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.
You thought I'd forgotten, didn't you! Well, yes. I did forget. But in my defense, it's because I've been so busy catching up on B-SPAN's June 19 rush that I hadn't had a chance to take a wider view of the month. Our podcast this month focuses on the Presidential Fellows Lecture Series, featuring Mr. Anwar Ibrahim, the former Deputy Minister of Malaysia. I picked it for the podcast because it's a high-profile event for our internal audience. But the event that I've enjoyed the most this month has been Rethinking the Role of Jobs for Shared Growth, which I just posted today. Parts of it are dry, but the central topic often under discussion--that is to say, the contrast between "good jobs" and "bad jobs" as opposed to a focus only on employment rates--is interesting for both the developing world and our own employment situation.
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An old thread on the Lowdown surfaced today via e-mail: we had been discussing the problems of usability for effects units, and it got me thinking about how we use technology. Perhaps an overview for non-musicians might help first.
You can split bass and guitar effects a lot of ways--by function, or by architecture, or by quality--but a big philosophical issue for musicians is single- versus multi-function boxes. The traditional FX pedal is a single function. It does one thing only, and hopefully does it well. Individual effects boxes can be digital or analog inside, but they tend to have manually-set knobs--they're not programmable, but they are very tweakable onstage. Musicians, being tactile (and sometimes not very bright) people, often like these standalone effects because they're simple and direct.
The other side is multi-fx pedals, which are capable of doing many things, often at once. For example, I have a Digitech RP-50 guitar pedal for experiments, which can add EQ, distortion, delay, and one other kind of effect (chorus, envelope, pitch-shift, etc.) all at once. Multi-function effects are almost always digital, because putting so many kinds of analog circuitry in one space would take up too much room and be incredibly expensive. Cheap sound processing chips can do credible imitations of the analog original, and it can be nice to have so many options available. So a lot of people start out with a multi-function pedal until they figure out where they want to spend a lot of money.
But if you're going to build what amounts to a sound-pedal-emulator, it's nice to have a save/recall function for settings, because now you're not just tweaking one pedal at a time, you're modeling several. Lo and behold, that's exactly the way it works: you set up everything the way you want it, and then the pedal typically saves all those settings into a "patch." This is cool, because it allows musicians to jump from one sound to another very quicly. You might have one patch that's lots of stereo delays and light distortion to sound like U2, and then another with very heavy distortion and a sub-octave to sound like Cheap Trick.
Naturally, there's a tradeoff for that much power and flexibility. Switching between patches tends to take time as the pedals--which are running on as little power and memory as they can possible get away with--unload one chunk of code from RAM and load the new patch to start processing. It's not a lot of time, maybe 20 milliseconds or so, but for that 1/5 of a second you are muted--effectively dropped out of the song. That's one reason why I quit using multi-FX and went back to individual analog pedals. I just couldn't stand having to pre-trigger my sounds to keep from missing a beat.
Zoom recently released the B2.1U, a multiFX pedal with only 8ms of switching time. Obviously, a few of us were interested in anything that would give us more power without the delay. However, one board member, well known for his vocal advocacy of a particularly flexible (but equally expensive and elaborate) effects unit, went the other direction. It doesn't matter how fast the switching time is, he said, because you shouldn't be using more than one patch anyway. Just set that up so you can change it a little, and you should be good to go. And he dropped this flame into the thread:
In other words: if you can't make it work with one patch, it's your fault. Even though the pedal organizes itself in presets and that is the primary mode of user interaction, it is not a design flaw that it can't do so quickly. It is your fault that you didn't plan around the huge gaping silence when you wanted to make a different noise.
I hate it when people make that kind of argument. It is a huge problem with technology. Blame the victim, not the crappy machinery. Sound familiar?
I am so tired of being told that it's my fault when things are hard to use. You used to hear this a lot from the Slashdot variety of Linux afficianado: the computer isn't hard, you just have to learn how to use it! Well, yeah. Maybe if it's that hard to learn, there's a flaw somewhere in the design, not in the people. If a game controller is intimidating to people, it's not that they're unintelligent or uninterested, it's that they're not willing to geek out for years in order to learn the muscle memory required. There's the infamous "blinking twelves" on an average VCR. All kinds of machines have this problem.
It's not that technology should all be simpler, because there is a time and a place for power and depth. But the tech community has been really good at shifting the blame from the designers, where it belongs, to the users, where it probably doesn't. What I've noticed is an inferiority complex by anyone who's not a self-defined geek. People are afraid of technology. They're convinced that they're not smart enough to use it. So they won't. And if the communications revolution of networking has shown us anything, it's that we don't benefit from people who just opt out of the web.
If you're reading this, you're likely to be a go-to tech person in your office or family. You can do something about the blame. Sure, you can't redesign someone's effects, or re-build their operating system. But (and I'm trying this myself, it's not easy) you can be more patient and friendly when explaining technology to someone. Make it clear that it's not their fault--and they're more likely to learn more, until they won't have to ask for help so much.
See? From effects pedal to broad societal doom-and-gloom in one post! Now that's value-added.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/bass x link x 0 comments
Myspace is Terrible: On the Way to Manassas
Thomas: So I got a couple of new friends today on the Myspace page.
Belle: I saw that!
Thomas: But you know the worst part? I have yet to see anyone with a page that isn't absolutely hideous.
Belle: Yeah, like mine.
Thomas: Well, yours at least looks somewhat coordinated. But most people, it's like the Internet threw up.
Belle: Actually, you know what it's really like? Remember back when the Internet first got started? All the neon fonts and garish background images and huge titles?
Thomas: Oh no! You're right! When we all had blinking green text on orange backgrounds. I had a scrolling Bad Joke of the Day with the matinee tag, and embedded midi music.
Belle: Exactly. MySpace is the Web from 1992, but more annoying. Because at least we had the excuse that no-one knew what they were doing yet.
Thomas: It's a whole new wave of people discovering animated gifs and Java reflecting pools.
15:35 x Thomas x /music/tools/internet x link x 1 comment
Caught between a downtown height restriction (according to myth, nothing can be taller than the Washington Monument) and a Paris-envy style palette, it's hard to call DC an attractive city. That's not to say that individual neighborhoods can't be charming--many of them are not unpleasant, although the housing bubble has made that charm a bit galling when you remember the price of even the smallest home. But the city itself has a kind of concrete frumpiness and self-importance, like a mental institution specifically for unattractive people in suits.
Karl Rove: Hello there, neighbor!
Four days of rain, though, is definitely rubbing it in. The limestone facades, already leeched and stained by polluted precipitation, now glisten unpleasantly. The Metro system--never a model of efficiency or reliability--struggles along, but flooding at Federal Triangle and Navy Memorial stations has resulted in further delays and mechanical problems. The Mall is waterlogged and soggy. I don't actually hate DC, but times like this I can understand those who do.
Every summer, editorials and news stories remind residents that DC was, after all, founded in a malarial swamp. Perhaps this is supposed to make us feel better. "Sure, you're hot and miserable, with so much humidity that you can't breathe. Sure, your surroundings are almost always unpleasant and no-one knows how to drive. But at least you're not dying of a tropical disease!" Fantastic. I can barely wait until global warming adds its personal touch of pathos to the district's marshy ambience.
15:08 x Thomas x /dc/annoyances x link x 1 comment
This weekend, I went over to record some bass tracks for a friend I met at the Stacy's open mike. He's a good kid, a singer/songwriter type who mostly plays white-boy blues. We tracked something like 12 songs in 3 hours, which is screaming--but since all he was usually asking for was root-5 lines, it was pretty easy work.
Really, it couldn't be more different from what I'm doing now, something that became clear when I played a couple of my sketchpads for him. Whereas all of my stuff is spare loops layered with distortion, he was looking for that acoustic folk vibe--to the point of asking me if I could sound like an upright. But while it's not the same sound, it's nice to know that I can still play a traditional rock bass role when I need to. Sometimes I miss the idea of being in a full band. And then I remember the hassle of practice, paying for equipment, searching for gigs, and having to play second fiddle to a guitarist again, and I feel pretty good about what I've chosen to do.
In other solo bassist news, one of my acquaintances from the Lowdown, Steve Lawson, has a new gig. He's still playing his looping bass, but now he's doing it with a jazz vocalist and covering everything from Slipknot to the Cure. They're calling themselves "The New Standard." It's interesting stuff, and very different from the way I loop. You can check it out here.
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My father is sick of getting pushed around on the river.
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This month's book for discussion by the Coterie of Frustrated Intellectuals is Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. I admit to being conflicted about this book, which is why I picked it. As is customary for our book club, I'm asking the other readers to keep in mind, and be prepared to answer, the following questions:
More questions will probably be ready by the time we meet, but these seem like good starting places for someone to explore the themes of Someone Comes to Town.
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How to Write Screenplays Badly is not a regular read of mine, but John Rogers pointed this entry out. I'm still laughing about the schoolbus scene.
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Just a quick note for anyone who hasn't checked out Battlestar Galactica: Scifi.com has an option now where you can watch whole episodes, including a full-screen option. It's a flash player, a little bit lower quality than the iTunes version.
Right now, they're playing Scar--which, granted, is probably one of the three weakest episodes from season two, and it might be a little hard to get into mid-season. But even at its worst, Galactica's still better than anything on network TV. Take a look.
10:47 x Thomas x /movies/television/galactica x link x 1 comment
Sorry, what were we talking about?
So the DVD finally starts playing the actual movie after forty previews, mostly for terrible Disney flicks you will never watch, and then--hey, who is that actor? You've seen him somewhere before. Fire up IMDB, check out his CV, add a couple of his films to the Netflix queue--and while you're at it, check your e-mail, because it's been five or ten minutes, and maybe browse a blog or two. Who's on AIM? And is the movie actually over already?
This is how it starts. Nowadays, I actually have trouble sitting down to watch a movie without a laptop or something to do while it plays--a habit only exacerbated by my taste in forgettable horror flicks. Now, I know I live a pretty varied, busy life with lots of hobbies and interests that I bounce between, but should I really be multitasking that much?
At work, I'm actually worse. I have my monitor in portrait mode. Lotus Notes is maximized in the background, with B-SPAN videos played at the top inch or so of the screen. The rest of the screen plays host to cascaded applications: tw.net webmail, a random browser window or two (including Pandora when I'm not watching video), the B-SPAN admin applet, notepad.exe where I keep my to-do list for the day, at least one instance of Word, and my SSH session to milezero.org off to one side, where I can add a few sentences every half hour or so. I alt-tab like a madman.
A long time ago, I read this editorial by Rands and thought "he's talking about me." He calls it NADD, Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder--not a name I'm particularly fond of, but you have to admit it describes the situation pretty well. And he thinks it's a good thing.
I'm not so sure.
It took me a long time to build the kind of self-organization structure (remember that notepad window?) that I need to keep myself on target. I make a lot of lists--you've probably noticed. I can hold a good, interactive conversation nowadays--but I still have a tendency to begin ranting and jump from topic to topic, which I have realized is not only frustrating for others but is also more than a little rude. And my inability to pick only a single area of expertise landed me a Comm degree and the realization that nobody wants to hire a generalist anymore. I got very lucky when I transferred to my current position, since they are more than happy to exploit whatever random talents I manifest in addition to my writing skills.
Did I mention the boredom issues? Seriously, I've got boredom issues. Gotta be doing something all the time. Drove a couple of ex-girlfriends nuts.
I wonder, sometimes, if people had this kind of problem before the Internet existed--and if so, how they handled it. More importantly, is it going to spread? For those of us in developed countries that don't face the Grim Meathook Future, we are going to continue being surrounded by information. Advertisements are everywhere--and I hate to reference Spielberg, but it is only a matter of time before they start interacting a la Minority Report. The Internet is on everything. Appliances are getting smarter, and more networked. Wireless is becoming standard. Bruce Sterling probably hears this kind of thing and practically has puppies from excitement, but I'll be honest: it frightens me.
I see this as a trend in two directions. The first is the sound bite, which we all know and love. It simplifies complicated issues, eases the production of misleading information, blah blah blah--not a good thing. On the other hand, I wonder sometimes if the modern fundamentalist movement, at its core, is a symptom of people who are just not wired to handle a high-information environment. And as it gets worse, do they keep getting weirder?
17:51 x Thomas x /culture/internet/excession x link x 1 comment
The sketchpads I've been doing have been great for picking out mistakes that I'm making--there's always at least one thing that I like about each recording, and at least one thing that I really need to improve. Hopefully, each time I find a mistake, I can figure out a way to correct it. For example, the percussion on the third sketchpad was incredibly weak, both in tone and in terms of filling sound. Since then, I've been experimenting with creating more complicated slap rhythms, which has never been a strong point of mine, and I'm trying to figure out ways to add reverb selectively as I loop.
But a persistent weak area is the instrumental solo sections. I'm just not very good at doing rock solos--and unfortunately, I keep trying. I'm actually incredibly proud of the "Voodoo Funk" solo, because it just kind of popped out. Usually, when I play them back, what I hear is too rhythmically simple, too similar to what I've played before, and too filled with atonal mistakes. With that in mind, I'm working on a three-part improvement plan.
First, I'm trying to make my solos more lyrical by singing them before I play them. It's easy for a guitarist or bassist's fingers to fall into the same patterns as before, which leads to ho-hum work. But by singing them first, it gives me a reference that's completely unrelated to the fretboard while being more fluid.
Second, I'm going to make sure that I've got solos worked out ahead of time before I record the final versions. Sketchpads might remain impromptu just because they exist to get the idea down, but I really don't want to leave the final performances up to chance. I'm also going to try to take this opportunity to work more chords into my solos, because I think that's an interesting sound and helps counter the sometimes limited range available to me.
Third, and this is kind of a cheat, it's probably a good idea if I stop arranging songs with solos in the first place. They don't all need them--and frankly, with the looping material I've been working with, a better idea would probably be to create clever bridges and break up the repetition. When the solo works, I'm sure it's great, but let's be honest: I'm never going to be the next lightning-fingered star player. Why not work with my strengths?
13:28 x Thomas x /music/technique x link x 1 comment
Diane Rehm plays into this somehow
Just a thought, which other DC residents may find amusing: wouldn't it be great if WAMU offered a "Kojo Nnamdi Is My Copilot" bumper sticker?
Just give me a few minutes alone with Photoshop...
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"Rock 'n roll is a participatory sport."
Just one of many great lines from the Onion AV Club's interview with Steve "Little Steven" Van Zandt. Better still are the parts where he discusses the philosophy behind his radio show, Little Steven's Underground Garage:
Basically, it's what we call garage rock, which is traditional rock 'n' roll. I hear a very specific, obvious emotional connection, even if it's just in the spirit of the record. They're all connected in my mind.
AVC: You're unusually up to date for someone of your generation.
SVZ: I did this show for probably three or four reasons, and one of the main reasons was the impulse to support these new, very good rock 'n' roll bands that somehow ended up in the 21st century with no format. I don't know how we got here. Rock 'n' roll was the mainstream for 30 years, and now we've ended up in radio with formats for everything except rock 'n' roll. It's incredible, when you think about it. So I thought, "Well, we have to support these new bands too, in a way that keeps the relevance of the older bands."
If it's in a museum, it becomes an artifact, not emotionally connected to now. And that can't happen, because rock 'n' roll is a continuum, the way I see it. An emotional continuum, going back as far as you want to go, and leading into the future as far as you want to see. It has to stay connected in order to make that continuum effective, and you can't do that without playing new music. When you hear The Boss Martians or The Hives or The Strokes or Jet, whoever it may be, you can trace their roots back directly, and that keeps the old stuff fresh. We wanted to give these new bands a chance, and let the next generation of kids actually hear what rock 'n' roll is. When they hear it, they love it. We know that. I get e-mails from 11-year-olds and 61-year-olds. But if they never get a chance to hear it, we're gonna have a generation of kids never having heard the real thing. That's not acceptable.
AVC: Have you noticed any change in the past couple of years? It seems like there have been more inroads for rock 'n' roll at MTV and elsewhere.
SVZ: Yeah, yeah. A little bit. When we started five years ago, there wasn't a single rock 'n' roll group signed to a major label. It was horrifying. Now there's about 12, which is progress. Five of them went gold or platinum in the last couple of years, which is remarkable, really. But there's still no format to play them other than mine. The alternative formats will play The White Stripes for a couple of weeks, or The Hives for a week or two, but they can't play them regularly, because they don't really fit. It's a different format. Different genre. It's garage rock. We finally had that officially recognized by Billboard magazine in the last month. There's finally a garage-rock chart, up in the front, connected to my column. For the first time, people have started to realize, "These things don't fit in anywhere else, really. They're different." So it's a beginning of recognition, and in one sense, it's fucking slow motion. But it's progress.
SVZ: Not like it once would have been. You know, I spent 10 years doing nothing but international liberation politics, and I was quite obsessed with it, and I wanted to make a point when I started this show that it was not going to be political. Really. I have a bigger mission now than any kind of specific politics, which is trying to restore the accessibility of rock 'n' roll. It's a much bigger job, and more important, I think. So I never wanted to make the show a political platform of any kind, and I very rarely wander into that area. In that sense, it's not important.
There's a lot to unpack here, but I've highlighted these passages in particular because they carry a common theme: Rock is in danger. How you will react to that statement probably depends on how you define "rock 'n roll." You'll notice that Little Steven doesn't give it a set definition, other than an emotional thread that runs from past to present through the genre. What's Rock? And if you agree with him, what do you do about it?
Normally, it'd be easy to ignore people like Van Zandt (and myself) as the ranting of musical ideologues. But after the National Review starts extending its culture war to the appropriation of rock music, one might wonder when we need to start taking up arms for the art form, such as it is. The thought of Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum boogeying to the Who or the Clash may be a little discomforting, but surely no-one can begrudge them wanting enjoy the best parts of the counterculture. But to imagine them smugly singing along under the impression that these artists were unknowing reactionaries in the name of Jesus, lower taxes, and hating the gays--that way madness lies, friends! Madness carrying pitchforks and torches, storming the mansions of The Man in one last glorious stand!
Ahem. Sorry, I get a little carried away.
The theft of Rock by these Brooks Brothers-wearing used car salesmen of the American spirit is disarming, but it is not the end of Rock. It is more likely a symptom of its decline. Only in a world where rock 'n roll has been divested of its sexual swagger, its blues parentage, and its working class origins could it be described as "conservative." Libertarian, maybe. But conservative?
What is Rock? Who knows, but it ain't what it used to be.
We're sidestepping, of course, the entire musical discussion of what makes a rock song. Chord progressions based on I-IV-V intervals, a band consisting of guitarist/bassist/drummer/singer, and a verse-chorus-verse-chorus-solo-chorus structure are good starting places, although not the end-all and be-all of the form. But I think the reason that rock could have the cultural impact it achieved is due to more than just the musical qualities. Besides, clearly we have to include the Ramones but any sane observer would disavow the pop-punk movement, and the surface musical arrangements are very similar. What's the difference? Ah, here we might find an answer to our quest for Rock, and then an explanation for its decline.
Now me, I blame Blink 182 for the near-death of Rock. Of course, I blame Blink 182 for almost everything, including global warming, avian flu, people who cut me off in traffic, Black Cherry Vanilla Diet Coke, the war in Iraq, and Tony Scott movies. And in some cases, I'm right to do so. But why aren't they Rock? Don't they adhere to the form of a punk song? Don't they present youthful, often juvenile material? Well, yes. But for all that, the current wave of pop-punk, rapcore, and whatever it is that Nickleback thinks they're doing--there's little or no challenge to the status quo in this music. As typified by Blink 182 or their spawn (Sum 41, I'm looking at you), there's no rebellion or subversion in the music besides a snotty insistence that Daddy'll pay for grounding me one day. Real rockers will kick your ass when they grow up. Blink doesn't want to grow up in the first place (note the annoying, whiney, faux-teenage vocals). There is no righteousness.
I know, I know: righteousness is not in and of itself a scientific--or even coherent--test. But it feels right to me, and when it comes to Rock I tend to trust visceral impulses. By offering us a choice of rebellion limited to which consumer directives we'll follow, or a smoothly-paved pre-teen crudeness, we can feel like we're sticking it to the System, when all we're really doing is choosing a different colored lever. Rock should be more about chewing your way out of the cage.
09:55 x Thomas x /music/business x link x 1 comment
Musical Sketchpad, Session Seven
Although there's no reason they should be, these sketchpads are really satisfying. I put the file online, post a short description, and then probably two people download it. I guess they just make me feel productive--and it's always good practice to record yourself.
This is an old song. The band didn't like it. I'm not sure if it is worth resurrecting or not, but hey: that makes five originals! (six, including Innsmouth Blues). A couple more, I could be all indie and release an EP.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/recording/sketchpad x link x 1 comment
I'm trying to cut back on the number of entries I begin with the pronoun "I," because it's probably not good to trumpet my narcissism that clearly.
...oh. Crap.
13:49 x Thomas x /random/note_to_self x link x 1 comment
Musical Sketchpad, Session Six
Sometime next week the ProTools rig that my department ordered at work will arrive. I'm very excited, and not just because it's a serious DAW to play with outside of work hours (mental note: pick up a flash drive for my personal projects). It's also a real opportunity to add much more polish to the Best of B-SPAN podcasts. One of my plans is to add musical beds underneath all narration--but for that, I need freely-licensed samples that include both intros and outros, plus a subdued central loop. And why use our canned music library when I can make much more interesting backgrounds myself?
This sketchpad is an attempt at building such a loop, using a riff that's cool but far too busy to fit into the Four String Riot. It's not perfect for that purpose--the overlaid solo is choppier than I wanted, and this is probably too high energy to use for such low-energy material--but I think it turned out surprisingly well as a compositional experiment, and was good for planning my approach. I think it also proves that it's possible to build this kind of music quickly using just my bass and a few software tools. The drum loop was programmed using the essential free beatbox Hammerhead (using its Acoustic kits) and then imported into my Cubase session. I recorded all of the bass directly into the Tascam US122 at the same tempo, then tweaked it with either the built-in effects or the MDA VST collection which is fantastic and free.
Much easier than writing a real song. And honestly, not much less fun.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/recording/sketchpad x link x 0 comments
This week's Escapist features my article "How China Cheats at the Videogame Industry" as the cover story. I hope I got those characters right. They should read dianwan shijian, or "video game world"--not an especially deft turn of phrase, but not inappropriate. I just don't want to end up on Hanzismatter.
A couple days ago I mentioned to a Bank co-worker from Hong Kong that I'd written something on software piracy in China. "Software? That's not important," he said. "They counterfeit medicine and food there, too. People die, they get poisoned. That's a big problem." I think that's a good perspective to keep in mind. The Escapist piece tries to restrict itself to the causes, problems, and solutions of the gaming market--but this is a struggle faced by many different industries, not just entertainment software.
In other news, after submitting my DWI article to NoVA Magazine, they asked me to write a short piece about telenovelas, the soap operas that are fantastically popular on Spanish-language television. I don't know where to find a telenovela expert--but I'm going to enjoy figuring it out.
21:00 x Thomas x /gaming/media/online x link x 1 comment
This is awesome: Middle-school and high-school kids from Manhattan built their own instruments and amplifiers as part of their art program. There's a short radio show hosted by student "DJ Kev" featuring their work. As Music Thing said, where was this when I was 14?
Along similar thematic lines, have you seen Konono No1? They play Congolese trance music through a homemade sound system, including hand-carved microphones and electric thumb pianos. It's... interesting.
16:32 x Thomas x /music/tools x link x 1 comment
I hope this is not gratuitous, but an economist with some experience in the region has responded to my Escapist article in the accompanying Lounge entry. I think both his comment, which is interesting and not unreasonable, and my response are worth reading--but then, I would. You can find them both here
00:00 x Thomas x /gaming/media/online x link x 0 comments
Yes, it is basically a movie about Al Gore giving a slideshow. Go ahead, get the jokes out of your system ("Perhaps we could put global warming... in a lock-box.") And then once you're done snickering, go see An Inconvenient Truth. It's really very good, and it's really very important.
The most frustrating thing about the movie is knowing--knowing--that if you try to talk to someone about it (and it really does give you a drive to action, makes you want to save the planet), they're probably going to bring up the same tired objections that all ignorant people use against global warming. "I'm not convinced it's us," they'll say, or "I heard that wasn't solid decided science yet." (Right: because "teach the controversy" has turned out to be such good, ethical advice.) And all those kinds of questions are actually answered by the movie. Gore explains why it is man-made, why there is no scientific controversy, and why we have to make changes now. It is a chilling demonstration, even as he delivers it with wit and good humor.
There are really very small things we can do. Change your light-bulb for one that uses less energy (it'll last longer, too). Move your thermostat up or down by only 2 degrees. There's more good advice at the movie's supporting website, ClimateCrisis.net. You're helping the planet, and you're lowering your energy bill. You'd honestly have to be malevolent to not support this fight.
I know I'm a soft touch, but I honestly walked out of the theater fired up and looking for ways that I can help. One of them, I hope, is to encourage you to go out and see the movie--but even if you don't (and I understand, money can be tight and it's not out everywhere), just take a look at ClimateCrisis.net and see how you can help yourself and the planet at the same time.
14:22 x Thomas x /movies/reviews/documentary x link x 1 comment
A Conversation, Imagined: I Was A Teenage Doppleganger Edition
Fig. A: Lalita Panyopas, star of Thai cinema. Fig. B: My adorable
girlfriend.
Thomas: Belle, look at this picture!
Belle: What about it?
Thomas: That's almost exactly the same pose as that movie poster I showed you a while back. Don't you think that's weird? (pulls up the original image, holds them side by side.) Put a gun in your hand and you could be the same person.
Belle: ...I don't see it.
Thomas: Whatever. I want to put them up side by side.
Belle: Okay, but you have to explain why I'm dressed like that.
Thomas: Toga party gone wrong?
Belle: No! It was spirit week for high school, and the color for the seniors was white.
Thomas: ...you had a senior color?
Belle: And it was the last day of spirit week, so that's why the band was playing.
Thomas: ...
Belle: And you have to write that I was "marching percussion," not like regular band. I don't want everyone to think that I'm a band dork.
Thomas: ...
Belle: Because I wasn't.
08:17 x Thomas x /random/personal x link x 1 comment
After having so much fun with Belle's Greco-Roman parade dress, it's only fair to tell this story: when we first met, she put a picture of me from my old band site up on her LiveJournal. I can't find the picture anymore--it's archived at home, but when I converted the site to this blog I removed all the old images and HTML. So you'll just have to make do with this high school-era picture, which I think is very similar:
I believe the comment that she got from one of her friends was that I looked like a "sweetheart Bob Saget." Not America's funniest home videos.
00:00 x Thomas x /random/personal x link x 0 comments
A cold shot of Justice--on the rocks!
According to the Virginia State Police, almost 25 thousand drivers were arrested for driving while intoxicated in 2005, and a similar number will probably be arrested this year. Even more tellingly, Northern Virginia is a hotspot for these arrests, because it's more populated and easier to police. Fairfax County alone accounts for more than ten percent of the state's DWI arrests each year. When the flashing blue lights urge them to the side of the road, many drivers may not be prepared for the cost they'll pay--a proper cost, many would argue, since drunk drivers are a danger not only to themselves but also to others on the road. Whether the current laws are appropriate or not is out of my purview. But anyone who risks getting into a car with even the slightest amount of alcohol in their system should know what they might be facing if they get caught.
A cautionary tale, soon to be printed in Northern Virginia Magazine (although I'm not sure exactly when). And with that, I am out of freelance assignments. My next goal is to publish in Washingtonian and City Paper. If anyone has any great DC stories, let me know.
00:00 x Thomas x /journalism/articles x link x 0 comments
Sebastian Mallaby's The World's Banker is half modern history of the World Bank and half biography of recent Bank President James D. Wolfensohn. In both cases, it is admiring and yet critical. Mallaby has clearly been charmed by Wolfensohn, but the portrait that eventually emerges is that of a brilliant man simultaneously blinded by, and insecure in, his own brilliance. The Bank itself is portrayed in a similar light: an institution with great power and knowledge that, under Wolfensohn, finds itself caught between politicians that expect miracles and NGOs bent on its destruction.
Despite such a conflicted description, Mallaby still manages to express his admiration for the Bank's work, and makes a convincing case for its success. Perhaps the book's greatest accomplishment is that it provides a personable layman's guide to the role of the Bank. Having worked at the Bank for almost two years now, but not having gone through any formal orientation, The World's Banker cleared up a lot of questions for me, and provided a lot of historical context for the observations I've made. Whether you agree with his ultimate conclusions--and I would argue that he comes across as far too glib when dismissing the concerns and works of many NGOs--you could do a lot worse than this as a text for understanding why the World Bank is not actually a Bank, and how its role in development has changed over the last fifty years.
Speaking of glibness, I also picked up--but could not bring myself to complete--Joe Stiglitz's Globalization and its Discontents this weekend. It is not that Stiglitz is a bad writer, or a bad economist. The former is certainly not true, and while I am not an expert the latter also doesn't seem to be the case. Rather, it's the tone and subject of the book, which are not immediately evident, that drove me away.
Perhaps I will return to it later.
00:00 x Thomas x /bank/analysis/institutional x link x 0 comments
Last night I finally got around to installing homebrew support on my old DS. Now I've got the DS Lite as a game machine, and the original DS as a music sequencer using NitroTracker. I'm loading files from the GBA Media Player (Lik-Sang), which uses cheap compact flash and is itself pretty inexpensive. A lot of homebrew supports access to the FAT32 on the GBAMP, so that's a gig of space on my DS for samples and songs if I wanted.
Here's the process I used to get everything up and running:
If you try to do this with a DS Lite, you have to be careful, because it's much easier to touch the wrong contact during the flash upgrade and brick the whole machine. But on the other hand, at least you're not masochistically struggling against Sony the whole time, as with PSP homebrew. Nintendo seems to have taken steps to prevent this, but it looks like a half-hearted effort at best.
16:57 x Thomas x /gaming/software/homebrew x link x 1 comment
For my own reference: Converse All Star Flame hi-tops, on clearance, not available from Zappos. After-tax purchase. Also: must investigate the durability of the leather versions, as opposed to the canvas, which wears out after about a year.
11:39 x Thomas x /random/personal x link x 1 comment
With the issue off the shelves for at least a couple weeks now, I can add my NoVA Magazine piece to my online portfolio, ThomasWilburn.net. It's in the Writing section, or you can just click here. There's also an option to read it as a scanned .pdf, so you can see how it originally appeared in the magazine--handy if you're not actually in the Northern Virginia area. I think it looks good, myself, but I have to admit I'm a bit biased.
Sadly, I may have lost the original .txt copy of the other article in that issue, my interview with the ROCS Staffing founders. Since it is mostly just them speaking, and not so much my own words, it's not terribly critical--but when I get a chance, I'll scan and capture it (retype, if necessary, it's not very long).
00:00 x Thomas x /journalism/articles x link x 0 comments
Post.
12:50 x Thomas x /meta x link x 1 comment
Reactions to a bassist playing chords vary widely. Most people aren't really aware of the difference between a bass and a regular guitar, much less the traditional roles of either. For those lucky people, it's nothing out of the ordinary--as Ed Friedland once remarked, they simply see someone playing a large, warm-sounding guitar. Of the musically-aware, some are amused, or even ho-hum. But for a lot of musicians who really ought to know better, the idea that a bassist would dare to use chords is shocking, or even offensive. What, you think you're some kind of guitarist?
Well, no, I certainly hope not--I'm trying to play in tune here! (ba-dum-bum) Jokes aside, there's no reason that bassists shouldn't be just as polyphonic as their thin-strung counterparts. Granted, bass chords don't fit into every context. For one thing, they're huge: the low fundamental and rich harmonics of bass strings, combined with the relatively vast frequency range of the average bass amp, means that it's possible for them to swamp a band if they're used improperly. Good for annoying a lead guitarist, maybe, but not so good for your overall sound. With that said, playing chords is a lot of fun, and can also help fill out an empty arrangement or a non-traditional instrumentation.
A few ground rules before we start:
All of the following shapes, written as tablature with the interval relationships to the side, are fully movable, and almost all of them are closed--no open or skipped strings. They are all G chords, as far as I know--my knowledge of theory is actually a bit rusty, so feel free to correct me if I've accidentally mislabeled one or two. For example, the chord that I list below as a minor seven (m7) chord is listed in Wheat's Bassbook as a Dominant 7 chord. Since I am not really concerning myself with key relationships, it's easier for me to remember m7.
-16-(3) -15-(b3) -17-(8) -17-(8) -17-(5) -17-(5) -15-(R) -15-(R) Major Minor
I rarely strum chords across all four strings, but these are useful both as reference points and also for arpeggios. They are good shapes to have around for the few times that you will use them. Cutting these chords apart into chunks will yield us a few more useful shapes.
---- -7-(5) -17-(8) or -5-(R) -17-(5) --- -15-(R) --- Power chords
Power chords are very, very useful. On bass they are also very heavy sounding. As you can see, the same basic shape can be played starting on any of the E, A, or D strings. I use a barred ring finger to play the fifth and the octave. You can actually drop the octave note without substantially altering the chord, but you might be better off dropping the root for a clearer sound. That brings us to our first inversion...
-16-(3) -17-(R) -17-(5) ---- inverted major
The inverted major chord is handy because it sounds much lighter than a corresponding power chord or four-string chord, while implying a lower note. I like to use this shape to hint at very low chords (like a low B) while actually playing in the upper frets.
-15-(b3) -17-(R) -17-(5) ---- inverted minor
Here's the minor chord equivalent of my inverted major. The same uses hold true.
-10-(b7) -11-(7) -12-(5) -12-(5) -10-(R) -10-(R) ---- ---- m7 M7
This minor seventh is one of my favorite shapes. It's the strum loop for "My Foundation" and the first rhythm chord in "Voodoo Funk." What I like about it is the tension it creates, which can then be resolved either through another instrument or by transitioning to another chord. It's a little edgy. The major seventh, on the other hand, sounds whiny to me, and I usually prefer to use an inverted major unless I'm aiming for melancholy.
-8-(b6) -5-(4) -4-(3) -3-(b3) -5-(R) -5-(R) -5-(R) -5-(R) --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- m6 add4 major minor
These double stops are all useful for creating lightweight implied chords, especially on the highest strings, or as transitions and accents for the double-stop power chord shown above. Note that the add4 doubles as a power chord up a fourth (in this case, this Gadd4 double stop is the same as an inverted C power chord). The ambiguity of double stops is useful because it requires less work to move quickly between them.
-14-(2) -17-(4) -12-(5) -17-(R) -10-(R) -17-(5) ---- ---- add2 add4
Here are a couple more extended chords, this time as triads. I don't rely on these for regular use, but they make good accents to the power chord and the inverted major chord, respectively. To form the add2, I just swing my pinky up to fret past my ring finger. For the add4, I flatten my middle finger out from barring the first to strings, and bar all three. You can hear these used in "Lazy Sunday Eyes" for both the verse arpeggios and the chorus transitions.
-12-(R) -12-(R) -12-(5) -12-(5) -13-(b3) -14-(3) ---- ---- minor major
Finally, here are a couple of second inversions that can be useful. Because the root is moved all the way to the top of the triad, they sound much, much lighter than the other versions of the same chord. I don't use these often, because they're difficult to finger accurately. I usually bar across all three strings to get the top two notes, then use my middle or ring fingers to add the third. This is also more difficult to do the higher you go on the neck, because your arm is forced into an odd angle. They are, however, sometimes useful when you need to imply upward movement at the top of the fretboard.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/theory x link x 0 comments
Everything Bad is Not Quite Good for You
The South Park Republicans, not content to make me ashamed for enjoying television, music, and dumb action movies, are now trumpeting the value of video games as brain-building mental exercise (link to Joystiq, not OpinionJournal).
No offense to the many whom I'm sure will leap to join the chorus defending this hobby, but that's terrible reasoning. I'm more in agreement with Roy Edroso:
Though I cannot speak to the aesthetics of Doom and Grand Theft Auto, I will say that, much as I love The Sopranos, complicated plotting is the least of its excellencies; and that, while the ability to follow multiple story lines may be admirable and perhaps useful, it would better suit a young person to learn how to tie various story threads into an analysis, a skill that far predates the digital video disc.
It has been my experience as a remedial English tutor that even the brightest students are undertrained in, and often unaware of, the simplest analytic tools -- including grammar, sentence structure, and outlining. These are not nearly so easy to absorb as the skills Gladwell values, but the fact that he can make himself clear in essay form shows that he has himself mastered them, which makes it rather disturbing to me that he seems not to care much that we make so little effort to wrench our kids away from their entertainment modules long enough to learn how to diagram a sentence or tie three supporting details to a main idea.
We are all futurists nowadays, and it is to be expected that the author of The Tipping Point would hope to find some bright, positive New Paradigm in the video obsessions of our young people. But it is a stubborn fact that some sorts of machinery, greasy and earth-bound as they may seem, are yet necessary to our progress, and that this goes for intellectual as well as physical realities. If we don't teach our young citizens to think rather than merely process information, all the video-savvy in the world isn't going to save their sorry asses. As seductive as the Information Age fantasy is, we will never be a nation of managers, magically summoning prosperity with our Blackberrys, without something to manage. Something has to be created first. And to create we need tools. Noun-verb agreement is to my mind a good start. You can do your part by collaring some young ruffian and making him or her learn it.
Play a lot of video games? Do I! Embarrassingly so! But Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You argument that somehow inventory management and basic logic puzzles are creating valuable life skills has gotten way out of hand. It is certainly possible for gaming to carry an educational mission, but I would doubt honestly that the vast majority of entertainment software is causing the next stage of human evolution--much less granting job skills that couldn't be just as easily learned in a different context, such as (and these are just my examples) joining a rock band or closely following professional sports management.
I try to look at gaming as a hobby that exists in a greater context; socially, politically, and culturally. Sometimes, I'll admit, the resulting posts are tedious and not well written--or even well-considered. But I like to think that it's possible to take such a wider view by using the same tools we might use to analyze a book, or a movie, or an action taken by a public figure. You won't learn how to critique a rhetorical message from a video game--and maybe you shouldn't. That's not a fault of the medium. It is instead an endorsement of complicated answers to our questions. Too often, especially in the tech community, we look for simple answers: OLPC, the ESRB, and now video games.
I also can't say for sure if the toolkit required for these complicated answers--logic, evaluation of credibility, and some grasp of metaphor--is being taught to the disobedient youth at our debauched modern day schools. Nor can I say whether they will stay off my lawn! My father, who teaches the anklebiters for a living, feels that there is a lack of critical thinking ability in the young today, but the school system hasn't had much time with them by the time they reach him.
In "A Canticle for Leibowitz" the polite term of post-nuke address is "simpleton," a backlash against the scientists who invented the bombs. It's a symptom of a wider anti-intellectual movement. Only in the presence of a similar anti-intellectual movement--and look no further than the Oval Office for its prime advocate--could we see video games as anything other than a neutral cultural artifact. It is one thing to be able to look at those games, and by extension the large part of our society's empty-headed entertainment product, and try to see what it says (or could say) about us as people. It is quite another to trumpet the games as a learning experience in and of themselves, which is what Opinion Journal (and ultimately Johnson or Gladwell) would have you do. Limiting ourselves that way is the mark of being a simpleton, and proud of it. I don't want any part of that.
Five posts in one day? Why yes, my Internet connection at home has been unreliable lately, how could you tell?
15:09 x Thomas x /gaming/perspective x link x 1 comment
A list of reasons that movies based on games suck:
Every medium has difficulties in the adaptation and transition from one form to another. Books that are turned into movies tend to be too heavy, suffering from crushing 500 pages of plot into 120 minutes. Comic book movies betray the worst of their source material: the silliness of outlandishly-costumed vigilantes Fighting Evil while mishandling their soap-operatic personal lives. Nowadays we even have a whole genre of movies adapted from other movies, particularly in the case of foreign flicks (read: Japanese horror). Because sadly, Americans may run screaming from the theater if they have to watch anything without a cracker as a main character, or listen to the devil-tongues of furriners.
I watched Advent Children the same weekend that I finished the third Prince of Persia game. AC is blatant fan-service: Square managed to squeeze every character and reference into the movie as was humanly possible. A friend and I had a good time calling out various references ("Ha! Limit Break!" "Bahamut!") as it went along, but that's not the same as saying that it's a good movie. It just means that it's not a terrible two hours if you are a tremendous dork. Even if you are a tremendous dork, you probably need to have played the game--and since I never actually got more than an hour into FFVII, I was lost pretty much the whole time.
The shame of this is that Final Fantasy VII is one of those games that (for some reason) brings back misty-eyed reminiscences for people who actually have finished it. You would think that just remaking the cinematics from the game using new tech, and finding a way to glue them together narratively, you'd have a half-decent movie. With games being more cinematic these days, it would make sense to do that, right? Take GTA's non-interactive sequences, play them sequentially, and you've basically got a Godfather knockoff right there.
Instead, when I look at the list, I see two different approaches: one is to overcomplicate an otherwise faithful script, and the other is to pretty much disregard the source material altogether. The former isn't hard to understand, since (despite my enthusiasm) much of what glues a game together is repetitive and relatively uninteresting to watch. Nobody wants to watch someone level up after killing ten rats, and you can't base an entire movie on drive-by shootings (now that I've said that, someone will try). Leaving those mechanics in the movie (read: Doom) is a boneheaded move. The key would seem to be striking a balance between faithfulness and the rules of cinema--finding devices to fill the space where the game took place, and using them to build character or flesh out the already-existing plot--more "based on" and less "inspired by."
There are people who would say that you can't make a good movie from a video game by definition, because they're basically trash. I actually take some heat from friends who will read here every now and then, because I occassionally discuss the games I play at a higher level than they might deserve. To those people, all I can say is "Pirates of the Caribbean." Was there ever a dumber idea than to make a movie from a (let's be honest) lame and uninteresting theme park ride? Cory Doctorow might get all slobbery when someone proposes turning Disney animatronics into a feature, but I'm pretty sure the rest of us heard the news a few years back and rolled our eyes. Now look at it (and try to ignore The Haunted Mansion while you're there).
I'd like to discuss pulp at a later time, but in short: there are many great movies that are based on material as shallow as the average video game. Spiderman turned out pretty well. Seven is nothing more than a cheap thriller that realizes the best of the medium (great acting, excellent plotting, and a good gimmick). When it all comes down to it, classics like The Maltese Falcon are based on dime-store material. I'd like to say that there are a lot of games that would meet some level of quality--maybe not enough to rise to greatness and widespread acclaim, but competence would be nice. I don't think it's too much to ask that they be as good as, say, Mission Impossible.
Ah, easy for me to say. At the center of my optimism is the belief (new, I'm sure, to a generation of people who grew up post-NES) that a game can be just as much a cultural artifact as a book or a film. The implication of many conversions is a lack of respect for the original--Silent Hill is one of the first that seemed to take itself seriously, for what good it did.
Could just be me, but I'd watch that.
00:58 x Thomas x /gaming/media/movies x link x 1 comment
I wanted a drum machine that I could control with $20 of game hardware, so I built it in Excel. A little weird, but I think acceptably eccentric. But Drumpad has its share of problems--funky implementation, non-standard compliant, and often unacceptably laggy when actually played through a joystick. The problem is that I'm trying to build a poor man's MIDI synth.
Well, if I'd thought about it, I would have actually done it with MIDI. CDM featured command line-based utilities, including a keystroke-to-midi translator and a drum sampler, a few weeks back that would make a fine project base. You can find them here. If you were to use ControlMK to link the joystick to those utilities, it's much more responsive, and it's still free. Plus, there's a lot of other fun hackable tricks you could play. I love the command line.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/digital x link x 0 comments
At Least "Purple Haze" Is Safe
It was a hard struggle not to comment on the absurdity of National Review's 50 Greatest Conservative Rock Songs, a list which is so mind-bogglingly oblivious that it includes both the Clash and the Kinks. I was worried I couldn't do it justice, and besides--everyone else on the political blogs had already covered it, and I hate jumping into the same tired controversies. But Charles Pierce, also known to Altercation readers as The Man, splashes through its shallow depths with his usual aplomb.
00:00 x Thomas x /politics/wingnuts/national_review x link x 0 comments
The security alarm at the building entrance goes off when I try to scan my ID card.
Me: Oh, no. My card expired today. Can I get a temporary ID?
Security Guard: We don't have you in the system.
Me: Well, that's because my contract lapsed Friday, but the new one starts on the first.
Guard: I can't see that.
Me: Come on, I've been working here for almost two years. I just need to run upstairs. It's obvious I work here--look at the old ID.
Guard: All right, fine. Here's a temporary card.
A short while later, I try to bring my amplifier and spotlights out of the building.
Guard: Hey, wait a second.
Me: Yes?
Guard: You can't take that out of here.
Me: Why not? It's my property. I played for the division end-of-year party on Thursday.
Guard: We don't know that.
Me: How many bass amps do you think the World Bank could possibly own?
Guard: You can't take that with you. You'd have to fill out a property form.
Me: Fine! Yes! A property form! Can I fill that out?
Guard: No. You're not in the system.
Some days, it's like I work in a Kafka novel.
00:00 x Thomas x /bank/experience/personal x link x 0 comments
Shorter Final Fantasy: Advent Children:
"Beautifully stylized fight scenes, physics-defying motorcycle chases, and a large cast of shallow but well-costumed characters? You know, this would make a really good video game."
00:00 x Thomas x /movies/reviews/anime x link x 0 comments
