4e encourages players to be someone who does amazing things; OD&D required them to do amazing things (to the ruleset - in the form of endless, unfortunately necessary houserules - as well as within the gameworld itself). The aesthetic of modern D&D doesn't encourage a DIY approach, even though the game's designers go out of their way to talk about player freedom and creativity. (And to their credit, the new edition makes the mechanics of adventure-creation absolutely dead simple for the DM - a huge improvement over the endless number crunching of 3e.)

The most important feature of D&D 4e is this: it's not built around improvised actions (though they're possible). The central behaviour in D&D 4e is 'Move, make some augmenting action, then activate one of the Powers specific to your class.' A good DM will roll with the punches if you go off-script a little; a great one will encourage you to modify the behaviours of Powers in situ, dynamically generating a robust improvised action system with suggested effects (to keep the classes distinct and their roles clear). Most DM's and players will play the Powers on the page. If you're gonna do that, why not play World of WarCraft? (Seriously.)

Back in the day there were two competing real-time strategy games for the PC: Total Annihilation and StarCraft. The former had an object-oriented plugin architecture that allowed the development of 3rd-party units - you simply defined the unit and imported it into the world, and new world behaviours emerged from its characteristics. StarCraft, on the other hand, was basically a single giant table: one unit attacked another, and something specific to that pairing occurred.

StarCraft was the more successful, critically-acclaimed game, and was perfectly balanced. T.A. felt like its loopy DIY cousin. (I owned both - but abandoned StarCraft pretty quickly.)

D&D 4e is built a lot like Total Annihilation, while StarCraft actually resembles OD&D's combat mechanics in certain ways (OD&D contained several notorious, ridiculous pairing-specific outcome tables). Ironically, though, 4e plays like StarCraft - you kind of feel guilty building new subsystems, and you can't help feeling you're going 'off the grid' when you don't utilize the system's library of deterministic Powers - while OD&D, with its enormous blind spot around the social/roleplaying/interaction portions of the game, and mapless environments existing only in shared imaginations - bred a sort of garage-band gaming culture akin to that of Total Annihilation and its ilk.

What you like you like, and you don't get to choose the day you're born. There will be plenty of players, twenty years from now, whose glorious first experience with fantasy roleplaying will have been D&D 4e. And good for them - it's a great game in so many ways. But they'll come into a hobby whose glory days have passed, which by virtue of its accessibility and cleanliness - the very things that enable it to reach a large audience - has sacrificed something of its, yeah, hacker aesthetic. It's not punk anymore. Then again, it seems like nothing is, which means something is wrong with everything - or with me - or with 'punk.'

The necessary stupidity of open-source culture.

The basic problem with open-source software as a model for cultural production is this:

The Apache HTTP server is not like a novel. It's not like an encyclopedia. It's absolutely different from those things in every way: it does a specific thing (an interlocking set of specific things) the accuracy and speed of which can be measured and compared to those of other HTTP servers. Apache is a famously successful open-source project, and is indeed a handy illustration of the value of collaboratively-written software: each modification brings it closer to a well-understood, precisely-articulated goal/ideal.

Encyclopedias don't work that way. The tasks for which we write software, and the text of the software itself, don't need to be interpreted. A human doesn't need to figure out what kind of response to give to a particular HTTP request; there's a spec, and the programmers follow it. This isn't to say design doesn't take place, of course. Rather that there's a set of very simple fitness functions to apply to such software, with clear feedback available (you know when a request is badly handled, and can generally deduce how/why) to aid revisors/programmers.

Writing creative/interpretive prose doesn't work that way. And Wikipedia, for instance, is clearly a creative work, poorly done on average.

I desperately want Wikipedia and its analogues to become a source of expert summary and analysis. But they never will. They can't. With very, very, very few exceptions (relative to its enormous size), Wikipedia is a laughable waste of time. It reflects a lot of hard work. Nonexperts have to work hard in complex discussions to keep from embarrassing themselves; encyclopedias should aim for something grander.

The specific nature of the Wikipedia project - an open-source creative project the success of which can, for a variety of reasons, only be evaluated by those who didn't work on it - is what keeps it from being terribly valuable. Not the intelligence of its participants, nor the lack thereof.

Absolutely Horrible ethics.

Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, this summer's 45-minute web-serialized musical 'comedy' from Joss Whedon, isn't as rich as the best episodes of his long-form work; for instance, 'Restless' and 'Once More With Feeling,' respectively the dream-sequence and musical episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, are on par with Dr Horrible in terms of formal interest, but are enmeshed in seven years of complex narrative continuity that the low-budget one-off tale doesn't have (for better or worse). The advantage of a one-off is the chance to present familiar thematic material - the rush and burden and attractiveness of power, the ongoing victimization of women in men's power struggles, nerdly social difficulty - in stark terms, free of overdetermination and accumulated sympathies. The downside: a 45-minute show with 20 minutes of singing doesn't leave a lot of breathing room.

If you're a hack, that means you sacrifice complexity and just hit your one-two-three Big Points.

If you're Joss Whedon, on the other hand, you draw on whatever terrifying intergalactic power source brought you to this planet in the first place, and work the usual assortment of miracles.

On its own terms Dr Horrible is every bit as impressive as Whedon's other work. It's not as heartbreaking as issue #5 of the new Buffy comic, nor as eerie as 'Restless,' nor as audaciously bleak as the two-part Firefly pilot, but Dr H offers Whedon what looks like his most personal topic and generic framework yet: a young male nerd, smart and talented and genuinely nice but pathologically shy and kind of an overbearing jerk (but an...honest one), who happens also be a comic-book hero, or rather a villain. The quiet nerd falls for the even quieter nerd girl, the mousy do-gooder who predictably falls for the alpha male bane of the titular beta male's existence. It's every comic book geek's nightmare, in the form of a deeply uncomfortable, unquestionably funny story that might not be a comedy at all. Unlike Buffy, which stemmed, I think, from Whedon's bountiful sympathy for a certain kind of fictional character and the young girls doomed in turn to sympathize with her, Dr H seems to deal directly with Whedon's firsthand experiences of sexual not-bliss.

Dr Horrible sets out to be a lot of things - more than you might expect from a low-budget web musical written by three brothers and one wife. It's Whedon's most multifarious short work, and its ending [spoilers ahead] casts Dr H in an uneasy light. Joss Whedon's most easily empathized-with protagonist might be his least sympathetic. Here's a rundown of what's going on in this, the most impressive online film production yet made. Some of these readings contradict one another; that's OK. If you wanna read this text, maybe start like this:

A Mary Sue story about Mary Sue stories. Dr Horrible is a doofus who makes himself into a comic-book villain (in a world complete with superheroes and superbadguys); he works with a vocal coach to get his evil laugh right. 'That's about standards,' he says. He's also close to Joss Whedon's self-description: awkward, smart, exceptionally talented, and shunned by ladies who prefer dimwitted alpha males. He's a lot like the protagonist of the typical 'Mary Sue' fanfic: an original character inserted into the ongoing superhero story, who solves everyone's problems, is smarter and more morally nuanced than everyone else, sees into each villain's neuroses and each hero's unfulfilled needs, and gets the girl...only it doesn't work that way. Few TV personalities have the cult of creator-worship that Joss Whedon does; he knows fans (he is one). Dr Horrible is a meditation on how fucked up and lazy their self-projecting fantasies are.

It's an origin story. Of course the shape of the story is familiar: it's the tale of a man's first confrontation with his nemesis, how he becomes a comic book character. The formative event. Dr Horrible wins this one, against the odds - it's an ascension - but the origin moment of the character is also a defeat. The big deal with Dr Horrible is that he lost someone (Penny is Dr Horrible's Gwen Stacy, if you know what I mean) even as he beat the bad - excuse me, the good guy.

Moreover, this is Captain Hammer's origin story too, for the same reasons - he loses the girl he 'loves,' and is born to new consciousness and so forth. 'With great power comes...' In other words, the animating question under the tale of Dr H is: What is the cost to the 'villain' of being a player in the hero's drama? Does the villain know what he's doing? Of course he does: Whedon is fond of recalling an interview with Willem Defoe, who said that villains and heroes are no different from the actor's point of view. 'Everybody thinks he's righteous.' Dr Horrible is an illustration of that point.

As the lyrics to the closing song points out, Billy gets exactly what he wants.

Authenticity. Double-edged sword here. Billy is a good guy who does bad things, it seems; Captain Hammer appears to be a bad guy who does good things. Whedon's tale poses the question, 'Which is the hero, really? In society's eyes, who's the admirable one here?' Hammer doesn't even stick around to take care of his girlfriend Penny ('Yeah, we totally had sex'); Billy comforts her in her last moments. Of course she believes in Captain Hammer - sucks for Billy!

Here we can point out the obvious: Penny is barely a person in this story. Interesting choice for Whedon. (Don't think eh makes such a choice lightly either - he turned the goddamn X-Men into a war-of-the-women story!) Why's she so content-free? The guys around her make her so. Billy just wants Penny to notice him - not to be with him, really. Because he has no idea what that requires. Whereas at least Cap'n Hammer knows how to show her a good time. He lives in the world of other people. Billy's sentiments are real, as are his resentments; you watch him struggle with them. But he shares them inauthentically - he doesn't have a single moment of conversation with Penny that doesn't rest on a lie. Think about it: the yogurt fake-out, the petition, 'texting,' Gandhi, dissing Hammer, 'I don't love these - see ya'...

...indeed the only honest moment is when he's talking about being a supervillain and how much it would mean to him to make in that way.

The real Billy is nothing more than Dr Horrible. (Know any other superpowered guys named Billy of whom that might be said? C'mon comic book nerd, this one's for you. Shazam!)

Billy is a blogger. Embarrassing. The meta-story of Dr Horrible is about the transformative power of personal media, grassroots technology, and new storytelling channels. The text of Dr Horrible is about a nerdy little shut-in who doesn't know how not to fuck up people's lives. The world is better when he's in his basement. 'There are no villains in this story.' Wrong! There's at least one. And he's the character who most closely resembles the average viewer. Does that seem nasty to you? Could the comic-book creator be cautioning us against simple identification? What a jerk.

Both guys were offered the same choice. 'A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do / Don't plan the plan if you can't follow through / All that matters (is) taking matters into your own hands.' Both guys respond to the world according to their natures. Captain Hammer's response to the world is...to help it. What's Billy's? This is the protagonist of the fucking story we're talking about, and this isn't one of those implication-free Book Club Suggested Study Questions you don't have to think about it in order to enjoy the story. Billy is...what? He's a bad guy. Why is Joss Whedon making a comic book story about him? Why does he want us to identify with this horrible little fucker? To show us what we're capable of.

Fans. Ask yourself why the three fans, who collect Captain Hammer's hair and wear shirts with his pictures on them, are wearing Dr Horrible shirts at the end of the story. Why would Joss Whedon paint such a hugely unflattering portrait of these media fans? (I mean, by the end of the story they're probably reading his blog.) They want what Billy now has - power. Not goodness, which is what it only looks like Hammer has. (Betcha Hammer wins new, weepier fans once he starts crying to his shrink.) People are drawn to power; Hammer's an alpha male, and he happens to work for good. When we judge him morally we should forget that he's a dickish alpha male and remember that he runs around saving citizens from villains, because he chooses to. Same with Billy: he wants 'anarchy...that I run.' Nasty business. And once he's running it, the fans flock to him. Nasty.

And yet again, with feeling. A side note concerning the music: Dr Horrible is a step ahead of the Buffy musical, 'Once More With Feeling,' both lyrically and musically. The best of the 'OMWF' songs ('Under Your Spell') combines a moving love song with a creepy subtext: Tara sings about being seduced and brought out into the world by love, while under a literal magic spell that erases the memory of fights she's had, so that she's both right about her growth and eerily wrong about what's enabled it. 'OMWF' is all over the map musically, a cheeky pastiche of musical-comedy staples (check out the devilish 'Those Were the Good Old Days' strain in 'What You Feel (Sweet's Song)') with an overall pop-rock feel. That latter feel is where Dr Horrible lives, and the lyrics are more attentive than ever, doing as much work as Joss's Buffy-words while starting from scratch in terms of character. From the opening song's elegant metaphor for romantic desperation to the spot-on mirror lyrics in 'My Eyes' to the hectoring finale and its gut-punch final moment, Whedon really nailed the Dr H tunes. With the exception of Penny's song - easily the weakest of the bunch, its smart 'Everything happens' message notwithstanding - each song in the bunch is a step up from its 'OMWF' predecessors in intensity, formal rigor, and (importantly!) singability.

False consciousness. 'Anyone with half a brain / Can spend their whole life howling in pain / The dark is everywhere and Penny doesn't seem to care / That soon the dark in me is all that will remain,' sings Billy at the top of Act 2. But by the end of that episode he's belting it out: 'Penny will see the evil me / not a joke, not a dork, not a failure.' A 'brand new me,' he says. But then look at where he goes in Act 3: 'No sign of Penny, good / I would give anything / not to have her see...here goes no mercy...' And in the end, it's not like he turns down the Evil League of Evil's invitation - check out the fancy new blood-red threads! He's even got fans for god's sake. From 'Penny doesn't seem to care' to 'Penny will see the evil in me' in one act: which translates to 'This is all your fault.' Preemptively lifting blame, because he doesn't really want to kill Captain Hammer. Golly, he's not even a good villain, and he lies to himself constantly, near as we can tell.

We are that way too.

This fact doesn't make Dr Horrible more sympathetic. It makes us less so.

'I can not believe my eyes.' This is big Penny/Billy duet at the top of the second act, and it's practically each character's mission statement. Each character sees only what he or she wants; the self-deception is absolute (Billy's right that Penny is only treating the symptom of social ills - 'The fish rots from the head!' as he points out - while Penny herself is evidence that Billy's a pessimistic misanthrope in love with his own style). That's how you know they're either perfect for one another or really not. This leads us to the weirdest part...

The only honest character in the whole story is Captain Hammer. 'The day needs my saving expertise / A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.' It does, and one does, so he does. 'When you're the best you can't rest, what's the use.' 'Everyone's a hero in their own way / In their own not-that-heroic way...It's not enough to bash in heads / You've got to bash in minds.' Hell, he even finds it in himself to cheer on plucky homeless types! 'A hero doesn't care if you're a bunch of scary alcoholic bums / Everyone's a hero in their own way.' Shit, that's kind of nice!

Yes, the man's an idiot - 'So you wonder what your part is / 'cause you're homeless and depressed / But home is where the heart is / So your real home's in your chest!' But that's the right kind of idiocy. He's right, after all. Take things at face value and try to help people and you can get away with being an asshole - and as long as 'getting away' isn't your secret goal, maybe that's enough.

Not a bad guideline. But wait, I thought Hammer was the villain hero bad guy good guy wait I don't understand. This is supposed to be simple. Why isn't it simple.

Mental health break (as the man says).

It was a tough weekend. This helps.

Nerd, nerd.

Ain't It Cool News is a putrid cesspool of prolonged-adolescent garbage, and Harry Knowles is a laughable little fool and a willing, spineless corporate shill of the worst sort, but the site has got staffers - Quint, Beaks (cf. his DFW remembrance), Massawyrm, and particularly Moriarty - who can write when they want to. Quint's latest interview is poorly conducted overall but the guest is fascinating: the lead actor in the new LucasArts Star Wars game, Sam Witwer. In this interview Witwer provides some of the smartest Star Wars commentary I've read in a long, long time:

Sam Witwer: And also another thing for anyone who has ever criticized Mark Hamill, I take issue with that as well. This is an actor who delivered a performance where at no point do you ever look at Mark Hamill and ask “I don’t really get what’s going on with that character.” In every moment, you know exactly what that character is going through and that’s exactly what a STAR WARS movie needs. It needs a main character whose through line is so clear and the actor who is just so clear on what every moment means and his evolution through those movies is phenomenal. By the time you get to RETURN OF THE JEDI, he has shed all of that... what people say about him that he’s whiny. It’s like he’s completely shed that in JEDI.

In JEDI he is a totally different guy, he’s an adult and now he’s facing the main issue that got him there to begin with, even to the point of when he’s taking about the force or addressing the Emperor, his vocal pattern changes. As an actor, he instinctively knew if you talk about these things, you don’t go British, but you go somewhere between American and British, you know what I mean?

Quint: Yeah.

Sam Witwer: You don’t want to say “The Force,” you want to say “The Force” [Different emphasis] and little things like that I really appreciate. I think Mark Hamill is the guy who, aside from George Lucas, he’s the guy who gave us STAR WARS. Don’t make any mistake about that, along with a whole bunch of others, but in terms of like chief contributions, dude, that guys is unbelievable. He was perfect for that and then Ian McDiarmid shows up and James Earl Jones and Harrison Ford… All of those people… Carrie Fisher… Everyone really played their role, but as far as I’m concerned and I will always say this, Luke Skywalker is my favorite character. That’s the guy. He’s the guy who, whether you like to admit it or not, he’s the guy that we all relate to.

[...]

Sam Witwer: [A]s far as JEDI is concerned, my take on that is “Yes, there are flaws…” That movie takes the most difficult… Let’s be clear, RETURN OF THE JEDI is what turned Darth Vader into the character that he is today, not EMPIRE. EMPIRE hinted at it. Throughout EMPIRE he is the Dark Lord of the Sith, but you are starting to learn that there is something else behind it.
JEDI, he’s actually dealing with those issues and you are seeing it for the first time and you project all of that stuff back to EMPIRE, because that’s when it started, so you’re like “Oh yeah EMPIRE did that” and it’s like uh uh, RETURN OF THE JEDI gave you all of that and the Emperor… Imagine, “We are making a STAR WARS movie and we are going to introduce another villain and he’s going to be even badder than Darth Vader!” It’s like “That’s not going to work.” Then you get this 35 year old Ian McDiarmid and he just blows everyone’s socks off and it’s like “that’s incredible.”

My whole thing with JEDI is that there were ways that they could have more eloquently tied in the whole “Luke and Leia are brother and sister.” There were ways they could have utilized Han Solo to make his story arc more of a constant throughout the whole trilogy, but the main storyline of the trilogy in RETURN OF THE JEDI, I don’t see how it could have been done better, and that’s what is most important and it’s a home run with that. On top of that, it’s also the one that has the most showmanship, so it’s like anyone who wants to take issue with JEDI is like, “You guys are going after a pretty great movie.”

Leave it to a goddamn actor.

Nerdery over, continue on your way.

Every Apple-related article/blog post ever written boils down, ultimately, to...

...'Everything that isn't exactly how I want it to be in this world must be broken. And as for Apple, Inc. - a sentient being with a unitary personality, coterminous with a human being named Steve Jobs, devoted to the world's happiness, one that coincidentally turns a profit but is Really Cool About It, so much so that it can't possibly care about money, not really: Apple's enormous strengths in industrial and software design, in engaging with users imaginatively and commercially, are also critical weaknesses, because in spite of my desperate wish for fairy dust to rain down on me while I tap at my keyboard and palm my mouse, Apple's insistence on having a goddamn identity separate from my wishes for it (and following a so-called 'business plan' rather than my muse, which if they were really spying on me like the 'critics' say they'd know about!) makes it impossible for me to get fabulously, dizzily high on my odors like Charles Babbage promised.

'As a side note, I don't understand why a phone and a laptop don't work exactly the same.

'Of course, had I read Wally's blog a goddamn year ago, all this would be clearer to me. [...] What was I saying? I was saying something, but I lost focus for a moment. Hey why isn't there cut-and-paste on this telephone?'

How to understand reading on the Internet vs. reading books.

If you don't know anything about sex, have never seen a naked person other than yourself, then the first time you look at pornography is a revelation. You see anatomy, interlocking shapes, configurations of desire, the expected progression of physical this-and-that.

It is, in short, a learning experience.

And after not too long it begins to make you stupid.

I believe we've talked about this before but this NYTimes article reminds me that the category error analogizing 'reading online' to 'reading books' persists; comparing article-browsing and fanfic-commenting to prolonged engagement with a novel is like comparing looking at a porn film to talking about sex with your lover(s) (or even doing the thing). The one is what attention-deficit babies think makes up the other.

Shiiiiit, I'm too busy getting married this weekend to care about saving this sorry goddamn civilization! Cry amongst yourselves!!!!

Decadence.

The whole idea of sending this message from a phone puts me off. And yet here we are, Reader(s), and here we go. I've done worse than hate myself, haven't we all?

[Update: I have lessened the horror by enlittling the picture. This update was not sent from the accursed phone.]

Woo-hoo.

All these Web 2.0 startup clowns complaining about Yahoo having 'lost its way' or 'stopped making tin' or what have you, are like long-haired rock dudes complaining that Radiohead don't play guitars anymore. Shiiiiii.

Stewart Butterfield is...

...one of the founders of Flickr. Since I don't use Flickr and find hipsters who post their Every Boring Goddamn Photo to be some of the most tiresome beasts ever whelped, I'm not overpoweringly grateful for his work. But nothing could have prepared me for this.

The overwritten prose, the 'check out how awesome I am' subtext, the 'my options vested, off come the golden handcuffs, off I go!' not-so-deeply-buried subtext, the stupid, stupid moustache: help us o Lord. When the polar ice caps are melting and we start selecting human beings to be liquefied, frozen, and packed into the ice, I'm gonna volunteer Stewart's ego and his moustache. If the rest of him accidentally makes it into the mix, so be it.

Spring - For when you absolutely, positively got to kill every robot motherfucker in the room.

OK, I'll be quick here.

Did you play Total Annihilation? Then you should play Spring, an open-source community-coded update to that classic RTS game. (If you never played it but did play games like Starcraft, the rundown is: TA used an open-ended combat system that allowed for many, many units and hugely unbalanced gameplay. It was awesome.) Spring's big deal is: bring TA to contemporary hardware and OS's, balance the gameplay, new gorgeous graphics, fine-tuned interface mods. Then: an AI plugin system, tons of user-created mods, etc.

OK but if you're playing on the Mac you'll need extra information. Search around on the Spring Wiki for OSX installation information. Download some mods, maps. Then grab this script and put it where the post says. Then change several values in the script to reflect the actual path to your Spring install. Pay attention to your error messages and make whatever changes the machine says you need to make (e.g. the new version of AAI needs a config file to play with the new 'Balanced Annihilation' mod - but you can simply copy the existing file and rename it with the current Balanced Annihilation version number, 6.2.1 as of this writing).

Anyhow it should make sense. Install the thing and run the aerial combat test - PageUp to see the proceedings. Yes, that's 3D sweetness. Then pick a unit and press 'C' to make all your wishes come true: first-person mode in an RTS. Sweeeeet.

Am I dork? You are a dork.

Version control Nomic?!

I wonder: has anyone ever tried using CVS or Subversion (or Git, you Linux fools) to maintain a game of Nomic?

The big game.

You know what's gonna rock?

When someone builds an iPhone game that's half Pokémon, half Spore, half Nethack, and fits in the milieu of Cloverfield/Lost - that conspiracy-minded horror-is-about-unfriendly-geography vibe that does so well these days. (This idea has stuck with me for ages; I've got outlines and interface sketches for such a game going back to before Spore began development. The iPhone is the device that makes such a game not only possible but necessary.)

Regardless: the iPhone SDK came out yesterday and it's gonna be huge, without question. If you've been holding off on buying one, this summer - with the buzz of a possible switch to 3G - will be your time.

How Barack Obama is like the iPhone.

[Yes, dorky title, I know. Additionally I worry that this isn't actually a good post at all. It's longish but I find it unsatisfying. Well, I'm never gonna revise the thing, so here it is and here goes nothing.]

When the iPhone came out last year, I wrote the following:

The iPhone takes aim at another big company in another (related) field: Sony. Apple has already gone one up on the Walkman and devices like it; now it wants Sony's name, its reputation for consumer-electronics leadership, its position as semi-official symbol of an entire class of product, and semi-official ambassador to an entire class of shopper. Can't capture the market share? No problem. Make a new market.

When Obama gave his landmark speech on Christian progressivism at the Call To Renewal conference in mid-2006 - of all his speeches, the one most important to me - I wrote this:

If American Christianity has been reduced to a caricature in the public eye, Obama is arguing that the caricature can be replaced with a rejuvenated vision of active and activist communitarian Christianity grounded in liberal tolerance. In other words: he's seeing a possible future for religious politics in this country that's not in a straight line from how things are (moving) right now. And that's stirring.

[...]

Obama's overall point, that the language of progressivism and the many languages of religious faith share much common ground yet to be staked out by Democratic politicians, is both complex and clarifying. As a social argument it's more complex than condemnations of Obama's apparent 'sop to the Right' approach imply; as rhetoric it's an elegant negotiation of the tricky straits between political constituencies. Obama is talking about giving birth to a new constituency here.

[In the comments to the Obama post, Shervin pointed out that Dorothy Day was a fairly well-known member of a Catholic progressive movement - a free-love advocate, pro-women's-rights, a nonviolent labor activist, but also an orthodox Catholic who would have stopped publishing her pro-labor paper had the Church ordered it. Day died in 1980. Sherv was right to point this out and he's helped me avoid an ahistorical pitfall here.]

* * *

Part of what appeals to me about Obama's candidacy is that beyond his status as Great Transformative Symbol and so forth, he's the right Democrat for right now. He's serious about his religion, and can speak to activist Christians without sloppily pandering; he's serious about his secular liberalism, and has credibility with more militant liberals and lefties [compared to his opponent, certainly]; and he's enough of a scholar to know that the two major parties can't stand forever in simpleminded opposition, nor are their politics immutable, nor are their constituencies fixed. His appeals to moderate Republicans don't seem cynical. Early in the campaign some critics on the left claimed he was 'running to the right' of Clinton on some issues. But I believe that's a simpleminded criticism, because I believe Obama's candidacy represents a good-faith attempt to conceive of political alignment differently. No, he's not some magical hybrid who fits neither party; clearly he's aligned with the Democrats on the overwhelming majority of the issues. But in the Dems' ill-starred tenure as 21st-century opposition party, they've built up a supply of self-righteousness that would make it difficult for a party-line Democrat to work productively with Republican lawmakers or appeal directly to Republican constituents.

Obama seems to understand that persuading traditionally Republican voters to back his policies will put pressure on GOP lawmakers to moderate their oppositional stance. I assume that's the only way to apply such pressure; would that it were not so. Moreover, Obama seems to understand that the Dems will have to respect the concerns of the Republicans and other voters, even when they don't initially agree on solutions. Say what you will about the relative moderation of his policy proposals, but that's a revolutionary outlook, given the political climate right now.

To that end, his Call To Renewal speech proposed the formation - the reformation, rather - of a very visible, engaged Christian progressive constituency under the Democrats' tent. It's clear that the Republican Party is in a state of disrepair right now, and rather than playacting big muscles to peel off a million Republican votes, he's talking about assuaging Christian-right fears of (basically) godless Commies in the White House, and demanding a quid pro quo on social legislation.

In short, he's avoiding the cynical, lazy straight-line projections that are standard fare for journalists and politicos throughout the nation. People get up with his campaign saying 'I didn't realize you could see that from here.' That's what his rhetoric of hope is: an expression of the belief that the current political/cultural situation contains the seeds of a very different situation, a different way of being. He's not saying we can remake the world into something unimaginable, he's saying we're holding ourselves back, choosing not to embrace possibilities (primarily of cultural reconciliation) that would seem to threaten our cherished identities (as members of this or that political group or grievance committee). In terms of political calculus, he's saying that voter alignment can change, and should. And who doesn't agree? But who's saying so?

* * *

The iPhone - like the MacBook Air - signals a similar conceptual shift. Many people already assume the presence, wherever they go, of: cellular service; Wi-Fi connectivity; Web access; voicemail; and so forth. Think about this: millions of people are accustomed now to carrying around all the music that they own. And many people have multiple computers at home, or a home and a work computer, and have needs regarding synchronization, smart storage allocation, etc. Laptops have gotten bigger faster than they've gotten smaller; we may well have 19" 'portable' computers this year. And with this increase in dimensions has come an expansion in capabilities: you can edit and score your feature film on a moving train nowadays.

But as I said last year - as some people have been saying for years - the idea that each computer must be everything to all people is done. We've had 'gaming PC's' for a while now; many companies sell multiple tiers of machines, with specific uses (or limitations) in mind, e.g. rubbish graphics card in a machine intended for email and school papers; devices like the awesome Drobo (an expandable automated networked backup drive that will blow your mind) are pushing us to understand that your treasured data doesn't live in a specific machine, it rests up in a drive and can be shuffled around - should be shuffled around. Indeed, the MacBook Air doesn't even come with an optical drive: while you can use it as your primary computer, if you want to load software the traditional way (on a disc) you're gonna have to find either an external drive or another computer. The MacBook Air, alone among full-sized laptops, simply assumes ubiquitous computing.

The iPhone crystallizes these trends by suggesting that the average consumer should start thinking of their telephone as a full-featured 'computer' - a move that expands the definition of 'computer' enough to explode it entirely. (And let's not forget: the protestations of cranky pundits aside, no 'smartphone' has even come close to engendering this shift in thought.) There's never been a handheld computer like the iPhone before. It's the first of a new class of product, but not because of its capabilities; rather, because it's presented as a component of a new kind of computing environment. It does some of the things your home PC does, but not all; it does all of what your iPod does, but for fewer songs at a time; it does more of what your home web browser does than does any other mobile browser, but leaves out some 'key' bits (e.g. Flash).

So here's what the iPhone is: an attempt to make mobile computing a part of the lives of millions of people who've never considered it. It makes the tent bigger. It's network-society technology, getting more things right than any predecessor because its makers know its potential importance (and because the folks at Apple tend to get those things right).

* * *

Maybe it's because I'm pathologically fixated on being left out of social fun as a kid, maybe it's the 'Media in Transition' focus of my Comparative Media undergrad/grad program, maybe it's that I hate my own lazy ambivalence about everything, or maybe I just hate old people and like seeing them befuddled and unhappy (unlikely), but I take great pleasure in what I take to be moments of sudden, radical perspectival shift - from the 'Jack figures out who Tyler is' scene in Fight Club to the soaring now-we're-dead final verse of 'Exit Music (For a Film)' to the first sight of the birthing fields in The Matrix. What appeals to me about Barack Obama in this regard is that he's making an argument for this kind of shift in perspective in terms that anyone can understand - he's making the possibility of radical bipartisan outreach viscerally exciting. The iPhone embodies a complex sense of how next-generation computing will work, but beyond its potential, it's one of the cleanest, snappiest, sexiest consumer devices you've ever seen or held. That's craft coupled to conceptual seriousness: knowing the possibility of the moment and taking care to share it with others, to find a language (visual, rhetorical) that will outlast your personal appeal.

Whatever the opposite of cynicism is, that's it: if you can't find a home you like, make a new one, and invite everyone over. Well I like it.

Insanely great.

Steve Wozniak is one of my heroes. I remember when the Woz commemorative Apple IIgs came out, with his signature on the front - how badly I wanted one, how personal it seemed, thinking of how proud he must have been of that machine. We did get a IIgs in the end, without his signature, and the unique clack of its weird little keyboard (smaller by far than the ][e and //c keyboards, shallower keys) is one of my most cherished sense-memories. Yes, I'm a geek. I don't mind.

Please, read this interview with one of the men who changed the way you live for the better. MIT's motto is mens et manus - mind and hand - and for engineers, mind and hand may seem sometimes like enough. But Woz is a living reminder that greatness happens somewhere about halfway between them. He is a treasure.

Little kingdom.

I like my Dock the way I like it. Unlike the surface of my physical desk, if the Dock isn't in perfect order I feel it, and it makes it difficult to concentrate. I'm not this way in general - or in any case I live too sloppily to know whether I'm this way in general - but if those goddamn icons aren't in the proper order, the colours arrayed a certain way, the rough thematic organizational scheme in place, I get a little twitchy. Indeed, when I switched to my newish lappy, I took ten minutes just to move icons around on the Dock to get my mind straight; it was like watching someone vaccinate my babychild.

Well, I just moved the Ecto icon around (and by the way how shitty is it that Ecto 3 can no longer handle em and strong tags correctly in HTML mode?) and now I need to take a screenshot of it so that I can have a Garden to return to when things next go awry. But thinking consciously about it is physically painful. Was Ecto on the right of Textmate or the left, next to Adium's little green ducky? Have I always had Automator sitting there thoughtlessly in the rightmost app slot, opposite the patriarchs, Safari and iTunes (which I click pretty rarely, now that I think of it)? How sexy/lame is that Moleskine icon for my 'writing' folder?

This is why I'm not famous yet, you know. Well, this and laziness. Um: this, laziness, and vicious anti-Catholic discrimination.

The modern age.

My dad called me at 8:15 to wish me a happy birthday, which was a great way to start the day - or would have been had I not already checked my email. I'd already received two birthday wishes, you see: one from OKCupid.com with a picture of a birthday cake; one from the JohnStoneFitness.com discussion fora.

They knew before anyone else did. This might worry another man, but a Tech man welcomes his new automated-mailer overlords.

(Then I made macaroni and cheese, thinking I'd save it for lunch, but I just ate it for breakfast instead. So I guess lunch will consist of the breakfast bars I'd earmarked for today. The GF/F and I have agreed upon a little cost-cutting experiment for me - two weeks eating only at home, with an exception for a birthday dinner or drinks - and the first finding is, if you're gonna pack a proper lunch, you'll need something more than an adorable leather laptop bag. Two words: Tom Bihn.)

What Air means.

This piece, about Apple's new optical-drive-free ultrathin (gorgeous) laptop, is very, very sharp.

So, too [like the late lamented Mac Cube], is the Air a proof-of-concept. The concepts it sets out to prove are the clearest ones implied by its name: that data is weightless, that storage is wireless (a concept augmented by the parallel release of Apple’s new hard drive-equipped wireless router dubbed Time Capsule), and that connectivity is ubiquitous.

Five years from now, I suspect that laptops will typically look more like the Air than like my MacBook. Small will win. Wireless will win. Multitouch will win. Security, ubiquity, and interoperability will win. The iPhone changed things, in ways analysts and 'smartphone' addicts still don't seem to understand. And the Air is its direct descendant, conceptually: a portable computing component that leaves home computer tasks to your home computer. It's part of a computing ecosystem, and doesn't pretend to be a self-contained device. It's incomplete as yet - presumably six to twelve months from ubiquitous wireless/cellular access - but the Air is to the laptop what the iPhone is to the 'smartphone': more expensive, more hermetic, and able to do things out of the box that its competitors can't begin to imagine. Gleeful self-quote:

[B]etween the AppleTV and the iPhone, we can see the outlines of a coherent vision for what comes after the personal computer, which isn't a new vision but which is a long leap closer to reality because of Steve Jobs and company: extensible modular devices, omnipresent networking, home data storage distributed invisibly among multiple machines. The box attached to your TV with the Apple logo; the phone in your hand; the Luxo Lamp-looking PC on your desk where you do your homework and make posters for parties; the device that senses when you wake up and plays music from your docked iPod; the control box for the lighting in your garage, with a broadband connection and a Web frontend - all these things are computers, one like the other, in different form factors and with different levels of complexity and extensibility. That's not new. What's new is that it's here and it's being aimed at Joe Consumer.

[...]

What's now your PC will someday soon be part of a suite of networked devices in your home; it'll be powerful, moreso than today's PC's, but it'll be different, and some of its features will be gone entirely, except among retro-minded users. (Start with the traditional QWERTY keyboard, a weird technological artifact of the typewriter era.) And its functions will be dispersed among a half-dozen or more devices around the house and office and subway station and public plaza. The PC is just one tool for interacting with certain kinds of data - some of which are better suited to other hardware interfaces entirely.

The MacBook Air is a public invitation to think about information in a new way. Which, since Apple is no longer a 'computer' company as such, may as well be their official ambit.

The supposed wisdom of crowds: an intellectual seller's market, and no investors.

This passage from Anatoly Lieberman thrilled me, and not in a Luddite way:

Our civilization has reached a stage at which together we are extremely powerful and in our individual capacities nearly helpless. We (that is, we as a body) can solve the most complicated mathematical problems, but our children no longer know the multiplication table. Since they can use a calculator to find out how much six times seven is, why bother? Also, WE can fly from New York to Stockholm in a few hours, but, when asked where Sweden is, thousands of people answer with a sigh that they did not take geography in high school: it must be somewhere up there on the map. There is no need to know anything: given the necessary software, clever machines will do all the work and leave us playing videogames and making virtual love. The worst anti-utopias did not predict such a separation between communal omniscience and personal ignorance, such a complete rift between collective wisdom and individual stultification.

OK so here's a proposal in line with those claims:

What if the 'wisdom of crowds' meme has met such an enthusiastic welcome among the lite-intellectuals of our culture not because it so accurately describes the real workings of collective intelligence, but because it justifies to us the ready relinquishing of individual power? That is to say: 'rugged individualism' is something we as a culture value, but it's not something we teach - like making a marriage work, we're happy to praise you if you manage it, but we sure as hell don't have any lasting memory of how it was done, and we're quicker to encourage than to enable. The 'wisdom of crowds' narrative - the growth of collective intelligence - is the flip side of another narrative, the loss of faith in independence, not to say the death of the capacity for independent thought, necessarily.

Cass Sunstein says we're learning more about less, though it's clearly we're not learning more deeply (just 'more'); I put in a cover letter the other day that I was skilled at finding answers to technical questions, by way of excusing that I didn't know those answers myself. It's a real skill, you know - there are classes of question you're better off asking me to google rather than just googling them yourself. I find quickly. Meaning that as long as the Internet exists in its present form, I'm incredibly capable. Extensible, even. But how much of it am I taking away? How translatable is that knowledge, how readily will my reading knowledge of Ruby and HTML translate to community-building? Why have I not committed myself to increased facility in these areas that are important to me? Why am I not saving up?

OK let's not get silly here. To bring it back a little: transformative art and cultural artifacts tend to be made by experts, not by mobs. The 'wisdom' of crowds isn't wisdom, it's near-knowledge. Information. And information alone doesn't make community. We may be getting smarter as a group but we're worse at grouping, They Say, and I suppose the Wisdom of Crowds Cottage Industry might have as its narrativising purpose nothing more than reassurance: it's OK that we are inept. Mathematically we are expected to be inept. Let's lull ourselves to sleep with stories of the ineptitude of great women and men throughout the ages; let's reassure ourselves we could quite easily have lived without them. Which is to say: without the hard work they did and do.

'Saving up.' That's the key here: the loudening popular narrative of the value of shallow knowledge works to praise a culture of intellectual borrowing rather than saving and reinvesting. Crowds don't grow knowledge, they mark its location on a map and return there. Buried in the ground, it has no opportunity to mix and intermingle with other ideas, to spawn crazy notions. It is in no danger of becoming genius. Genius could reside momentarily inside anyone, but I believe in the importance of a culture that encourages exploration of great ideas, their working-over, their deepening. Heavens forfend we have to rely on...academics...to do our thinking for us. (One possible description of or reason for our resentment toward the moneyed and degreed, eh?)

The one-word description of the above state - 'communal omniscience and personal ignorance' - is decadence. Dark clouds.

The paradigmatic Gawker-style post.

Choire (pronounced 'Cory,' apparently) Sicha is guest-blogging for Jason Kottke this week. Sicha comes from Gawker, a rubbish commercial blog about New York gossip, like Page Six without any real cachet (ha ha) - and while the blog itself is merely bad, what's awful is its huge readership. You get the Web you deserve.

This is his Sicha's Kottke.org post in its entirety; I think it handily sums up many things that are wrong with blogs as they are widely understood today:

I have finally found the guy I want to marry. Seriously, this is my favorite YouTube video right now, and I'm not even sure that I can explain why. Something about the soft color, and the quiet. And he's so sensitive. (I sure hope he's 18 or older or I'm gonna feel real bad inside.)

...only it looks better on Kottke.org because when you have nothing to say your CSS better be fucking spotless.

'Seriously, this is my favorite YouTube video right now.'

And that's where the hands have come to rest on the clock, Reader(s).

Mac users, I give you something now.

Safari will apparently attempt by default to load RAR files into a browser window instead of downloading them; this will cause Safari to spend some time with the Spinning Beach Ball of Death and then shit itself, and that's exactly as unpleasant as you remember it. Be advised.

One of several problems with your stupid digital culture.

This post is a fairly standard 'not all people are cut out to be managers' rant-lite. John Gruber - who increasingly wants to be Jason Kottke[*], or at least get Kottke's web traffic, judging from his linking habits of late - linked to it today with no real comment. He apparently loved it. For a few seconds I couldn't figure out why - there's no particular insight, just...aah.

I can tell you why he loved it, folks. The two (understandable) fetishes of every Web/tech blogger: nomenclature and graphs, none strictly necessary of course. When I can rouse myself to give a shit about the world again, we'll talk more about this: the reign of a certain 'clean' design aesthetic online, the fetish for a certain kind of infographic, the substitution of 'staring at charts' for 'learning about information presentation' - the NaNoWrization of the Web. But yeah I just can't care right now, sorry. I mean have you ever gone grocery shopping at Trader Joe's the afternoon/evening before Thanksgiving? Friendly advice: bring an iPod, you're not gonna wanna deal with those yuppie motherfuckers. (The customers, that is; the staff at our local TJ's is unfailingly friendly and enthusiastic.)

[*] It kills me to say this. Gruber's one of my favourite bloggers, insightful and opinionated, and Kottke's site is...well, it's kind of pointless. It's a list of links with vacuous commentary. Gruber can do better. Not a coincidence of course: once he signed up for The Deck, his linking habits sort of...changed. I think.

Evidence suggests that Robert Scoble has less than half a brain.

If you buy a Kindle and you buy my blog. It looks like I get 30% of that fee.

Anyway, thanks Amazon for all the cash! (I'll need it, cause I just bought my own — it will be here tomorrow).

As far as the strangely popular Scoble goes, the Macalope indeed said it best: 1,000 monkeys typing, 999 monkeys short.

Can't talk won't talk.

This is about human emotions.

There's this application on my rapidly aging Mac G4 desktop called Growl. Growl is a centralized messaging notification app, which is to say it takes the various messages that other apps put out (such as Safari's 'I've downloaded this file' or Adium's 'Some fool from your Buddy List just got so bored he logged out') and provides a consistent, customizable look-and-sound. Growl lets you make notifications persistent (so that a new-email message stays onscreen until you tell it to piss off) and so forth; the idea in part is to minimize the damage of periodic interruption by both (1) telling the machine what you don't need to know and (2) telling it what form of interruption will damage your concentration least. At least in theory. Added bonus: you can get notifications Over the Online, though I live on a digital island and don't do this. One can well imagine the usefulness of this feature.

I like Growl; along with Quicksilver it was one of the apps that helped me 'round the corner of outright Mac fandom, and like that other (far more powerful) app it combines a pleasant, customizable look-and-feel with an obvious-in-retrospect basic function.

And Yet.

Since my hard drive died a couple of months ago and I reinstalled Tiger, I've been having some seemingly random problems with my old computing styles. For one thing, Quicktime in Safari is just broken; I can't watch .mpg or .mov files without downloading them (at which point they work just fine). I've downloaded every codec I can think of, have reinstalled Quicktime, and so forth. Nothing. Another strangeness: the volume bezel appears only intermittently; when I press the volume-up and -down keys on my keyboard, nothing happens. I miss that little bezel.

Plus, Growl won't talk to me. Or rather it doesn't listen when I talk to it.

In theory you can click on many Growl notifications to be taken to their source; e.g. GrowlSafari should shoot you back to the Downloads window from the 'I finished getting this file' message. There's a checkbox in the application's preference pane: 'Inform GrowlSafari when a notification is clicked.' Well yes it's checked. Growl doesn't want to listen for me. It offers pleasantly to listen for network notifications - whatever other people are telling it - but I say it should keep to itself the way I do. I think it resents me for my role in stunting its interpersonal development.

Growl reminds me of me as a teenager, of course. Well, a teenager and early-20something. I worry sometimes that I'm more interested in being right about people's motivations and intentions than I am about knowing their feelings fully as an end in itself; i.e. I'm a really good listener up to the point where I think I know something about you that you don't know, after which point it's a bit of a crapshoot. Maybe I'm not like this, maybe I don't give myself enough credit for genuine empathy. I'm certainly concerned with empathy as an aesthetic marker, and my views on relationships definitely stress empathy rather than (much easier) sympathy and concern. But I do worry that my obvious need to 'win' emotional exchanges is actually the leading term in my own emotional makeup, rather than a 'charming' roguishness or competitive streak. That would be the uncharitable reading of my tendency to walk into a room ten minutes after an argument and say all the restrained, reasonable things I was incapable of saying during the argument itself (dudgeon and pique!), then insist that we not talk more about it - 'what's past is past,' of course. Which is the pass-agg version of 'let me have the last word' but is also the generous thing, right? To say, let's dwell here, at a moderate height and depth. Well that's what I think as I walk in the door anyhow.

'As a teenager.' Well we can imagine what I mean and meant. I've become aware of my certain problems over the years and if I can't quite rid myself of them I can at least hope that my recognition is authentic, that on the other end of it I'll want to do something about it. But isn't total knowing a smokescreen? Isn't that what every writer basically ever has told me and you? It seems that way. But see we know our tendencies only consciously, and map that country through a keyhole; you play the mind you're dealt. I'm trying to forge a new relationship with Growl based on mutual respect. I want to listen more closely to it - even if only at intervals, only when it speaks aloud, when it has the courage to ask - but I need for it to listen back. It's earlier in the morning than I'm accustomed to and I realize, pouring water into the dark at bottom of this well, that echoes aren't enough. I - I mean you don't need to be reminded that I've, no you've, no wait: that we have spoken; you (I) need to hear that I (maybe you) love what you (maybe I) say. I want - no, need - to love saying it. Notify me when you're ready.

iPhone SDK.

Well, that didn't take long:

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February.

[...]

It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true.

[...]

We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.

Steve

P.S.: The SDK will also allow developers to create applications for iPod touch. [Oct 17, 2007]

No permanent link; oh well. What does this mean? Well, it's good for consumers, good for Apple, blah blah blah. But much more importantly: it means that instead of being mostly correct, my long iPhone rant is now entirely correct, and I am the winner. Make the checks out to Wally the Wonder Walrus, thanks.

Layer tennis in review.

If (in spite of my excited advertisement) you missed the Cornell/Inman Layer Tennis match today, or even if you caught it, it's instructive to look at the images next to one another. The premise: one designer has 24 hours to produce a Photoshop image. He bounces it to his opponent; they then send the file back and forth, with fifteen minutes to do something neat with the image each round. The results are...

...a little astounding. (This is a reminder that even if you know Photoshop, you don't really know Photoshop.)

The complete record of today's match is after the jump. I prefer to see the images this way, one after the other, but in realtime it's strangely thrilling. John Gruber's commentary wasn't bad either.

[Update: Psych! I took them down! They were cropped strangely and I need to resize the images before reposting, so cool your jets.]

[Update: They're back! Scaled though. Download for full size.]

Layer tennis.

Watch this now!

Alternatives to Photoshop for OSX.

This has been an interesting summer/fall for OSX users who dabble in graphics work: because of Tiger's Core Image libraries, it's getting easier to (partially) emulate the layer-based image-manipulation ability of Photoshop in smaller, low-cost applications. Two noteworthy applications have entered into the space recently: Pixelmator and Acorn. Pixelmator wants to be a more elegant, quicker full-on alternative to Photoshop; its interface is gorgeous, very Mac-like, and stuffed (already) with palettes. Acorn goes another direction, with built-in Python scriptability and a single tool palette. (If you get Acorn, by the way, get this, the best advertisement yet for Acorn itself.)

Acorn's cheaper, smaller, and faster than Pixelmator, and is developed by Gus Mueller (the fella responsible for the charming, simple VoodooPad, the third piece of shareware I ever bought, after NetNewsWire and Kung-Log [now ecto]), which should give confidence. Pixelmator is hunting bigger game, but arguably a smaller market (since for the foreseeable future anyone who's serious about graphics work will probably pony up for Photoshop anyway); Mueller doesn't think they're in direct competition. Indeed, Acorn seems like an ideal photo-editing program for users who want something beyond iPhoto but have no need for a business-class app. On the other hand, the visual metaphors in use in Pixelmator are a good deal closer to the industry-standard look/feel/function of Photoshop, a helpful thing for users with aspirations. The differences between the apps are neatly symbolized by their homepages: Acorn's is clean and clear, and a litty dorky, while pixelmator.com is snazzy as hell but a little bloated in terms of ad copy. (There's a panel called 'Reign of Mac OS X Technologies,' for God's sake.)

Anyhow, both programs are worth a look, and very affordable. When some Windows-using fool or Linux troll mocks you for your Mac addiction, point him toward the growing library of superb shareware for OSX as another strong reason to switch.

Those poor, poor kids.

You know what's really screwing up today's teenage boys? Not the 'culture of violence' nor the Iraq War nor videogames.

No, for millions of teenagers there is a new, unlikely scourge: they're sitting there furtively masturbating to Internet porn, short streaming video clips free of charge, and the dropped frames are only a mild irritant - indeed in an odd way part of the pleasurable anticipation - and then the Pleasure Moment arrives with all its power to imprint on the malleable teenage-boy mind, and instead of the explosive climax of Anal Crime Spree 6 what is our poor protagonist looking at?

Buffering........35%

Theirs is a lost generation.

The street finds its own uses for things.

The street's latest use for the iPhone: visiting the GUE.

iPhone data network speeds: juiced?

If this is true, one reason to hold off on the iPhone at least partly went away this week. (AT&T's network is the main - indeed in some cases the only - source of complaints from iPhone reviewers.) The reported speeds aren't rock-your-balls fast, but they're bumping up against respectability.

The iPhone is going to change things.

Jack Valenti died.

[Update: Go read Lessig's brief remembrance of Valenti. It's the one that matters, today.]

Apparently MPAA head and founder Jack Valenti died yesterday. I've long said half-jokingly that Valenti's the most powerful lobbyist in America; his control over the content and economics of the film industry was (depending on whether you benefit financially from films) either an invaluable business setup for Hollywood or a crippling cultural liability for the entire nation. I've generally tended to think mainly the latter, since his most visible creation, the MPAA ratings system, is a stupid moralizing draconian joke that extorts from theatre owners and moviegoers on behalf of the most depraved Hollywood entertainments.

Now this is embarrassing to admit, but I read Ain't It Cool News. Most of the writing is awful, all of the Talkbacks are awful, the tone of out-and-out misogyny and homophobia is inexcusable, and generally the choice of topics is consistent with the interests of embarrassing prolonged-adolescent jerkoffs. It's 'cinephilia' of the worst kind. But there are a couple of strong writers on staff, the best of whom, Moriarty, did this quick write-up on Valenti last night. Worth a read. One of the commenters even turns on his brain for a moment to echo Moriarty's suggestion: without Valenti's lobbying efforts, the FCC might now be running the Hollywood ratings system or something like it. There's a whole raft of reasons why that's not an unmitigated good - one of them is 'the entire corpus of post-MPAA Hollywood film' - but that's something to leave aside for the moment. The film industry should obviously be deregulated, but it's not clear that the current state of things is much preferable; most films are unsurprisingly bullshit, but worse, most well-made films are bullshit, and the best craftsmen in Hollywood labour longest on the least meaningful commercial pap. Hollywood money is a problem.

(Go rent Cradle Will Rock, by the way. For nostalgia's sake. Silly film, irritating politics at times, but stirring.)

When Valenti spoke at MIT a few years ago, about movie piracy, I thought he made an eloquent case for sensible IP protection and the rights of creators to a level of control over the use of their work. He was wrong about some things - not least the horrifying practice of prolonging copyright for a century - and it's clear he never quite understood digital distribution and production technologies in anything but the most obnoxious bottom-line terms if at all, but he scored some serious points, and more than held his own against the mini-rants of wannabe-pirates in the audience. His most stinging criticism, to me, was that most filesharers aren't 'free information!' advocates at all, they're just lazy kids who'll steal when they have a chance and don't care one way or the other where their films and music come from, and Hollywood shouldn't take 'information wants to be free' seriously as a counter-ideology. To his mind, the big problem in the ethical debate about filesharing was that it wasn't actually happening, that dealing with new pricing schemes, micropayments, digital on-demand sales, and such wouldn't actually address the basic problem that if it was easy to steal movies, lots of people would steal movies. He pressed the point that adopting new distribution technologies before effective copyright enforcement could be put in place would create even greater instability than already exists for filmmakers. That's not a simple truth but there's a lot of truth in there. But then he wasn't a technologist. It's unlikely his successor will be, either. They're businessmen and politicos. Technologists have a responsibility to learn to speak to such people.

But at MIT it seemed that for Valenti the business concern had bled into an interesting set of moral concerns; he spoke with the drawl and cadences of a hellfire preacher, and rather than speaking of the Business and Profits of Hollywood as a pure moral good (like I expected), he seemed to want more progressive policies than were currently possible. (He worked in the White House under LBJ, not Nixon.) Valenti's been famously wrong about several things in his career, not least his infamous prediction of the VCR's impact on Hollywood's bottom line, and I think he did a lot of harm to the film industry, creatively and technologically. The MPAA's rating scheme creates a wrongheaded artificial hierarchy of aesthetic objects and is (I suspect) one of the main causes for the decadent nihilist spectacle of mainstream Hollywood fare (in which merely human sexuality is a greater sin than apocalyptic violence, and authentic moral transgression gets no officially-approved public viewing). Hollywood's relationship with movie theatre chains is perverse as well, grounded in monopoly-leveraging business practices that make it impossible for small theatres to compete on even ground with the multiplex, and make small indie films an unnecessarily risky business proposition.

But he seemed to have a heart, and it seemed to be in the right place, even if he was basically a grotesque lying ignorant reactionary lobbyist on behalf of many of the nation's worst human beings (the studio bosses and execs, etc.). Jack Valenti came out on the wrong side of a few key debates, but the scope of his work extended well beyond his visible battles over distribution technologies and the awful ratings system. It's weird in an 'obituary' to say this, but: I'm happy to assume he did plenty of good, and hereby tip my hat for it. To the extent that it matters at all how we speak of the dead, that seems like a reasonable thing to do.

Andrew Sullivan is fucking clueless about...blogs. [Updated.]

Sullivan today describes Tim O'Reilly as 'a person the blog-clueless NYT deems to be relevant to the blogosphere.' He then advises O'Reilly to 'go back under the rock whence some clueless reporter from the NYT discovered you.'

It's not always the case, I have to admit, but on this topic Andrew Sullivan is a clueless asshole.

This is Tim O'Reilly.

Andrew: before you open your mouth, do even the most rudimentary fact-checking, please. You're embarrassing yourself.

[Update: Thank you Andrew for protecting us from that terrifying straw man that was menacing our online conversations. We are much safer. Berk.]

Longing to linger.

The most heavily-commented post on this blog - which received a comment a few minutes ago, actually - is this offhand thing about beautiful songs. Five of the comments are from regular readers/friends, and fourteen non-spam comments have since been added, in the three years since the post was written, by strangers who googled their way to that entry.

Nearly 5,000 people have read some or part of the lengthy fandom essay I posted last week; roughly a dozen have left comments at this blog. It's strange, the things that prompt people to share. Well not that strange.

Today I'd add, by the way:

• 'Mother Nature's Son' (The Beatles)
• 'Dream a Little Dream of Me' (Adolphus/Kahn, variously covered)
• 'Don't Dream It's Over' (Crowded House)
• 'I Loves You Porgy' (those Gershwin lads)
• 'They Can't Take That Away From Me' (the brothers Gershwin)
• ...and so forth.

As before: not exhaustive. (Apparently not exhausted either!)

Additional thoughts on two affairs - Sierra and Bungle - in a contemporary blog context.

'Mr Bungle' - the LambdaMOO character who perpetrated the 'Rape in Cyberspace' that got Julian Dibbell his book contract and almost singlehandedly swelled the size of LambdaMOO's player database into the thousands of entries - turned out to be not merely a single asshole but an entire roomful of NYU students taking turns being coarse. Anonymity enables sociopathy, banality, perversity, and creative extroversion to about equal extents, I've come to believe, and the greater the number of people involved in a given anonymous exchange - up to the Mob, of course - the greater the propensity for destructive or nihilist action (in part because predictability is lost in a mob, so a kind of large-scale Prisoner's Dilemma kicks in, whereby altruism and soul-baring are 'cooperative' strategies bound to lose because of distrust). And LambdaMOO - with its structures that denied registered characters any identifying personal information about one another, though guests were identified by IP address - is as consequence-free in its anonymity as it gets.

All of which has something to do with someone named Kathy Sierra, trust me.

I ran into one of the targets of the 'online assault', legba, in a MOO based on Samuel Delany's Dhalgren in summer '95 (during one of the lab sessions for our Text-Based VR class). I was so terrified to upset her that I totally failed to ask any useful or interesting questions. Embarrassing, in retrospect. But at the time I thought I was touching an adult world that I didn't quite know what to make of. And the breathless tone of Dibbell's article certainly heightened my melodramatic expectations - I was sure she'd still bear scars, two years after the events in the Voice article, and didn't want to seem insensitive. Years later I realized I'd bought into the article's implicit claim, i.e. that the 'Bungle Affair' (spoofing of grotesque text and the deletion of a character) was tantamount to rape and execution. More than a decade later, my tendonitis healed and my skin thickened, I'm a good deal less certain about that claim. I suspect Dibbell is too; but then on the cyberspace 'frontier' everything seemed possible, new social categories in the offing, new ways of being-in-the-world a mouse-click away. (I took Howard Rheingold's tech-evangelical writing very seriously back then - and let's not even talk about the rush I felt reading John Perry Barlow's ludicrous Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, thanks.)

Earlier I brought up the Bungle Affair solely to make the point that a lot of today's concerns and breast-beating about blogs, privacy, and online identity were already getting heavy play in the media a decade and a half ago. But the deeper-down lessons of that event and the resultant changes in LambdaMOO are more particularly relevant to this week's events, which (though known to a very small audience at this point) are illustrative of the concerns all online community members have (or should have) as bloggers come to number in the tens of millions.

(Again: if you haven't read the Dibbell article, I heartily recommend it. It's a breezy, engrossing read, and for all his breathy invocation of Grad Student-speak, he doggedly sticks to a complicated view of certain debates in identity politics that remain maddeningly pertinent. Heh: spoilers follow.)

Quickly, re: the Kathy Sierra 'hate speech' story crossing the blogosphere.

The kerfuffle re: Kathy Sierra's decision not to attend ETech because of (real and perceived) online threats reminds me of something.

The summer after my sophomore year of high school, in 1995, I took a class at Johns Hopkins called 'Explorations in Text-Based Virtual Reality'; I didn't know what 'media studies' was then, but that was my first exposure to it. We read Mark Dery, Scott Bukatman, William Gibson, Howard Rheingold, Pavel Curtis - important names in the growing academic recognition of virtual and computer-mediated community in the mid-90's. That was the class that introduced me to MUD's and MOO's - and led pretty much directly to my tendonitis, as I became (frankly) addicted to the peculiar stew of satisfactions that virtual communities and digital communication could offer.

That summer was when I first read Julian Dibbell's notorious Village Voice article, 'A Rape in Cyberspace', later to serve as the first chapter of his overwrought but riveting book, My TinyLife.

If you're not familiar with the article, it's a description of a 'rape' that took place in an online forum, LambdaMOO, in the early 1990's. The event consisted of exchanges of text in real-time: immersive collective real-time fantasy messaging. (My favourite variant of MUD is 'MUSH': Multi-User Shared Hallucination.) I've had a character on Lambda for a long, long time; Dibbell's description of virtual life there was what drew me (along with a certain rubbernecking impulse of which I'm admittedly ashamed). In retrospect the 'Bungle affair' seems tame and utterly childish; at the time, at age 16, I thought Dibbell's article was a letter from a fantasyland, an ethnographic description of a Utopia where your social status depending on how quickly and how cleverly you could write. LambdaMOO is where I learned how to 'speak' in 'public,' and I can't read Dibbell's description of the events without a weird melancholy. Maybe it's missed opportunity, or lost innocence, or the very same stymied-copresence that made the MOO compelling in the first place:

"Mostly voodoo dolls are amusing," wrote legba on the evening after Bungle's rampage, posting a public statement to the widely read in-MOO mailing list called *social-issues, a forum for debate on matters of import to the entire populace. "And mostly I tend to think that restrictive measures around here cause more trouble than they prevent. But I also think that Mr. Bungle was being a vicious, vile fuckhead, and I...want his sorry ass scattered from #17 to the Cinder Pile. I'm not calling for policies, trials, or better jails. I'm not sure what I'm calling for. Virtual castration, if I could manage it. Mostly, [this type of thing] doesn't happen here. Mostly, perhaps I thought it wouldn't happen to me. Mostly, I trust people to conduct themselves with some veneer of civility. Mostly, I want his ass."

Months later, the woman in Seattle would confide to me that as she wrote those words posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face -- a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words' emotional content was no mere playacting. The precise tenor of that content, however, its mingling of murderous rage and eyeball-rolling annoyance, was a curious amalgam that neither the RL nor the VR facts alone can quite account for. Where virtual reality and its conventions would have us believe that legba and Starsinger were brutally raped in their own living room, here was the victim legba scolding Mr. Bungle for a breach of "civility." Where real life, on the other hand, insists the incident was only an episode in a free-form version of Dungeons and Dragons, confined to the realm of the symbolic and at no point threatening any player's life, limb, or material well-being, here now was the player legba issuing aggrieved and heartfelt calls for Mr. Bungle's dismemberment. Ludicrously excessive by RL's lights, woefully understated by VR's, the tone of legba's response made sense only in the buzzing, dissonant gap between them.

At one point we (on Lambda) thought the entire world would change because of virtual communities. I got the same feeling playing Ackanomic, and again actively participating in Usenet newsgroups. I'm sure I wasn't alone.

But nothing has changed.

Those braying back and forth about crimes of online harrassment and the limits of identity and anonymity would benefit from a little bit of history. To the extent that online community-builders were ever 'pioneers,' those heady days are gone. Few enough lessons have been learned, it would seem. Fault lies, at least in part, with those whose responsibility is to teach.

Well, others will take responsibility. Let's hope anyhow.

Iconical.

One thing I've never been able to take up with the expected faux-techy vengeance is the LiveJournal/AIM obsession with status and user icons. Given my strong affinity for identity-systematization and a sense of writerly continuity - in an ideal world I'd have a single webpage on which every comment I'd ever posted anywhere would be automatically digested and annotated, which I could print once a month and send to subscribers who would then, for the good of America, be culled - you'd think I'd have gotten around to just picking a mode of online presentation by now. (This site is the closest I've come, and it uses a generic Typepad theme.) But as with everything else we keep our bytes nice and slipshod here at w-b-dot-n. I'm sure that in a parallel Internet-equipped universe there's some version of me, perhaps slightly more physically attractive, who's a regular poster to alt.devilbunnies and still visits various MOOs, always under the same alias. I used to admire those people who devoted energy to such conscious identity-projection.

Now they worry me slightly, I confess.

Anyhow I couldn't sleep last night (nor this morning, it turns out) so here's an icon. The windmills make no sense until you remember my surname. (See what I mean? If I had a lick of sense I wouldn't sign my actual name to this embarrassing blog! It's because I can't bear to lie to you, Reader(s). Not about my name.) I arranged the facial features myself, choosing from a supply; look at it as an experiment in multiple-choice self-representation. I rather like the likeness (narcissism!). The GF's first comment was, 'Your ears don't stick out that much.' Second: 'And you've got less hair up front.' (Addendum: 'I said your smile was right, when you do your funny half-smile thing.') Well that's love, basically.

Via, via.

I just realized who Twitter was designed for.

Twitter was designed for the sort of people who often find themselves at Web 2.0 and tech-for-hipsters conferences. Did you see the usage stats at waxy.org? During SXSW, Twitter traffic far surpassed its previous high. I imagine this is because 98% of Twitter users were in Austin.

Look for a bunch of articles in the near future in the 'tech lifestyle' press about how the 'phenomenal recent growth' of Twitter indicates clearly that it's a powerful social too and the whole world was clearly looking for a way to broadcast status messages (see the first sentence of the waxy.org article). Such articles are prompted by the fact that the people who write them appear to room with, play World of Warcraft with, share Modest Mouse mp3's with, go to dinner with, and sleep with other Twitter members, exclusively.

I miss Usenet.

And please read my Twitter page.

Possibly inspiring, possibly excessive, arguably grotesque vis-a-vis body hair and narcissism: one year of exercise in pictures, and thoughts on fitness as personal goal and obsession.

[Wrote this a couple days ago; was worried that it's not strong enough to show to people. Standards are lower at this moment, apparently! But: this is clearly an incomplete post; I've been thinking a lot about this collection of topics and want to come back to them. To it? Damn, I never did take a proper grammar class.]

This guy took daily pictures of himself for more than a year while he worked off some excess weight. How much? He shed roughly 50 pounds in six months, and went from a 46" waist to a bit over 31". The movie is striking for several reasons, not least his egregious decision to start waxing his body hair, and his wife's suggestion that he go bleach-blonde (which frankly I think suited him once the roots grew back). As he puts it elsewhere on his site: he wasn't eating enough, so the weight loss is in part due to slow development of lean mass, not just fat burning.

So, done how? Weights six days a week, cardio workouts every day. Doesn't sound too hard, actually.

See, here's the thing: I find the movie kind of inspiring. The guy's a network admin, and did all this working out in a room in his house because he was tired of (ahem) looking like me. (I mean he didn't put it in those terms, exactly. But unfortunately his starting stats are essentially the same as mine.) I don't tan, I burn, and frankly I find the idea of prancing about on the beach a little goddamn silly. And let's face it: being concerned about muscle mass as a visual feature, rather than an aid to some kind of athletic achievement, is evidence of a crippling narcissism. I mean for all the guy's brotherliness and plainspoken articulateness on his web forum, his life appears to consist of doing exercises, cleaning his house, maintaining computer networks from his home office, constantly updating his website (every day since the beginning of 2003, without fail) and once every year or so allowing himself a calorie-packed celebratory meal with friends. John Stone may have mastered his own body, but he still has a geek's lifestyle in a lot of ways, and that tinges the inspiration he provides with a little bit of sadness.

But is it possible to bring yourself to make such a change without an element of narcissism? And can you turn it on and off for tactical purposes? And can admiration of positive change be separated from mere addiction to one's own neurochemistry? And isn't a shapely happy jock preferable to a dumpy unhappy nerd? And am I seriously asking that fucking question??

This is to say several things, firstly: I'd like to be in good physical shape. In late November and December I tried to go running as often as I could bear it, and found it both frustrating and enjoyable. I don't have much endurance, but even over the span of 2-3 weeks I noticed a huge uptick in my ability to keep up with the program I'd been assigned. Then Christmas vacation hit like a truck, and I went jogging once with my brother back home, and that was it - only a couple of times since then. Frankly, I find the activity crashingly boring; plus my knees and back screamed constantly in pain whenever I jogged.

Plus do you realize how goddamn cold it gets in Boston?

But then a gym membership was acquired, and a routine established: 4-6 trips to the MIT gym per week, combining a half-hour on the (!@#$!^$#) bike with at least a half-hour of weightlifting. Between running, biking, and lifting, change has been almost instant: I have more energy, breathe more easily, sleep better, feel more confident. My self-image has altered perceptibly; though I know academically that no major physical change is apparent, that I'm still overweight and soft-looking, I sense that people must see me differently, that my carriage or something-or-other has changed. Anyhow I now walk into the gym without shame and that feeling has been a long time coming: more than a decade.

At the same time, I wonder whether I'm even capable of pushing myself with the zeal required to achieve that kind of health change with that rapidity. I can't help but think time spent sitting should be spent running...but then time spent running should be spent writing, i.e. sitting, and it's tiring just giving a damn.

Clearly I need some wine. To take the edge off. Today's a 'space out lots of little meals' kind of day. So it may also be a 'little bit of wine goes a long way' kind of day.

If you know what I mean.

Message to 'old skool' Flickr users upset about switching to Yahoo logins...

...grow up, you fucking whiners! The people who run your precious photo-sharing website sold their shit (quite happily and profitably, let us add) to Yahoo ages ago. It's a goddamn login name. No one is impressed by how old your Flickr login is. Let it go!

Well I feel I hell of a lot safer now.

So there's an Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie coming out. Nothing to be excited about, right? ATHF is dumb.

But some ad cats employed by Turner Broadcasting thought: let's market this thing by putting little electronic doohickeys all around ten major cities in the US.

And here's how it went. And here's what the deep thinkers at the Boston Globe editorial board think we oughtta do about it.

And here's what the thing looked like.

Ladies and Gentlemen: two Boston-area douchebags were arrested for strategic placement of circuit boards and LED's. As one commenter at this occasionally-funny but largely embarrassing and lazy Reason comment thread puts it:

Let me get this straight. The city of Boston is paralyzed in fear of Lite Brite?

This is why I moved to VA.

The newsmen have taken pains to mention that the police purportedly 'detonated' (i.e. blew up using their own bomb) at least one of the devices - presumably to discover that it was not, in fact, an explosive of any kind, as should presumably have been apparent to trained professionals from a couple of key facts:

• These stupid sculptures have been up all over the country for weeks now
• Bombs generally require explosive materials, I think
• Embarrassment, though contagious, is not explosive

The furor in the press is about wasted gov't resources, 'panic,' and the fear (among those in positions of authority) of embarrassment. The Globe editorial is a risible piece of moralizing hackwork:

Perpetrators of terror hoaxes can anticipate prison sentences of up to five years if apprehended. But potential criminal prosecution is only one consideration. The tricksters at Turner, a unit of Time Warner, Inc., should pay the bill for the consequences of its lame marketing gimmick.

Terrorism hoaxes are common. Two years ago, a drug addict and smuggler gave a fake tip about a terrorist incursion in Boston that led to another massive mobilization of law enforcement. In 2005, an angry deportee used a fake threat that forced officials to close a tunnel under Baltimore's harbor. Turner officials say their devices were never meant to be seen as threats. Yet they find themselves in bad company.

This was not, of course, a 'terror hoax,' at least not according to the several news reports that have already come out; prosecuting the two 'artists' for deliberately inciting public terror is disgusting, and would set a bad precedent for dealing with public electronic displays. (Do you realize there are complicated digital billboards and 'televisions' arrayed all...over...the...city?!!???!?.2/2d) These boards looked like IED's? Seriously?

Even when they lit up pretty colours?

The city reacted properly in this case, for the first few minutes, it looks like. We should be glad our first-response team is deadly serious; someone has to be. But Menino's government is now embarrassing itself and needlessly causing problems for its citizenry.

But restitution should be made by someone: that's the American way. How's this. If Turner foots the bill for deploying the Bomb Squad, I'll pay for Menino and the Globe editorial board to go into therapy. It can only help.