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.
Nintendo is the reddest sun in our hearts*
*a play on an old Maoist slogan.
Last year at some point I noted a particularly nice turn of phrase by the writer at Broken Saints: "This is the sound of four lines dropping." It's the kind of clever reference to Tetris that evokes both the concept (oh, how sweet it was to engineer those four-minus-one-block lines) and the peculiar honk of a Gameboy. You have to have a certain level of cultural penetration to make a reference like that. Most gamers probably get it, and according to Nielsen an increasing amount of non-fanatics are seeing games as a common cultural experience, similar to books, television, and movies (via Brinstar).
What nobody seems to be asking is: a common cultural experience for who? The Nielsen study conveniently breaks it down by gender and race, and tells us which groups have greater potential for video game purchases, conveniently sidestepping the class issue. See, with console prices going up even in the cheaper realm of handhelds (the DS is $5 to $10 more per game than the GBA, and don't get me started on the PSP), I'm beginning to wonder if this hobby isn't becoming a cultural experience for the rich, leaving the poor behind.
Most modern culture, at a basic level, has a cost of entry. You have to buy a TV to watch anything from Seinfeld to PBS. DVDs are extra money, and so are movie tickets. Libraries are basically free, but you have to pay transportation costs to get there. It's not fashionable to discuss the digital divide in this country, but (as I've pointed out before) minorities and the poor have far lower access to computers and the Internet--and my inner Socialist notes that those facilities in particular grant great opportunities for leaving poverty. The gap between rich and poor is wider as the technology grows more current and more powerful.
Can you be a member of the wider mainstream culture without taking part in these media artifacts? To some extent, yes. Having access to several information streams can even compensate for a lack in others: I don't watch much TV, but I catch up on shows I like via Netflix, or read about them at Television Without Pity. If you're missing too many streams, however, you may end up a bit culturally out of sync. I'd propose that being able to connect with your work cohort culturally at a certain level is a significant factor (among others) in advancement through white-collar employment. You need to have a common cultural ground to communicate with others, to understand their position, and to appeal to them.
In a country with a shrinking middle class, I worry about the non-material factors separating the rich from the poor. Videogames may not be a primary cultural experience yet, but they are increasingly useful as metaphors and as an introduction to other technological interfaces. In the same way that the expense of compilers and documentation creates a high proportion of White, upper-class software developers, a rising cost of videogames may begin to prune the population of gamers as well. If the more thoughtful community is really going to treat gaming as a cultural artifact, an art form, and a force for good, we need to pay attention to which audiences can afford that good--and which ones are being left out in the cold.
23:39 x Thomas x /gaming/society/class_and_race x link x 1 comment
Tapioca pearls for homemade bubble tea have been located, in both classic black and multicolored. I found them tonight at the H Mart in Merrifield, VA, just past Gallows Road. If you've never tried them before, now you've got no excuse.
10:28 x Thomas x /culture/asia/imported x link x 1 comment
Here are a few presentations that have caught my eye this month while working for the Bank's Internet broadcasting arm. Of course, I'm an armchair development strategist--you may or may not be as fascinated as I've been.
00:00 x Thomas x /bank/events/bspan x link x 0 comments
Sure, but is there a giant robot fighting for debt relief?
From the sales pitch:
Rei's pride and ambition set him up for many a fall, but throughout the series, his good heart and inability to walk away from those in need makes him an engaging and likeable protagonist who will appeal to young men and women alike.
The first two pages are available here.
No comment.
00:00 x Thomas x /bank/analysis/pr x link x 0 comments
Although latency remains a possible issue, my sound library wishes have been answered courtesy of BASS, an audio library that runs on Windows and OS X. The code is as simple as initializing the defaults, loading the sounds to memory, and then calling BASS_ChannelPlay(). You can add extras like EAX, multiple outputs, streaming, and many other features I won't ever use for this kit. Still, I highly recommend it, especially for Visual Basic developers. It's free for personal use, and relatively cheap for a license.
Speaking of Visual Basic, I remain thrilled by the possibilities of Visual Basic for Applications as a development framework. Are you going to craft Quake 5 in it? Probably not, although it wouldn't surprise me to see it done. The bottom line is that most of the functionality that I'll ever use is built into either the Office suite or Windows itself (accessible through .dll calls). I can do very complicated things in very little time, because the language largely stays out of my way. In my more utopian moments I imagine an operating system that runs scripts as if they were programs, creating a remix-friendly environment for experimentation and imagination. Windows has this ability, somewhat, but it was hidden away after the Melissa virus debacles. I wish they would make it more accessible, a bit like what Apple did with the Dashboard widgets, but on a grander scale. It seems to me that a lot of wild ideas would be implemented if people knew these tools existed.
As for my wild ideas, I'll have to test DrumPad with ControlMK tonight to see if the drunken drummer syndrome remains in effect. With success, I can finish building the application out with customized sample support for release. That's when the really crazy thinking begins, because I've been daydreaming about the input possibilities for this project. After all, there are some bizarre peripherals out there for xBox, and now they're under my control. One of the more intriguing possibilities is adapting a dance pad to USB for foot control. Blues artists have been known to mike a tapping foot for percussive sounds--but why limit yourself to footstomps and feedback when you can just step away on a DDR mat? There's also the possibility of pulling the triggers out of the mat, and taping them to different surfaces. V-drum kits typically start at $800. I can build a cheap alternative for $20. There's a lot of potential here.
00:00 x Thomas x /gaming/hardware/control x link x 0 comments
Archivist's note: I received the following excerpt the other day on the fax line that I give out for my freelance work. It looked to have been originally printed on cheap newsprint, crumpled, and then rescued from a trash can. At first, I figured it was a wrong number or an advertisement, and went to throw it away. After a closer examination, however, I was fascinated by the story within. I've tried to reproduce it here to the best of my abilities, in the hopes that someone else can verify the information inside.
A Talk with the Neighborhood Abominable Snowman
By Tenna Vasquez
EXCLUSIVE TO THE NATIONAL WEEKLY WORLD INQUIRER NEWS!! MUST CREDIT NWWIN!!
"It's hard, you know? I won't lie to you now. It's hard." The yeti leans back in his chair, a stylish Swedish contraption made of balsa wood and green canvas. I expected to be in a forest for this interview, but instead my directions brought me to a condo in Greenbelt, Maryland. The yeti met me at the door and gave me a Coke, which I sip in his lounge-themed living room.
"I mean," he continues, "being a mythical creatures isn't what it used to be. But you've got to change with the times, man. Just keep on truckin', you know?" And with those words, the Yeti unloads his furry soul to me.
CON MEN
"For example, everyone's always tryin' to make money off you. All kinds of people. They sell fake yeti fur, yeti toenails. Maybe they really believe it, but in the end they're still taking advantage of others." The snowman sighs and reaches across his desk. "It's not just me, right? Check this out." He hands me a plastic card with scribbles all over it. "It's supposed to be some kind of astral protection, but this guy Skeptico says it's just a waste of time. People are paying good money for that. I'm in the wrong business."
It's as bad as homeopathy, the yeti insists. "Do you know how much I've paid for homeopathic fur softeners?" he complains. "And then I find out from my friend Jim at Some Are Boojums that they might hurt animals. Heck, I might have been better off doing nothing at all! It's killing my self esteem." I try to look comforting, but he's off on a new target before I can get a word in. "I've tried it all, you know? And it took Pharyngula's PZ Myers to clue me in, but I finally realized that alternative medicine, even from a university, isn't going to help anyone."
I try to change the subject before he gets really excited.
BACK TO SCIENCE
The yeti isn't upset by people who claim he doesn't exist, which surprises me. I was worried that he wouldn't react well when I brought it up, but he's really very sympathetic. "I can't blame them," he says. "There's no evidence for me at all, really--and there's not going to be." I remember his insistence that a photographer would not be allowed. So he's a pro-science bigfoot?
"Oh, absolutely. Look at the history of us mythical creatures. A pack of hoaxes and lies, you know? And now they're trying to tar science with the same kind of crap. Look at this post from Matt at Pooflinger's Anonymous, about textbooks that try to discredit evolution. That stuff really burns me up. I'm thinking about running for the local school board."
But isn't he flattered by the attention of the hoaxers?
"No way, those people are nuts. Bunch of tin-foil wearing conspiracy-theorists. And that's not even going to help them. I saw the other day a note from Phil at Bad Astronomy where MIT studied foil headwear and couldn't find any benefit. It's a bad scene. I don't want to be associated with that kind of thing."
He's getting worked up again. Before I can stop him, he's rummaging through another stack of papers to add to my growing collection of handouts. "Here," he says, thrusting another hairy hand toward me with a printout. "This is what I'm talking about. You've got to be skeptical, but you also have to be scientific, you know what I mean?" I nod, but I have no idea, so to cover I look down at the paper. It's a post from Orac, covering Dean Esmay's HIV denialism, and it is very detailed. The snowman is grinning at me--respectfully, but insolently.
LOSING HIS RELIGION
So what does a yeti believe about the world beyond? The answer is vague. "It's not really specific," the yeti muses. "Am I in an organized religion? No, not really. On the other hand, I've got friends who are writing their own creation myths, like Mark at Be Lambic or Green and his egocentric intelligent design. Whatever works for them, right?"
But the yeti does get specific about what he doesn't believe. He's not a believer in Reiki, for example. "Check out what EoR wrote at The Second Sight about it: it's more of secret cult. I've got no time for that kind of thing. What's next, Scientology?"
He's also dismissive of supersititions. "It'd be one thing if you could produce results with it. But it's really being laid out that there's no accuracy derived from mysticism. People are keeping diaries, something I've always wanted to do. Look at Jim from Decorabilia: he's chronicling his dreams to compare them to reality--I don't want to live in his dreams! Or Rockstar Ryan's Rockstar Ramblings about his horoscopes: it's great snark, but also great skepticism about the techniques of fortune-telling."
"In the end, I guess you could say I'm non-denominationally spiritual," says the yeti. "But then I think--man, I don't even know what that means, dig? I'll say this," and he leans in closer to me, "the atheism argument is pretty convincing some days. I've read Darksyde's What It Feels Like To Be an Atheist at Unscrewing the Inscrutable, and I just about give up on religion. ...or become a Santist, really." He peeks down at my notes. "That's 'Santist,'" he says. "Not 'Satanist.' Make sure you get that right."
MO BETTA' META
Our time's just about up, and I stand to take my leave. The not-so-abominable snowman seems uncomfortable with goodbye, and continues to thrust skeptical writing at me. "You want some more classical stuff?" he asks, and hands over some skeptical philosophy from Steve at Socratic Gadfly. "Or maybe you want to talk about fighting a backlash against the Enlightenment, like this piece from Skeptic Rant's LBBP?" I assure the yeti that I'm sure it's very nice, but I have a deadline to meet and a long Metro trip ahead of me.
Looking back on it, all I've got from my interview with the yeti is just pages of notes. I forgot to even get a fur sample. But while his existence may be in doubt, the lessons of critical thought he taught me are something I can take to the bank.
(signed) Tenna Vasquez, for the The National Weekly World Inquirer News
Hope you enjoyed this take on the Skeptic's Circle, and be sure to check out the next edition at Circadiana, to be held on December 8th. Thanks to Orac for letting me host, and have a great and skeptical Thanksgiving!
00:54 x Thomas x /science/skepticism x link x 1 comment
This story (listen to it here), about a lobotomy patient who goes looking for the story of his operation, is one of the most powerful, painful, and riveting things I have heard in a long time. I caught it on the way home today, and spent 10 minutes in the car to hear it finish. This kind of reporting is the reason that NPR is a national treasure.
16:16 x Thomas x /random/linky x link x 1 comment
I'm still working, off and on, with getting my gamepad drumkit running. The Pelican has been ditched for an outlandish Spider-man pad ($20 and more reliable) which you can barely see in my last studio shot. It's ugly, but it works, and it matches the new bass.
Here's the point: before I was interrupted by the new job and a host of other priorities, I had built the basic skeleton of the drum machine in Excel using Visual Basic for Applications. I did this for three reasons: Excel has a warm place in my heart as a prototyping framework, VBA is quick and easy, and it's a reasonably portable build without resorting to Java--I'm convinced that Java is a language designed by spiteful CS professors just to annoy me.
However, I'm running into two problems and a possible solution. The first problem is latency, which may be due to the ControlMK application, because I didn't seem to have any problems with it when I just used the keyboard to play the kit. I can handle a slight delay in the controls, but too much and my drummer will sound permanently drunk. Realistic? Perhaps. But too frustrating for the audience member using the pad.
Second, VBA--and possibly Visual Basic, period--doesn't have an easy way to mix non-blocking sounds. The kit plays fine from the keyboard, but only one sound can be heard at a time. I need at least two sounds at once (kick and snare, for instance), and optimally three (both "hands" and a "foot").
Now, the possible solution is that I do have a free copy of Visual Basic.net, ordered through some twisted Microsoft promotion. Once it's installed, and I work out all the kinks with my laptop and the .net VM, I could have a real programming environment instead of just a handy scripting language. But I'm guessing I still need a library that will handle joystick input and sound output to conquer my problems.
Let's make something clear: I really don't want to learn how to open and lock displays, or initialize subsystems, or do my own mixing. I haven't done hardcore programming in a long time (nor do I want to), and when I did it was mainly clever greyscale hacks. Surely there's something out there that can do the heavy lifting for a simple task like triggering .wav files, right? Any suggestions?
00:00 x Thomas x /gaming/hardware/control x link x 0 comments
Lunch in the Golden Triangle: Asian Bistro
I can review the Asian Bistro, located on L St. between 18th and 18th NW, in one sentence: "Well-constructed Asian food at D.C. prices." Whether or not that will count as an endorsement depends on your priorities.
When I say well-constructed, I mean that it's good food off a varied menu. They specialize in Vietnamese, Japanese, and Filipino dishes. I've had the pho and the Mongolian tofu, and both were excellent. The tofu was a little one-dimensional, but the pho had a terrific flavor and came in a huge serving size--to go, no less! The arrangements are also very nice: dishes either come on sushi-style china or in wooden serving boxes (bento boxes? My Japanese is too anecdotal to tell). The kitchen is mostly open for viewing, so you can see the chef putting everything on the plate just so before he serves it up.
But you'll pay a penalty for that construction. The service is slow, sometimes excruciatingly so. A friend ordered fried rice and it didn't arrive at the table for at least 30 minutes going on an hour. Once it arrived, we both enjoyed the meal, but clearly Asian Bistro is not a place to stop in for a rush order. The take-out options are good, but call ahead, in other words.
And it's not particularly cheap, which is the "D.C. prices" part of the review. I usually take care of my pho fix at a place in Fairfax that'll feed two for $15. You'll pay a little more than $10 for one person at Asian Bistro, which isn't extravagant, but it's on the upper edge of the cheap eats mandate I'm trying to follow for Lunch in the Golden Triangle. A notable exception to the high prices is the Thai iced tea, which is large and satisfying for about what you'd normally pay for a Coke.
Thanks to the wait and the expense, Asian Bistro probably won't be a habitual stop for me. If you're only interested in American Chinese food, there are easier and cheaper ways to satisfy your craving. However, if you've got the occasional craving for Vietnamese, and you're willing to show a little forsight on the phone or fortitude in line, it's nice to know that the option is there.
00:00 x Thomas x /dc/golden_triangle x link x 0 comments
Memo to Faceless Corporation: Best Buy Edition
It's not that I mind that you're a monstrous national chain with hardly any taste or discretion in your retail habits. It's more that you're just not any good at it. For example, if I were to come to your store because someone on the phone clearly stated that you have several copies of Mario Kart DS available, but when I got there none of your incompetent staff could find them, I might begin to wonder if you honestly wanted to sell anything to me anyway. You're certainly not going to do so now.
00:00 x Thomas x /random/letters x link x 0 comments
Our birthdays are better than your birthdays
In a blatant attempt to move Chris Crawford down the page so it's not contantly staring me in the face, here is a new snapshot of Four String Riot Studios:
The new bass, a present to myself, is on the left. Hopefully from this picture you can see how much smaller it is than the All Star--being headless and modeled on Ned Steinberger's designs, it's significantly shorter, lighter, and less bulky--although these are not always good things. I think I'll have more to say about it later. The amp behind both basses is my actual performance rig, a GK 400RB-IV. You can also see my harmonicas in the lower left-hand corner. I really need to figure out how to integrate them into the Riot.
Showing that she knows me all too well, Belle gave me a subscription to Bass Player. I would have never worked up the initiative on my own. With so much celebratory cheer floating around, we picked up her birthday present a bit early.
Puppies, my dear! Puppies!
00:00 x Thomas x /random/personal/events x link x 0 comments
I'm pleased to announce that I'm now accepting submissions for the Skeptic's Circle, to be held here on November 23rd, in two weeks. Please get your entries to me by the 22nd, addressed to blog1 (at) milezero.org.
The current issue, located at Pooflingers Anonymous, continues the Circle's high standards of presentation with a tribute to the immortal bard. Please take the time to check it out--fine writing on the part of both the host and guests. It'll be a real challenge to meet those standards in turn, but I'm looking forward to the opportunity.
It has actually been a while since this site has played host to traditionally skeptical thinking. Nevertheless, I think it's a standard to which all journalists should aspire. Although we don't have the advantage of a strict scientific method, real journalism backs itself up with verifiable and reproducible evidence, or it doesn't run the story. I can only say it's a shame that newspapers and television sometimes abandon those guidelines for cute features and sensationalism, particularly when it comes to the "supernatural" or alternative medicine.
00:00 x Thomas x /science/skepticism x link x 0 comments
How do you say "coming up roses" in French?
So... slow month, huh? Sorry about that. But I've got a few good excuses for the cobwebs in the corners around here. The results of a lot of work are really starting to pay off:
01:35 x Thomas x /meta/announce/delays x link x 1 comment
The fixation on Erasmus isn't doing much for me either
Two weeks away from the keyboard while I was in France, and I got itchy fingers. It's still wearing off, so in the meantime I am feeling irresponsible, as the wise Green Day noted on their first album. And then, like a dachsund in the Iditarod, I ran smack into the snowbank of Chris Crawford's website and was irretrievably mired.
Because hey--really vague design documents are funny. But what's really hilarious is the overwrought musings he's tossed out on the response to his Escapist train wreck. And you know what? I thought my letter was pretty even-handed. After this, I feel like living up to his straw man and being cruel. Will this be productive? No. But since I left my old band, I've had too few letters to mock, and I feel like my chops might be aquiring a patina of disuse. What follows is Crawford's complete text (I won't be accused of misquoting)--but with value added through careful and ill-tempered snark! These economists must really be rubbing off on me. Before I start babbling about capacity-building and public sector governance, let's take a quick whirl through his fevered imagination:
Let's all give Chris a hand, because that is a really fantastic first paragraph. No, seriously, take a bow. There's a little of everything here: tactless misstatement ("The article was pretty straightforward..."), pretension and arrogance ("There were plenty of admirers, of course..."), needlessly purple prose ("...a rusty spike rammed up my anus. I infer from this..."), and a total lack of contractions. He won't use any of the latter until the third paragraph, perhaps in an attempt to sound scholarly. His actual tone is reminiscent of a Heinlein novel--and not the good early books, but more the sexual fantasies Rob scribbled later on in life to distract from his terminal illness.
Is Chris lying at points here? Through his teeth, his hat, and possibly several feet of brick wall. We could give him the benefit of a doubt and assume that he really is simply this oblivious, but there's a repeated pattern of self-deception in his writing that makes me suspicious. Take his insistence that there was nothing particularly odd or inflammatory in the article. Even if we assumed that the article's thesis (girls don't play games because we don't let them enact 1950's stereotypes) was a) based on logic and reason, or b) not unbelievably insulting to women, Crawford's continued use of words like "twit" or "idiot" seem a little inflammatory to me. But then, I'm not a woman, and so I probably just lack the genetically-honed social skills to understand his subtle point.
I want to single this paragraph out, even though it is puny and otherwise unconvincing as an argument, because I think it's telling in regard to Crawford himself. In a theme repeated throughout his writing here and elsewhere, Crawford doesn't regard his critics as actual human beings. He refers to them in clinical terms, saying that he "probed several of them, trying to understand." Detractors are rabid dogs, and Chris is the animal control worker calming them down. The portrayal of enemies as the Other is not only condescending, it's a little sociopathic. The idea of Chris as a superior human among philosophical zombies will recur frequently, and makes you wonder if he hasn't been spending too much time applying pop psychology to simulated people.
Chris--can I call you Chris? Chrissie? Craw-daddy? C-Dog?--I am duly impressed by your psychic powers. Through the magic of the Internet, and possibly a decoder ring that you found in the dumpster behind the 7-11, you have determined the age of anonymous writers! You might want to recalibrate your ouija board, though, because while some of us may be driven by testosterone and adrenaline many of your critics were female. Particularly the commenter at Old Grandma Hardcore who asked you to (what was it again?) "have a rusty spike rammed up [your] anus." She's not a dude, dude. And all those other commenters, with names like "Becky" and "natalie" or "nikki"--maybe they're all just the exceptions that you claim prove your rule, but it's starting to look a little shaky...
(In case you follow that link to the commenter, note Chris's utterly craven response when he learns that Tim, the site's author, is transgendered. "Anonymous, thanks for pointing out Tim's background, as it certainly explains the intense hostility." he writes. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Crawford also has some inoffensive opinions about the LGBT community--from an evolutionary standpoint, of course. Combined with a completely non-defensive article on how his hero Erasmus WASN'T TEH GAAY!, I'm starting to doubt that Chris should be making Oedipus jokes about anyone.)
Moreover, Crawford's disdain for the use of the vernacular and vitriolic--hang on, there's someone at the door. Oh, what a surprise: it's Mark Twain, Hunter Thompson, Dorothy Parker, Charles Bukowski, and the rest of the American literary tradition. They've come to take your language back, since they say you're not using the best parts of it. Come to think of it, even Shakespeare was a pretty filthy guy in his time--but then, Chris doesn't seem to understand that tricky "context" very well.
Don't make me wait!
Can't they both be true? Personally, I'm upset that he's just regurgitating the same outrageous claims about women as every other self-important amateur geneticist online.
You know, I don't think I wrote in a muddy or mushy fashion for my turn in the Escapist. I'm not thrilled with the way the article turned out, but it's not because I was too vague. In fact, I was writing about a similar hot-button issue (race), and I got only one letter in direct response--they were more upset about the fact that I even used the concept of race than anything I wrote about that concept. But perhaps that's because I, like many journalists, actually researched my topic and presented that evidence to the audience--mushiness, in other words. In the future, I'll be more clear about my views. I could just make up some evidence ("people don't like snakes, ergo racism," perhaps) and use that for support instead.
You have got to be kidding me.
Unfortunately, the field is often attacked by dogmatic fools who think evolutionary psychology amounts to some kind of genetic determinism.
Some commentators claimed that I was labelling anybody who disagrees with me a dogmatic fool. They seemed to view the qualification presented in the relative clause as probabilistic rather than boolean. They infer that that the insult "dogmatic fools" applies with lesser force to people who don't quite satisfy the terms of the qualifying clause. This inference is, of course, an incorrect reading of the sentence.
Here we come up against one of the central problems of language usage: prescription versus description. Good language is whatever people take it to mean. I may be technically correct to insist that "arrogant" does not mean the same thing as "proud", but the fact is that most people consider the two words to be synonymous. So what am I to do? Write slovenly English that any Neanderthal can understand?
But the problem goes beyond style and to the very core of our thinking process. Consider the use of subjunctive mood. Some people have real problems understanding subjunctive statements, watering down the hard boolean logic into some sort of probabilistic statement. To alter the previous example, consider the statement, "If you think that evolutionary psychology amounts to some kind of genetic determinism, then you're a dogmatic fool." Some people are insulted by this statement, even if the subjunctive clause excludes them. They don't appreciate the "what if" aspect of subjunctivity, the fact that it addresses not what is, but what could be. We cannot abandon the use of subjunctive thinking merely because some people are too stupid to appreciate it.
It just so happens that I speak Spanish tolerably well, a language that actually uses its subjunctive tense, while its usage in English has atrophied considerably. So I'm not exactly a stranger to the idea. In contrast, Chris seems to have something else completely in mind. See, when you make a statement like "If X, then Y" in English, there's not an implied "maybe" before the Y unless you put it there. And I find it very strange that someone with even a passing familiarity with programming wouldn't understand the contradictions of boolean and probability. A boolean value is one that is True or False. So when readers interpret an If-then statement as true or false instead of some goofy "what if" that he's made up on the spot, how is that "watering down the hard boolean logic?"
I can't even read that without getting a headache. There are so many misconceptions of rhetorical theory, linguistics, logic, and human nature that the words should self-immolate. The problem is not that your critics have watered down your conditional statement, Chris, it's that they take offense at the condition itself. Referring to actual practice of clear, expressive writing (i.e., noting when a word might give the wrong impression to a reader who lacks your exact experiential background) as writing "slovenly English that any Neanderthal can understand" only underscores my point. Self-respecting Neanderthals would hide their thick-browed and hairy heads in shame if they had penned this essay.
By the way, that last sentence was a real subjunctive statement, expressing a desire or mood through "would-if" instead of the more concrete "if-then." Just in case you needed an example.
I can understand how this feeling arises. We all use language as a social sorting mechanism. The vocabulary you use allows others to categorize you into some defined social group. Youth have their special cant that they rely on heavily to differentiate themselves. Academics festoon their writing with the jargon of their field so as to gain acceptance (and expose interlopers). Thus, when somebody uses elegant or educated language, they unavoidably set themselves apart as superior to the monsyllabic morons around them. And the morons reciprocate with anger at being exposed as such. Note that there need be no pretension on the part of the elegant writer -- it is the act of writing well that sets off the morons, regardless of the intentions of the writer. The elegant writer may indeed be pretentious -- I have certainly known people to retreat into in inky cloud of polysyllabic gobbledygook when challenged. I can't even vouch that I have never done so myself. But elegant writing does not prove pretension.
Indeed, the argument can be reversed. For example, one of my critics complained that I had used the word "belabor", suggesting this as an example of pretension. I suppose the critic's reasoning was that I used this word knowing that most normal people don't use it, hence I must have used it to show normal people that I'm superior. The counterargument is that, had I toned down the writing, confining myself to single-clause sentences with a tenth-grade vocabulary, then I would surely have been talking down to my audience (something I am often accused of anyway. *sigh* ) The truth of the matter is that I use an advanced vocabulary in order to sharpen my writing. I don't use "belabor" just because it's a high-falutin' word -- I use it because it expresses an idea that no other word in the English language expresses quite as well. On the question of how I think my vocabulary will be received, I figure that most people can recognize a great many more words than they use, and that most really will be able to figure out what "belabor" means, using the context and their own recollections. And if a reader doesn't recognize the word, then this would be an excellent stimulus to look it up. Everybody wins.
There's an ex-girlfriend of mine, sharp girl but spent too much time hanging out with autodidacts. When she writes, it's with an outpouring of vocabulary that's embarrassing, and it reminds me of Crawford. In fact, this point really bugs me, because I like words. I like using them, and I like knowing them. Yet there's a limit to the erudition that you should employ in clear writing--not necessarily because you're talking down to the audience, but also because flashy vocabulary is distracting. The best writers employ it sparingly, mixing in the occassional flowery term for effect. Reading a passage filled with rare--but precise!--terms is exhausting, and it treats the audience with disrespect. It implies that the author is desparately trying to impress readers.
I'm pretty sure that the critic using "belabor" as an example of pretension was probably noting Crawford's use of the word in yet another construction that denies anyone equal status with his planet-devouring intellect. I expect to hear any day that Crawford has Sublimed into a being of pure energy, since no-one is capable of matching wits with him. Yet "belabor" is hardly a high-falutin' word, nor is it even the low-hanging apple of Crawford's purple prose. After all, is "stimulus" really the word that best expresses his point at the end of the third paragraph? Wouldn't "incentive" or even the pedestrian "reason" get the job done without the needless connotations of high-school biology classes?
And now comes the fun part:
Another deficiency I share with Erasmus is my thin skin. In both of us, it's really a consequence of a naive idealism that assumes that all people share a basic decency and reasonableness. I still find it difficult to dismiss these vicious ravings with the observation that the writers are beneath consideration. So when one of them observes that I should have a rusty spike rammed up my anus, my sense of fairness requires me to give the proposition due consideration -- perhaps I really am such an evil person that I deserve that punishment. I end up rejecting the proposition, but it still takes an emotional toll.
A moment of silence for the deep introspection Chris has just shared with us. Oh! The emotional toll it has taken! Why, he may never jot down another poorly-considered article again!
We have truly lost a visionary. Yes, just like his hero Erasmus (who finally gets name-checked, as if Crawford hasn't tried to label everything else within line of sight with him), Chris is too much a genius for his age. One must hope that, like Erasmus, Crawford will be obsessively seized upon by a future martyr-complexed sage for constant reflection. Only then can we realize that his attempts to dehumanize and denigrate his opponents were merely the sign of a naive idealism and not a combination of deep insecurity and rage.
Unfortunately, the field is often attacked as some kind of genetic determinism.
This is a much better formulation, and had I written it as such, there would likely have been less inflammation of the blogosphere.
On the other hand, I shall not yield an inch on the matter of precise and elegant writing. I shall continue employing subjunctive mood, selecting the most precise word, and even resorting to the occasional foreign expression. To the morons who don't like that, I have a reply that even they can understand: go to hell.
You show us, Chris. Even the occasional foreign expression? Duibuqi, wo ting bu dong zhe ge waiguoren!
...why does anyone take this lunatic seriously, again?
23:17 x Thomas x /gaming/society/gender x link x 1 comment
Want to see what's keeping me so busy during the day? I like to think of my new job as severely capsulated journalism: I take raw footage and reference material, weave a silken cocoon around its pudgy thorax, and eventually something like this crawls out to spread its wings for the first time. Apologies in advance for the RealPlayer, but I'm sure you can figure out an alternative. I don't get a byline, but careful readers will note the trademarks of my style on that summary, particularly the egregiously elongated final sentence of the first paragraph. You know I'm fixing that tomorrow morning.
Actually, I'm thrilled to have the new position, not in the least because I get to watch just about everything the Bank records for its archives. Although I don't write about it much (the magic words "contract termination"), I've become even more obsessed with the World Bank's internal culture and collective viewpoint. Take that video, for example: be patient, and you'll watch the former president of the Bank speak a little bit about his development philosophy, as well as the way he worked around the Bank's decidedly odd management style. It's a fascinating place. If I come upon any other tidbits in the future, I'll try to highlight them here.
Speaking of the Bank and blogging, the Private Sector Development blog has some interesting tidbits, including links to a review of the sub-$100 laptop project and a Tanzanian rapper who advocates privatization in rhyme. The PSDBlog and I clearly have different priorities and constraints when it comes to the Bank, but it's a step toward more transparency at the world's largest development organization, and I think that's always a good thing.
22:19 x Thomas x /bank/experience/bspan x link x 1 comment
Belle uploads her pictures right away. Why yes, that is a general aura of procrastination surrounding me! Thank you for noticing!
09:51 x Thomas x /culture/europe/france x link x 1 comment
These aren't all of my pictures from the trip--just the ones that tickled me for one reason or another.
00:00 x Thomas x /culture/europe/france x link x 0 comments
There is a certain amount of shame and dismay to reading science fiction. I can get away with it because I am a Journalist and a Rock Musician of Note, but for someone with more self-doubt and less god-like power, I can understand how it would be difficult to admit reading SF, and there's simply no hope for those who read fantasy. It's pure societal guilt, of course: while there's a lot of crap out there, there's also a significant amount of science fiction that may even (grab the rails, kids, this is rough) be better than traditional fiction. I read the good and the bad about equally, myself.
Meanwhile, I'm in two book clubs, one run by my girlfriend and another by a coterie of frustrated intellectual friends. The latter reads Nietzche, Freakonomics, and Johnny Got His Gun. The former, on the other hand, is a more recent development and has only completed Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Which I hated.
My problem with EL&IC is the sheer amount of gimmickry that packs the book. It certainly doesn't need it: although he's a little bit precious (and precocious), the 9-year old main character is charming and very well written. His name is Oskar, and his dad died in 9/11, turning an almost-autistic kid into a rambling weirdo. Foer doesn't need to mark up certain pages with red ink (Oskar's father was a compulsive proofreader) or include lots of grainy black-and-white pictures (supposedly an Oskar-eye view). With Oskar's voice so strong, it's surprising that his grandparents, blind and mute respectively, are so two-dimensional and rely on more typographical tricks. And Foer's closing pages, a reversed flipbook of a man falling from the WTC buildings, undermine what otherwise was a passably weighty ending.
The final impression is that the book, supposedly about September 11, is really all about Foer. I'd have rather read an actual story rather than watch a man jump through increasingly precarious flaming hoops. You may disagree, of course. The rest of the book club certainly did, with one member saying something I thought was interesting: these were ways of going beyond the novel form, of stretching the medium.
Well, maybe. I'm still not buying it. And I think it's frustrating that narcissistic styles like Foer and Dave Eggers get more respect than Iain Banks or William Gibson. But I'm curious about the concept of going "beyond the novel" in literature, especially since I don't think that clever typesetting is anything to write home about (pardon the pun). What would it take to rewrite the novel? At the book club, I proposed hypertext, which got a bunch of blank looks. In retrospect, that's probably just another tricky font choice, although you could probably do some interesting work with timelines or footnoting.
If a science fiction novel did that, would anyone care in the same way? Would it be called (perhaps) a heartbreaking work of staggering genius? Or would they just say it's another toy for the geeks? Why do I think that it would be the latter? I'm a little bitter about that. Never mind.
More importantly, does the novel need a new way to tell a story? I guess I'm a bit of a traditionalist, but what exactly is a novel lacking? If your job is to present a narrative, the simple power of words on paper, one after another and without external embellishment, seems hard to argue with. Readers of literary fiction are looking for something different than I am--the next book for the club is Wickett's Remedy, which apparently contains margin notes from the dead.
It stings a little, knowing that margin notes from the dead are probably better received than, say, American Gods or Perdido Street Station. Doesn't it?
I'll say this much: I don't think we need to reinvent the novel. I like it the way it is, and I like tricks to be in the story, not on it. But I find it curious how few science fiction books I can think of that employ literary fiction's games--and I wonder if there's a link between that lack and the perception of triviality.
16:14 x Thomas x /fiction/writing/technique x link x 1 comment
Women gamers are music to my ears
Nowadays I'm amused by the perpetual question of "where are all the women gamers?" As a musician who used to hang out in the Bass Player forums, every now and then the same basic thread would wind its way up. "Where are all the female bass players?"
Well, there's Sheryl Crow, for a start. Yow.
The real answer to the question always ended up being something along the lines of "if you weren't such a jerk, you'd probably see a lot more of them." There are plenty of female musicians of all stripes out there, at all levels. One of my personal influences, Clatter, is fronted by bassist Amy Humphrey. My friend Lee Flier, guitarist for Atlanta-based What The? comes highly recommended. And then there are people like The Great Kat, seen there in a terrifying Guitar Player interview. If speed metal had script kiddies, they'd be The Great Kat.
More importantly, all three of those are very different people, and react very differently to their situation as women musicians. Amy has been in grrl rock groups, but would rather be known as a bass player than a female. Lee, if I remember correctly, tends to feel the same way, possibly more strongly. In contrast, she's said that she passed on events featuring women rockers, because she doesn't really care for the issue. And the Great Kat is insane, but I'm pretty sure that the feminine dynamic in her work should be taken with a pretty strong dose of irony.
Man, it's almost as if they were distinct and complicated human beings, with their own thoughts and opinions, just like men. Perhaps something similar could be said about gaming. Maybe Josh is right after all.
And while I am guilty of firing off an angry e-mail in response to Chris Crawford's unfit-to-evolve editorial, it may help to step back and remember that there's a parallel in rock music for his kind as well. Believe it or not, serious people have tried to state that women just couldn't play rock music, because it required too much testosterone and aggression (anyone who thinks women aren't capable of aggression hasn't dated much). It was ridiculous then, and it's ridiculous now.
I mean, all I wanna do is have some fun, right? Nothing wrong with that from either gender.
14:34 x Thomas x /gaming/society/gender x link x 1 comment
The Bell Curve comes to gaming
The following letter was sent to the editors of the Escapist in response to Chris Crawford's "Women in Games" from Issue 17.
Dear Editors,
If Mr. Crawford is interested in fighting what he's aptly described as people that "just don't get it," then more power to him. But frankly, attempting to address the problem of women in games by literally reverting back to the role of women in primordial times is counterproductive. Likewise, perhaps he shouldn't be advocating the use of bodice-ripping romance novels, a genre filled with restrictive gender roles and rape, as insight to the female mind. It's patronizing and insulting--not just to women, but to the men who are presumed only to be good at hunting and killing.
Moreover, as Harvard president Larry Summers found out when he also tried to base a speech on the dubious assertions of evolutionary psychology, the research isn't quite as supportive as he'd like to think. Isn't it suspicious that the field seems to unequivocally confirm the status quo and restrictive roles that feminism has been fighting for decades? At its best, real evolutionary biologists like P.Z. Myers (blogging at pharyngula.org) are doubtful of evolutionary psychology's conclusions. At its worst, EP is used to "confirm" the inferiority of women and minorities through deceptive statistics and blatant racism, as in Charles Murray's The Bell Curve.
I'd love to see more women playing games, the same that I'd like to see more female CEOs and female politicians. But the way to do it is not through stereotypes masquerading as dubious scientific research. As the Escapist noted in its Issue 12 article, Crawford hasn't designed or been responsible for a game in more than fifteen years now. If this is his idea of winning design, perhaps it's best that he stays out of the field altogether.
Sincerely,
Thomas Wilburn
www.milezero.org
P.S. Contrary to his example, there are plenty of people who do not immediately leap away from snakes, offering evidence that it is, in fact, a learned reaction. Children love to play with snakes, in my experience, and only fear them after being warned. I'd like to see his evidence for this point sourced. I'm not buying it.
10:19 x Thomas x /gaming/society/gender x link x 1 comment
I wanna roll you up into my life
First test of the Tascam US-122 interface for my laptop, here. Initial impressions: it sounds good, with much more clarity and less interference on instruments and especially vocals. Much easier to get a decent mix out of this than using the mixer->line in, and the signal chain is greatly simplified. It is very soft in the headphones, but Audacity seemed to receive plenty of input without the high noise floor. I'll have to try putting new and old originals through it tomorrow to see if I'm happier with the results, as well as learning my way around Cubase LE. I will probably end up replacing the audio for Four String Riot while I'm at it. I've never been entirely happy with the mixes there.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/recording/production x link x 0 comments
There was no hot water in the apartment this morning. I'm guessing I had an easier time of it than the girls, if only because I have less hair to wash. But man, what a way to start my day.
On a warmer note, I beat the first dungeon of Zelda's Master Quest last night and found the second dungeon this morning, tasks that have taken months of off-and-on work. Between Zelda and Castlevania in the Classic NES series, the serious old-school challenge has really made a comeback. I find it a little funny, because I can't be one of those people that talks about how I used to beat these games easily and now my old, gummed up reflexes can't handle them. Although I grew up in the days of 8-bit glory, I didn't own an NES until I was 16, and didn't own a Super NES until I was 22. I've played the classic games, but it's almost always been through emulation or at a friend's, and I hardly ever beat them until the re-release on GBA.
National Novel Writing Month begins today. Thanks to the inspiration of Josh and Corvus, I'm going to try to take part, using this microfiction as a seed idea. It's not going to be a terribly serious book. Hopefully it'll be a book at all, since I've also got the Four String Riot, writing for the day job, semi-daily updates here, and my personal life to balance. But then, I always did hate boredom.
00:00 x Thomas x /random/personal x link x 0 comments
I meant to post this yesterday, when the title would be more appropriate, but the desktop was running at 105 degrees, and I didn't really feel like sitting in a hot apartment with the laptop baking my legs.
I'm getting serious about better recording for Four String Riot, so I've decided to pick up a Tascam US-122. It's basically a stereo in-out box with midi that runs over USB. The preamps are better quality than those on a sound card, and I don't have to use a mixer or adapter to run XLR or unbalanced lines into it. I should also be able to use it to record live by just sticking it at the end of my signal chain before the amp. You may remember that I was thinking about getting a Line 6 TonePort (who am I kidding? You don't remember that!), but I've decided that I don't want to risk using a CPU-intensive modeling package with my laptop, and I don't really need the models anyway.
Anyway, I'm sure I'll write more about the preamp later. The point is that I decided yesterday to try a little Music and Arts Center store in Vienna instead of Guitar Center, thinking that I would give my money to the independent store and not the franchise chain. They didn't have the Tascam for display, but I asked if they had anything similar.
"No," said the saleswoman, "but maybe you should try our partner company... Guitar Center."
I guess she thought the look of disbelief on my face meant that I wasn't familiar with them, because she started to give me directions and I had to cut her off. It feels a little silly to explain the stick-it-to-The-Man impulse after something like that, so I just extricated myself as kindly as I could. But consider: Music and Arts Center is designed to look as unlike a Guitar Center as possible. The walls are cheap white paint, or even pegboard. The instruments are cheap, and there are no slick displays or posters. It looks just like a local-run music store. It had me fooled, and I'm sure it calms nervous parents considerably.
I've been reading No Logo, by Naomi Klein, which basically explores the various unsavory sides of a branded culture. The book is good, but it's a little dated, and I think the Music and Arts Center is too recent to have made it into Klein's timeline. Perhaps at some late point corporations have started to encompass not just brands, but anti-brands. Who knows who owns what? That mom and pop on the corner could be run by Seven Eleven for all you know. I'm going to have to start asking for tax filings before they ring me up.
At least under socialism we'd all have health care.
00:00 x Thomas x /politics/issues/economy/corporate x link x 0 comments
