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.
Original trade-in price offered by Gamestop on five games: ~$45
Income from selling said games on eBay instead, not counting shipping: $106.52
Difference between Gamestop and eBay prices: $61.52, or 136% of the trade-in price
I didn't even have to try very hard. eBay has an ISBN database now, so usually I could type one number and have the whole listing completed for me. Retailers had better hope no-one realizes that it's basically the same amount of hassle whether I wait around at the post office or at the store. Not to mention, postal workers rarely ask me if I want to preorder anything.
Although I was tempted by their crafty "stamps" pitch. Next time, USPS. Next time.
00:00 x Thomas x /gaming/software x link x 0 comments
Galactica Season Three Gag Reel
First Draft included this in Athenae's weekly Galactica post. Since it has spoilers in it, I can't watch it for another couple months, so I'm saving it here.
13:22 x Thomas x /movies/television/galactica x link x 1 comment
When I first started learning bass, I did what any young geek does during a new challenge: I went online.
My roommate was a bassist, and a pretty good one. Unfortunately, my roommate was also insane and didn't play well with others. I bought a used amp from him, but he wasn't much help for developing my skills. I also picked up a copy of Peter Murray's Essential Bass Technique, which had lots of pictures of how to use my hands--fingerstyle bass can be very technical, and I honestly considered myself too uncoordinated to learn. Beyond questions of physical movement, though, I had a lot of questions about what the bass does in a rock band, what situations I might want to prepare for, and how to properly set up the equipment.
I don't know how I found the Lowdown. I probably just googled a random topic, and one of its threads came up. I wasn't reading Bass Player yet, so I doubt that I realized that the Lowdown and the magazine were linked. But there was a lot of information available, and a lot of really experienced players. I practically read the whole archive, and I lurked on the main page for weeks before I made my first post.
I've been a member of the forum since late 2003--about three and a half years now, I guess. It doesn't seem that long. I don't post very often, and when I do it tends to be gear-related, since I don't usually have much to contribute to the theory or technique threads. But what has amazed me are the ways that I feel like I know those people, even though I've never met them in person. I've gotten help with buying wine (kind of hard when you don't drink it), learned to ask "What would Lemmy do?", and given someone money to buy a Swatch.
A few months ago, one of the oldest board members--a moderator, actually--died of a heart attack. It was very sudden. His name was Dave Brown, and he was a music teacher in Texas. Dave had been one of the calm, helpful members of the forum, and someone who could contribute to discussions of musical theory, which were always valuable even if the rest of us didn't understand all of it. Dave's passing became the forum's first sticky thread, and all the regulars (as well as a number of lurkers) gathered there to dig up our favorite quotes or threads. Bass Player took note, and an obit appeared in the February issue. Dave's family even got in touch with a few people, and posted audio from the funeral online for us to hear.
That an interpersonal connection could be created without face-to-face interaction (for the most part) is not completely new. But the speed of communicating over the Internet makes it easier. The structure of forums themselves--grouping conversations by searchable topics, while still retaining a chronologically fluid linearity instead of the heirarchy of threads that's more common in places like Livejournal--means that discussants can interrupt each other, wander off topic, and all the other noise-to-signal that nevertheless is a part of most human interaction. Over time, a forum develops its own personality, and people who join it have to learn its quirks and customs. I don't like to think of these as a "space," because I think that gives forums credit for more physicality than they deserve. It's more like an echo.
There's an article in Wired this month about MTV's virtual space, built to promote trashy reality show Laguna Beach. MTV's online environment, like Second Life and other massively-multiplayer online games, seems like it's meant to be the next step up from the text forum. Because I think part of my schtick is to be a luddite, I'm honestly a little skeptical. My main criticism is that they're not archived--newcomers can't search through the environment's past for bits of wisdom. Instead, most of what people tend to learn in avatar-based spaces has to do with the space itself--and they may resort to more traditional forums when it comes time to document those lessons.
By Internet time, text forums are old. They date back to BBS systems. I guess I'm just impressed that something so relatively simple can be such a powerful experience, one that seems hard to improve. I don't think adding polygons is the next step, but I'm stumped as to what it could be.
08:09 x Thomas x /culture/internet x link x 1 comment
So like I said, we had a talent show at work yesterday to raise money for charity. This takes some explaining.
The Bank itself doesn't pay taxes, because it's an international organization. Most of its employees don't pay taxes, because they're not American, and as far as I can tell most other countries are not as gung ho about gathering revenue from expatriates as we are. In fact, according to the IHT, the US is the only developed country that taxes overseas citizens, and it recently increased those taxes, perhaps as punishment for Americans who dare to work outside our borders with suspicious furriners.
In any case, I'm sure that's a real plus for individuals working here, and it's not like the employees are robbing the federal government blind. But it is kind of a drag for the city of DC, since Bank staff use the infrastructure and work here, but don't contribute to its coffers. Like many cities, DC already has a lot of commuters who work in the city, but live and pay taxes outside. So each year, in the spirit of making up for their consumption, the Bank runs a Community Connections campaign that donates to local charities and humanitarian groups.
This is not uncontroversial within the staff, mind you. Many people here feel that they already give significant amounts to their home countries, which are actually still developing in many cases. And they do, to some extent have a point. I don't agree with it, but I can see why they feel that way. So to get people to contribute without guilt-trips about DC's AIDS and homeless rates, our coordinator put together a talent show and charged ten bucks to watch managers and staff embarrass themselves. Yes, of course I was on stage.
I'm still waiting for the tape, which I expect will showcase the totality of disaster that was the musical portion of the program. But I have to say that I was surprised by how many people stuck around until the end. I got good comments on the music, proving that there's no accounting for taste, although I was told several times that it was "very loud." I played "Voodoo Funk," and then a trio of myself, a Bank drummer, and the drummer's cousin played "Werewolves of London" and "Wipeout." We also backed the VP on a performance of "Malaika," which is now still stuck in my head--no small accomplishment in Swahili.
So don't let anyone ever tell you that economists (and especially World Bank economists) don't know how to have a good time. They just prefer to have a good time in short bursts, and it helps to bribe them with free food. Also, have their manager send them threatening e-mails about their attendance. That doesn't hurt.
00:00 x Thomas x /bank/events/staff x link x 0 comments
Charity Talent Show at Work Postmortem
...Well, my morning's shot. How about yours?
15:26 x Thomas x /bank/events/staff x link x 1 comment
I'm selling some games on eBay this weekend. They're only up for three days, because I'm impatient that way. If you're looking for a pretty good deal, I think these are fair prices, and they're more than I'd get from the thieves at EBGames. Of course, just between us friends, I'm not selling all of these because they are too good to keep, if you know what I mean. So here's what we've got.
All games start low and have a Buy It Now price of $20, except for Animal Crossing at $10 and Zelda at $40, because I'm CRAAAZY! They end Tuesday at around 12pm ET.
Speaking of the grey market, I have to say that in retrospect the imported DS Lite is looking like a pretty good purchase. When I first got it, and then they announced that they'd be releasing it a month later domestically, it looked like I'd paid a big premium just for the blue color. Now, of course, Nintendo hardware is backordered everywhere, and the import prices have skyrocketed. Brinstar and I don't look quite as silly now. Well, relatively speaking, I guess.
22:50 x Thomas x /gaming/software x link x 1 comment
Remember that scene from Blade Runner, when they interview the worker to find out if he's a replicant? I have been in that interview.
Getting a good head start on the unemployment process, I've started sending out resumes. It's reassuring to get responses, even in the negative. The last time I did this, I wasn't important enough to even get a rejection letter half the time. For one recent application at a large quasi-journalistic organization, I had to visit their site and fill out about 500 multiple-choice personality and management questions, most of them banal ("Do you prefer a casual workplace?" "Do your coworkers know when you are upset?"). Only in the last step did I actually type in my name and detail my CV, which felt decidedly anticlimactic. A screen said that someone would contact me by e-mail if any further attention was needed.
A few days later, I got an automated e-mail from the organization, instructing me to call a number for a phone interview. Excited by the progress, I phoned them up at lunch and made an appointment for the next week.
"Now," said my impossibly-cheerful interviewer when she called, "I'm going to ask you a series of questions. I cannot explain any of these questions or elaborate on them in any way, although I can repeat them if necessary. Do you understand?"
I agreed, a little hesitant, at which point I was confronted with verbal versions of the same bland, pointless management questions as the web form. I could tell that it even had follow-up questions built-in, because if I started to elaborate on my answers, the voice on the phone would interrupt me.
"Could you explain why you answered that way?" she would bleat. Toward the end of the call, I began to try increasingly subtle segues on yes/no questions, just to see how far I could get before she broke in. It was odd: before the call, I had been seized by an irrational fear that I would begin answering questions with grotesque lies and resume inflation, and like the Southern accent that I sometimes find myself gently mimicking over phone conversations, I would be unable to stop. Now my biggest task on the interview was retaining a semblance of humanity when faced by a virtual automaton.
After the interview, my caller (I believe her name was something like Patty, or some other name that summons images of beehive hairdos and church-basement cassaroles) answered my question about the odd format with what sounded like another prepared spiel. They were trying not to bias the process, she said, and so they asked everyone exactly the same thing. My recorded conversation would be played for an analyst, and they would let me know within the week. Almost a week later, I got an e-mail saying that my skills were not a match, and thanks for my application.
Perhaps it's paranoid of me, but I've started to wonder if Patty or the analyst actually existed. It doesn't seem out of the question that a carefully-programmed answering service could have made that phone call. At any point, did real human beings see my application? And in a business that's based on communication, isn't it a little ridiculous that I could even ask?
11:05 x Thomas x /journalism/professional x link x 1 comment
As Hackaday observed, I wish I had an industrial robot to play with. A couple of robotic engineers linked the Wii controller up to a robot arm with a fast response time, and quickly had it playing tennis or swordfighting. The motions are basically canned and matched to a set of prerecorded swings, but they explain how it could be converted to a more real-time system.
I wonder what the price tag on one of those arms would be? Not even just for this. I'd train it to spray water at the cat.
19:31 x Thomas x /gaming/hardware/control x link x 1 comment
From a friend, in response to my lack of recycling:
Speaking of communists and myself, I go over my server logs every couple days, since I don't have trackbacks here. Apart from the many, many hits that I'm giving myself (M0 basically acts like a portable bookmarks list for me), I'm seeing references from two Chinese-language sites: Haosl.com and ChinaDV.com. Unfortunately, I can't actually read enough Mandarin to find a search link, and Google isn't very knowledgeable. If you're a reader from one of those sites, can you please let me know just what exactly led you here?
19:26 x Thomas x /random/personal x link x 1 comment
What is the What, by Dave Eggers
This review is split into two parts. The first part, labeled appropriately, is for people who simply wish to read the book. They don't want to pick nits with its postmodernity, and they don't want to get meta. It is, in that section, a pretty short review. The second part is concerned with an argument that could be called difficult, perhaps because it is challenging but more likely because it is me being a giant pain about the structure and framework of the book, not its dramatic content or technical execution. In other words, the first review is for readers, and the second is for critics.
Part the First
What is the What is the best thing Dave Eggers has written yet. Depending on your opinion of Eggers, best known for the high-technique but shallow debut novel A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, that may not be a terribly impressive statement. But What is the What is a genuinely moving and skillfully-written book, centering on one of the Sudanese Lost Boys, Valentino. The protagonist is sent out of his village one day after soldiers attack, and begins a long march with other boys to Ethiopia, where he lives in a refugee camp. Around this story is wrapped a present-day narrative of Valentino, now living in America, as he recovers from a mugging. These excerpts serve as anchors for his story of the past, addressing each chapter set in Sudan to a different character from the America story arc.
Although this flashback structure sounds cumbersome, it actually serves to break up the long, depressing death march through Sudan, and it simultaneously reminds us that a refugee's life in American remains a struggle to survive. It is a story of atrocities in Africa, but Eggers gives us a critique of our own actions and support for the victims of atrocities, and the result is more moving than you might expect.
Part the Second
What is the What ends with Valentino addressing the reader directly for the first time. In previous chapters, he speaks silently to people around him, telling them his story, but on the last few pages he drops this device without ceremony and begins using the second-person pronoun instead. It's a strong rhetorical statement, and Eggers uses it to deliver the surprisingly brutal final lines: "How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist." For a book about a largely-ignored civil war and genocide, the words are a striking reminder of the apathy of most Americans toward its subject.
And yet, what a curious ending for a book shelved in the fiction section, and bearing the confusing frontispiece "What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel, by Dave Eggers." Taken literally, we might actually doubt the sincerity of Valentino's existence. Eggers based the character on an actual person, including his real name, but the experience within the pages has been extensively shuffled and combined with other refugee stories to create a more compelling narrative. While I find Eggers' other work to be tiresome, I can't avoid that he is extremely skilled with words, and uses the urgency of an "autobiography" to draw the reader in and elicit sympathy. I hope that his book, all proceeds from which will go towards the Sudanese, is a success.
But it is also impossible for me to believe that Eggers, a self-conscious postmodernist known for his use of irony, is not aware of the implications when a partially-fictionalized character uses his "existence" as a goad for audience action. Given a survey of similar works, the decision to frame this account as both a fictional novel and a factual autobiography surely comes across as truly bizarre, and unnecessary. And as I will point out, while I think that What is the What is a good book, the questions that it refuses to answer about authorship and veracity prevent it from being a great one. Why do we care whether this is a novel or an autobiography? Does this matter, in the face of the subject? I would argue that it does, for five reasons.
First, the device undercuts the narrator's reliability. This is nothing new to fiction, and if this were The Sound and the Fury or Lolita it would probably be considered admirable. Those were works of literature. What is the What, on the other hand, obviously wants readers to do something about the Sudan. Characters remark on a regular basis that the United States could take care of the civil war if it felt like it, comparing it to interventions in Iraq. Valentino prods us gently through most of the book, explaining that we can't know what his life was like, before adding that final jab. But do we believe him? Can he be considered an authority? Because of hallucinations and misunderstandings, as well as his relatively uneducated state, Valentino is an impassioned victim, but he's not a historian or an authority.
Indeed, because he has tied himself so strongly to the first-person literary device, Eggers is forced to introduce other characters--soldiers, teachers, and aid workers--who hold forth across a page or two about Sudan's history in order to inform the reader. A valiant attempt has been made to bring these excerpts into the text, but it still often comes across as Chris Farley in Wayne's World--"My, the security guard certainly had a lot of information. I sure hope it comes in handy sometime in the future." And whereas other accounts of nonfiction events (I'm thinking specifically of Under the Banner of Heaven, but there are numerous others) momentarily step with the reader into a few paragraphs of historical explanation before moving back into the narrative, the insistence here on subjectivity--particularly from the memories of a starving, exhausted, confused boy--leaves readers with a relatively weak feeling of veracity.
This raises the second weakness of the non-non-fiction approach: it implies that the real story of Valentino Achak Deng is not good enough to be novelized without embellishment. Determined to tell all kinds of horrifying stories through a single narrator, Eggers compounds the misery of many Lost Boys onto Valentino's thin shoulders, and he struggles to keep up. In the Washington Post review, Gary Krist claims of What is the What that "[t]he result, however, is a document that -- unlike so many 'real' autobiographies -- exudes authenticity." Unlike real autobiographies, this fake seems real? What does this even mean? It is disturbing, not only that we need "better" nonfiction to be driven to action, but that we have to turn a real person into a fictional character before we can really empathize. Poor Valentino: apparently he's not good enough to be "authentic" without Egger's help.
In fact, another reason to be bothered by What is the What is that there are shadows of colonialism--the White man improving and editing the Other--hovering around this narrative device. Again, I find it hard to believe that Dave Eggers, who is by all accounts a generous and conscientious liberal in addition to his literary ambitions, hasn't questioned that fact. The pedagogical side-characters explain to us, through Valentino, that Sudan's conflict is often rooted in the actions of the racist colonial powers. Yet it didn't seem to occur to him that there is a difference between "The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, by Dave Eggers" and "My autobiography, by Valentino Achak Deng with Dave Eggers." I hesitate to assign racist motives to the author (although The Stranger was not so kind), but for me the question of why this material was not approached as a traditional--and more equitable--ghostwriting project hangs over it, and colors my view.
Which brings us to the fourth weakness of such a complicated frame: it weakens the book's rhetorical strategy. At a basic level, readers must be aware of the book's history and strategy, or it could easily be confused with fiction. The back cover--which, by the way, consists of a leaflet looped over the hardcopy binding and not something integral to the book--makes no mention that Valentino Achak Deng was a real person. A brief preface by Valentino introduces the book, but a preface by a fictional character is not unknown, and certainly isn't out of place for readers who are familiar with the jokey style of Eggers' other works. Attempting to lend weight to the book by relying on its own preface reminds me of a fundamentalist who answers criticism of the Bible's trustworthiness by pointing to Biblical verses about "God's Word." It is a weak argument, even without the author's unfortunate tendency toward elaborate literary playfulness.
By presenting this book as fiction, and shelving it as such, it's entirely possible for the reader to discount it or to feel less moved. After all, it's only a story. For a skeptical or hard-hearted reader, a crime to which I will obviously confess, reading interviews and reviews of the book calls its facts into question--which parts really happened to these characters, we might ask? Which are inventions, based on the testimony of other characters (Lost Boys, Valentino helpfully reminds us, being in the habit of exaggerating their stories for sympathy). Because it's fiction, we're not given a bibliography or future references. It would be possible, a year from now, for someone to pick this book up unaware of its pedigree, be moved by the skill of writing and the character, and then completely disregard it as a true story that demands action.
Is that really the best way for Eggers to make his argument? That is a tough question to answer, especially since many people will claim to be uninterested in nonfiction. I will grant that, as such, it may find more readers than is otherwise likely. Yet my final argument is that the novel has been weakened even as fiction by its determination for self-referentiality. While aficianados of literary fiction may find it charming or clever, the constant interplay between the two stories--particularly when Valentino picks a new present-day character to whom he addresses his past narrative--is jarring. For many readers, it drops them out of their suspension of disbelief. Those members of his audience with Korsakov's Syndrome or other brain damage may thank Eggers for these constant reminders that yes, they are reading a book. It will save them tattoo ink, I'm sure. But for myself and I have no doubt a number of others, these additions don't create more value than they detract.
Why is it that Eggers can't simply leave the two storylines alone, that he has to complicate things in this way? Clearly, for some readers, the device will overshadow the work itself, which would seem to make the novel a failure. I am not willing to go that far. I will say that it is striking that Eggers still cannot write a book that does not eventually star himelf, even one where he does not appear inside. My uncharitable side is inclined to say that he's simply too self-absorbed to step aside without stealing a little bit of the spotlight. At best, I think he's just too clever for his own good.
00:00 x Thomas x /fiction/reviews/eggers x link x 0 comments
Did you know? Anyone who uses a name online taken from an Ayn Rand novel has forever forfeited the right to be taken seriously. Now you know.
00:00 x Thomas x /random/linky x link x 0 comments
In which I liveblog Bloodrayne. It's Uwe Boll: how bad can it be?
| Elapsed Time | Notes |
| 0:00 | The movie opens with a series of faux-Renaissance frescoes, depicting the characters in the movie. I would love to have been the guy who got to photoshop Ben Kingsley into a fresco. |
| 0:01 | Hey, it says that Meat Loaf's in this! But his last name's credited as "Aday." Is that really his real name? Or is it a joke, like "A meat loaf aday keeps something at bay?" These are deep thoughts. |
| 0:06 | Kristanna Lokken as the half-vampire is being used as a freakshow attraction. They make her drink lamb's blood. It gives her a blood mustache, like a very morbid "Got Milk?" commercial. |
| 0:08 | I was hoping that Ben Kingsley being in this movie was just a sick joke, but there he is in white pancake makeup and a get-me-out-of-here-please lack of emotion. He's the only person in this movie with an actual accent, even though it's set in Europe during the 1600's. If I pretend not to know that fact, it's like I'm watching the Maryland Renaissance Festival. |
| 0:12 | I'll say this: Boll must have hired a decent DP for this. It's much more competently shot than House of the Dead. But he still can't direct actors, and he's emphasized that fact by hiring the least expressive actors he could find. Putting Michael Madsen and Michelle Rodriguez together in a scene is like watching the animatronic Presidents at Disneyland perform standup, except the robots are more charismatic. |
| 0:22 | Boll keeps doing these low establishing shots. I guess they're supposed to look very slick, but it's more like he's hired midgets to do his steadycam work. |
| 0:31 | There are movies based on videogames, and then there's this movie, which follows gaming logic to its disastrous end. Rayne sneaks into the basement of a monastary to steal something for some ridiculous reason, sees a sleeping guard wearing a cross, and then spies a cross-shaped hole in the wall. A normal person would think that maybe those both have to do with the monestary decorating motif, what with it being a religious institution and all. But Rayne knows that it's actually a lock for a secret passage. It's embarrassing that she leaps to this conclusion, and even stupider when she turns out to be right. |
| 0:34 | At some point my TiVo is going to catch up with realtime, and I'm going to have to watch those terrible Galactica promos with the emo rock. The exec who okay'd that must have been the same guy who decided to run Bloodrayne as a Saturday night movie. On the other hand, I'm actually watching it. Touche, tasteless NBC producers. Touche. |
| 0:46 | Meatloaf's not phoning it in. I respect that. |
| 0:54 | If I were a vampire, I don't think I'd put stained glass windows in my bloodsucking orgy lair. I also wouldn't let Michael Madsen and some generic minion just walk right in, swords drawn. But that's just me. Still, the movie does seem to prove my instincts correct. |
| 1:08 | Oh, look! Michelle Rodriguez is angry! That's different. And now for a training montage. I love a good training montage. Remember in Army of Darkness, when Ash trains the townspeople to fight with spears, all in unison? And then later on, when they face the skeleton warriors, they do the exact same moves, like it's a synchronized dance routine? That was awesome. I wish I was watching that movie instead. |
| 1:24 | All of the swords in this movie look like they were just cut from sheets of aluminum. They don't have any edge at all. It looks really silly, like they're fighting with large butter knives. I'm reminded of this because the characters have gone to some blacksmith to get weapons. He's also got holy water just sitting around on the shelves. I wonder if holy water has a sell-by date. I'd hate to use it on the undead, only to find out that it'd gone bad. |
| 1:30 | Rayne gives her cross medallion to Madsen's generic assistant as protection. Did anyone ever explain if other holy artifacts also work on vampires, or is it just the cross? In Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, the protagonist figures that the aversion to crosses is some sort of bizarre superstitious reflex left over from life, caused by self-loathing. The Jewish vampire is repelled by the Torah. Does that mean that atheist vampires are repelled by science textbooks and biohazard symbols? So much for Cobb County. |
| 1:40 | Every time someone gets on horseback in this movie, suddenly we get lots of helicopter shots. It's like Boll watched Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies and thought "Hey, I could do that." |
| 1:43 |
Why doesn't anyone in this script use contractions? Is that supposed to
make them seem like thespians? I'm going to have to try that sometime. "I
think I will walk the dog," I'll say. I feel more dramatic already.
Also: thespian? I don't remember dating within my gender. |
| 1:51 | Last fight scene between Kristanna Lokken and Ben Kingsley. I can't believe I just wrote that. Why did he agree to this? He was Ghandi! Ghandi! I'm at a loss for words, frankly. |
| 1:58 | It's over! It didn't make any sense, but it's over. Looking back, it could have been worse. I mean, yes, the dialog, plot, special effects, acting, and set design were all terrible. But some of the camerawork wasn't too bad. If Boll is set on the subject matter, maybe he could just direct video game commercials instead of movies. But then, there's probably no tax loophole in that. |
07:52 x Thomas x /movies/reviews/horror x link x 1 comment
Lime Chicken without the Chicken
Belle starts another weekend dogsit tonight, so she won't be having one of our homecooked meals for a few days. I'm sure that she can manage the store-bought pasta that's a staple on our dinner table (and one of the main reasons I keep a membership at Costco), but if she feels more adventurous I thought I'd try to write up one of her favorite dishes. This is a Mexican Lime chicken, but since Belle's a vegetarian obviously we're not going to be using real poultry. You'll need:
Start by adding a little bit of olive oil--only about a teaspoon--to the pan. Cooking with fake meats takes getting used to. Real chicken tends to have lots of its own juices, and when I've tried to use oil in the past, using too much just saturates the meat and makes it greasy. But vegetarian meat obviously never had any real juices, since the good stuff is usually some kind of mycoprotein (read: fungus. MMmmm!) so you have to help it out and keep it from burning in the pan or drying out. On top of the oil, squirt in some of your lime juice. With a squeeze bottle, I use two or three squeezes--probably a full lime and a half. Then I actually add a little bit of salt and pepper to the lime and oil mixture, so it'll cook into the bottom of the meat at first. I'm wary about doing an actual "rub" for fake meat, because I think it's less cohesive or durable than the real thing. You don't want it to crumble on you.
Now put the stove on medium to medium-high, enough to get a little sizzle but not enough to flash fry. Remember that the ficken doesn't really need to cook to be done--we're just trying to warm it up and sautee the outside a little. Add the cutlets, and sprinkle more lime juice on each, enough that the spices will stick. Sprinkle the salt, pepper, and other spices on top of the cutlets to taste. Now your job is basically just to babysit the cutlets and make sure that they don't burn--you want the outside to be browned but well away from blackening. There's nothing worse than burnt fungus. Turn each cutlet a few times, and use their position on the stove eye to regulate their cooking. To test, cut a little bit off the end and see if it's hot all the way through, as well as making sure that you don't need more lime or salt. Be careful not to add too much of either, though. It shouldn't be sour.
You can serve this on its own as an entree. I think it'd be good with wild rice and black beans, to offset the saltiness. But when I've served this for Belle, what I actually do is crush tortilla chips to cover the bottom of a shallow bowl, shred a little cheese on top of that, then layer on the cutlets and add a thin line of salsa down the middle of each. It's a colorful meal, quick to make, and pretty filling.
19:08 x Thomas x /random/cooking x link x 1 comment
When Enterprise started syndication on the Sci Fi channel, I figured I'd give it a shot. The idea of a prequel to the original Star Trek is interesting, even if I have reservations about anything starring Scott Bakula.
I doubt it'll stay on my TiVo watchlist for long, and I don't really want to discuss that at length here. What really struck me are the production elements and the scenery. When Star Trek moved from the original show to the Next Generation, it signalled a shift in the "future" as seen from the 1970's to a sleeker, information-age future. The blocky consoles and blinking light bulbs were replaced with smooth curves of plastic and touch-displays. The show's underlying premise underwent a similar revision, covering the original swashbuckling with a thick coat of liberal humanism (although regressive elements still lurked under the surface). While those changes make TNG superficially easier to watch for an audience that's used to slick special effects, I think it's going to age more poorly than it's first incarnation.
Enterprise casts itself in the mold of TNG in a lot of ways. The design of the ship, the sets, and the writing largely evoke the same polish, ergonomics, and mindset, respectively. I don't really care about what that does to continuity, since I shed any pretense of being a fan around the time when DS9 hit its peak. But I think it would have been more fun to watch a show that took its inspiration from Kirk instead of Picard. This doesn't just include the big, bulky technology that somehow has slimmed down and networked itself in Enterprise, although I think it would have been cool to see the old flip-top, satchel-shaped tricorders and square bridge panels again (Matt Jeffries, the original set and prop designer, reportedly said that subsequent entries to the franchise turned his bridge into "the lobby of a Hilton." He wasn't all wrong, either).
But more than that, there's a kind of sexiness to the first Star Trek that was neutered when Roddenberry revived his show in the 90's. Subsequent shows flirted with the idea, pardon the pun, but they were never allowed to be as blatant as the original. Catch a rerun sometime, and you can see why a million disturbing fan-fics have been written about it. Flared pants and calf-high leather boots, with tight-fitting tunics and gold trim? Starfleet had style, man--a markedly 1966-69 kind of style, sure, but it was there. Not to mention the ridiculous miniskirt uniforms, and Kirk's habit of either bedding any lifeform that moves, having his tunic ripped to shreds, or both. Whether you think it was great cinema or not (it wasn't), Star Trek was fun to watch.
Maybe the solution would have been to give Enterprise a much lower budget. After all, it's comforting to know that the technology for creating "ice or rocky planet #364" has remained relatively stable for the last twenty years. When push comes to shove, apparently nothing satisfies like styrofoam rocks and speckle-painted canvas wrapped around irregular shapes.
08:45 x Thomas x /movies/television/star_trek x link x 1 comment
Small Studio Find: Presonus Digitube
A lot of midrange audio interfaces will boast lots of inputs, but then a closer examination shows that those are S/PDIF, a digital audio protocol that uses an RCA jack, but has to be connected to another digital source. For example, my M-Audio Firewire Solo is technically 4 ins and 4 outs, but 2 channels each way are run over the S/PDIF jacks. I just ignored those for a long time, since I don't record from anything with a digital output and I figured I never would. Standalone analog-to-digital converters can be extremely expensive, and I thought I was more likely to upgrade the interface than to buy a $1,500 preamp just for an extra input or two.
With that said, BSW is selling the now-discontinued Presonus Digitube, which can transmit 24-bit S/PDIF signals and includes a semi-parametric EQ, for $89, which strikes me as a pretty good deal. If you've got a small project studio and you'd like to add another input without having to replace your interface, this looks like a decent way to do it. I'm holding off until I have more to record than just myself, but it's tempting.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/digital x link x 0 comments
Warren Ellis found the classic French film, La Jetee, on Google Video. If you've seen 12 Monkeys, you'll recognize parts of the plot and some design elements, since Gilliam's film was basically a remake. I'd never seen the original before. Ironically, the use of relatively banal still images juxtaposed with matter-of-factly surreal narration makes the film seem older than it actually is (1962), but also makes it ideally-suited for low bandwidth online video.
00:00 x Thomas x /movies/commentary/classic x link x 0 comments
"The Future was Funky." Exactly.
00:00 x Thomas x /movies/television/star_trek x link x 0 comments
One of the Multimedia Center staff started a wiki for lessons-learned and internal production knowledge-sharing. In a spasm of weekend activity, I added something like six pages to the audio section. I tried to write what I would have wanted to read when I first started learning, and I'm thinking about adding it to my portfolio. But it may be a little bit... specific... for my department's needs:
Sounds are originally created by vibrating or moving objects that set atoms in the air (or any surrounding medium, such as water) into motion. Those atoms bump into others, which bump into more atoms, and so on until the collision reaches your eardrum, moving it just slightly. Your brain translates the motion of your eardrum into "sound." Because these vibrations move through the air in a spreading pattern of high pressure (many atoms crashing into each other) and low pressure (atoms bouncing away from each other), they form a spherical pattern of pressures over time. The rising and lowering pressures can be seen as a wave as they pass by--a sound wave, in other words...
00:00 x Thomas x /music/theory/physics x link x 0 comments
A regular on the Lowdown posted a link that he described as "grindcore played by cute little Japanese girls." It would be more accurately described as "the antichrist has arrived, and he is a J-Pop band." This is terrifying. Of course, I must share it with you.
Not safe for quiet work environments, small children, the elderly, or people who would prefer to associate Japan with Hello Kitty and big robots.
16:42 x Thomas x /music/artists/yellow_machine_gun x link x 1 comment
One of my coworkers was heading back to the Dominican Republic, and he saw the USB/MIDI keyboard I had on my desk. Apparently, good hardware is hard to come by down there, and he asked to buy it. It was near the holidays, so I sold it to him for the price plus about ten dollars. I'm not a good keyboardist, but I like to monkey around with samplers and synths, and I've gotten used to running Pro Tools with physical controls. So today I finally got around to getting a replacement.
The Axiom 25's a nice keyboard. I liked the little drum pads in the top-right corner, especially. But ah! No sooner do I get everything unpacked, but the drivers refuse to install. It seems that M-Audio has decided not to support anything less than Windows XP, even though the driver model for Windows 2000 should be entirely identical. Back to the store it went.
This isn't the first time that audio hardware's refused to work with the older operating systems that I keep around the house. Presonus's Inspire 1394, my first choice for a Firewire interface, is likewise incompatible--clearly it's not a problem with IEEE 1394 audio, since the M-Audio Firewire Solo works just fine. Why couldn't they write a Win2K driver, since it's practically the same kernel? Who knows?
I'll tell you what I do know: it gets really old listening to Guitar Center employees repeatedly comment "Maybe it's time for an upgrade" when I try to find a working exchange. Yeah, I really want to spend a lot of extra money on a completely new operating system with increased system requirements just to fumble around with MIDI--a technology that has existed since 1983, and has been run over USB practically from the protocol's creation. There's really no excuse for it not to work on almost everything.
There's every reason that musicians should be able to make digital music on the cheap. I used to record on the laptop where I'm typing this now--a 366 Celeron--because just streaming audio with a few plugins doesn't cause a lot of stress. Theoretically, USB takes more overhead than Firewire, but I could never tell a difference. And as I've pointed out, most entry- to mid-level hardware comes bundled with a decent sequencer. It's depressing to hear that relatively simple controllers and interfaces are becoming harder to use without upgrades.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/tools/digital x link x 0 comments
Catty.
16:43 x Thomas x /random/personal/filthy_beasts x link x 1 comment
Home fabrication machines are now possible for around $2400. Congratulations, we're now one small step closer to post-scarcity.
When I saw this, I immediately thought two things. The first, since the article says the machine can be loaded with chocolate, was "I could make my own chocolate bunnies." The second was to remember how, a few years back and using one of the commercial fabricators, one engineer designed a working pellet gun straight out of the machine.
09:21 x Thomas x /science/engineering x link x 1 comment
My Internet claim to fame, before I started plastering my name all over this mountain of wandering ASCII, was as a coder in a very small corner of the PocketPC gaming market. Quake had just been ported to Microsoft's first usable mobile operating system, which was a big win, but I couldn't run it. At the time, PocketPCs were much more powerful than the Palm device where I'd started, but they were also much more expensive. To save money, some OEMs were making using cheap greyscale screens instead of the color versions that were more common. Greyscale was actually an advantage for some users, because the battery life was longer, but it used a 4-bit screen depth (like the original Gameboy) instead of 16-bit color. As a result, applications that weren't written to handle the lower scale would overwrite video memory with four times as much information, all incorrectly formatted, and the device would crash.
I was just a student, so I had to dip my toes into the WinCE market with one of the lower-end devices from an eBay auction. And while I was content to grin and bear it when the best commercial games would only run on color devices, Quake was open source. So I got a copy of the compiler and started mangling the video code until I created a version that would run on both devices. The conversion was tricker than I had initially figured (the buffer was actually addressed in landscape mode, so I had to write non-adjacent pixels to each byte when in portrait), but I managed to blunder through. It wasn't perfect (I had a bug in my lookup tables, and very bright colors would turn black), but it was a hit in the small community of users who used the same devices. I followed up with a replacement for the PocketPCs game .dll (which told software where to locate video memory and directly access the buttons) that would automatically convert color games to greyscale, even if the author hadn't done any work, by creating a virtual color screen and converting from there.
I could do all of this, even though I didn't (and still don't, really) know anything about the Windows API, because Windows CE would give considerable leeway to programmers. If you wanted something onscreen fast, you didn't waste your time trying to get the OS to draw it for you. You grabbed the screen memory and wrote the bytes yourself. This was a low-level hackability that the PocketPC shared with Palm, although the latter was even more primitive (and therefore even more fun to code on). PocketPC does, after all, have several great modern features--multitasking, protected memory, error collection--that always felt like they were in my way. On a Palm, the OS was laid open. You could ignore the proper way to code, disrespect the other programs, and have your game largely take over the machine. As a user, it was an often unsatisfying platform, but as a programmer it was a blast.
The reason I started to think about this was because there's word that the Apple iPhone won't be able to run third-party software. Well, that's not entirely true. I expect that a few months after it's out on the open market, or as open as a $500-with-expensive-contract phone can be, someone will have hacked it open. Eventually, you will be able to play Quake on it--everything plays Quake or Doom, given time, even if no-one could ever imagine such a thing being useful or enjoyable. At this point I think the port just spawns on its own, no coders required, after a set gestation period. But what you probably won't be able to do is break into the system guts like I did. Maybe that's a good thing, from a modern perspective--should kids really be learning about addressable video memory at this point, instead of real APIs like Core and DirectX (which will eventually come to Windows Mobile, mark my words). No doubt those kinds of programming environments are more powerful. I guess I just wonder if they're any fun.
I read a theory once that British programmers became dominant during early days of computer gaming because they learned on terrible little machines (the BBC Micro, I think) that were nevertheless easy to hack. For the last ten years or so, coding on a portable computer has been like a time machine back to a simpler era. For a certain kind of person, like me or maybe the guy who wrote a GTA game for NES, there's a powerful appeal in that simplicity. But it looks like PDAs and cell phones are no longer a destination for that kind of ground-level coding. We're either going to have to go to even simpler devices (wristwatches? digital cameras?) or to emulation for a retrocomputing fix. As our present moves into the future, our past keeps pace with it.
00:00 x Thomas x /random/tech/coding x link x 0 comments
This is old, but still true.
Man, Fridays are slow.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/artists/brighteyes x link x 0 comments
From an article on the revamp of James Randi's Million Dollar Challenge:
00:00 x Thomas x /science/skepticism x link x 0 comments
The Career Guidance Center Didn't Prepare Me for This
My B-SPAN coworker and I were talking about job interviews the other day. We're both on our way out of the Bank this year, and we recently finished going through the interview process for replacements. It was, as I've said before, a really educational process to be asking questions instead of answering them. My coworker, who I think ended up in the Bank practically straight out of college, asked what my worst interview had ever been.
So I was working at the American Diabetes Association my last year of school. It had its high points (my coworkers were good people who liked me) and low (the pay was terrible, the work itself was tedious). I started looking late for anything that would pay me to write, even though I had little in my portfolio at the time. Three months later, although I didn't know it, I'd be working at the Bank doing office work as a temp, a gig that eventually gave me an in for my far-more-satisfying position at WBI. In any case, while at the ADA, I got a call back from a wild resume submission I'd made: a high-end chocolate/confectionary supply catalog located in Rockville, Maryland. Taking an afternoon off, I drove up the beltway to go to the interview.
I hate driving in Maryland anyway. The state's department of transportation takes a sadistic glee in placing street signs behind trees, buildings, and other signs, making it hard to find where you're going. And Maryland drivers are, for one reason or another, among the worst on the face of the earth. Anyone who lives in Northern Virginia for long is familiar with the experience of watching someone do something truly boneheaded in traffic, invariably accompanied by a set of Maryland plates. So I was already nervous when I pulled up to the offices. They were located in a run-down commercial district that looked like a neutron bomb had hit, although inside they were quite nice. Since I was early, they sat me down with a copy of the catalog to look over--it was one of those pretentious "catalog with interviews," like a Skymall for people who need 50 pounds of sculpted, pulled sugar ribbons.
Finally, they called me into the interview room, and a harried-looking man sat down across from me. He introduced himself as the manager, and then he cut right to the bone.
"Why are you here?" he asked.
Now, I confused this with a standard interview question, like "Why do you think you should work for us?" I had a prepared joke ready for it. "Well," I said, "according to your web site, you're importers for the best Swiss chocolate in the world. Why wouldn't I want to work here?"
No laughter from the interviewer. Awkwardly, I segued into an explanation of how I wanted to be a journalist, and while they weren't doing news writing per se, I thought it would be an interesting place to build experience. And besides, I said, although I'm not a chef myself, I do love food.
The man looked at me. "I just don't understand," he said. "I've looked over your resume, and you don't have any experience with the food industry. I don't understand why you're here, since you're not qualified."
Then why did you make me drive up for an interview? The whole thing lasted about five minutes. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the worst interview I ever had. It's too bad. I think I would have been good at it.
00:00 x Thomas x /journalism/writing/career x link x 0 comments
In a post about the so-called angry left, Digby linked to the worst book a political consultant will ever write, Applebee's America. Although the website is unclear on whether the book will come with poorly-crafted imitations of the TGI Fridays menu, it does have a quiz that's not going to sell any copies. How inaccurate is it? It says I'm a Republican.
But how could it fail to capture political genius with questions like these?
* Dr. Pepper
* Sprite or Pepsi
* Audi
* Saab
* A superstore like Wal-Mart or large supermarket such as Kroger
* Whole Foods or similar organic grocer
* Bourbon or Scotch
* Gin or vodka
* Ozarka or local brand
* Evian or Dannon
* Coors
* Bud
* Monster Truck Show
* Pro Wrestling Match
* An auction site, like eBay
* A dating site, like Match.com
I suppose that if books about the differences between Americans are selling, you could do worse than to replace the "red state/blue state" dichotomy with something a bit less (what's the word? ah, yes) false. I'm partial to the urban/rural divide myself, but this "tribes" thing isn't bad. Or at least it would be, if they weren't just new names for Republicans and Democrats. Because I didn't really need a book to figure that one out.
14:14 x Thomas x /politics/activism x link x 1 comment
I tell people that I'm not entirely comfortable with doggy daycare. It seems like something that rich yuppies do, and I instinctively cringe at the possibility of rich yuppiedom, especially living around here. But we get it half-price after Belle's part-time dogwalker discount, he only goes three days a week, and the results... well, let them speak for themselves:
That dog is knocked. out.
12:43 x Thomas x /random/personal/filthy_beasts x link x 1 comment
Craig Anderton has an article in EQ Magazine this month with lots of cheap and easy recording fixes. I'm interested in making the change to 88.2kHz, 24-bit audio myself, after a Sound On Sound editorial discussed why bass sounds better when there's more resolution available to describe low-frequency waveforms.
Not to come across like a broken record, but what you can't do is increase audio quality after discarding large chunks of digital information--i.e., compression to MP3 or AAC. Wired reviews a few devices that claim to restore audio quality to portable music. My favorite snake oil is the third review, the Creative X-Fi, which garners a good score even though Wired can't say for sure what it did, or even if it did much at all. Judging by the demo on Creative's site, it sounds like a smile EQ setting, and possible a little drive for warmth. You'd be better off buying a bigger hard drive, and just ripping your CDs lossless. It takes a bit more work, but there would be a real, valuable audio difference.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/recording/production x link x 0 comments
A final version (by which I mean that the arrangement is solid and the quality is good enough for the web) of "Mastermind" is now available at Four String Riot. Obviously the little gimmick samples are not technically kosher with my manifesto, but I couldn't resist considering the subject matter.
I did manage to resist using the Digitech Whammy pedal I picked up this weekend, but it is probably the coolest pedal I've ever owned. When the Gib Cima Experience played "Werewolves of London" on Saturday, I kicked in the octave up mode to do the guitar solo, and with a little distortion it sounded just about perfect, including double stops. I may have to record it as a sketchpad. On triple stops or more complicated chord voicings, it still throws up all over the sonic spectrum, but overall it's certainly the best pitch shifter available short of a $1,500 Lexicon MPX-G2 or an Eventide harmonizer. The Whammy's octave harmonize function also does a nice 8-string bass imitation, and I've been playing Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" every time I turn it on.
15:14 x Thomas x /music/recording/mp3 x link x 1 comment
I love the recent revelations in both gaming and mainstream press that Second Life might not actually have more than two million people in its "population." I practically quiver with glee for three reasons:
Now on that last one, technically I'm picking nits. After all, a population density is nothing more than a vague measurement spread out across all available land, whereas real people congregate. But I'll tell you something: I've seen a fair amount of photos of events in Second Life, like the U2 concert that was held there, or the town hall meeting on copybot, and frankly I've had more people in my apartment.
The simple fact is that for a long time, the population numbers from Linden Lab went unchallenged because reporters and commentators were caught up in the buzz about its markets. They were dazzled by the idea of a bold new Metaverse where smart people make money hand over fist by the mighty power of their frontal lobes. It was the worst kind of capitalist free-market spin-doctoring, and almost without exception they fell for it.
00:00 x Thomas x /culture/internet/second_life x link x 0 comments
What We Can Learn From The Creationists
I read Ronald Numbers' history of anti-evolution fundamentalism so you don't have to!
Numbers' book is not something I would necessarily recommend to other people. It is organized oddly, by time period and region, lending it a slightly fragmented narrative--sometimes persons will appear, take up a few short paragraphs, and then completely vanish by the end of the next page. This seems to be a sign of exhaustive research (almost a third of the volume is citations and endnotes) without much thought to the idea of a strong narrative backbone. Numbers is also very sympathetic to his subjects, having been raised as an Adventist and losing his faith during college biology courses. For many readers, he may be too sympathetic--this book does not aim to discredit the views of the creationists at all, but simply summarizes them in a matter-of-fact way. It does make sense that Numbers has not tried to detail the flaws in each plan, and accounts for the warm reception this book has apparently recieved from both religious and scientific communities, but newcomers to this material should probably pair it with a good primer on evolutionary biology--The Blind Watchmaker, perhaps.
00:00 x Thomas x /culture/religion/evangelical x link x 0 comments
Alexandria's Just Down the Road, Actually
Wheat writes:
I tell you. Take a few weeks off the news and the net in general and the world reveals itself as the strange place it really is. I'm feeling the strong desire to stick my nose back in a book and pretend I don't notice.
I respond, in comments:
As someone pointed out, the point of a library is the democratization of the written word, so that people who can't afford to spend $12-$25 on a new book can still read and keep up with the cultural zeitgeist. Miller claims that book chains bombard customers with "inexpensive choices" including mp3 audiobooks, which are words spoken by someone who has never known the financial crunch where a $7 paperback--much less a trade or a hardback, whether it be pulp or fine literature. I spend $10-$50 on books every week nowadays, but at one point I had to scratch for change in order to afford reading material. It's not a cheap habit. If someone wants to read the classics, there are several used bookstores around Fairfax Co. where they can pick up a copy for a buck fifty, or Amazon will sell used books at about that price.
John J. Miller is the same guy who wrote the "top 50 conservative rock songs" that was roundly ridiculed a few months back. In that light, I'm particularly drawn to where he writes: "There's a fine line between an institution that aims to edify the public and one that merely uses tax dollars to subsidize the recreational habits of bookworms." (emphasis mine) In other words, Miller feels like he (and conservative pundits like him) stand at the bulwark of determining where good and bad culture lie--particularly when it comes to those who can't afford books on a regular basis. How dare those layabouts read a "Mitch Albom tearjerker" or "whatever fickle taste" they might have, instead of dedicating themselves to the manly prose of Hemingway?
Maybe it's my librarian father rubbing off on me, but I think we (and by we, I particularly mean the culture warriors at Opinion Journal) should be less concerned about what people are reading, and more encouraging toward the development of a reading habit in the first place. ...and, sweet mother of mercy, this probably should have been a blog post and not a comment.
13:46 x Thomas x /politics/issues/education x link x 1 comment
I saw this on Kung Fu Monkey, but apparently it's spread to the game blog networks, and Brinstar tagged me. The goal is to write five things other people don't know about me. I'm re-introducing the variation that one of them is a lie.
I don't usually do memes or tagging. If you want, tag yourself on my behalf in comments.
17:20 x Thomas x /random/personal/memes x link x 1 comment
Loaded up Pandora this morning, but left it in a window behind Notes, so I didn't see the station selected. The song starts: clacky synths, kind of annoying, and then the bass comes in, sliding up the neck into a quick triplet. And I think "John Entwhistle."
There aren't a lot of bassists who were distinctive enough that I could identify them with just three notes. Especially off an album I've never heard before (Who Are You) from a period of the band's history that I don't really care for (post-Quadrophenia). That's pretty impressive. I should really study more Entwhistle.
12:45 x Thomas x /music/artists/the_who x link x 1 comment
A couple of weeks ago, Penny Arcade devoted a comic/essay to the business practices of dedicated "game outlets" like EB Games or Gamestop or Huge Game Conglomerate--whatever they're called nowadays. Basically, these companies have a policy involving a "preorder" which is like a dinner reservation but instead of paying nothing to be able to sit down for a delicious meal you gain the privilege of paying money in order to buy a video game once it arrives in the store months later.
I stress the words italicized in that sentence because I want to remind everyone that these businesses are not selling precious commemorative chunks of gold, or signed copies of the Torah, or other similar items with a limited supply. What they are basically selling are DVDs: the effort to create said DVDs may have been high, but the cost of manufacturing more of them is basically zero. And the storage space, for that matter, is not nearly as limited as they want you to believe. If you go to a video and music store, say Sam Goody for example, it is perfectly acceptable to find movies shelved spine-out. If you go to a bookstore, they likewise place the books so that the titles on the side are visible. Only in a video game store do we typically find the games laid out in the least efficient manner possible, flat against the wall.
I think it's generally understood that the preorder nonsense is, as others have speculated, all about the margins for both stock purchases and used games. Gamestop makes a lot more money when you trade something in for $15 in store credit and then they sticker it for resale at $30, compared to the thin profit from a new game. In terms of arrangement, I'm guessing some MBA in middle management discovered that people buy more when there's a huge wall of visually-conflicting material confronting them. It's like the way that malls are often designed with hexagonal or angled layouts because the confusion will put customers on edge, encouraging them to make a purchase (increasing their subconscious territorial control) in order to soothe their primitive reptile hindbrains. Which is no insult to either the reptiles or the customers, but just the friendly influence of micromanaged capitalism in this day and age.
But since the holidays, I've done a little browsing in the larger electronics and general stores, and I've found that the experience is better. Tycho noted that they don't make you go through preorders or hassle you about trade-ins, which is true. But--and I'm going to be really shallow here--it seems cheaper to me. I tend to see DS titles priced at $30 instead of $35. The selection is better, too. There are more bargain games lying around, and you're not reliant on the luck of used stock to find something.
I'm not really a fan of Best Buy, but it's saying something when I think I'd rather drive a few miles to the store in Baileys Crossroads than get off the bus after work and walk to the EB Games in Ballston.
12:50 x Thomas x /gaming/perspective x link x 1 comment
Why did they spell it Scurge instead of "scourge?" Probably because they were trying so hard not to name this "Metroid Fusion."
Does that seem unfair? It shouldn't. Southpeak is obviously a big fan of Nintendo's last 2D Metroid, since they've ripped off the premise (an alien infection that takes over everything in its path), the protagonist (a female bounty hunter in an armored spacesuit, guided by a computer program), the basic mechanism for progress (gradual upgrades make new portions of the map accessible), and the musical themes (minimalist space techno).
What they didn't steal is the infection counter, which has to be periodically reset at save points, and a 3/4 perspective. The combination makes Scurge a lot more action-oriented than Metroid games--exploration takes a back seat to firepower and large hordes of enemies. It's not a bad change, and for newer visitors to the Metroid series, probably not significant. Since Nintendo seems hellbent on ignoring 2D in favor of 3D Metroid offshoots, it's nice to see someone else taking up the slack, and handling it well.
10:43 x Thomas x /gaming/software/scurge x link x 1 comment
I just found this the other day when I reinstalled Cubase on my recording laptop. The copy protection for Cubase LE is luckily (and thankfully) nonexistent if you have a working copy somewhere, although I did have to register a couple of DLLs with Windows. But after loading the software, even with the new Firewire interface, sound latency was awful--something like a full second round trip. It's impossible to monitor yourself through software when the delay is that bad, and although there's a direct mode on the interface, it involves opening up a mixer window and fiddling with the inputs. I didn't really want to do that, especially since I know that Ableton Live and Phrazor are perfectly capable of fast software monitoring with this hardware.
It turns out that Cubase LE can manage just fine, but the option is hidden. By default, Steinberg includes a driver that wraps the lowest levels of Windows functionality (MME, or maybe DirectX) in an ASIO layer. It works, but it's really slow. I'd known this all along, but I thought it was a restriction built into Cubase LE to encourage upgrades. That'll teach me to be cynical--they've just give the menu a very strange name. To change ASIO drivers in Cubase, choose "Device Setup" from the Devices menu, and then open the "VST Multitrack" tab. There's a pulldown menu that will initially read "ASIO Multimedia Driver"--when I opened it up, there was my Firewire Solo (as well as ASIO4All). Cubase still has trouble operating at the very lowest latency, but I had a comfortable experience running VST plugins on a recording track with 44.1KHz, 16-bit audio and a sample size of 128. Much better.
The only reasons that I can think for Steinberg's weird choices here are two-fold. First, they've obviously included the ASIO-MME driver for compatibility, and they don't want to take a chance on auto-selecting the wrong driver. Second, they've hidden the option in the "VST Multitracker" tab (which I had seen, but always ignored) because Cubase started as a sequencer instead of a recording workstation. Latency isn't as important for predetermined MIDI sequences, and from that perspective they might have referred to audio I/O as a "multitracker" instead of more straighforward terminology.
00:00 x Thomas x /music/recording/production x link x 0 comments
Dear World,
Congratulations on making it to another year. As promised and much like 2006, 2007 offers new hope and new possibilities. Try not to screw it up like you usually do.
Sincerely,
Thomas Wilburn
15:21 x Thomas x /random/personal/events/holidays x link x 1 comment
From Steve Gilliard's news blog, which added a couple of tips on finding repair parts, comes this article in the Guardian UK about disposable culture. It's not just that we're used to throwing our toys away when they break--it's that few opportunities exist to do anything else, thanks to all-in-one manufacturing and the decline of the electronics repair shop. The attitude and the process have formed a vicious cycle.
Worldchanging had some good (and some not-so-good) solutions for the problem. Some of the duds included repurposing old or broken items in new ways (a vacuum might still have a usable motor inside, plastic bottles and containers can be used for crafts projects around the house)--that's all well and good for the reasonably handy, and I usually count myself among them, but if I tried to make lamps or desk sculptures out of old detergent bottles I think Belle would kill me. Then she could wrap my body in non-biodegradable doggy-waste bags and bury me in the back yard, just for ironic value.
A better suggestion is to buy products where the whole supply chain, crade-to-cradle, is taken into consideration. Barring that, you can look for products that are built to be repaired, or that are made and packaged in recyclable materials. You may know that HP has a recycling program for any brand of computer equipment, in which they will charge you for the shipping and processing, issue a coupon for more than what they charged, and then require a purchase of $10 over the value of the coupon if you wan