Mile Zero
no matter where you go, there you are
Mile Zero is the personal website of Thomas Wilburn. All statements and opinions here are my own, and do not represent the views or policies of my employers at Congressional Quarterly, Ars Technica, or other publications.
Strange things are afoot at the Super H
Ever since I've had my grand idea about improving iced chai, I've been thinking about implementing a solution on my own. So tonight I went to the Super H, an Asian market not far from my house, to try and pick up some tea bubbles.
I love Asian markets. For one thing, it's just the simple, giddy pleasure of a novel experience. Items are available for purchase at a Super H that you will never, I promise you, see at a Giant or a Shoppers. There are whole squid and octopi available, shrink-wrapped for freshness, in the seafood section. These same creatures, along with a wide variety of other animal and ocean life, are also found freeze-dried an aisle down. The meat section includes porkchops and steaks, but there's also a good supply of "bull pizzle," and I'm pretty sure that is exactly what it sounds like. Can you even imagine walking up to a butcher in the US and asking to have two pounds of bull pizzle? You'd either get laughed at or hit on.
Those are just the items that typical white Americans might have heard about. There's a lot of produce, various roots and vegetables, that we don't grow domestically. There are uncommon spices. I personally enjoy the collection merely labeled Asian Snack. Some of the candies found under Asian Snack look like their American counterparts, and of those, some of them will actually be the same. The rest will either be dopplegangers shocking to the unexpected or wholly unconventional packages, perhaps made of shrimp. The Asian Snack aisle also contains Pocky. I've never really understood the geek fascination with Pocky. It's good, but it's very expensive for what it is.
Shopping at an Asian market, unless you can read Korean, is probably done by looking at the pictures on the package. For some reason, all of the stores around here are Korean-owned, like Super H and Grand Mart. Even if it were all in Chinese, I'd probably have a lot of trouble reading it. Korean, being a phonetic language that is completely unrelated to Mandarin, leaves me wandering back and forth and peering at the hanzi/English translations on the back of various packages. You could try to ask for help, but the managers are probably no-where to be found. The stockboys are Latino of one flavor or another and seem to collectively view the whole store as a colossal joke--you might or might not get an accurate answer.
Side note: speaking of Hispanic employees and language conflicts, one of my friends (who is Japanese) took a temporary position at one of these markets. They put her to work giving out samples of flavored soy milk. I went to visit her with my then-girlfriend and found her mooning over one of the stockboys, who didn't speak much English (and hers wasn't terribly expressive at the time). We joked about learning Spanish so she could flirt properly. In response, this cute Japanese girl, who had always seemed to be a total innocent, asked me to translate the phrase "I want to melt in soy milk with you." To this day, I haven't found a more interesting subject for translation.
The other interesting trend to be aware of, should you choose to patronize one of these grocery stores, is that they often contain smaller shops dedicated to cheap consumer goods. If you want a really good rice cooker or a set of sushi plates, that's where you can find them. Larger stores sometimes have clothing and imported video rental stalls. You pay for these things separately. When I was in China, the "malls" there operated on a similar model--instead of having separate storefronts, the inside is one huge space with booths for various wares. I'm assuming that the domestic stores have simply imported the idea, just as if they had brought it over on a pallet with boxes of Haribo Peaches.
There are times when I wish I could pick up and take another trip overseas. There are still a lot of countries I haven't visited, and working at the Bank (where people take frequent vacations or home leave) can revive my wanderlust. Stepping into the Super H is a trip just out of the ordinary, and one that doesn't invoke any jet lag. I wish it had been a trip resulting in tea bubbles tonight, but they were absent, which surprised me. The iced chai revolution will have to wait at least one more night.
23:29 x Thomas x /culture/asia/imported x link x 1 comment
(Metrorail Propaganda, part 2 of an infinite series)
What you're looking at is the newest ad that caught my eye in the DC metro system. It's titled "Virginia's Least Wanted," and it is a victim of incredibly poor design, rhetorically. See how small the text is, and how tiny those little pictures are? They don't seem any bigger when you're actually there in person, and the wild west wanted poster theme isn't exactly drawing in the crowds. As much as I hated the deceptive "shark" trial lawyer ads, they had a great visual hook, and they understood that the average viewer will be rushing by them, not stopping to browse.
It's too bad: I wish more people were reading these ads, because I think they show the increasingly schismatic Republican party at its worst. The campaign is based around the idea that some state legislators, who voted with Mark Warner (our centrist Democrat governor) to raise taxes must now PAY WITH THEIR LIVES. It's no surprise that, according to this rabid conservative editorial, the campaign is being run by Grover Norquist (who is anti-tax and quite mad) and the Virginia Club for Growth. That reminds me: is there possibly a worse name for a PAC than "Club for Growth?" It sounds like either a kid's treehouse or a Viagra-centered Hair Club for Men. Neither of which is probably very far off the mark.
But to return to the actual point, the poster sets the agenda of removing all moderate Republicans from the state legislature, just because of the tax issue. Never mind that this my-way-or-the-highway posturing has little to no support, even among businesses. Never mind that these are well-liked politicians in a state that typically votes Republican (it's not like they're lacking for visibility). And certainly, never mind that this action may well split the Republican votes into two portions, the ignorant and the insane, possibly opening up slots for Democratic intervention. Norquist demands blood, especially since Warner has been able to frame tax increases (after he took over the governorship from the deliciously wingnutty Jim Gilmore and his no-car-tax medicine show) as economic and social stimulus. That kind of communism cannot stand! The purges must begin! Bring Norquist the heads of the disloyal, comrades!
This is what happens when Republicans give power to people like Norquist power, or when your party leadership starts paying attention to lunatics like the Club for Growth. Once they have tasted blood, they can barely keep from drooling and slobbering all over the scenery. They have taken the tactics of the Bush administration, both at home and abroad, to heart: leaping over barriers of good taste and manners, they go straight for the throat of the first phony argument they can find, branding all those who disagree with them as traitors. I'd like to say that I'm pleased, that this kind of goose-stepping will alienate the average Virginia voter, who loves freedom and America but who may also be dimly aware that schools and health care are not free. I would like to think that this is a grand opportunity for moderate Republicans to step up to the plate, make a few more centrist gestures, and hold off the hordes from the Cato Institute a little bit longer. But my terrible fear is that the voters are morons, the politicians are weak, and Norquist has himself another catchy slogan for the rubes.
12:12 x Thomas x /dc/propaganda x link x 1 comment
00:00 x Thomas x /dc/photos x link x 0 comments
The first Carnival of the Gamers is now available at Buttonmashing.com. Don't forget, I'll be hosting the second-ever carnival on June 9, two weeks from now, so go ahead and start sending in your pieces. I've got some good ideas for the presentation, I think. In the meantime, I intend to get involved in more Carnivals if possible. It's a good way to get writing out there, and also to read people who you might not otherwise be aware of--I've found some very nice writing through the Skeptics Circle and the Carnival of the Godless.
Meanwhile today, I've got a couple more things to write about, including the second in my series of Metro propaganda. I'm still working on my story, although it's going to be delayed--the focus is less gimmick than my usual ramblings, and so I'm trying to reach a higher level of wooden characterization, forced plotting, and stilted prose.
UPDATE: I just remembered, I really need to provide an e-mail for Carnival submissions. So if you want your work in the Second Carnival of the Gamers, send a link to your post to gamers@milezero.org. I'm setting up the mailbox now, and I can't wait to hear from you.
00:00 x Thomas x /gaming/carnival x link x 0 comments
Around 9:30 this morning, Security asked everyone to evacuate the building. We walked two blocks away, only to hear explosions and see black smoke pouring from the building. Luckily, it was just an electrical transformer. Hopefully, I'll never see a real bomb there.
There is some nervousness among the Bank staff about this kind of thing, especially since Wolfowitz came on board. This morning it materialized as some gallows humor. I think it's pretty unlikely that terrorists would attack the World Bank, myself. But having a primary architect of the Iraq war in the building won't help matters. Still, there's nothing we can do. In the meantime, I'm not really sure what to think of our reaction--we went to get coffee, people went shopping, and phone calls were made to various countries of origin before the news could hit CNN. And of course, we'll be back to work tomorrow.
00:00 x Thomas x /bank/events x link x 0 comments
Yes, I've been inattentive. No, there will probably not be any posts today. I'm working on a longer short story, my first in quite a while, and I'm very excited about it. I'll be posting it here in an experimental form as soon as it's done.
11:55 x Thomas x /meta/announce/delays x link x 1 comment
We say that actions speak louder than words. That's the point of Operation Yellow Elephant. Personally, as a journalist, I believe in the power of words, like the post by the General's inner Frenchman that sums up everything I hate about this war. It is not about freedom or democracy any more. It will wreck lives for years to come.
So while I believe in the force of a finely-tuned phrase, I'll also be planning to take part in one of Operation Yellow Elephant's Strike Teams, probably this Sunday. I don't know for sure if I'll make it--apathy is a force that I struggle with every single day, but I read patriotboy's post above and I feel like I have to do something, even if it's just satire.
Those in the DC area who feel like joining me, please let me know.
00:00 x Thomas x /politics/activism x link x 0 comments
There are some games where we want to look at them as art. For example, I just finished Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time, which has an utterly charming narrative and set of characters. The story is not only powerful, it's used as a creative device to wrap the entire game into the tradition of Scheherazade. Another that springs to mind is Ikaruga, which is the perfect shooter--you could not add any elements to Ikaruga that would make the gameplay better without either changing its genre or unbalancing the rest. These are games as art as games.
To people who confine themselves to that type of experience, Electroplankton seems a lot more revolutionary than it really is, which explains the mixed reviews. Most of the articles I've read about it are confused about the lack of replay value, the total absence of goals or unlockable content, where is the game here? And the secret, of course, is that there is no game here. This, unlike POP or Ikaruga is not art as a game. It's art as art. Although many journalists are trying to position it as a "gateway game," part of Nintendo's initiative to hook non-gamers, clearly it's not going to sell DS units. It is too odd, and people are unprepared to buy a game that's not a game. Most people will poke at the screen for a few seconds and move on.
Think of the cartridge as a gallery holding a collection by creator Toshio Iwai. Within that gallery are ten pieces of art with a common theme, both visually and musically centered around aquatic animals dubbed plankton. I'm not going to try to describe all of them, because this is not a review, but suffice to say that they range from the straightforward to the chaotic. All of them are highly interactive, through the touchscreen and the physical buttons. Some of them manipulate sounds from the DS microphone, and some of them react to that input to change their own arrangement. Depending on the plankton and the user, the results of any given piece might be music, ambient sounds, or just random noise.
If you google Iwai, you find that this is not his first electronic piece. In fact, he's a fairly well-known media artist who works in interactive electronic displays combining visuals and sound. At least one of the plankton, Luminaria, is very similar to a table installation he created in the past. He's also done similar work for the Exploratorium in California.
So what? Why am I explaining all this?
I think it's because I find myself fascinated by Electroplankton. There are a lot of lines blurred here. It's not a game, but it runs on game hardware. Does that change the meaning of the individual pieces? Does it alter how we think of art, when the pieces are digital artifacts, capable of being passed from place to place? Is the art just in the exhibits, or is it how we interact with the exhibits? Toshio Iwai's name is prominently--and deservedly--featured on the packaging and the titles, but does the user deserve any credit? What does it mean that you are a "user" or "participant," not a "viewer?" Some of the plankton are self-sufficient, but some of them seem pointless until you remember that Iwai's installations were cooperative--do I need someone else to get the most out of it?
These are not, admittedly, very deep questions, and I'm sure most of them have been contested about deeper subjects by better-informed critics. Yet I really like the way that I'm forced to think about them when I try to elaborate my impressions of this software. There aren't any goals in Electroplankton and you've seen everything in the package after a few tries, but I still find myself going back for more. I don't want all gaming to move in this direction--by all means, let's have more involving stories and clever systems like Prince of Persia and Ikaruga. On the other hand, my hope is that this experiment will cause other new programmers to ask questions about what the medium can do, and how they want to work. I'd like to see this kind of art gain more ground with the public.
00:00 x Thomas x /gaming/society/art x link x 4 comments
...any contractor willing to work on that Death Star knew the risks.
In an alternate universe, Orson Scott Card writes Clerks. Which begs the question: how impressive is it that OSC's fiction is still a great and relevant read, even as his personal viewpoint becomes steadily more fanatical and insane?
Via Pharyngula, where PZ laments the irony of it all.
00:00 x Thomas x /culture/pop/starwars x link x 0 comments
Memo to Faceless Corporation: Starbucks Edition
Your iced chai latte is good, if a little too sweet. You know what would make it perfect? Bubble tea.
Now get to work.
00:00 x Thomas x /random/letters x link x 0 comments
Every week, I look forward to Fred's Left Behind Friday over at Slacktivist. I enjoy it partly because it is always fun seeing horrible Christian apocaliterature torn apart by someone who knows the subculture and picks up on the little inhumanities, but mostly as sweet revenge. See, I've read the first couple books in the Left Behind series. I got bored one summer, grabbed them off of Gnutella (what were they doing on filesharing anyway? Isn't it a sin to steal books?) and churned my way through them. So I have first-hand experience with Jenkins and LaHaye, and I'm going to share what I found so that you don't have to satisfy your curiosity the same way.
Let's get it out of the way: the books are awful. Really, really terrible stuff. It's one thing to have an ideological viewpoint, and it's another to simply have no fictional writing ability in the slightest. Jerry Jenkins (the primary writer--Tim LaHaye is the "religious consultant," another travesty all together) combines these two flaws into a nexus of Suck unequalled through known history. I like to think of it as a tiny black hole that he keeps in his back yard, where it sucks up wandering pets and small children into its event horizon and in return generates page upon page of hysterical fascist prose.
It hurts me to say this, but Left Behind is honestly worse than Ayn Rand, who was previously my benchmark for terrible fiction. At least with Rand you can pick out a decent pulp story if you skip most of the dialogue and the misogynistic rape scenes. Her writing functions fairly well as a comic book or as a movie, where time and space restraints would carve out only the barest essentials. In contrast, Left Behind could never be improved in any medium. This is too bad, because the first book has potential. Oh, I know: if you read the Slacktivist's coverage of the book, you'll see where he's caught all kinds of psychosis just in the first 80 pages. But if you're not paying such close attention (perhaps because you're having so much trouble reading Jenkins's traffic jam prose), the Rapture scenario can hold your attention momentarily. You may start to anticipate where a better writer could take this material, someone like Garth Ennis (or Stephen King, who basically wrote the same book but without the holes in The Stand). Worse, you may hope that Jenkins's reach simply exceeds his grasp, and perhaps he plans to tell such a gripping story, but simply lacks the talent to make it run smoothly.
Ha! At that point you have fallen into his trap. As soon as Jenkins manages to bring the characters together, through a series of increasingly unlikely devices, the book goes from being an adventure story to a 300-page scripture lesson, and it never eases up for the remaining 11 books (and one prequel now). The characters simply become observers, plodding through the same simple plot structure over and over again:
Not that I found out. After the first book, I tried to struggle through another, but it was just too much for me. Which, in a way, is too bad: did you know there's a whole genre of this stuff? I could have been set for new reading material for life. Rapture porn is one of the leading Christian subgenres, romance novels for the righteous. They're even taking over new genres now. One of Jerry Jenkins's pet projects (apart from his terrifying Left Behind for Kids books, coming soon to an rural elementary near you) is the trio Soon, Silenced, and Shaken, three science fiction novels that chronicle a double agent working undercover to save the Christian minority in a dystopian future. Christians in the minority? A rational, secular government that suppresses fundamentalists? Maybe to the intended audience that's a dystopia. After reading Left Behind and realizing that these books sell millions of copies, it's starting to sound pretty good to me.
16:53 x Thomas x /culture/religion/books/leftbehind x link x 1 comment
Know who else I hate? Tony Scott. Just in case you were curious. One day I will meet Mr. Scott, and I will make him explain how it was possible for him to blatantly and perversely steal from so many great directors, including his brother, to make Man on Fire and still not end up with a good film. Somewhere out there the next great director hustles his journeyman work, hoping for funding, only to be repeatedly turned down while that worthless hack Scott is entrusted with another movie. It is enough to make even this hardcore skeptic believe in a very real and malignant Evil.
13:19 x Thomas x /random/comedy_and_tragedy x link x 1 comment
It begins: the first Carnival of the Gamers is now active. If you have something clever to say about gaming, game culture, game design, or a funny story that peripherally involves games, send it in. All submissions will be accepted.
Note on the above: please do not write in with an entry that is merely another "OMG PS3 RULES XBOX IS THE SUXX0RS" article. However, I do think more of the average Buttonmashing reader than that--it's a thoughtful site, along with many of the other gaming blogs, and I'm sure that it will attract thoughtful commentaries. I will be hosting the second Carnival, which I think is on June 9th.
13:15 x Thomas x /gaming/carnival x link x 1 comment
Is this thing on?
15:35 x Thomas x /meta/blosxom x link x 1 comment
When I left work yesterday, I decided to test the mobile browser lane, so I plugged the wifi card into my PocketPC as I walked by Starbucks on H and 18. Now, I'm used to hotspot access--they had it while I was at college, I first used this new SD card at the Panera in Fairfax, and I've also connected at DC's official hipster coffee shop, Tryst. The way it usually works is that the router will hijack your browser homepage with a login screen, asking for a nebulous EULA and maybe trying to sell you something else. It's not much of a hassle when you consider, hey, free Internet. But Starbucks is my first experience with public WiFi you have to pay for. And not surprisingly, I just walked away rather than sign up.
I don't know what their thought process was when they dreamed that up, but I can't imagine it's making them any money. I can think of at least three places within walking distance that will give me WiFi for free. And honestly, let's look at the economics of it. Pretend you are the owner of a small coffeeshop in an urban area. You have to have a phone, so you're halfway to DSL already, if you don't already have it just to handle your financial records and your ordering system. Adding access means $30 a month for the line and maybe $150 for hardware. You can use an old computer as a router, and if you're even reasonably handy or you have a technical friend, it's not hard to set it up for the re-routing trick.
Add all this up, and for a year you can figure on spending about $500 to provide your customers with access. In return, you can pretty much count on increased business. Your users are going to be divided into passers-by, who will be grateful and feel guilty enough that a few of them will buy something, and hardcore users, who will probably hang out there and drink cup after cup of your foul concoction. Your regulars may even become more loyal, since you're adding value to their visit. All in all, it seems like a pretty low cost for a high-satisfaction service.
So why is Starbucks making it so difficult?
00:00 x Thomas x /random/tech/wireless x link x 0 comments
Today, the Bank held an event saying goodbye to its president, James D. Wolfensohn. Whatever you say about the World Bank, there's now denying that JDW, as he is known, is a hell of a guy.
It remains to be seen how Paul Wolfowitz will do at the Bank. Internal opinions are mixed, but hopeful. Regardless, Jim Wolfensohn will be missed. He did a lot of good, for the World Bank, and for the world.
UPDATE: Oh, and for his closing speech, he just sent us all home early. That's an abuse of power I could get used to.
00:00 x Thomas x /bank/events x link x 0 comments
For three minutes, With Teeth had me worried. The first track, "All the Love in the World," begins like an outtake from The Fragile: staggered synth beat, wandering piano, reserved vocals. Trent Reznor's voice cracks in the first verse, then recovers. Gradually, the song grows until it's good, but not great. And then, almost exactly at 3:13, the bottom drops out. The extra noises vanish, the piano reverts to power chords, and the synth beat is replaced by a classic cheesy NIN kick, pounding out quarter notes. Reznor reemerges vocally, stronger, surrounded by a chorus of thousands. It's like watching Keanu Reeves walk into the lobby of the Matrix for the first time.
At that moment, I knew that With Teeth was going to be just fine.
What you need to understand about With Teeth is that it is a collection of singles. I have a personal rule about NIN CDs: I never shuffle them. On the last two full releases, The Downward Spiral and The Fragile, the songs are part of a cohesive whole, blending from one to another. The Fragile in particular uses instrumentals to move between songs, changing moods, tempos, and styles. With Teeth doesn't do any of that. It's not a concept album, and it's easier to listen to, although perhaps less ultimately rewarding.
That being said, there's hardly a bad song here, no matter what order you play them in. Reznor isn't taking any huge steps forward technically, but he sounds absolutely comfortable with the tools at his disposal, and it lets him stretch out sonically. Tracks like "The Line Begins to Blur", "Every Day Is Exactly The Same," and "Getting Smaller" are vintage NIN, with heavy distortion and vocals wrapped around a complicated but ultimately danceable beat. They're great, but it's oddballs like "Sunspots" and "With Teeth" that stand out. The former sounds like the Pixies run through a blender, and the latter struts monstrously through the overpronounced but oddly catchy chorus ("uh-WITH-uh-TEETH-ah!"). The radio single, "The Hand That Feeds," has grown on me with repeated listenings. Its rhyming dictionary chorus is its weakest link and a throwback to Reznor's sometimes clumsy writing skills, but the rest of the song is solid, enjoyable industrial pop.
By far my favorite song on With Teeth is it's most unique offering, "Only." The drumbeat is funky even by NIN standards, and it's got one of those two-note basslines that induce chronic toe-tapping. But it's the lyrics and their delivery that cracks me up, since Reznor speaks his lines like some sort of manic beat poet.
The weakest points of the CD are songs that don't take advantage of Reznor's new range. "You Know What You Are?" and "The Collector" almost stall With Teeth after "All the Love in the World" as solid but unremarkable NIN. They could easily be tracks from The Downward Spiral or Broken. Besides that, it's hard for me to find much fault here. The production is, of course, flawless, and the DVD side of the dual-disc format offers a "Hand That Feeds" music video and a 5.1 mix, which is very nice. The lack of a theme means that With Teeth may not hold up as well as previous NIN releases in the long run, but that's not the intention. Instead, it's a great set of songs collected for shorter listening times. Fans of Reznor's work should definitely pick it up.
One last note: the dual-disc version may have some decent features, but it also doesn't always play nice with various CD and DVD players. My car unit (a cheap Panasonic) and home computer optical drive (some bizarre Korean import technology bought on a whim) handle it just fine, but the Dell computers at work don't like it. They refuse to even see the CD side, and have trouble reading the DVD side. If you have a choice, and you don't plan on listening to it in a 5.1 setup, see if a copy on standard CD exists. The extras aren't worth the hassle.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/artists/nin x link x 0 comments
Blosxom calls them "flavours" and I call them "lanes" because I dig the road metaphor I've got on the site so far. They're alternate site templates you can apply. Right now I've added a link to the RSS feed for this page (as well as automatic feed notification in Firefox, thanks to Peter from Tea Leaves), and there's a mobile edition. I don't know if anyone other than me will use the latter, but now that I'm once again rocking the PocketPC wifi, it'll be nice not to see my layout mangled in 240 pixels. It's still pretty mangled, but intentionally.
I am examining comment systems again, and I've almost settled on one called Pollxn. It looks workable and lightweight, but I'll have to spend some time poking around under the hood and writing new templates. I don't feel like doing that this afternoon, and I don't have all the tools I really want here at work. I'm sure it'll be done this week, though--Belle's off to see U2, and I'll have some free time.
On an odd side note, I don't really use the command line for anything other than troubleshooting anymore, which is a little saddening. I cut my teeth on old DOS commands, and I miss the sense of speed. Maybe that's why I do all my FTP by hand nowadays. Nothing beats "cd blog cd meta cd announce lcd desktop/personal bin send changing_lanes.txt quit" for geek fu.
00:00 x Thomas x /meta/announce x link x 0 comments
I may have to buy one of John Scalzi's books, since he's just written such an excellent defense of book piracy. He notes that there are really only two kinds of people who pirate books:
As for the people who can't pay for things, well, look. I grew up poor and made music tapes off the radio; my entire music collection from ages 11 to 14 consisted of tapes that had songs missing their first ten seconds and whose final ten seconds had DJ chatter on them; from 14 to 18, I taped off my friends; from 18 to 22 I reviewed music so I could get it for free. And then after that, once I had money, I bought my music. Because I could. As for books, I bought secondhand paperbacks through my teen and college years. Now I buy hardbacks. Again, because I can. Now, being a writer, you can argue that I'm more self-interested in paying for creative work than others, but I have to honestly say that I don't know anyone who can pay for a book or a CD or a DVD or whatever who doesn't, far more often than not.
See, here are the facts: when I was in college, and just after I graduated, I worked crappy jobs with horrible hours for very little money. $7 for a paperback seemed like a lot of money, so I have quite a collection of random e-books that I've downloaded from USENET or P2P over the years. Ditto for music. Now, I have a decent job with regular hours paying me more money than I honestly know what to do with, and so I buy books. Constantly. I have an Amazon order on the way, and I love being able to stop in and buy any book I feel like on a whim. $7 isn't very much to me any more. I've started a bad habit of using CDs to fill out my book orders on Amazon so they'll qualify for the free shipping. I feed my sci-fi habits, but I also buy non-fiction and political fiction and all kinds of crazy things.
What Scalzi doesn't explicitly point out, but which I think is an excellent supplement to his argument, is that people who love books want to own the paper copy. Don't get me wrong--e-books are great, because they are portable and searchable and you rarely lose your place. I carry at least two unread e-books at all times, because I hate boredom and I always have my iPaq nearby. But I love, deeply love, books. I love how easy it is to read the pages. I love the cover art and the typefaces and the ease with which I can loan them to people. And perhaps most of all, I love buying them, because for a long time I couldn't buy them. Being able to buy books, to me, is a sign of how my life is measurably better.
And authors who make their books available for free? Oh, they have a special warm place in my heart. Eric Flint and David Drake and Cory Doctorow (and now Scalzi): I will buy your books, as soon as I can get through the ones I already own, because you gave me mental sustenance during those days of lower financial security. Thank you, for not treating me like the pirate I was.
00:00 x Thomas x /fiction/industry/ebooks x link x 0 comments
My apartment's Internet connection appears to have taken a summer vacation, and may not be fixed for a while. Thanks, Cox High-Speed Internet! I'll be able to check e-mail and post again on Monday.
00:00 x Thomas x /meta/announce/delays x link x 0 comments
Politricks who robin hood down your zone
And now for something completely different: Philanthropica's Madmunk looks deep into the crystal ball of the Kansas City Star and compares the list of senators abusing DC housing tax exemptions to the list of Finance committee members pursuing the same kind of abuse in the non-profit sector. Included is a list of numbers and addresses. This is not an isolated problem--I've heard of Rick "Puppy Love" Santorum doing the same thing with his Pennsylvania home--but it's a disgrace regardless. I'm especially annoyed at Ted Kennedy, Jim Jeffords, and Jay Rockefeller, people I thought had more principle than that.
There are phone numbers. Perhaps someone could call them.
Be sure to check out the rest of the writing--I particularly like the piece on song covers, and would like to see it taken further.
00:00 x Thomas x /dc/gov/taxes x link x 0 comments
I'm going to put this under journalism, even though it's a gaming issue, because I think the former is more relevant.
Recently, a writer for Gamespy submitted a review of Donkey Konga 2 to his editors. When it was actually published, he noticed it had grown an extra 30% to its ranking, as well as being subject to a significant modification of its content. Jane of Game Girl Advance (who, full disclosure, works for one of the major game publications), immediately flailed around bonelessly searching for something to say about the controversy.
It's not a case of "Gamespy sucks Nintendo's cock" or any other crappy shallow assessment of the situation; Gamespy has a right to try to control the editorial voice. The problem is we feed on an industry where TIME is at a premium - the idea is, whoever gets the newest stuff up FIRST wins. So we scramble to put up reviews and previews and news as fast as we possibly can. And in this case it meant that Gamespy editorial decided to quickly edit a freelancer's review to reflect more closely what they thought the game should get, instead of trying to talk to the reviewer and come to a better solution.
She concludes with no real solution at all, instead merely the weak rhetorical device "Maybe we need a revolution." Peter at Tea Leaves comments succinctly on how this kind of sloppy ethical thinking has led to the lack of credibility for the game magazine industry. He ties this in to the lack of credibility held by the game mag industry, noting that there is no game reviewer with the cachet of a single lowly local movie reviewer. I think it's more related to the lack of respect we as a society have for games in general, but the point is a valid one. As many have pointed out in recent months (just check These Damned Machines Are Killing Me for great examples), gaming magazines are awful, immature chunks of paper visually reminiscent of a freshman design major's first Photoshop project. The market's supposed to be getting older, so why isn't the media?
But I'm getting off-topic. What stuns me about the whole debacle is that they actually thought they could get away with this--substantially altering the tone and conclusions of a review without contacting the writer? I mean, editorial vision is all well and good, but there's a reason that most magazines (on- or offline) ask you to consider their tone when writing. If it doesn't match that voice, or if it's not up to editorial standards, editors have two choices:
So say that you're an editor at Gamespy, and you get a review for a game that completely misses the boat--which, to be fair, seems to be what happened. It bitches about inconsequentialities, doesn't correspond to the review of the previous installment, and just generally reads like something off Pitchfork Media. I guess you could alter the thing yourself, post it up, and hope that your writer is spineless/greedy enough not to care. Or you could do your job, send an e-mail back to the writer with the requisite changes, and ask to have it back the next day while you allocate your valuable time for the tasks that actually apply to being an editor. It's called delegation of labor--you're not asking him to play through the whole game again, it's not some herculean task. And if he refuses to work with you then you write it yourself and you don't hire that writer again. I doubt there's a shortage of people willing to write game reviews out there.
I don't think these people really understand how great they have it. Apparently, for them, copy editing just means running the article through a spellcheck and making sure that it reads consistently. It's not their fault, really--people like Jane aren't really interested in journalism. They just want to write about games, and games only, and someone gave them a chance. I'm sure most of them have no interest in writing about current events, or learning about the fact-check process, or moving on to more credible print institutions. Many of them are probably aiming for jobs in the industry. Self-limited writers like this are all over the place. I've worked with a lot of them, and for some of them. Nevertheless, because of the way they are writing and being edited, the institution isn't growing. There's precious little intellectual curiosity at work, and no big-picture view (another role the editor should be playing).
Jane is absolutely wrong about her "revolution." I've seen the revolution at sites like render and insert credit, it calls itself New Games Journalism, and although it has the vision it is plagued by the same lack of discipline. I dig NGJ, but it's not the prescription for this illness. The solution is not some sort of industry-wide paradigm shift, or the eradication of ratings. It's simply hard work and a dedication to the same ethical principles that traditional journalists employ. It requires hiring people whose worldview is wider than games, and it means paying them better in compensation. The revolution is the easy way out, and it misses the point--they need an ombudsman, not a manifesto. Unfortunately, I don't think we can rely on people like Jane to make that effort. The change will have to come when games percolate farther into our consciousness, and readers begin to demand better. If we're lucky, this debacle will further that process.
00:00 x Thomas x /journalism/ethics x link x 0 comments
PZ Myers at Pharyngula did a very foolish thing--he publicly complained that there were too few submissions for his hosting of the 8th Skeptics Circle. Now he's published the results, with 48 (!) fine examples of critical thinking from around the Internets. I am proud to say that two of them are mine, on the Epoch Times and Why People Believe Weird Things. Now that I'm done with the self-promotion, I also have to say that I was very impressed with the submissions from Shades of Grey ("On Skepticism"), Oasis of Sanity (hysteria and chemicals in food), alphabitch ("Losing My Religion. Or Not."), I'll Explain It When You Are Older (Psych students and evolution), and Saint Nate (alien abductions).
The next Circle will be back at Saint Nate's place, so get cracking on the crackpots.
00:00 x Thomas x /science/skepticism x link x 0 comments
For those who are interested, the hamster has been recaptured. She is alive and well. Perhaps too alive and well. Let's hope that brief taste of freedom does not prove to be a dangerous precedent.
Also, With Teeth is here. I listened to it on the metro, and will run through it a couple more times today, I'm sure. But my initial impressions are excellent. For better or worse, it is definitely a Nine Inch Nails album.
00:00 x Thomas x /random/personal/fyi x link x 0 comments
Following in the footsteps of Buttonmashing, I'll be hosting the second ever Carnival of the Gamers on June 9. In the meantime, the first Carnival will be held on the 26th, so get your submissions ready! Entries from blogs that are not exclusively gaming-focused are welcome--this doesn't need to be another gameblogs.org. Fresh viewpoints, people!
More details will follow.
00:00 x Thomas x /gaming/carnival x link x 0 comments
Second Life's Sexual Ambiguities
Let me start by saying that I love Bonnie Ruberg's work, and have been meaning to link her at Heroine Sheik for a while now. This Wired article on a porn mag launched in Second Life, however, raises some interesting questions that I'm surprised she didn't address (although perhaps she will in another place). The magazine uses online avatars as models for its spreads, but only female models. The magazine's editor-in-chief, Thomas Struszka, gives two reasons as to why: there are more options for attractive women in Second Life, and because many women in the game are real-life men there's a high demand for attractive females from a wide pool of users.
I want to know more about this. What do the options for females represent? It seems unlikely to me, given the high amount of customization and skinning present in traditionally male-targeted genres like FPS and racing (Need for Speed, anyone?), that the "women want to buy more clothes and jewelry to be pretty" excuse will work. The desire to differentiate one's avatar isn't restricted to one gender or another. My guess would be that when he says there are more options for attractive women online, what he really means is that female avatars are innately sexualized, while male avatars don't have to be. In other words, if you're female online, you're a sex object. Men could be, but don't have to be, so there's not as many options for them. This would tie into the recent World of Warcraft naked skins, which were (shocking, I know) only available for female characters (as if that's a coveted bonus).
While that's really nothing more than another patriarchy moment for us to cherish, Struszka's other off-hand remark raises a completely different set of issues. He's presenting porn to his users with models that are not only may look different in real life from their virtual representation, but may be of another gender entirely (and there's nothing wrong with that). So what does it mean about the relationship of purchasers to this publication? If you pointed out to a reader that the large-breasted, blue woman he or she is ogling might actually be Jonah Goldberg, does that lessen the appeal? Are people buying this for the fantasy of the image, or for the "woman" behind the image? One of the criticisms I've read of porn in more academic circles is that it dehumanizes the subject--again, it turns them into sex objects. There's been, I think (don't quote me, because it's not like I read about porn all day long. Blame Pandagon's occasional forays into the subject) some debate on whether objectification is intrinsic to the medium, or whether it's produced because of the culture in which porn exists (in other words, is it possible to create "progressive pornography"). Certainly, it wouldn't seem like you could get more distant and objectified than image files of rendered polygons created by faceless, anonymous users for sale to other anonymous users.
On the other hand, it's apparently a $.60 purchase when you figure the exchange rate. So maybe it's just a novelty buy. Who knows?
Update: Kotaku reports that soon they'll be publishing real-life photos next to the avatar's images. The reaction will be very interesting.
00:00 x Thomas x /gaming/society/gender x link x 0 comments
Danny sits alone in his closet, a blanket wrapped around him. The clock on the wall reads 2:13am, with Mickey's white gloved hand's pointing to the right like a hapless disco dancer. Danny can't read the clock--he's only 4, and his class at school won't learn to tell time for another month and a half. He just knows that it is late, and he is afraid of the light outside his door.
"You're not hiding very well, you know," Rabbit says. "They can smell you. Do you think they're hungry?"
Shut up! Danny shouts--well, doesn't actually shout, because that might bring them after him. But he thinks it, hard, at Rabbit. Shut up! I don't like you any more!
Rabbit just grins in the dark and undulates silently, grotesquely, his stuffed ears brushing against the wall. When Rabbit used to talk, Danny only heard him in his own head, and he only said what Danny wanted him to say. Now Rabbit says strange things, grownup things, and Danny thinks that he hears him with his ears more and more. Or does he? How would you test that? And would it make anything better if he were right?
Outside his door, the light shifts, and Danny shrinks farther back into his blanket. The yellow light against his blue carpet turns it into an unfamiliar landscape, with sharp black shadows. It is brighter tonight.
"Do you think they're closer?" Rabbit asks softly. Danny doesn't reply. He hates the questions more than when Rabbit threatens, because they make him think of answers. The first time Rabbit spoke to him, after Danny saw the bad spot, he asked a question. It was another late night, and as Danny lay awake thinking about the yellow under his mother's fingernails, Rabbit asked him:
"Have you ever seen blood like that before?"
And Danny hadn't been thinking that it was blood at all, had in fact wondered if it was mustard or dried paint crusted under Mom's nails, but then he knew. After that, Rabbit asked lots of questions, especially about the yellow, when it appeared on his mom or dad like one of those lottery cards that Danny liked to rub with a quarter. It was never in the same place twice, and where it had been the skin was looser and... thinner.
"I'm sure it's nothing to be afraid of, Danny." said Rabbit, and he shakes again, up on his shelf. Danny knows that means Rabbit is laughing. "It's just your parents..."
And Danny shrieks "They're not my parents! NOT MY PARENTS! THEY'RE NOT!" before he realizes that he's standing up in the closet, his fists balled at his side, shaking with fury. The light under the door pulses and shifts again, a heavy tread moving closer. Danny's skin goes from hot to clammy instantly. He can't move. The steps halt at the door, and something touches the knob lightly. Danny thinks of loose, sloppy flesh taking hold to turn it, what used to be his mother's hand.
"Danny?" His mom's voice calls softly. "Is everything okay in there?"
Rabbit laughs.
00:00 x Thomas x /fiction/micro x link x 0 comments
Every now and then I get annoyed at how far my foreign language skills have slipped, and I saturate myself in media way above my level. At the Civil Society event, there were a lot of Spanish- and Mandarin- speakers there, and so now I have a ton of Spanish and Mandarin movies in my Netflix queue. Last night I watched The Road Home, which I'd been looking forward to, because it's by Zhang Yimou (Hero) and stars Zhang Ziyi (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). It wasn't a bad movie. It wasn't very good either.
The Road Home begins with a young man returning to his home village for his father's funeral. His mother insists that the father, a former schoolteacher, must be carried back to the village on foot, as is tradition. This prompts the flashback that makes up most of the story--how the schoolteacher and his wife met and fell in love. It's an old story, but that doesn't mean it's a bad one. And there's a lot going for this, frankly. The cinematography is quite good, using the backdrop of rural China to full effect, including a stunning set of snowbound shots. Zhang Ziyi turns in a very good performance--Americans who are used to seeing her as a flawlessly beautiful martial artist will, I think, be surprised to see her with such baggy clothes and awkward movements, but it's a really well-done physical portrayal.
Still, the movie drags a bit. The courtship between the schoolteacher and Zhang is chaste and, while cute, not terribly passionate. This is a G-rated flick in more ways than one. There's never really any tension between the two lovers, and no sense of discovery. When the teacher is hauled back to the city for political reasons (most likely the Cultural Revolution), Zhang waits for him patiently and obsessively, but I wasn't really convinced that she should have. Likewise, at the end of the film, when the father's funeral is supported by hundreds of his former students, it's a nice gesture but one that's not really supported by the rest of the movie. It's simply meant to be a given somehow that he was a great, inspiring teacher.
The Road Home has won several international awards, but I'm not really sure why--surely there were better foreign flicks available in 2001. It felt to me like an old Disney film--it's a throwback. It's a quality movie, make no mistake, but there's no real distinctiveness to go with that quality. It's accessible for an American audience, with no obscure customs or motives that need to be translated across cultural boundaries. All in all, I'd say this is a good lazy Sunday film, or a fine date movie, if your date is into subtitled Chinese drama.
00:00 x Thomas x /culture/asia/china/film x link x 0 comments
Book Review: Distraction, by Bruce Sterling
Lately I've been reading a lot. When I cleaned out my car, I dumped all the books I'd finished on the Metro into the trunk, which resulted in a view of nothing but books. More are on the way. If anything good has come of my recent raise, it's clearly that I can now afford to buy books on a regular basis. And that means that I can try out new authors.
Sterling is not a new author, but he's one of those people that you're supposed to have read in SF, and I never got around to it. I read his Victorian steampunk effort with William Gibson, The Difference Engine, and liked it a lot, but I think the covers on his paperbacks just always looked way too self-consciously trashy for me to read them. I won't be making that mistake again--I've already started picking up more Sterling just on the strength of this book.
Distraction is a dystopian political thriller, if that makes any sense at all. It's set in the US after China and India, among other factors, caused a serious economic crash. Intellectual property is essentially devalued, leaving science stranded and the country struggling between a wealthy political upper class, and roving, networked mobs. The main character, Oscar Valpraiso, is a political consultant just off a campaign to elect asenator he thinks could bring the country back together. When the senator suffers a breakdown, Oscar is stranded at a science lab in Texas, where he tries to put the lab and Big Science back together while fending off violent takeover attempts by the crazed governor of Louisiana.
Looking back on it, I guess it's obvious that Distraction is a pretty messy novel, but the story is gripping while you read it, and there aren't any real loose ends to be tied up. The book is also filled with clever little moments that fuse sci-fi and politics, like the flash mob called in to storm a bank at the novel's beginning, and the mob respect network lifted and improved from Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. There's also Oscar's Personal Background Problem, a scandalous secret from his past. Every character in the book, at one point or another, reassures him that it'll remain a secret between just those two, eventually becoming a running gag worth a smile every chapter or so.
Despite the wit and the craft that went into it, I can single out one gaping flaw in Distraction: like many political novels, it has problems of scale. The plot zooms from close-ups of the main characters, most of whom are interesting and active, out to general descriptions of the larger political decisions and impacts. When it takes the long view, it's harder for Sterling to Show and not Tell, so the novel reads more like a plot outline and less like a book, until it dives back into the muck of Oscar's life.
All in all, this is a book that should appeal to a wide group of people as the new wave of SF. Like Doctorow and Gibson, Sterling's writing here is undoubtably futurism, but it's character- and society-centered, making it much more accessible (and, it hurts me a little to say, smarter) than Larry Niven-style gadgetism. Distraction walks a fine line between commentary, satire, and fiction, but ultimately it's a successful balancing act that's great fun to read.
00:00 x Thomas x /fiction/reviews/sterling x link x 0 comments
I can't help it: every time I go into an EB Games now, this box is staring back at me, and I find it oddly hypnotic. I'm not really attracted to it, per se, it's just a very striking character design. I think it's the eyes--she's like a sultry emo girl of doom.
Too bad it's one of those crazy online fantasy timewasters, so I'll never actually play it. But kudos to the art team anyway.
00:00 x Thomas x /gaming/design/art x link x 0 comments
I just looked down to see inchworms crawling over my computer. Real inchworms, look just like the cartoon versions. It looks like somehow they hatched out of an envelope filter I had opened and then left on top. It left me torn between amazement and detached horror.
Then I wiped the little bastards up with a paper towel, flushed them, and put the pedal out on the window ledge. Because the wonder of nature is all well and good, but I don't need inchworms getting all in my motherboard.
00:00 x Thomas x /random/personal/events x link x 0 comments
This is why I don't own a PSP (apart from the expense). I should not have to carry around an extra battery plugged into my console for it to last a reasonable amount of time. This is not 1990 any more. I expect more from my electronics.
The PSP is not so much more powerful than the DS that I can explain the huge difference in power draw--it's like a Dreamcast vs. an N64. So why is it sucking the battery dry three times as fast? With PocketPCs, where we've been fighting the battery life battle for years, the biggest drain was the screen followed by the processor--but the PSP screen is the same as a DS screen, bigger, but there's only one. The only conclusion I can reach is that the handheld is simply poorly engineered. That being said, I'm still waiting for some serious hardware-pushing 3D games on DS. I get the feeling that nothing has really challenged it yet. Need For Speed comes closest, followed by Metroid Prime: Hunters. The latter has the potential to be a really beautiful game.
Halo on a DS would absolutely slay me. Are you listening, Bungie?
00:00 x Thomas x /gaming/portable/competition x link x 0 comments
As a way of saving time and energy, as well as informing the linguistically curious, I'm going to repost some comments I made over at Skeptico as a side note. There was some confusion over the pronunciation of qi, the Chinese term for living energy flow used in acupuncture and martial arts. I said (edited for context):
Chi is the most natural sounding--the vowel is pronounced as in English. Qi is the "accented" version. For most intents and purposes, English-speakers can pronounce chi and qi the same, just the way it looks. Because English doesn't have tones, we butcher Mandarin anyway, so leaving the umlaut off is relatively minor. It's just good to know that although the pronunciation is almost the same, the meaning can be very different.
When actually trying to speak Mandarin, on the other hand, it's very significant, and very difficult for Americans to do correctly. I got a lot of stares from people when I was there for a month, only to be "clarified" by my professor with a word that sounded (to me) exactly the same. Talk about frustrating. It takes a lot of practice.
Pinyin is the romanization system used by the mainland Chinese, and is the official system of the PRC. Taiwan (and to some extent Hong Kong, if I remember correctly) still uses the old system, Wade-Giles. I think the new system is less confusing, personally, but neither of them is necessarily "intuitive" for non-Mandarin use. For example, the same q/ch structure also exists for j/zh and x/sh.
This has been your introductory Mandarin grammar lesson for the day. Now, please turn the tape to side B.
00:00 x Thomas x /culture/asia/china/mandarin x link x 0 comments
The zombie obsession unites us all and brings families together. This kid has the right priorities. Forget your puny living will! Who will take care of my shuffling corpse when the inevitable bite occurs? I need an undying will!
Posting is light. Work is busy, and then I must catch up on writing. The temptation to use this book to unite my multitude of obsessions is terrible in both scope and consequences...
00:00 x Thomas x /culture/undead x link x 0 comments
