October 27, 2007
What you may draw
Microsoft has clarified its rules for how you may use its game software to create animated movies (machinima). There's excellent coverage and discussion of this at Law of the Game. The rules, which are written in remarkably accessible language, include the following restriction:
You can’t use Game Content to create pornographic or obscene Items, or anything that contains vulgar, racist, hateful, or otherwise objectionable content. We can’t help you much here except to say that just like the old saying goes, you know it when you see it.
I am so not a lawyer, but at first glance, this seems like Adobe saying you are not permitted to use Photoshop to create pornographic images, or possibly like buying a sketchpad in an art store that says you may not use it to draw sexually explicit pictures. But there is a difference: Machinima uses graphic elements created by the game company. Even if you're using those elements essentially as clip art, the company has (apparently) the right to keep you from publishing its content in configurations it finds objectionable.
I say if Spartan-117 wants to get it on with Lord Terrence Hood, and if they want to bring in Daffy Duck for a threesome, and you're not making money off the machinima that shows all the high-res clanking, well, that's the price creators pay for successfully contributing to our culture. But, apparently I'm wrong.
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October 14, 2007
Mad Men - Attention Deficit Theatre
J. Kristin Ament has been writing sarcastic recaps of episodes of the AMC show "Mad Men." They're hilarious. For example, here is one from the week before last (the one with the erotic washing machine).
I've been enjoying Mad Men, but find myself holding back from utter and complete enthusiasm because, I think, there's something too mannered about it. It's still in thrall of its premise. But there's so much to like: The acting is terrific, the writing is pointed and funny, the sociology is exhilirating if a bit overdone, the art direction is fantastic, I care about the characters. It's on its way to becoming an unreservedly great show in its second season, especially if the writers can stay away from the big, melodramatic arcs; the writing is better in the details than in the big strokes. IMO, of course. [Tags: mad_men j_kristin_ament humor tv]
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September 30, 2007
Backup BradSucks
BradSucks has posted the main track of his new song "Out of It," and is asking you to provide the backup vocals. [Tags: bradsucks collaboration ]
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September 23, 2007
Bioshock: Most immersive game ever?
I'm only a little bit into Bioshock, but so far it's the most immersive game ever. It's game play may turn out not to hold up as well, but as of now, it's actually got HalfLife2 beaten. It plops you rather literally into a utopia-gone-sour created by a suave visionary named Andrew Ryan (who, I'll bet, is as to Ayn Rand as Howard Roark is to hard work). The graphics, the sound, the voice acting, the settings — post-WWII sf — all work to make the city feel like there's an entire world behind it.
I'm still just warming up. It may get tiresome or disappoint in any of the ways that games, narratives, and computer programs can disappoint. But so far, it's swell. [Tags: bioshock games halflife]
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September 09, 2007
Webby Sunday Funnie
Today's Dilbert is destined to be shown during the introductory remarks at every Web 2.0 conference for the next two years. And it uses the phrase "tag-based folksonomy," albeit it as a phrase so technical it's suppose to scare us. It
And today's Doonesbury is destined to be shown during the introductory remarks at every "Future of Media" conference for the next two years. Along the way, the strip mentions DonorsChoose.org, a cool site that will get a boost from the plug, thus inadvertently showing the power of the mass media that the strip questions. (I blogged about DonorsChoose here.) [Tags: dilbert doonesbury donorschoose web2.0 media everything_is_miscellaneous]
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September 03, 2007
Google Flight Simulator
Google Earth, the coolest app ever — go to "Crisis in Darfur" if you have any doubts — now includes a hidden flight simulator, as discovered by Marco Gallotta, a South African student. Once you've started Google Earth, type Control+Alt+A in Widndws or Command+Option+A in OS X. You'll then be given a choice of two planes to fly. The controls are documented here. [Tags: google google_earth games darfur ]
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August 27, 2007
Shakespeare, Stoppard, Branagh, etc.
Edward Rothstein of the NY Times reviews Shakespeare & Co.'s Antony & Cleopatra alongside their production of Tom Stoppard's Rough Crossing. I saw both and think Edward works too hard to find a Big Picture analogy between the two. Yes, the Stoppard play cleverly relies on a character mistaking a performance for life, but the play and the characters were too slight to make anything metaphysical of it. And while A&C is obviously about the political and the personal — and, as my sister-in-law Meredith Sue Willis points out, also about the personal struggling to become mythic — I just didn't believe it. Or much enjoy it.
I blogged about A&C here. Meredith Sue Willis just blogged about Rough Crossing; look for the August 25 post. She's a poet, novelist, teacher, and a hell of a writer.
I hate to say it, but I also wasn't bowled over by the new Kenneth Branagh "As You Like It" being shown on HBO.
I'm a big fan of Branagh's Shakespearean movies, yes, including "Love's Labour Lost." But this one was weird, and not because it was set in Japan for no apparent reason. (Oh, there were some nicely framed indoor shots, but I didn't think it was worth the distraction.) The first hour of this two-hour abbreviated version seems to be setting us up for tragedy. Touchstone — enjoyably played with exuberance by Alfred Molina — is the sole source of levity in this half, making him feel like the clown in a tragedy. Perhaps Branagh was thinking that he needed to deepen the drama so that the romance would be deepened, and the acting is indeed so good that I was touched by the love of the lovers. But the plot contrivance of this play is so outrageous that it can't really handle much drama. (A boy plays a girl playing a boy playing a girl, although now of course we have a girl playing a girl playing a boy playing a girl.) And Branagh cut much of Rosalind's part, so we don't get a sense of her — an odd choice.
Still, there's lots to like about the production, starting with the acting. Branagh finds a lot in the relationship of Orlando and his brother, Oliver. The play looks great, even though a forest in the UK plays a forest in Japan playing a forest in the UK, so to speak. And we want Branagh to do more Shakespeare plays. So, go out and buy the action figures and eat the Wheaties with Rosalind on the box.
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August 22, 2007
Antony & Cleoptra
We were expecting so much. My family loves Shakespeare & Co., the Berkshires-based institution. The Company's founder and spirit, Tina Packer, stars in this production — taking a leading role for the first time in many years. And the play has gotten raves, including in the Boston Globe.
But I thought the performance lacked many of the Company's signature delights. Although the language was as clear as ever, and many of the performances were strong, the director Michael Hammond staged it inertly. It was as close to watching actors stand and declaim as I've ever seen the Company come. Some of this he clearly did on purpose, as when the factional leaders meet and form an alliance. But the rest of the play also was staged as a rectangle within which people talk. Usually, Shakespeare & Co. fills the place with movement that enlivens and enlightens. To this performance's detriment, two nights earlier we'd seen the Company's version of Midsummer Night's Dream for the second time, which is staged beautifully and hilariously. But A & C didn't just pale by comparison. It was, put most positively, staid. And that's really being too generous. For example, Hammond chose to insert battle scenes that were slow motion, stylized ballets that conveyed nothing; they might just as well replaced them with a placard that read: "Insert battle here."
And, although I hate to say it because she has been such a force for making Shakespeare matter despite the barriers of time and language, I thought Tina Packer was not very good in the part. I never believed her. Her final scene — granted, by that time I was already resenting being held in the theater — struck me as a parody of a stagy Shakespeare reading...Cleopatra as performed by Mrs. Rittenhouse. Where she should have shown us Cleopatra's allure, she was coquettish. Where she should have broken our hearts, she resorted to tricks — the brave smile, the looking away. She was at her best, I thought, in her scenes with her maidens; the Company usually excels at women's roles.
I liked some of the other performances. Nigel Gore, so good as Bottom, was believable as Antony. I was especially surprised by Craig Baldwin, one of the lovers in Midsummer's Night Dream, who brought nuance and sympathy to Octavius Caesar's cold determination. Walton Wilson as Enobarbus, well-delivered the beautiful explanation of Cleopatra. He evoked her better than Packer did.
I've never seen this play before. I'm glad to have seen it, but, alas, not because of the strength of this performance of it. I hate to say it. Go instead to see A Midsummer's Night Dream. Twice.
For an alternative view of the same performance, see Meredith Sue Willis' blog, where she'll soon be posting about it. She's my sister-in-law and a novelist whose opinion is far better founded than mine.
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August 13, 2007
Gwabs - crowdsourced desktop combat
Gwabs has a cool little trailer up showing how much fun it'll be to go hand-to-hand where the destructible environment is your desktop. (Windows only.
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July 25, 2007
Three person chess
Our daughter Leah brought back from Prague this very cool, hand-made, three-person chess board.
I haven't tried playing it because, as a result of an ancestral genetic mutation, I am unable to visualize spatially-arrayed objects even when I am looking at them, much less three moves ahead. But it might be fun for you Normals.
As far as I can tell, it doesn't violate either of these two patents: 1 2. Of course, I also can't figure out what the hell these patents are describing. [Tags: chess prague games]
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July 24, 2007
Celebrate "Move It!" hitting 50
In 2008, Cliff Richard's first hit, "Move It!," will come out of copyright because the British government just refused to extend the term of copyright for sound recordings from 50 years to 70 years after the artist dies.
Richard's is up in arms about this. Instead, lets help Cliff Richard celebrate the ultimate success of his work: Fifty years later, it's touched enough people that it matters that it's moving into the public domain.
Congratulations, Cliff! You should be very proud that you have the opportunity to see something you made become something all culture now can rely on! [Tags: copyright copyleft cliff_richard ]
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July 19, 2007
Saw Sicko. See Sicko
Sicko is brilliant. And hilarious.
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July 16, 2007
Midsummer
Last night we saw Shakespeare & Co.'s Midsummer Night's Dream in Lenox. Over the course of the twenty years we've been going, this was one of the best productions of this play, and one of the flat out most enjoyable productions of them all. It's hilarious.
Jeez, that guy could write! [Tags: shakespeare ]
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July 08, 2007
Older than Lennon
As I write this, it is my mother in law's 80th birthday. I love her, I like her, and I enjoy being with her.
As far as arbitrary markers go, an 80th is a big deal. We've marked it by gathering the entire family, as well as the four couples known collectively as The Wine Group who have known her since high school. They are only slightly reduced by age: One couple is now a single, they are all shorter than they used to be, one of the men runs down conversational paths a little too long. Still and all, when I was a lad, eighty year olds were by and large dead, and for the survivors we had words like "dotage" and, if they were lucky, "spry." I don't know if being 56 enables me to see past the wrinkles and pates or whether we're just aging remarkably better than our grandparents did — if we are lucky enough to get to old age, a contingency that, as ever, comes without merit or mercy.
So, this morning I went for a run. Of course, if you saw me, you wouldn't say, "Oh, there's a man running!" You would have said, "Oh my god, should we get that staggering man some help?" Nevertheless, to me it feels like running. It was the first time I've run wearing my new iPod, which came basically free with my new MacBook. Yes, I am now Apple Man, right down to my iSkivvies. So, here's a Note to Self: Do not exercise while listening to John Lennon songs because it's hard to keep up one's breath while weeping.
By December 8, 1980, nothing had gone wrong in my life. My parents were middle middle class, although growing up I thought we were wealthy. None of my desires were frustrated (well, except for prom night, but that's a different story). An aunt and an uncle had died young, but I'd managed to make that feel like someone else's loss. I had convinced my draft board to make me a conscientious objector — a first for them, I was told — and even then, my lottery number didn't come up so I didn't even have to spend two years doing alternative service. I'd gone through philosophy graduate school having been warned for six years that there were very few teaching jobs available, yet in 1980 I was an assistant professor in a philosophy department. I'd married well and truly.
We were sitting in our little apartment in Portland, Oregon, when the radio announced that John Lennon had been killed.
The Beatles' story was my story, our story. It wasn't just music, although I'm ever more impressed by their talent and daring. It's hard to explain my — our — sense of identification with the Beatles. I didn't think I could have been a Beatle if only I had been in the right spot. I didn't identify with their rise from humble origins. I didn't envy their lifestyle of concerts and groupies. They were more important to my self-understanding than that. They exposed my — our — possibilities. Everything was up for reinvention, or so we thought, never dreaming that when our generation took over it'd be in the form of Bill Clinton and George Bush. The Beatles in their music, but also in their way with celebrity, said we could take the old, bust it up, make fun of it and delight in it, and build something new. Love and youth could refashion the world.
Until they shoot you.
Had any of the other Beatles been killed, it would have been sad and horrible, but it wouldn't have marked the end of my own youth. John was special.
John was doing to himself what the Beatles did to music and culture. He became a father and househusband, and started writing songs as naked as his photo on the "Two Virgins" album. I didn't like many of the songs. Some were embarrassing. And that often was the point. In fact, many of his most personal were sung at the highest reaches of his voice, as if to say, "I love you so much that I'm willing to sing badly for you." (Not that Lennon ever sang badly. I will have none of that!)
So, I was running this morning, listening to "Instant Karma," the 2-disk collection of Lennon songs sung by others, with profits going to Darfur via Amnesty International. There are performancs, particularly on the second disk, I like a lot. Green Day's "Working Class Hero," Jack Johnson's "Imagine," Ben Harper's "Beautiful Boy," Jaguares' (or Jakob Dylan's?) "Gimme Some Truth," The Postal Service's "Grow Old with Me." I'm sorry to say that I didn't like the under-represented women's tracks as much: Avril Lavigne's "Imagine" and Christina Aguilera's "Mother" both sing songs that came more directly from Lennon's voice.
The compilation makes it clear that Lennon was inconsistent. In "Imagine," he singles out religion a couple of times as a force that stands in our way. Later, he thanks God for Yoko. So he likes God but not organized religion. But then he bashes God. Oh my! What a great blogger he would have been, so eager to be imperfect in public.
I admired the perfection of Beverly Sills' singing, but I could never get past wondering how she did that with her voice, which is also my reaction to ventriloquists. I know her singing touched many, but it wasn't for me. The imperfection of Lennon's voice, his insistence on being human right in the midst of our insistence that he be John Lennon, is what got to me. Gets to me.
Mark David Chapman thought he was protecting John Lennon by killing the evil Lennon-impersonating robot outside the Dakota that December evening. Bang. Lennon isn't given the chance to be patient with his children, to tell them how beautiful they are, to grow old in their eyes.
So, here I am at 56. Our children are 25, 22, and 16. I've made it past the point where they'd be too young to remember me clearly if I died tomorrow. I find comfort in that, although I'm enough of a rationalist to find it also silly.
But, like many heading into old age, I don't feel old. I still dress as if I'm going to summer camp. Yet I remind myself — biting down on a painful tooth — that I'll be sixty soon. Fifty you can pretend is the new forty, but sixty is just freaking old. I've always avoided mirrors, but now I find myself examining my baldness to try to fix in my mind how old I look to others. Likewise, when talking with young people (a symptom of my denial about my age: It feels weird to call them "young people"), I force myself to dredge up an external image of this old man talking with the kids.
This isn't a pity thing. I think I know more than thirty years ago, and, thanks to the Net, I'm part of many networks, each of which is smarter than I am. I have more love in my life than when I could take three of flights of stairs, skipping every other step, while whistling. ("Octopus' Garden" for many years was my stairs-climbing song, even though I never liked it very much.)
But something has gone wrong. I know what the path to old age is supposed to be: You're young, you marry, you work, you retire, you become small, cute, and certain, and you die. But, here I am hanging out with 80 year olds who don't feel all that old to me. And here I am, hanging out on the Internet where no one knows you're an old dog, and where the pace on the treadmill has been turned up from cane-assisted to massively multiplayer intellectual marathon. The simple journey we're supposed to take, one of ascent and descent, has been disrupted. Only the end remains fixed.
The truth is that I don't feel myself on a path. The truth is that I don't know how old I am.
[Tags: john_lennon instant_karma beatles aging death ]
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July 02, 2007
Stoppard's Rough Crossing
We saw Shakespeare & Co.s production of Tom Stoppards Rough Crossing last night. We always enjoy their productions. This one too. But it is slight. It's 100% froth. Of course, it being Stoppard, it has its moments of self-reflective cleverness, including a hilarious exposition toward the beginning. But I was surprised that it didn't do more with its genre, a drawing room comedy at sea in which the men are Cowards and the dame is Russian blonde who pronounces "Naples" as "nipples." It is all very silly, exuberantly performed, and very funny, but just a little disappointing - the play within the play doesn't really get reflected back into the play - given Stoppard's usual standards of meta-cleverness
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June 11, 2007
Sopranos' ending: Am I the only person who liked it?
[HUGE SPOILERS AHEAD]
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There are two possibilities, and both worked for me.
First, their life and stories continue, too organic to wrap up, but the series ends. We sit in silence, feeling the series' absence.
Second, as others have pointed out, last week the series replayed a clip of Bobby telling Tony that you never hear the one that gets you. That's what we "heard" at the end.
At first I thought it was ending #1. Actually, like everyone else, at first I thought it was broadcast problem. Now I think it's ending #2.
I might add that the more specific my predictions were, the more they were off. And if #2 is the meaning of the ending, then I was way off.
There are a bunch of comments about tonight's episode attached to a 2004 posting I did about that season's finaled..."
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June 10, 2007
Distributed journalism project: Sopranos spoilers
Here's a distributed journalism project for Jay Rosen's NewAssignment.net: How many headline writers tomorrow are going to give away the ending of The Sopranos by giving articles titles such as "Carmella's Revenge: A Sad Farewell to Tony," "Tony Soprano Sings for His Supper," "King Tony - Justice Foiled, Fans Delighted," or possibly, "Tony Saved by Aquaman? Who'd a Thunk it?!" ?
So much for Tivo-ing it... :( [Tags: sopranos]
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Guessing the end of the Sopranos
[NO SPOILERS AHEAD. Just bad guesses. Although I do give away some general stuff about the old series Oz. And I do presume you've seen all but the last episode of The Sopranos.]
I hope The Sopranos isn't going the way of Oz, which spent its final episodes relentlessly killing off its characters. The writers may have thought they were playing with the form in a postmodern way, but I thought it was just cheezy writing.
The Sopranos has never been cheezy. But I worry that the kiss-off by Dr. Melfi and the death of Bobby, the innocent, were meant to signal that the reality principle is about to kick in, where the proof of realism is that you kill your characters. That would be a betrayal, since the great joy of the series has been its recognition that realism is conveyed dramatically through the complexity of life, not the simple fact of death.
But I have hope. If I had to predict — and I certainly don't have to — I'd say that the show will end tonight as the comedy that it's always essentially been. No comeuppance! So, here's what I think will happen...but, since the writers of The Sopranos are just a tad better at writing The Sopranos than I am, I'm likely to be way off:
- Tony's family survives. Killing any of them would turn this into tragedy, which would be a tragedy. Besides, this season hasn't focused on the family, except for AJ. Either AJ is being built up for a tragic and ironic offing, or (as I hope and suspect), they wrapped up his story arc last week. (One of the disappointments of this season has been the small role Carmella has played. She was all set up to confront her own bad faith, but the show left that undeveloped. Of all the characters, she's the one I'm left most curious about.)
- Tony's resolution is complex. We'll be left thinking there is a story beyond the ending. That means he doesn't get killed and he doesn't go to jail. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see the FBI guys come through the door and pull Tony out. So, it's either the federal witness protection relocation program for him, or he relocates himself. (Another possible deus ex machina: The son of the former head of Phil's family — what's-his-name, the guy from Miami — might turn on Phil.)
- New head of the Sopranos gang: Paulie Walnuts. Comedy reigns!
- Last scene of the series: Carmella has just received her real estate broker license wherever they've settled. Tony settles into his LazyBoy, turns on his down-scale TV to a documentary about WWII, and bites into some cold cuts.
Now let the showing of me wrong begin! Please! [Tags: sopranos heroes tv]
Is The Sopranos the greatest TV series ever? Of course it's a silly question, but I'd still argue in favor. And because the series exists within its own crazy, stipulated rules, within which the characters and their behavior are real, it's also likely to survive the decades.
Over at Everything Is Miscellaneous, I've posted about why I'm catching up with Heroes via torrents instead of using NBC's video player.
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June 09, 2007
How to waste your morning
Start with Cat with Bow Golf. Then notice the other games to its right. [Tags: games]
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June 06, 2007
Cool tech at NY Tech Meetup
I'm at a company meeting at MeetUp.com and James Hong, founder of HotorNot is doing a speed history and demo. In his five minute talk, he makes three points of particular interest to me:
1. HotOrNot recently went from fee to free because, James says, because the Net is good at connecting people, and HotOrNot should not be putting money in the middle of that.
2. Your HotorNot photo can have keywords, AKA tags, which give people a quick sense of who you are. He says they took the tag idea from LiveJournal, before del.icio.us. But, he says, if you have too many tags, people won't read them. So, HotorNot lets you put music, movies, etc. on yor hotlist. That says something about you. (If you see an item on someone else's list that you want to add to yours, you just click the plus button.) You can also display these in some flashy widgets.
3. They added HotLists to Facebook, and hit 1M views per day in 4.5 days. Later, in his talk at the NY Tech Meetup, James said: "If I were starting from scratch today, I'd built on Facebook, not the Web." Facebook wants to be the platform. "If they can pull it off, they're the next Microsoft."
Unsurprisingly, at the Tech Meetup, there's huge interest in building on Facebook since not only is the market there, but the market is already clustered in social networks.
Robin Chase of GoLoco is giving a 15 minute demo at the same MeetUp meeting. (Robin was a co-founder of ZipCar, a success all the more impressive because it was so damn hard to start up.) It's a terrific idea: Make it easy for people to share rides. She wants it to be more than just saving money on fuel: It should be more fun to ride together than alone. She recounts a trip she took a couple of weeks ago. She posted she was driving a ZipCar from an airport to a college and got an email from someone looking for a ride. It turns out that the guy was going to the same conference, and Robin knew two of his bosses. Otherwise, she might have turned him down. As it was, they they are now friends.
She talks about some of the partnerships they're pursuing. I think the specifics are not bloggable, but some are not obvious and quite interesting.
She says "GoLoco" means you should go locally, go crazy, and go with low CO2. Clevah!
By the way, I'm glad to say that MeetUp.com is doing well, growing 10% per month. (Their only metric is how many successful meetups there are.) I love the Web, but I love faces more than screens. Also, I'm an admirer of MeetUp because it was founded to address a real social need. They are, well, good folk.
Now I'm at a NY technology meetup. Seven of us give five minute pitches, although I've been granted ten minutes to talk about my book. (Sanford Dickert did a great job liveblogging the event.)
Robin starts it off by giving the very short version of her demo. It's even cooler the second time.
ExpoTV.com is about video product reviews done by users.E.g., if you search for "Fischer Price Swing," you'll find videos of users reviewing the swing. In this case the most played is about 2 mins long. The ExpoTV person (sorry, I'm missing everyone's names) says you can tell that the person is a real mom, "not a sweaty old guy in a t-shirt." You can leave comments. You can see more about the creator. The site sells nothing, but provides links to affiliated stores.
They attach "a tremendous amount of metadata" to the videos by pulling in product info based on UPCs. They syndicate their videos out to syndication partners, e.g., a channel on Yahoo Video and AOL Video. They also use the UPCs to match up with Buy.com. You can ask to see a video on a product by, say, a research-heavy user who has contributed more than 25 reviews. [It's a great example of pulling together miscellaneous info, in part by using unique and meaningless IDs, and of profiting by becoming a meta-business.]
They have 100,000 videos and two VCs backing them.
Q: How will you screen out manufacturers pretending they're authentic?
A: We have an advertiser tag since ads are sought by users. We hope our community will suss out the fake stories. And we require people to declare that they're not affiliated [she said, rolling her eyes a bit].
Q: Multilingual?
A: We think it's quite portable internationally.
[For products I want to see—not commodities—I definitely would check out this site.]
LiveLook.net has two products: 1. Show anytihng on your screen to anyone without downloading anything. Simpler than Webex. They charge $0.025/minute/user. 2) For online businesses, customer service reps can see your screen. That costs $50/agent/month.
They're looking to raise capital and for tech partners
AdaptiveBlue.com works off a browser tool bar, bringing contextual relevancy to you as you're browsing. It helps you "browse smarter." E.g., if you're on an Amazon page, AdaptiveBlue knows it's a page about a CD and lets you browse for reviews, find other works by the singer or by CD, find photos on Flickr of the singer, create a station on Pandora.com, etc. On a movie page, the choices reflect its movie-ness. AdaptiveBlue cover about 20 categories. The menus personalize themselves based on your browsing history.
It's Firefox only, but the "smartsLinks" menu adds relevant links inline. They make money through affiliate revenues.
Mogulus.com lets anyone launch their own own live, 24/7 video channel. It's free. It is not video on demand. It's linear. E.g., GroundReport.com, which is aiming to be the first user-created CNN. You can broadcast live or even drag in YouTubes (or from other sources), in case you're not staffed up for 24/7 broadcasting. It's all Flash based. The free version puts in an ad every ten minutes. They hope to have thousands of channels. "It's all about empowering bloggers to take the next step." It's now in beta.
Founder Max Haot does an ultra cool demo. While he's being broadcast live on GroundReport, he adds his name to the crawl, pulls in a YouTube, does some effects, etc. Ooohs and aaahs from the crowd.
Q: [me] How many channels do you have to have to consider it a success?
A: Thousands.
[Very very cool and it may find a market, but I suspect that market's not going to consist of thousands of amateur 24/7 CNNs. Could it succeed if it instead got 100 channels? But if you're willing to invest the labor in being on air that much, will Mogulus provide enough functionality? Or, will this be a platform for types of programming that don't exist because they're currently too hard. E.g., might a candidate set one up for use by her supporters? The Obama Channel? Or might people build channels consisting of nothing but YouTube playlists? I dunno, but it was a great freaking demo.]
[Tags: meetup meetup goloco hotornot mogulus adaptiveblue livelook expotv demos tech media cluetrain everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 10:19 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 21, 2007
Violate copyright? $150,000. Violate free speech? $0.
Viacom sends YouTube a list of 100,000 videos that Viacom claims violate copyright, and under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, YouTube has no practical choice except to take them down. Viacom did not look at all 100,000. Some certainly did not violate copyright. For this violation of First Amendment free speech rights, Viacom was penalized, um, wait, let me get out my calculator...yeah, nothing.
We need to stop giving the world's Viacoms business incentives for violating our right to speak freely.
So, let me get a little more precise. The DMCA says that if Viacom sends a notice to YouTube that Carla's "I love Jon Stewart" video violates copyright, YouTube can either take the video down, or leave it up and risk being held liable for copyright infringement. (Viacom need not offer any evidence.) So, of course YouTube takes it down. Carla gets a notification of this. If she files a counter-notification, YouTube has to put the video back up. (Carla can go to ChillingEffects.org to find an online form she can fill in to file her counter-notification.) Viacom thus has no reason not to sweep wide in its takedown demands.
The DMCA does have a provision (17 U.S.C. Section 512(f)) for filing false takedown notices or counter-notices:
(f) Misrepresentations.- Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section-
(1) that material or activity is infringing, or
(2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification,shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys' fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner's authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.
Carla could therefore sue Viacom, but since the damage done to her by having her video unavailable for a couple of days is negligible, it's not worth it to her.
But the damage done to free speech by giving over-lawyered corporations license to take down free expressions of ideas without even viewing them is considerable.
So, why don't we ask Congress to make the penalties for violating the First Amendment rights of citizens as painful as the penalties for sharing an mp3 of Metallica's "Don't Tread on Me"?
Here are the penalties for violating copyright (as paraphrased in an email from Wendy Seltzer):
Statutory damages for copyright infringement range up to $150,000 per copyrighted work. The statute gives three ranges, $750-30,000 for ordinary infringement; up to $150,000 for willful infringement, and down to $200 for "innocent" infringement where the work was unmarked with copyright notice and the person had no reason to know his activity infringed. [source]
None of these quite cover the Viacom case, which is more like reckless infringement than innocent infringement; Viacom had to know it would catch some non-violating videos in its algorithmic sweep. So, we could do something like $150,000 for the first false takedown (since the company was willing to violate free speech) and $750 for each subsequent false takedown on the list.
Ouch? I hope so. Protecting free speech ought to be at least as important as protecting the rights of copyright holders.
[Tags: copyright dmca copyleft youtube viacom digital_rights everything_is_miscellaneous]
Cory Doctorow points out in an email that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (did you remember to join?) has been suing over bogus takedowns, and the courts have been awarding damages and fees. This, Cory points out, lays the groundwork for lawyers to take these cases on a contingency basis, making them feasible for people without a lot of resources.
Way to go, EFF! But I'd like to see the law acknowledge that infringing free speech is at least as bad as infringing copyright. Establishing statutory penalties such as those for copyright infringement would make that point at least symbolically.
Posted by self at 09:02 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
April 30, 2007
Rosie O'Donnell should look things up in Wikipedia first
HASSELBECK: Do you believe that the government had anything to do with the attack of 9/11? Do you believe in a conspiracy in terms of the attack of 9/11?
O'DONNELL: No. But I do believe the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel. I do believe that it defies physics for the World Trade Center Tower Seven, building seven, which collapsed in on itself, it is impossible for a building to fall the way it fell without explosives being involved, World Trade Center Seven. World Trade Center one and Two got hit by planes. Seven, miraculously, for the first time in history, steel was melted by fire. It is physically impossible.
HASSELBECK: And who do you think is responsible for that?
O'DONNELL: I have no idea. But to say that we don't know it was imploded, that there was implosion in the demolition, is beyond ignorant. Look at the film. Get a physics expert here from Yale, from Harvard. Pick the school. It defies reason. [source]
Interesting.
OAKLAND, Calif. — A gasoline tanker crashed and burst into flames near the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge yesterday, creating such intense heat that a section of highway melted and collapsed. [source]
And, from Wikipedia:
...Molten steel is cast into large blocks called "blooms".... [emphasis added]
Jeesh. [Tags: rosie_odonnell bessemer_process]
Posted by self at 03:55 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack
Vista for gamers: A charitable assessment
Games for Windows magazine (formerly Computer Gaming World) has a frank article about the strengths and weaknesses of Vista as a platform for games. GFW is independent of Microsoft, yet when it comes time to give the overall rating, it pulls its punch. The article reports that many games run more slowly (albeit they didn't compare on equivalent hardware...but why didn't they?) and that whole bunches of games just don't run. If any particular game had as many bugs and glitches, they'd drop the rating below 5 (out of 10). Instead, they give Vista 8 out of 10 as a gaming platform.
If you're a gamer, ignore the rating and read the article. You will not be tempted to "upgrade" to Vista. [Tags: vista gfw games_for_windows pc_games]
Posted by self at 10:56 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
April 23, 2007
JK Rowling's next book after Harry Potter
Now that she's finished the Harry Potter series, JK Rowling is probably wondering what to write next. With all modesty, I have an idea: She should answer her email.
I'm not kidding. Rowling's been good about fan fiction, apparently, happy that her fans are so enthusiastic. That's a welcome break from the brand mentality authors are encouraged to adopt by the life+70 copyright term. So, with those billion dollars in royalties in her back pocket (personally, I'd have it changed into one $500M bill and five $100,000,000's) she could spend a few years on the Web, engaging with young readers and writers in every forum and format that she's comfortable with.
That'd be some real magic. [Tags: jk_rowling harry_potter copyright books]
Posted by self at 11:12 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
April 19, 2007
The Ghost Map - Steve Johnson's latest is terrific
Steven Johnson just keeps getting better as a writer and as a thinker. He takes big ideas and makes them compelling by finding their connections to unexpected ideas, and then uses them to pry up the floorboards of our assumptions. Just at the level of putting words together, Steve is a master. Best of all, he's young, so we have many more years of his writing to look forward to, if the wily universe permits.
Although the topic of The Ghost Map is the cholera epidemic in London that led to the discovery that the disease is spread through contaminated water, it operates on several levels. In fact, it's about the need to operate on several levels. So, at one level it a terrific procedural mystery with compelling real-life characters, at another it's about the biology of bacteria, and at a third level it's about the structure of cities. We would still be at the mercy of cholera if the hero of the tale had not been able to go up a level of abstraction to see the statistical pattern of deaths. And Johnson's own meta-explanation requires going up to another meta-level to show how all the levels are required to tell the tale and understand the truth. It opens up a means of explanation that is rich and sometimes so surprising that it makes me laugh with delight. This fluidity with levels of abstraction also informs Steve's books Emergence and Mind Wide Open. And with its multilayered points of view, The Ghost Map serves as further evidence for Steve's point in Everything Bad Is Good for You that our culture is becoming more comfortable with complexity.
Steve is an intellectually sympathetic writer, which is a rare virtue. Rather than dismissing the then-prevalent theory that a "miasma" caused cholera, he is able to explain the good reasons why the miasmists held on to their theory so long. A lesser writer would have dismissed them as stupid, hide-bound, or buffoons. Steve is also able to explain why the doctor who figured it out was able to do so, tracing it to his previous work with ether, rather than claiming it was a bolt of genius lightning.
And to top it all of, The Ghost Map is a compelling, fun page-turner...a terrific read, as we say nowadays.
Steve makes my writerly cheeks burn with envy.
(Disclosure: I'm delighted to know Steve a bit. ADDED April 20 '07: I should also have noted that Steve blurbed my book. Nevertheless, The Ghost Map is a really good book.) [Tags: ghost_map steve_johnson books reviews ]
Posted by self at 09:14 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
April 17, 2007
[berkman] Wendy Seltzer on ChillingEffects and copyright take-downs
Wendy Seltzer is a founder of ChillingEffects.org. She talks about her "run in" with the National Football League.
Wendy waits for the room to fill by running a very funny YouTube clip of the Daily Show segment about Viacom vs. YouTube. (The room is now packed.)
She was watching the Super Bowl and saw the notice: "This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience. Any other use of this telecast or of any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent, is prohibited." She took the clip off her MythTV and posted it to YouTube under the title "Super Bowl Highlights," with a caption that said: "The NFL's overreaching copyright claim." That was on Feb. 8. Five says later, she got a notification from YouTube saying that they had taken the clip down because the NFL claimed it was infringing under the DMCA .
YouTube had received a list of 158 clips the NFL claimed was infringing. It's likely that the NFL had a robot search for anything that was titled or tagged as NFL. Wendy asked to see the list and received it.
Wendy believes her clip was Fair Use of copyrighted material. That copyright doesn't protect people from giving accounts of the game or describing the game. It doesn't even prevent people from making some pictures from the telecast. Wendy's clip was Fair Use because:
My use is for nonprofit educational purposes; the copyright in the telecast is thin; the portion of football that follows the copyright warning is a minute portion of the whole, with no significant action or commentary, useful to show people what it was the NFL claimed its copyright covered; and the effect on the market for or value of the work is non-existent.
At ChillingEffects, there is a counter-notification generator form that requires the claimant to get specific about why the piece is infringing. Wendy filled it in. This gives YouTube the ability to re-post the material without penalty; the poster now takes the heat if the complainant still complains. Wendy says this isn't quite an even balance because YouTube's terms of service protect it from complaints by users anyway, so while Viacom can sue YouTube for not taking a clip down, users can't really sue YouTube if it doesn't put the clips back up upon receipt of a counter-claim.
YouTube put Wendy's clip back up.
Then, on March 18, YouTube once again removed it because the NFL again complained. Wendy says that the DMCA has no explicit mention of a second take-down notice. If a company doesn't like a counter-notification, it can sue.
This time, it was clear that an individual from the NFL had actually watched the clip. But, Wendy thinks they were falling foul of 512f of the DMCA, which makes a person liable for damages (including lawyers' fees) for knowingly misrepresenting that a clip is infringing. YouTube was required to pass along Wendy's original counter-notification, so the NFL knew that Wendy was saying that the clip was for educational purposes.
Wendy sent back the same counter-notification. The Wall Street Journal blog and the Newark Star Ledger covered it, resulting in a letter from the NFL saying that Wendy clearly "doesn't understand" the DMCA. They objected to the fact that Wendy included 20 seconds of game play around the ten-second copyright notice. But, the letter said, she has their permission to use just the copyright notice. (She included the 20 seconds as context. It does not show a complete play.)
Wendy wrote back, saying that she thinks the clip in its entirety is covered under Fair Use.
They replied with an email, saying that "there is a substantial difference of opinion us on this matter that cannot be reconciled." So, the clip is still on line. But the NFL says it can offer no assurance they won't complain again.
YouTube is built on the DMCA safe harbor (512c) that says that it doesn't have to screen or filter content, or check the copyright of each piece posted. Instead, YouTube has to reply to claims of infringement. No one has alleged that YouTube has not responded. It's followed the DMCA to the letter. Instead, Viacom et al. say that it's "too hard" to send YouTube all these notices, so they want to shift the burden to YouTube. Even if YouTube could manage to do all that work, the next startup would find that too high a hurdle; it'd badly hurt innovation...a chilling effect. "I think they're trying to renege on the deal that was struck with the DMCA." Wendy would like to see the DMCA reformed "to address some of the burdens on speech" but not thrown out.
Q: (catherine bracy) Why do you think the NFL is "materially misrepresenting"?
A: They know that this is non-infringing. The second notification makes it harder to claim it was a good faith mistake.
Q: (bracy) Can I take a camera into the stadium, tape it, and put it onto YouTube?
A: The guards frisk you and say that your ticket is a contract that prevents you from using a camera. You could look on from a rooftop and tape it from there.
Q: Could you sell it?
A: There's no copyright in the game itself, so yes. But if you tape a concert you can hear from your house, there's copyright in the music itself. And "Super Bowl" is trademarked, which is why ads for, say, chips say things like "Stock up for the big game."
The "knowingly misrepresents" phrase, Wendy says, was added by the entertainment industry to make it harder to sue complainants.
Q: (john palfrey) What's their strongest case against your Fair Use claim?
A: Their strongest claim against the 20 seconds of football is that I haven't transformed it or added educational material into the clip itself. They'll say the announcers describing the plays is a creative work. And there are markets for licensing virtually everything, they'll say. If they want phone companies to continue paying them to stream clips to cellphones, this is a market into which I'm intruding.
Q: What might your damages be under 512f?
A: It's hard to quantify damages from speech. I didn't lose money from students not attending class because I couldn't talk about the clip, etc.
Q: (gene koo) How long can this take-down and put-back dance go on?
A: California recognizes that legal process can be used to squelch legitimate speech, so if this process continued, I might have a claim.
Q: (me) Someone posted an aggregation of Couric's questions of the Edwards. It was taken down. Was that fair use? And if this had been done by Jon Stewart, would it be protected the same way it was for the amateur who posted it.
A: Yes, it sounds like fair use, and Stewart and the poster are protected by the same law. But there is no DMCA coverage for broadcast. I don't know if Stewart licenses his clips or just asserts they're fair use.
[Tags: berkman fair_use copyleft copyright nfl youtube dmca]
Posted by self at 01:45 PM
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I've posted at Huffington Post today my latest doomed-to-fail attempt at spoilers for the new season of the Sopranos. [Tags: sopranos entertainment comedy]
Posted by self at 10:14 AM
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Death of a President bills itself as a thriller, but it got known first as the movie that shows George Bush being killed. No, no, the producers declared as some in the media protested before the movie was released. It's not some cheap, sensationalistic revenge movie for rage-addled Liberals, said the producers. It's about bigger issues.
Too bad, because it's got nothing interesting to say about the bigger issues.
[SPOILERS AHEAD]
It is certainly true that the movie doesn't dwell on the actual shooting of Bush. Since the entire movie pretends to be a documentary made a few years after the event, you see some chaotic video of "Bush" crumpling as he's shaking hands in a crowd. That's all. And yet, the movie's premise is that Bush is an awful president who has brought us to the brink of totalitarianism. Nothing good comes from the assassination, so it clearly isn't a call to arms. But it is an anti-Bush movie. That makes the fantasy of Bush's death disturbing in the wrong way.
After Bush is killed, we learn that the Patriot III Act was quickly passed, further limiting our rights. But, unlike the underrated movie The Siege, the movie's not interested in following the consequences of those limitations. In fact, we barely learn what they are. And a Syrian is arrested and falsely accused of the crime. The movie makes it clear that the system was stacked against him because he was a Syrian. Except that this is a Syrian living in America who, a few years earlier, accidentally (!) happened to go for terrorist training in Pakistan...which vitiates the theme that we'd take any Arab as the bad guy.
It took me three nights of viewing to get through the movie, so I guess that doesn't make it much of a thriller. My favorite part were the interviews with the filmmakers in which we learn that the Chicago demonstration consisted of footage of a real protest march and some staged scenes.
I have to say that I was also bothered by the fact that although this is told entirely as a documentary, with interviews with "participants" and news reelish footage of the "events," it is not a documentary that actually would have been made after the assassination, for it explains things that wouldn't have needed explaining, and relies on a sense of suspense that no one would have had. It's as if a documentary were made after JFK's assassination that depended on viewers not knowing if he'd be assassinated while addressing the crowd or driving in the car.
I've seen worse movies for sure. But I've seen a lot better. (Disclosure: The film's publicists sent me a free copy of the DVD. Thanks.)
[Tags: movies film reviews bush documentaries]
Posted by self at 07:50 PM
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The public radio show "Whad'ya Know" is wrapping up it's American Idol-style hunt for a new song, and Oliver Brown — ukelele laureate, Wikipedian, and someone I've known since he was in fuzzy baseball-themed jammies — is a finalist. Listen to his song, The Girl with the Cotton Candy Hair, and immediately vote for him (ignore those other finalists, worthy though I'm sure they are), by sending a message to whadyaknow@wpr.org with the subject line " VOTE FOR SONG #2, "Girl with the Cotton Candy Hair" by OLIVER BROWN."
Act now! The contest ends soon! Well, March 23. Oliver is funny, eccentric, a high school teacher...what's not to like? [Tags: oliver_brown ukelele npr music]
Posted by self at 04:38 PM
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Sebastian Keil of Speaking English Podcast reviews my halfings book, My 100 Million Dollar Secret. He likes it and recommends it to people learning English because the vocabulary isn't too hard and the print size is good. And he wears a funny hat. What could be better! [Tags: my_100_million_dollar_secret books reviews young_adults sebastian_kiel]
As an ace marketer, I probably should have mentioned that you can join the almost two dozen satisfied customers by buying it at lulu.com or Amazon.com, or you can read it online for free or download it as a PDF or Word file for free.
Posted by self at 09:24 PM
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John Palfrey says we don't know how the Internet might affect democracy, but there lots of possibilities. He lays them out. [I'm typing quickly trying to capture the outline. As always, I'm missing stuff and getting it wrong.]
First, it might affect participatory democracy by providing open information enviornments, making new networks, enabling tools for individual activists, a productivity tool for campaigners, and attracting new participants. On the other hand, it might provide too much information, it can fragment us ("The Daily Me"), the participation can be watered down, it limits participation to those with access, some states are instituting censorship (cf. the ONI project), and maybe we should be jumping to "postdemocratic" order. So, maybe we'll see refinements; the context matters a lot and it depends "a ton on what baseline you choose." That is, if you're only asking if participatory culture makes demcoracy better, that's an easy bar. But maybe we should be aiming higher.
Second, acadmics says that the real story is about economic democracy and the emergence of a stronger middle class, and Doc Searls' "Vendor Relationship Management."
Third, academics also talk about semiotic democracy, e.g., control of cultural goods, with meaning created by many, not by the few. More YouTube and Second Life, less Disney. But (he asks), will people participate? Will we just create the old structures online? And won't new intermediaries emerge to decide what we see?
John lists takeaways:
Q: First, participatory culture and democracy are non-partisan. Second, someone has to tell us what's true or else we're liable to end up with fascism, racism, anti-semitism, etc.
Posted by self at 11:02 AM
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In a bid to make it hard for its readers to feel any sense of participation in the Oscars, and possibly to prevent us from mischievously spelling "DiCaprio" "DiCrapio," The trademark-and-copyright besotted Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences makes it difficult to get the list of nominees in a form we can munge the way we want. (No, pdf does not count.) So, I liberated the data and have posted it here. It's a very plain HTML format, with span metadata for nominees, categories and moredata. [Tags: oscars]
Posted by self at 02:45 PM
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Last night I was just going to watch a few minutes of the documentary about the boycotting of the Dixie Chicks, Shut Up and Sing , but I ended up watching the whole thing, going to bed too late. It's an imperfect documentary about imperfect people, which is why I loved it.
I didn't used to be in the DC's demographic. I'm a totally stereotypical northeastern liberal Jew, predictable down to my preference for iceberg lettuce and whining about sunburn. And that means I don't much like country music (although I was brought up on folk music). I only started paying attention to the DC's once their fans turned against them because Natalie Maines, the lead singer, uttered a single line critical of our president. Now, some celebrities have been brought down by using a single word, but generally those words have indicated an intolerance that we (thankfully) no longer tolerate. But Maines only said she's ashamed of our president. That's well within the range of political discourse. Economically punishing people you disagree with makes democracy worse, not better, imo — although I know many of you disagree. (As for Maines criticizing the president while outside of the US, the notion that we need to put on a fake, unified face for our allies strikes me as being ashamed of what's best about democracy.)
The documentary makes it clear that Maines is a big mouth. Nothing wrong with that. Heck, some of my best friends and bloggers are big mouths. She said that one sentence from the heart, in the heat of the moment — London had just seen its largest-ever anti-war demonstration — and, as she acknowledges, to get a rise from the audience. Life is complex, and the documentary's willingness to acknowledge this is a real plus.
Seeing the DC's embrace the consequences of Maines' single sentence, growing as people, citizens and musicians, is moving precisely because the growth is contingent and painful. This isn't a matter of riding some bromide. They feel their way. They're pushed and they react, sometimes with anger, sometimes with sadness, sometimes with their instruments. They may be insanely talented millionaire musicians, but it's easy to connect with them as bullies shove them off their accustomed path.
The DC's are great musicians and singers. I would never have found them if their politics hadn't snagged me. I am, I believe, part of their new demographic.
(Disclosure: I got sent a free copy of the DVD as part of a blogging marketing campaign. I was planning on renting it anyway.)
[Tags: dixie_chicks movies free_speech music country_music politics ]
Posted by self at 01:31 PM
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SJSU JMC163 New Media in Journalism School of Journalism & Mass Communications (yes, that's the name of the blog — I suspect it's class-related), has a nice example of an audience for a particular TV show — the BBC's "North & South" — forming itself into a conversation "with a voice" that worked around the BBC's attempt to moderate it. [Tags: media cluetrain bbc ]
Posted by self at 09:54 AM
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No, it's not a place where you can get free digital downloads. Rather, it's software for creating your own storefront for selling your music, documents, used Powerpoints, whatever. It's from the Web's favorite musician, BradSucks, and uses Amazon's incredibly cheap S3 storage service. BradSucks' store is DRM-free, of course.
You can see it in action here. Or you can download BradSuck's software here, so you can install it on your own site. (And while you're checking out BradSucks' store, you can listen to his music for free, and then go buy a copy of his album.) [Tags: bradsucks music drm retail amazon ecommerce everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 09:50 AM
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My wife and I are in DC as tourists for a few days. Some notes...
We took a two-hour docent-led tour of The National Portrait Gallery. Tom Thompson, the docent, knows everything and can put it in perspective. I'm a sucker for portraits.
The three-paragraph write-ups pasted next to each presidential portrait are surprisingly frank and overall quite negative about our fearless leaders. Surprising and refreshing.
Almost forty years later, it still find it difficult to watch the videotape of Nixon appealing to the "silent majority" to support his secret plan to end the war in Vietnam.
The National Gallery of Art has a special exhibit of its Rembrandt sketches and etchings. The craft almost overwhelms the art. (Simon Schama's Rembrandt's Eyes is an amazing, eye-opening work.)
The Library of Congress is closed on Sundays. It makes for a brisk walk up Capitol hill, though. We'll go today, if it's open on Presidents' Day.
The History Boys movie was quite enjoyable, although less substantial than I'd thought, less surprising, and less about the teacher it thinks it's about than it is. (The "academic" lesson it teaches is the same as in David R. Williams' little book of advice to students, Sin Boldly , [Tags: washington_dc dc travel rembrandt national_portrait_gallery]
Posted by self at 09:06 AM
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My wife and I are in DC as tourists for a few days. Some notes...
If you're going to visit the WWII memorial and the Vietnam memorial, do them in chronological order. The WWII is a big, open space with nothing to hang feelings or memories on. The Vietnam memorial — which, amazingly, I'd never been to before — is heart-breaking. No matter what we thought of that war, we all feel the full stop of those young lives.
The Hirshhorn is a truly enjoyable art museum. I usually conk out aesthetically after 45 minutes, but we did this museum from its opening hirsh to its final horn.
Because I am a mature individual, I refrained from yelling profanities at the White House.
I've never liked its palatial air.
We had a delicious Indian dinner at Nivana at 1810 K Street, NW. It's completely vegetarian, and much of it is vegan. The owners are very friendly and will tell you anything you want to know about Jainism.
Disturbing fact: Some of the wines they serve are marked vegan because, the owners say, most wines are "filtered through fish."
"Only Human" is a Spanish movie about a Jew who brings home a Palestinian fiance. We went because the Washington Post claimed it was laugh-out-loud funny. Eh. It had a couple of chuckles, but otherwise was just predictably silly. "My Big, Neurotic Jewish-Palestinian Engagement."
[Tags: washington_dc dc vegetarian travel]
Posted by self at 10:44 AM
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Wendy Seltzer, law professor and Berkman Fellow, posted the snippet of the Superbowl where they warn viewers that it's against the law to describe the game. Wendy posted this for her law class. And, yes, the NFL has sent a take-down notice to YouTube.
Wendy is a former EFF lawyer. She's sending a counter-notification to YouTube.
(Note: This blog post is copyrighted. You may not reuse it, link to it, describe it, talk about it, think about it, or remember it without the explicit permission of
Posted by self at 08:18 PM
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Jim Moore (a friend and former Berkman Fellow) received a msg from YouTube that they've removed a video of his at the legal request of Viacom. Had Jim posted a Viacom program he'd recorded? Had he posted a clip of his nephew performing a song owned by Viacom? Nah, it was a 30-second video of Jim and some friends eating ribs at restaurant in Somerville. That's all. Viacom complained to YouTube, and YouTube removed the "offending" video. No explanation of why. No query first. Nothing but one big bully of a company flicking its mighty finger Jim's way. Oh yeah, the DMCA is a fine law.
John Palfrey explains (and as a Harvard Law professor, he kinda understands this stuff) that Jim is entitled to file a counter notice. In fact, John says, Viacom may owe Jim money if it falsely accused him (as it did) of violating its copyright rights. John wonders if a court might decide that Viacom is papering the house with these take-down notices.
Yo, Democrats, care to take a good long look at the DMCA? Or is there not enough light for that inside Hollywood's pocket? [Tags: dmca copyright copyleft John_palfrey jim_moore youtube]
Five minutes later: I wonder if Viacom's spider saw "Redbone" in the title of Jim's video and thought that it was a clip of Leon Redbone. Does Viacom own Leon Redbone?
Posted by self at 06:17 PM
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Stately, plump Penguin Books is off on an experiment that is likely to fail in delightful, unpredictable ways...for which my hat is off to them. They've started a wiki and given us—any and all of us—six weeks to write a novel. The wiki has a blog (but does the blog have a wiki?), and the Penguin blog talks about the experiment as well. (But does the Penguin wiki blog about the wiki's blog? No? That's so Web 1.27! :)
Anyway, a novel seems like an unlikely venture for a wiki. Too many dependencies. Change "Carlo" to "Conchita" in Chapter 1, and who's going to make the updates throughout all the chapters? Add a penguin who invents pockets in Chapter 2 and now Freida in Chapter 9 actually does have a place to put the souvenir shot glass from Las Vegas. Not to mention that Wikipedia has reality to hold a page together (or at least a settled criterion for resolving disputes), while a novel has nothing but the sensibilities of a million penguins at keyboards. (Penguin Books has sicced some MA students on the wiki to seed it. )
So, I'll be surprised (and delighted) if a novel emerges from this. But two caveats: 1. If you'd asked me four years ago if Wikipedia would work, I would have guessed wrong. 2. A novel is not the only worthwhile result that could emerge from this experiment.
I'm impressed Penguin Books is doing it. I look forward to seeing if the writing gets better or worse, if the discussion page is more interesting than the novel, what the sexy parts of the crowd are like, if good triumphs or gets into an edit war with irony...
[Tags: wiki fiction novels collaborative_writing penguin_books publishing books everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 10:40 AM
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[NOTE: There are no plot spoilers in what follows, although I do talk about the general balance of the elements of the movie. I also assume you know the movie's basic premise, as explained in any capsule review of it.]
Pan's Labyrinth wasn't simply not as good as I'd expected. I actually think it's not good. Put differently: It's a bad movie. In my opinion.
From the reviews and promotional interviews, I expected it to have two threads that reflect on one another: a story about the Spanish Civil War and a girl's escape into a fairy tale world. In fact, this is a war story with a few occasional and relatively brief fantasy interludes. Neither story is worth watching.
The war story is hideously violent. Disgustingly even sadistically violent. But so is war, so this might be appropriate, except that the war story is also hideously cliched and shallow. The bad guy is one-dimensional. The brave freedom fighters manage to be even less than that. They are The Brave Hero, The Feisty Heroine, The Guy Who Stutters, The Rest of the Guys. The ending is very movie-ish. If the war story were shown without the fantasy elements, it'd be laughed out of town (except for the parts where audience is gagging).
The fantasy segments are, frankly, not all that original or interesting either. The characters are stock, which I'm sure is the point since they come from the imagination of an eleven-year-old. (There is one baddy who does something cool with eyeballs, although it will be familiar to kids who watched Nickelodeon's Real Monsters cartoons.) But that doesn't make it any better for the audience. If the fantasy segments were shown without the war story, they'd make a not all that arresting short subject. (The girl, Ivana Baquero, is a fabulous actor, though.)
Ah, but these two stories are intertwined, you say. They reflect on one another. The girl's escape into fantasy is oh-so-poignant because of the violence of the world around her. The violence breaks through our softening of it via stories. That's the theory, anyway. But it didn't work for me. The fantasy didn't intensify, illuminate or condition the war story. The war story was so cartoon-y already that the fantasy couldn't touch it.
My wife and son both really liked it. It got an almost unprecedented 96% positives at RottenTomatoes . So, I'm probably wrong. But, heck, that's what we have blogs for: To be wrong in public. [Tags: pan's_labyrinth movies reviews]
Posted by self at 10:16 AM
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I gave Midomi a quick whirl this morning. It searches for songs based on melodies you hum to it. Fun idea, but it took me six tries before it got one right. It thought my rendition of the opening of Beethoven's Fifth was the 59th St. Bridge song by Simon and Garfunkel, and it thought my rendition of the 59th St. Bridge Song was Oh Daddy by Fleetwood Mac. Midomi offers to play the matched portion of the song (recorded by users, which is rather charming), and in no cases were the match and the matchee recognizably the same, except presumably in some computer algorithmic sense. It did get, "Doe, a Deer" right. Unfortunately, that's the one song whose name is embedded in its melody.
I'm no Mariah Carey, but I'm within the bell curve of normalcy for singing on key. Even so, I played the opening notes of the 59th Street song on my keyboard, with my mic laid on top of it. That apparently is Only a Dream in Rio by James Taylor. And Beethoven's Fifth on the keyboard Midomi thinks is the melody to How Deep Is Your Love.
If I'm missing the point, I'm sure you'll set me straight. [Tags: midomi everything_is_miscellaneous music search]
Posted by self at 12:49 PM
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On Feb. 24, The Berkman Center, MIT Comparative Media Studies and the Information society Project at Yale Law are holding a one-day conference called Beyond Broadcast: From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy. The keynote will be by the estimable Henry Jenkins. Registration is $50, which includes lunch and an evening "reception" (which usually means the beer is free). There's a $50 discount for students... [Tags: broadcast media conferences berkman]
Posted by self at 03:25 PM
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The WGBH Lab lets anyone download and mash video clips from their archive. And they'll air and post some of the results. The clips whose rights have been cleared (now licensed via Creative Commons) are here. Click on the categories and you'll find some pretty cool videos, including of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, scientifical animations, and ants eating a caterpillar.
[Tags: wgbh mashups everything_is_miscellaneous web2.0 creative_commons ]
Posted by self at 12:30 PM
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Good lord I'm tired of David Mamet.
Last night, we rented Edmond because I'd read that it was a taut, twisty, noir-ish thriller that didn't suffer from the flaws of later Mamet. Or at least that's what dripped into my brain pan from some reviews I read.
Wrong.
As usual, his characters speak in an unnatural rhythm, repeating endlessly. They are all little people struggling with the author's big ideas, but the author thinks his characters are too little to be having ideas as big as his, so invents a form of speech uttered by no actual people ever. As the anti-hero, William H. Macy, moves through his existential (= inexplicable) crisis, we learn that nothing motivates him except the scriptwriter's desire to be deep. As for the acting, it was hard to tell if it sucked because of the direction or because the script is impossible to speak convincingly. It was painful to watch good actors (and Denise Richards) stuck with those words to say.
Glengarry Glen Ross was the one good movie for which Mamet was the sole script writer, and, while there's more to like in it than in the rest of his catalog—the plot has a surprise, sort of—it too has a condescending view of Ordinary Folks that thinks they need to be elevated into capital letters by speaking in an unnatural patois. Glengarry Glen Ross has one great role in it (the boss, played by Alec Baldwin in the movie) and a whole bunch of great actors struggling to escape the didactic machine.
Not that Mamet does mechanisms well. House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner are both complex, box-within-a-box, hoax-and-fraud movies that get your head spinning until you think there is no possible way Mamet is going to be able to resolve all the pieces, and then everyone gets run over by a truck. Feh.
The movie scripts that he's done that are not Mamety are surprisingly conventional and not very interesting: The Postman Always Rings Twice, We're No Angels, The Untouchables, The Verdict, Hoffa, Ronin, Hannibal. Vanya on 42nd Street I actually liked, but was cowritten with Andre Gregory. But now it's time for me to learn my lesson: If David Mamet is the only writer and it is reviewed as a David Mamet film, I'm not going. Unless I hear it's really good. Because I am a fool.
By the way, as William H. Macy entered the screen in Edmond, I said out loud that I've seen Macy's butt in more movies than I've seen the butt of any other actor or actress. "Please," I said, "let this movie be free of Macy-butt." But even that prayer went unanswered.
(Note: It is possible that your opinion is different than mine.) [Tags: david_mamet movies reviews edmond]
Posted by self at 09:53 AM
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I'm listening to Love, the Beatles mashup by George Martin and his son.
Yes, it's part stunt. The Beatles left such a rich selection of song styles and pieces that you can create a version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" without a dominant guitar. But the CD is also an act of love that makes that song—which I always found slightly embarrassingly George-ish—more lovely than the original. The Martins often reveal an essence of melody, harmony, voice, meaning or mood. (Keep in mind that I am a sentimental Beatles fool. They were our music in a way that my children have yet to find for themselves.)
The first track is a version of "Because" rendered less sentimental by highlighting the beautiful vocal work. The second track, "Get Back," is fun. But the third track, "Glass Onion" overwhelmed me. It pulls together many pieces, most recognizable if not actually familiar. Each of the parts is so resonant that it sank me into the feelings those songs had engendered. No, not feelings. Meanings. What the songs meant to me.
This is the part of what I've been calling the "miscellaneous" that that word doesn't capture. Categorization puts like next to like. The miscellaneous category consists of that which does not share likenesses beyond their shared domain—the kitchen's miscellaneous drawer contains implements that have nothing in common beyond the fact that they all belong in a kitchen. But the digital miscellany we're building for ourselves is an over-abundance of likenesses, across every domain. The likenesses are drawn by every link we create, each made of intention and meaning. In some ways, it is the opposite of the miscellany. It is the surfeit of connection, a potential unlike anything we've had before short of language itself. [Tags: beatles taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]
Posted by self at 01:28 PM
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I'm sure I'll get past the level I'm on in Ghost Recon 3: Advanced Warfighter (PC). If I put in enough time, I will not only rescue the VIP, but I'll hold off those bad, bad terrorists or whatever they are until the chopper comes to pick up me and my brave boys. But, you know what? I'm tired of replaying this same segment of the level. Run across the square. Position my squad. Shoot the two baddies who approach from the side. Then pick off the ones on the right. Wait for the armored vehicle. Wait for the tank and the radio instruction that I can call in an air strike. Carry the VIP to the chopper. Wait for the next wave. Shoot the guys behind the monument. Wait to be suddenly felled by a bullet or shell from somewhere. Reload from the previous save point. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Let me try explaining this to the game designers. You see, fellas (and I'm guessing you're mainly guys), I know you think this particular segment is fun. You probably used phrases like "It kicks ass" and "This is so fricking cool!" But some of us are 56 years old and happen not to enjoy getting 90% through the segment only to have to start again. Oh, sure, if I play it another ten times, I'll figure out where the fatal shot is coming from. But now I dread playing your game because I know I'll have to go through the same fricking cool segment again. Your game has become a chore.
But you're convinced I'm having a good time, because not only are we all as good at the game as you are, we all enjoy it for exactly the same reasons.
Stop being dicks. Let us save the game wherever we want, and let us know the codes so we can get past the parts of your game we're not enjoying.
Thank you. [Tags: games cheats ghost_recon]
Posted by self at 09:32 PM
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Thomas Vander Wal at the UNC social software symposium I'm at just pointed to the way people at Amazon have tagged Kevin Federline. Pretty funny.
[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy thomas_vander_wal kevin_federline k-fed amazon]
Posted by self at 09:37 AM
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Edgar Bronfman, head of the fourth largest music company, acknowledged in an interview that his kids have downloaded music without paying. He declined to say how he dealt with them. As a commenter (iburl) puts it:
So the concequences for 14 year old Susie Q. Public downloading some stupid song that she could have legally taped off of the radio are that her parents and her a put through a protracted form of legal extortion, resulting in the depletion of their family's life savings and plunged into debt, perhaps permanently effecting the child's future education. The concequences for this guy… he has to give a stern lecture. Now we know why everyone loves record company weasels! Here's a basic moral test: If you think a punishment is unfair if applied to you or your kids, then it's unfair if applied to someone else under the same circumstances. That goes for Bronfman, for drug-addicted right-wing radio hosts, and for certain sitting presidents who favor locking up coke users for ungodly lengths of time. [Tags: music justice bronfman bush hypocrites smug_bastards]
Posted by self at 03:38 PM
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Steven Levy has a column about what could make the Zune better. He's not nearly as negative as Andy Uhnatko (whose article I blogged about here), but he certainly seems underwhelmed. Steven focuses on how Microsoft could put the Zune's wifiability to good use.
As is acknowledged under the column, Steven is the author of a book about the iPod called The Perfect Thing, which gives you sense of where he stands on the iPod. (Not that you'd want to stand on your iPod.) I've been greatly enjoying the book even though I don't own an iPod, because (a) it's about the iPod as a cultural phenomenon; (b) it's about how something creative and elegant comes out of a commercial enterprise; (c) Steve writes real good. (I have a Creative Zen Nomad. It works.) [Tags: ipod zune drm ]
Posted by self at 04:02 PM
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Lessig explains and weighs YouTube's cease-and-desist message to TechCrunch that inists that TechCrunch take down some code that lets you save a YouTube video to your machine. John Palfrey adds another layer of explanation.
Notes Lessig:
For a company that was built upon the unauthorized spread of other peoples' copyrighted work to threaten legal action against someone simply enabling people to save that work to his machine deserves at least special mention in a book by Alan Dershowitz. To save you the mousing, the book is Chutzpah! [Tags: drm copyright lessig youtube techcrunch ]
Posted by self at 02:36 PM
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Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, responds to the op-ed written by Cary Sherman, CEO of the Recording Industry of America, in response to the CEA's Digital Freedom campaign.
Personally, I think the RIAA's op-ed is probably correct that the right to do what you want with a recording that you've obtained legally—including freely moving it around your digital devices—should not be pegged onto Fair Use. But, I am not a lawyer, so maybe I'm wrong about that.
That takes care of the part where I agree with the RIAA.
I don't see much in the Digital Freedom campaign about Fair Use, other than a passing reference by former Berkman fellow Derek Slater in a blog report. The RIAA's Sherman goes after Fair Use because he has a better defense against that. The real issue is: We want to be able to use what we've bought the way we want to use it, we want to be able to share music at least as freely digitally as we do in the real world, and we absolutely do not want the government mandating technology be crippled to prop up an industry that can't keep up with the demands of the free market.
The urgent issue is the RIAA's current push for a lame duck "Audio Flag" bill that will mandate that technology have built into it the inability to record radio signals without the permission of the broadcaster. This would mean that you just can't save music off the air for personal use. It would also kill TiVo for radio, an option that becomes really interesting if you're an XM or Sirius subscriber (as I am not).
[Tags: drm riaa cea digital_freedom audio_flag eff ]
Matt McKenzie has an excellent article in Computerworld explaining how Windows Vista turns your machine into a player owned and controlled by Big Content. He doesn't quite put it like that, but it's hard to draw another conclusion. [Tags: vista]
Posted by self at 10:42 AM
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Fsk has created a Flash toy that's more fun than it would seem if I described it. (Thanks to egopoly for the link.) [Tags: flash toys fun]
Posted by self at 09:00 PM
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Wendy Seltzer is leading a lunchtime discussion at the Berkman Center about how copyright works not just as law but as technology policy. Copyright tech has been shaping law and culture, she says. [As always, I'm paraphrasing, missing big chunks, making the elegant clunky, etc.]
She looked recently at the 1995 federal policy statement on the "national information infrastructure" (= da Net). It reads as if the Clinton administration wanted to promote the Internet by protecting "intellectual property." But it turns out that the Internet has even more value by letting us communicate with one another. Yet, the copyrighted content has been wagging the dog, restricting what and how we can communicate. E.g., the DMCA (which encourages ISPs to take material down), restrictions on fair use, the anti-circumvention laws (including the Broadcast Flag). Laws that give an incentive to create can then become a barrier to communication and access, Wendy says. "So far this limited monopoly is the best way we've found to give artists and authors an incentive to create." We don't want to return on patronage, she says. The market seems to be the best mechanism. "But this market has its own inefficiencies." E.g., every computer makes copies (just by visiting a page), so tightening copyright laws can inhibit us unnecessarily, not to mention preventing remixes and mashups that make political points.
While the Internet makes infringements easier, the laws passed in response have given copyright holders new tools to go after infringers, swinging the balance against users. E.g., section 512 of the DMCA says that ISPs should "expeditiously" take down material that someone—anyone—claims infringes. So, ISPs don't have to examine every piece posted to their system, but the incentive is to err on the side of removing materials.
Q: I've heard that YouTube is only taking down potentially infringing clips longer than five minutes. [A quick search on YouTube for "daily show" clips supports this—weak evidence.]
Q: What's going on with the counter-notice provisions of the DMCA (section 512g) which lets someone whose material was taken down complain. Q: How should the industry respond to the real threat? Q: The music industry doesn't care about secure DRM any more. Will that happen to other industries? Wendy hopes artists will insist on having more open licenses of their material.
Q: What should, say, Sony do? Q: Isn't the ease of ripping an argument for stronger IP, so Tower Records can stay in business? Q: How about AllofMP3.com? She says that she thinks the successful sites will be differentiated not by their content but by their navigability, guarantee of quality, etc.
Q: Protecting artists is a good ting. Art is a public good. You mentioned patronage. But in Europe, arts get funded through grants. Q: How can the communication side make a claim against the entertainment industry? Wendy likes subscription models that don't track the data too closely (for privacy reasons) and that allocate revenues to the artists.
Q: If we were negotiating copyrights with individual artists, what would the DMCA look like? Q: But when I listen, the artist would get ten cents... Wendy: That's what DMX does. Would artists give their rights over to bulk licensing agencies? Do what you will with the music and we'll figure out who to give the money to? If the agency was transparent enough...
[Tags: copyright drm digital_rights wendy_seltzer music itunes ipod berkman]
Posted by self at 02:55 PM
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From PRX, the public radio exchange:
Posted by self at 05:54 PM
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Given my difficulties with space, Portal (from Valve) sounds like exactly the sort of game that will leave me like a hound trying to untangle his leash. But, the web site vaguely associated with it is hilarious.
It's like an Easter egg, but not hidden inside the application (which means it's mainly not like an Easter egg). PCGamer ran instructions for entering it:
I actually chuckled out loud at some of it... [Tags: humor games portal]
Posted by self at 11:44 AM
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Sonific lets you provide background music for your page, choosing from the site's copyright-cleared selection. It's free, but even so, I am so far out of the demographic that I 'd rather have Sonific-earmuffs that auto-mute any site that installs it. Don't get me wrong: Sonific may catch on, and for those who like that sort of thing, it may be just what the dj ordered. The fact that it's not for me is probably a good sign for Sonific - we can only assume that Sonific's target market isn't crotchety old men.
Posted by self at 08:29 AM
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[Note: I know the following is dangerously close to self-parody. But I do think the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon is interesting.]
1. Remember how we all made Mahir, the Kiss man, famous? Some people spread the link out of a mean sense of superiority. (Mahir used his moment of celebrity to try to engage people across cultures, so now who's the foolish one, eh?) But we also spread it because we could. We — all of us, each of us, none of us famous — could make an unknown human famous. It changed our relationship to celebrity, the continued existence of Paris Hilton not to the contrary.
With Snakes on a Plane, we're flexing our muscles in a new way. We're not insisting that JarJar be killed in the sequel, although we did write the movie's most quotable line. But that's cool only because it means with SoaP we're messing with the audience's relationship to the movie, and not just - as with Rocky Horror - during the time when the movie unspools in the theater. Rather, with SoaP the audience has taken over the meaning of the movie. This is very different from being asked to design Indiana Jones' new outfit or write witticisms for the next James Bond movie. We, without being asked, have insisted on what this movie means to us.
What does it mean to us? Well, we're refusing to let the movie be marketed to us as B movies — think Anaconda — are, as if we're idiots who really think such movies are anything more than a retelling of the same plot over and over and over. With SoaP we're saying that we know exactly what sort of movie it is, and we're capable of enjoying it for the very qualities that make it a B movie. Don't think we're really surprised when a snake bites the guy on the nuts, as I assume happens, even if we jump because of the clever editing. We all knew someone would get bitten in the crotch, and we've always been conspirators in the success of B movies. Now we're making that clear by reveling in our power, just as we did with Mahir.
I don't think this is a turning point in how movies are made. The SoaP phenomenon has gotten much of its juice from the fact that this is the first time. Hollywood I'm sure is already trying to figure out how to repeat the success. But that's like Hollywood plotting to find the next Mahir. Nah, Hollywood will continue, and we'll find the next project we want to commandeer because, after all...[cue portentious music] aren't we all the snakes on the plane?
2. Samuel L. Jackson. [Tags: snakes_on_a_plane SoaP movies pretentious_writing]
Posted by self at 01:17 PM
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I first saw this 3 minute animated music clip a few years ago when it came bundled with whatever graphics card I'd just bought. In fact, in that version, you could control your viewing angle. Even viewing it in pure playback modeat pretty low resolution, it's an awesome piece of work. [Tags: music video animation]
Posted by self at 10:02 AM
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We've been coming to Shakespeare & Co.'s performances for over twenty years, I believe. We have rarely been disappointed — their attempt to get around the inconvenient sexism of The Taming of the Shrew didn't work — and we've been delighted this year. Hamlet and The Merry Wives of Windsor were both excellent, although The Merry Wives was — surprise! — funnier.
The Hamlet had some stunt casting: Jason Asprey in the lead, with his real-life mother (and company founder) Tina Packer as his mother. It would have been a mere stunt except both are wonderful actors, and Asprey played a resolute, believable Hamlet. He's grieving, angry, and set on revenge. This was a more visceral and affecting version, not as mannered and self-conscious as many of the other Hamlets I've seen. It was also not as funny as some of them: Polonius is often played as more of a fool, which can lessen the obviousness of the of love holding that doomed family together. But the visibility of the love among the various and overlapping families made this a more moving version.
In an inspired change, which also lowered the number of required players, the traveling troupe of actors consists of a single thespian who enlists the king and queen to act in the play within the play. The folded over inwardness and outwardness was fascinating. And there was another benefit: Asprey gets to instruct Gertrude — his real mother and one of the great Shakespeare directors — in the basics of acting.
Last night we saw The Merry Wives, and it was hilarious, full of the funny business Shakespeare & Co. brings to the comedies. Malcolm Ingram was a fine Falstaff, full of himself and, given his stage girth, there's lots to fill. Jonathan Croy chewed the scenery appropriately as the French Dr. Caius, and Dave Demke pushed pink-plumed foppery as far as it would go. But Corinna May and especially Elizabeth Aspenlieder really shined as the merry wives. The play is a trifle — the love interest is resolved pretty much offstage — but it is a trifle with the women firmly control.
(By the way, Harold Bloom's chapter on Merry Wives in Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human is unintentionally funny because he is so besotted with Falstaff that Shakespeare's use of the character as a buffoon drives him apoplectic.)
[Tags: shakespeare reviews]
Posted by self at 10:30 AM
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I saw A Scanner Darkly last night and thought it was worth seeing if only for the hammy delight of Robert Downey, Jr. But, I left wondering why Richard Linklater insisted on "rotoscoping" it, turning live action into animation. It's a difficult process and not nearly as automated as I'd thought. The effect is definitely cool and trippy, but it sure is distracting: "I wonder how they did the hair?" "Why is the tow truck so realistic when everything else is cartoony?" "Does that really count as a nude scene?" It actually made part of the plot (no spoilers ahead!) harder to follow. Would it have been a better movie if it had been left unpainted? If not, does the paint mask flaws in its construction?
By the way — and this too is not a spoiler — our daughter pointed out that the quote from Philip K. Dick that ends the movie seems at odds with the movie's thrust. Or maybe the movie is just too far out for a square like me. Daddy-o. [Tags: a_scanner_darkly animation movies philip_k_dick richard_linklater]
Posted by self at 10:37 AM
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Blufr.com, which seems to be a clever way of promoting Answers.com, poses amusing true-false questions. I spent a compulsive seven minutes there this morning instead of doing my email... [Tags: entertainment]
Posted by self at 09:02 AM
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The publisher sent me a copy of Jeremy Blachman's book, Anonymous Lawyer (book|blog). It's hilarious. In fact, it's far better than it has any right to be: It's told in the form of blog posts, with occasional email asides, which would seem to be a tough limitation, and it's about a one-sided character who is the most career-focused, shallowest, nastiest person you've ever imagined. But Jeremy pulls it off because he is a deeply talented writer. He is also fearless. A lesser author would have tried to curry the reader's sympathy. Nope. Not Jeremy. That takes guts. But it pays off in laughs...appalled laughs.
I don't want to set your expectations too high, because that's a sure way to kill a humor book. But I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
PS: In his personal blog, Jeremy reviews "Keeping Up with the Steins" and says: "The movie didn't know what it wanted to be — a farce about the excesses of bar mitzvahs, or a tug-at-the-heartstrings family comedy. And so it floated in between, and ended up not terribly satisfying." Anonymous Lawyer does not suffer from that problem. [Tags: anonymouslawyer jeremy_blachman books humor]
While we're talking about the intersection of blogs and books, you might want to take a look at the site for a book in progress, Search Analytics for Your Site, by Louis Rosenfeld and Richard Wiggins. Lou Rosenfeld's new company, Rosenfeld Media, (Disclosure: yes, I'm on the board of advisors) is trying to be innovative and open about the publishing of books. They're also publishing Card Sorting by Donna Maurer, with whom I got to bond over Eleanor Rosch at the Information Architecture Summit
Posted by self at 11:43 AM
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Warning!!!! SPOILER. Sort of. I don't actually give away the ending, but if you haven't seen it, don't read this post beforehand because I talk about it in general terms and mention some possible endings that didn't happen. On the other hand, you should feel free to read my predictions from before the start of the season. You'll be amazed at my prescience. Hahaha.)
[SPOILER]
. The finale makes total sense if you assume that The Sopranos is a comedy. Not just sometimes funny. A comedy. A dark comedy. It has always had a comic structure - we see through the characters' pretensions - and over the seasons it has generally moved toward being a comedy in substance as well.
That's not to say that Adriana's murder was hilarious. And the Big Pussy storyline had the inevitability of tragedy. But the overall premise of the show is explicitly about incongruities — a mobster family with the usual suburban problems, except instead of Timmy hiding the broken vase under the couch, Timmy shoots his babysitter in the head and buries her in five locations. The eruptions of brutal violence are not funny, but they are all the more overwhelming because they happen within a comic framework.
The characters are almost all comic. Tony. Artie. Paulie. Silvio. Janice. Dr. Kupferberg. Ralphie. Steve Buscemi's Tony. Johnny Sack. Tony's mother. These are great comic turns, transcendently written and acted. Carmela, on the other hand, is pulled between her desire to have a normal, happy family and her recognition that her family life is built on abnormal evil; her reconciliation with Tony was, I thought, tragic. (Melfi is resolutely non-comic, which maybe explains why she's one of my least favorite characters.)
So, I imagine the writers sitting around trying to figure out what to do with this semi-last season. They want to give Tony some peace. So, they shoot him in the gut as a way of clearing his head. If Tony is given a second chance, how much of the value in his life will he be able to see? How soft can Tony go? Then we had the Vito story line, which was pure comedy. (And more, of course, because it's the Sopranos.) "I wonder what would happen if we put one of these guys into a sleepy New England town," said one writer. "Yeah, and made him gay," said another. "And can we work the word 'johnnycakes' into it somehow?" wondered a third. (This entire conversation would have happened entirely in David Chase's head.)
And then the writers tried to figure out what ending would shock us. Tony kills Carmela? AJ gets whacked? Furio strangles Tony with his pony tail? Paulie Walnuts is appointed head of FEMA? What final scene would we not be ready for?
When they hit on the idea they went with, the writers must have had a good laugh.
I thought it worked. [Tags: sopranos tv entertainment]
Posted by self at 10:33 PM
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I got an email msg from Attila Weinberger, a Romanian blues musician who was wondering if we're related. I told him my father had Hungarian blood, and Attila's hometown turns out to have been in Hungary for a while. So, there's a pretty good chance we're cousins to some degree.
In any case, I promise you that this is the best Transylvanian blues you've ever heard. He's a damn fine musician who was playing the blues even when the Communists didn't want him to. You can hear some tracks here, or click on AG's Blues Radio at the upper left of his site. [Tags: attila_weinberger music blues romania]
Posted by self at 09:12 AM
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McDonald's Interactive has left McDonald's because McDonald's is leading the planet to "global calamity." Interactive is now devoting itself to stimulating mass action on the environment. [Tags: environment mcdonalds games]
Posted by self at 11:25 AM
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AKMA raises question about The Da Vinci Code that advance the discussion beyond the canapes served at Jesus' wedding and the resurrection of the mullet. (I read the first page of the book and put it down. And I haven't seen the movie.) [Tags: akma da_vinci_code movies theology]
Posted by self at 11:17 AM
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Bruce Willis is set to make a fourth Die Hard movie, in which his character, John The previous Die Hards were titled: Die Hard, Die Hard 2: Die Harder, and Die Hard with a Vengeance. So, what would be a good title for the fourth Die Hard given that it has the Internet as its villain? For example:
Die Hard on the Internets And what tough guy line might McClane utter in a signature sort of way? E.g.,
Something tells me the Net's no longer neutral. [Tags: movies contest bruce_willis]
Posted by self at 01:38 PM
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The Boston Globe is a great paper, I love it, I subscribe, I read it everyday, ok? But the little things unreasonably annoy me. Aaarrrgggghhh! For example:
EVery Saturday, the Globe's op-ed page runs a box of notable and fun quotes from the week, usually with a jest or two from the TV funnymen. This week, one of the seven quotes is Bill Clinton saying "I had a lot of happy times there," talking about his private White House office in an audiotape tour of his museum. Ooooh, "happy times"...Bill Clinton....snicker snicker. This is as funny as Steven Carrell saying "That's what she said" on The Office, except on the TV show it's supposed to be embarrassingly not funny.
The funnyman quote is a Jay "The Opposite of Funny" Leno joke about the Capitol being locked down because of what sounded like gun shots. It turned out it was just a pneumatic tool being used to repair an elevator. Japed Jay, "You can see how these mistakes are made. See, people in Washington, they're not used to the sound of actual work being done."
Hey-oh!
This was the funniest political joke on TV last week? Congress is lazy? Clinton got blown? How trenchant!
Both of these quotes are lazy and thoughtless. They're comforting, not revealing or provocative like the best political humor. In a small small way, they help abrade democratic discourse.
(Note to self: Next time have the morning coffee before blogging.)
[Tags: media whines boston_globe jay_leno humor]
Posted by self at 09:34 AM
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I'm sure people have studied this already and that some work is already well-known, but I think it'd be interesting to investigate the principles game designers use when creating AI for characters to see if we can learn anything about human psychology at the theoretical level. Game designers aren't trying to model human intelligence; they just want to not have enemies be sitting ducks who don't notice when the character next to them takes one to the head. Given the designers' extreme utilitarian and behavioral intentions, what can we learn about human psychology? Quite possibly nothing, but it'd be fun to learn about. [Tags: games psychology ai]
Posted by self at 01:15 PM
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StarForce is one of the most notoriously inept DRM schemes around, famous for taking over and then screwing up people's computers. According to Computer Gaming World, StarForce provided a link to an unprotected copy of Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lord, a PC game that is doing extremely well in retail sales even though it ships without copy protection (Yay!). If StarForce were named Soprano, it'd look like a protection racket.
The Galactic Civilizations' attitude toward copy protection is admirable and is likely to result in more sales rather than fewer. [Tags: digital_rights galactic_civilizations starforce drm copyright]
Posted by self at 06:34 PM
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BradSucks has blogged a terrific Japanese music video that, he points out, seems to have, let's say, inspired the Jack White Coke commercial. Brad has links to the YouTubes of both... [Tags: bradsucks music marketing yuki coke]
Posted by self at 12:13 PM
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I read the first page of The Da Vinci Code and didn't like it, so possibly I don't count as a leading expert on the topic. ToTheSource has apparently read the whole thing:
People often ask, "How much of The Da Vinci Code is true?" I wearily answer that Paris is in France, London is in England, and Leonardo da Vinci painted pictures. Let's look at four areas where Dan Brown's history is bunk. In case you're wondering, the four areas are: Constantine, the Knights Templar, the Priory of Sion, and da Vinci as a flamboyant homosexual. There's also a sidebar about the guy who made up the stuff about the Priory that, apparently, Dan Brown fell for. [Tags: da_vinci_code]
Posted by self at 08:26 AM
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Here are the lyrics to Neil Young's "Let's Impeach the President"
Let's impeach the president for lying He¹s the man who hired all the criminals Let¹s impeach the president for spying What if Al Qaeda blew up the levees Let's impeach the president Thank god he¹s racking down on steroids Thank God And here's a link to an interview with Neil Young on Showbiz Tonight in which the first question is "You've got a song called 'Let's Impeach the PResident.' What is the song about?"
The Neil Young site is still streaming the entire album. The album in some ways reminds me of John Lennon, who I still miss.
[Tags: bush impeachment neil_young]
Posted by self at 05:49 PM
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Neil Young is promoting his anti-war protest album by allowing us to stream it today only. [Tags: neil_young music iraq]
Posted by self at 10:34 AM
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Brad (who totally does not suck) has posted a demo of a song, the first in what he promises will be a new set. It's posted at his forum where everyone has ideas about how to make it better. My big idea about how to make it better is for people to listen to it...and to support the webbiest musician on the Web.
Yes, I know I am too old to be a BradSucks fanboy. But I am nonethelss. [Tags: music bradsucks]
Posted by self at 09:00 AM
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Steve Johnson has finished a draft of his new book, The Ghost Map. It sounds like it will be wonderful...what Michael Crichton might write if he were as talented a writer as Steve. [Tags: books steven_johnson]
Posted by self at 11:28 PM
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PC Gamer has run a list of five "games for everyone," including those who can't operate complex controls. They include:
Shades of Doom is a Doom-like game for the visually impaired. You can listen to the introduction here.
I was thinking of buying Midway Arcade Treaures Deluxe Edition for the PC, a $20 aggregation of old Midway Arcade games. But, at Amazon a couple of the reviews mention that it installs StarForce, a DRM device driver that does nothing for me except make it inconvenient to play the game. I don't want a low-level app messing with my — my — computer.
So, I'll make do with games that don't try to take over my machine.
[Tags: games drm accessibility]
Posted by self at 10:37 AM
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Today for the first time, you can buy a new Hollywood movie either in DVD format or via download. As the proud owner of a downloaded movie, you can do anything you want with it, except, um, play it on a DVD player, play it on anything other than a late-model Windows Media Player, transfer it to an iPod or PSP, or transfer it to more than two PCs.
And, please, let's not argue about whether two PCs is reasonable. First, it's not. I upgrade PCs about every two years, so my copy would have an expiration date of 4-6 years, whereas physical copies don't care how often I have to replace my DVD player or VHS deck. Second, we should not be arguing over how many machines we can use to watch a movie we've bought and paid for. We should be fighting the reconfiguring of our computing environment solely to support the introduction of artificial scarcity. If we bought it we ought to be allowed to play it anywhere as often as we want, make as many copies we want, and even grind it under our heels in contempt, although I'll grant that that last one is tough to do with a digital version.
By the way, because the downloadable version, because it is lower quality, has no manufacturing costs, and restricts how we use it of course costs about twice as much as the DVD, for the obvious reason that Hollywood pricing is done by babboons.
Kevin Marks notes that Korean music publishers have quantified the value DRM drains from music at 40%. [Tags: entertainment drm digital_rights movies hollywood krvin_marks]
Posted by self at 09:27 AM
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Comedy Central has yanked the South Park episode that makes fun of Scientology. Trey Parker and Matt Stone responded by writing the following statement to Variety:
So, Scientology, you may have won THIS battle, but the million-year war for earth has just begun!
Temporarily anozinizing our episode will NOT stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies. Curses and drat! You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail! Hail Xenu!!!"
—Trey Parker and Matt Stone, servants of the dark lord Xenu. For what it's worth, I don't watch South Park because I don't find it funny enough. But after SP's endless ragging on the world's major religions, there's something pathetic about Comedy Central pulling an episode making fun of Scientology. [Tags: south_park scientology entertainment tv]
Posted by self at 11:12 AM
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Actually, there's a huge spoiler in this post if you didn't see the first episode of the new season.
[SPOILER ALERT] I can't believe I posted predictions about the new season and did not post what I've told a few people was my hope for the show: Kill Tony in the first episode and tell the entire story in flashback. That way we get over the "What happens to Tony?" question, which is always up to the semi-arbitrary whim of the writers, and can focus on how and why it happens. Now that looks like a real possibility for the show.
The first episode was, IMO, brilliant.
[Tags: sopranos]
Posted by self at 10:55 AM
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[PHONY SPOILER ALERT!!!!]
Obviously, I have no idea what will really happen in the Sopranos' last season. Nevertheless, I approach this with a certainty that allows for no contradiction. Beyond any doubt, the following will occur. (I just enjoy setting myself up for a fall.)
Chris is a dead man. It'd be nice if they'd bring Martin Scorsese for a guest shot, so to speak, as the assassin. But it's more likely that he'll be killed in an ignominious way, perhaps taking a head wound after an unfortunate silicon explosion at the Badabing Club.
Carmela and Meadow survive so they can console each other. AJ, however, is going upriver. Tony will have to sell him out, perhaps to save Meadow. Or maybe Meadow sells him out. I leave that up to the writers' discretion.
In the final episode, Tony will be sent to jail for something relatively small. His cellmate bears an uncanny resemblance to his dead mother. Tony's psychiatrist is the only one who comes to visit him.
There's been a lot of speculation about the Russian mobsters who hang, unresolved, over the plot returning to kill Paulie. But I think Paulie not only will live, he'll inherit Tony's operation.
And he'll immediately sell it to the Russian mob. [Tags: sopranos television]
Another possibility occurred to me this morning: Christopher is forced to turn Tony in. Chris goes straight, thanks to the witness relocation program. Tony reports to jail rather blithely, saying he'll have no trouble doing the time. As we see the gang sit leaderless and rudderless at the bar at the Baddabing, we see Tony being eyed by another prisoner whom the show has already established is out to kill him. The end.
Posted by self at 09:45 AM
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Our Jonny was fine, but if you weren't already a Stewartiac, you wouldn't know what the fuss was. He was ok, escaped with his dignity, and gave us a few laughs. But shorn of his politic focus, he was just another comedian.
On the other hand, that gay cowboy montage was hilarious. [Tags: jon stewart oscars]
Wesley Morris, a critic for the Boston Globe, writes about the lack of out gay stars:
It's fine for Hollywood to urge gay tolerance. But it should give America an actual homosexual to tolerate first.
Posted by self at 10:14 PM
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Here are my predictions, based on a studious not-seeing of any of the major movies and a failure to correctly predict Oscar winners for 25 consecutive years. (The numbers indicates my degree of certainty.)
Picture: Brokeback 1.0 Now that you know who wins, you can relax and enjoy Jon Stewart. You're welcome!
[Tags: oscars stupid_predictions]
Posted by self at 07:27 PM
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CSOonline sent a bunch of security folks to see the movie Firewall. Is it realistic? Allow me to quote Dennis Treece on just one small point:
And he has the requisite blindingly fast and error-free typing skills, without even looking at the keyboard, which Hollywood demands of its geek heroes. Once again, nah, I don't think so. It's a fun set of reviews.April 06, 2007
Sopranos Spoilers: The guts to stay a comedy?
March 27, 2007
Death of a President: A waste of a scandal
March 17, 2007
Quick, vote for Oliver Brown!
March 13, 2007
My 100 Million Dollar Secret reviewed
February 24, 2007
[bb] John Palfrey
The Web is about creativity, innovation, and greater power at the edges.
This is a global phenomenon.
Big media companies generally have no idea how to deal with participatory democracy.
The legal and political battle over the future of the Internet is where a lot of this will play out. The outcome is not assured.
This conference is about where theory meets practice.
A: Something to talk about this afternoon. [Tags: beyondbroadcast07 john_palfrey media democracy politics berkman]
February 22, 2007
The Oscars - a (re)usable list of nominees
Shut Up and Sing
Audiences to conversations to communities
February 20, 2007
Free digital download store
February 19, 2007
Random DC notes - Day 2
February 18, 2007
Random DC notes
February 13, 2007
NFL demands its own copyright notice be taken down
the NFL Joho. Ok, Joho says you may.) [Tags: copyright nfl youtube wendy_seltzer superbowl irony berkman]
February 02, 2007
Viacom takes home movie down from YouTube
February 01, 2007
A million penguins at a keyboard...
January 29, 2007
Pan's Labyrinth Pan
January 28, 2007
Midomi thinks I'm flat and have no sense of algorithm
January 17, 2007
Beyond Broadcast: The Conference
December 30, 2006
WGBH goes miscellaneous
December 26, 2006
David Mamet: Too smart for his characters
December 24, 2006
Beatles miscellanized
December 22, 2006
It's not cheating if the game's not fun
December 08, 2006
Tagging K-Fed
December 06, 2006
Bad pirate! No TV for you tonight! Bad!
November 26, 2006
Mr. iPod on Zune
November 16, 2006
YouTube: Now with Sense of Irony Removed!
RIAA vs. CEA on DRM
November 10, 2006
Line rider
October 31, 2006
[berkman] Wendy Seltzer on copyright technology policy
A: It's rarely used. Many of the infringement notifications are invalid, and still few people counter-notify. Out of a thousand notices, there were only two counter-notices.
A: The data suggest that encrypting songs on iTunes doesn't stop them from being available unencrypted on filesharing networks immediately, but it does stop people from building their own music players and integrating them. E.g., because DVDs are locked, there's been no new technology that lets you do more with your DVDs.
Wendy: That's encouraging.
A: Reinvent themselves. They still provide "taste" services. But it's not the high margin business it used to be. They should pare down to the services they provide that have value.
A: Copyright is about protecting the artists, not Tower Records. If the market no longer needs Tower Records...
A: the business model seems to be: "We're in Russia and will ignore everyone else's copyright law."
A: It's great to have government support for the arts, but artists shouldn't be solely dependent on that.
A: If citizens demanded it...
A: I'm not convinced artists want the DMCA.
A: (someone) That's what Rhapsody does now.
October 25, 2006
Halloween Screamstream
October 23, 2006
Portal Easter egg
Go to www.aperturescience.com. Type "login" at the prompt. Enter any user name. Type "portal" as the password.
Type "dir" to get a listing. Type "Apply"
August 21, 2006
Want some background music?
August 19, 2006
Two reasons Snakes on a Plane is cool
August 13, 2006
Amazing animated music
August 09, 2006
Shakespeare & Co.'s Hamlet and Merry Wives
July 10, 2006
Why was that scanner so darkly?
July 02, 2006
Blufr's bogus questions
June 10, 2006
The Abominable (and hilarious) Attorney
June 07, 2006
Sopranos finale
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Attila Weinberger
June 06, 2006
McDonalds Games is more in touch with reality than is McDonald's Rain-Forest-Fed Cow Division
AKMA on da Vinci Code
June 04, 2006
Bogus Contest: Die Hard rev. 4
McCainMcClane comes out of retirement "to battle terrorists intent on using the internet to spread their attacks." According to Entertainment iAfrica, the original script was titled Die Hard 4.0, but Willis nixed the pix's title.
Die Hard 404
Die Hard: Packet Wars
Die Hard: Vista
Time to live? Ten seconds, you son of a bitch.
I'm going to tear you a new open source.
Markets are conversations...and I speak fluent Bullet.
Cathedral? Bazaar? It all makes the same beautiful, beautiful rubble.
June 03, 2006
Whining about the Globe
May 26, 2006
Psychology of game AI
May 05, 2006
Yeah, StarForce cares a lot about piracy. Sure.
May 04, 2006
Greatst diorama ever
May 03, 2006
da Vinci decoded
May 01, 2006
Let's Impeach the President - The Lyrics
And leading our country into war
Abusing all the power that we gave him
And shipping all our money out the door
The White House shadows who hide behind closed doors
And bend the facts to fit with their new stories
Of why we have to send our men to war
On citizens inside their own homes
Breaking every law in the country
By tapping our computers and telephones
Would New Orleans have been safer that way
Sheltered by our government¹s protection
Or was someone just not home that day?
For hijacking our religion and using it to get elected
Dividing our country into colors
And still leaving black people neglected
Since he sold his old baseball team
There's lot of people looking at big trouble
But of course the president is cleanApril 28, 2006
Streamin' Neil Young
April 25, 2006
New BradSucks demo
April 10, 2006
Steve Johnson's next draft
April 08, 2006
Games for the disabled, and disabled games
April 04, 2006
An odd sense of ownership
March 18, 2006
South Park
March 14, 2006
Sopranos: Failure to spoil
Sopranos : Failure to spoil
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March 12, 2006
Sopranos spoilers
March 06, 2006
Jon Stewart - One-term Oscar host
March 04, 2006
The Oscar Winners, 24 hours early
Directing: Brokeback 0.9
Actress: Reese Witherspoon 1.0
Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman 1.0
Supporting Actress: Michelle Williams 0.6
Supporting Actor: George Clooney 0.75
Animated Feature: Wallace & Gromit (0.8)
Cinematography: Brokeback (0.9)
Costume: Geisha (0.8)
Doc. Feature: Penguins (0.8)
Doc. Short: God Sleeps (0.7)
Foreign: Paradise Now (0.4)
Score: Brokeback (0.6)
Song: Crash (0.7)
Makeup: Cinderella (0.5)
Editing: Crash (0.5)
Effects: King Kong (0.8)
Sound editing: King Kong (0.5)
Sound mixing: Memoirs (0.5)
Adapted Screenplay: Brokeback (0.7)
Original Screenplay: Crash (0.9)
Short film, live: Last Farm (0.4)
Short film, animated: Band (0.3)
February 15, 2006
How real is Firewall?
Posted by self at 08:44 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 11, 2006
Institutionalized: The book
A few weeks ago, I got a promotional copy of a novel in the mail. Institutionalized is written by "Fred Smith & Joe Schmoe," whom I suspect are pseudonyms. (Since the book is copyrighted by Noel Guinane and Cassandra Helm, I'm pretty sure I'm right about that.) I enjoyed it despite itself, and I'm not entirely sure why.
The book tells about ten weeks in the life of Institutionalized Industries, a global plastics manufacturer. It's a rough ten weeks, starting with the egomaniacal CEO hiring a maverick VP of Sales pretty much on a whim. The vp is as close as the book gets to having a good guy, or at least someone who isn't a lunatic. The company undergoes crises caused by the depravity of the management team. It's quite entertaining.
But it's entertaining despite the fact that the satire is way too broad for my taste. For example, remember that egomaniacal CEO? His name is Bill Oge. The maverick sales vp? His last name is Kirevam. Yes, almost all the main characters' names are their distinguishing trait spelled backwards. And the characterizations are about as subtle as The Lockhorns. Their worst traits are endlessly put before us: One of them chews pencils like a beaver, the CEO has a Napoleon complex, etc.
So, this should be at best a mixed review. But the truth is that I really enjoyed it despite what I just said. Although I didn't care about any of the characters, I enjoyed watching them and their company fall apart. And it parodies typical office communications — the weekly pep talk, the self-serving memo, and yes, even blogs — with glee.
Here's the Amazon link if you want to see for yourself. (This is a book that would really benefit from having a chapter or two posted on the Web.) [Tags: books Institutionalized satire]
Posted by self at 11:02 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 10, 2006
Clarissa knows it all, OCD version
Just in case you were looking for the most complete scholarly explanation of where the Darling family, of Clarissa Knows It All, lives.
Personally, I think they live next door to the Simpsons. [Thanks to Leah Weinberger for the link.] [Tags: trivia clarissa tv]
Posted by self at 10:15 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 05, 2006
Arrested Development
I just watched this week's Arrested Development. It was an hilarious plea to be kept on the air.
The episode plugged www.SaveOurBluths.com, a fan site dedicated to keeping the show on the air.
And remember, when you're done writing to Fox executives, pop one off to your Congressperson asking her or him to begin the impeachment proceedings already.
[Tags: arrestedDevelopment tv comedy impeachment]
Posted by self at 11:35 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 30, 2005
Two reviews
King Kong defines what it means to get your money's worth. Now that's movie making! Yes, it's "just" an entertainment, but you try imagining an entertainment like that.
Peter Jackson (with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) is an incredible story-teller. The Skull Island segment is a non-stop 45-minute (30 min? 60 min? I wasn't checking my watch) action sequence that's brilliant in its choreography, visual imagination, clarity and articulation. As the twists twisted, I was laughing with glee at such barrelhouse film-making.
And it's not just chest-beating and dino-bashing (much as I liked both those things). Jackson gets at the mystery of inarticulate connection in a way that the original did not. In fact, he gets at it in a way that few have.
So, no, not great art. But great entertainment.
March of the Penguins can't help but be fascinating since the life cycle of emperor penguins is so unintelligently designed that it's as close to fiction as facts get. The movie is awesome.
But...
First, it goes on too long. (I know that's the usual complaint about King Kong, but I would only have cut a few minutes out of the final battle.) The penguins drudge across endless frozen vistas. The penguins huddle. Got it.
Second, it doesn't answer some obvious questions, including: "How the hell did they make this movie?????" and "What would have happened if having humans around disrupted the penguins' reproductive cycle?" (If an emperor penguin had set up a camera in our bedroom, I can guarantee you that we wouldn't have had children.) Fortunately, there's a "making of" feature on the DVD that does answer those questions and more, including how exactly the feathered comedians get it on. [Tags: KingKong MarchOfThePenguins movies films penguins IntelligentDesign PeterJackson]
Posted by self at 10:48 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 16, 2005
Unbearably great illusion
Go here, and don't forget to bring your eyeballs. (Link via Tim Bray.) [Tags: illusion OpticalIllusion]
Posted by self at 03:05 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Syriana
We saw Syriana last night. I liked it more when I left the theater than I do now.
I thought the acting was good. I found the narrative less bewildering than the reviews prepared me for. It came together better at the end than I expected. But it was surprisingly didactic given that it's based on true incidents. The screenwriter seems to have invented characters in order to fill particular roles: Conscientious Arab Prince, Dissolute Arab Prince, Young Moslem ready to be molded into a terrorist, Hardened CIA Operative who speaks the truth, Slimy Corporate CEO, etc.
Too bad the character writing wasn't just a little bit better. [Tags: syriana movies]
Posted by self at 02:44 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
December 10, 2005
Sound and lights
You may view this and think it is a really cool way of celebrating Christmas. I look at it and think: Worst. Neighbors. Ever. [Thanks to Leah Weinberger for the link.] [Tags: christmas]
Posted by self at 09:46 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Ricky Gervais podcast
Ricky Gervais, creator and star of the original The Office and now Extras has started a weekly series of half-hour podcasts, along wth Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington.
I haven't heard one yet — I've got to get some drive-time into my life — but I suspect it's probably pretty damn funny. [Tags: podcast RickyGervais]
Posted by self at 12:35 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 07, 2005
The Office - Surprisingly good!
[Note: What follows is my opinion. No, there is no reason on earth why you should care.]
The American version of the BBC's excruciatingly wonderful "The Office" isn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. In fact, I'm enjoying it.
In its second season, it seems to be moving away from the British original, which is a good thing: I'm a Steve Carell fan, but he can't touch Ricky Gervais, the creator and star of the British version. Gervais' office manager was a masterpiece of unself-knowingness. You could see what he was thinking even as he ran from what he was thinking. Just a gorgeous performance. Carell is funny, but he's not half the actor that Gervais is.
So, this season wisely has focused more on the ensemble dynamics, and there are some fetching performances — I'm liking Jim (John Krasinski) and Pam (Jenna Fischer) almost as much as Tim Freeman and Lucy Davis.
So, "The Office" is definitely on our TiVo list. It's sillier than the British one, not as deeply funny, and not as squirmtastic. But it's better than I expected and getting better over time.
Two criticisms/concerns, though. First, Dwight, the buffoon, is too buffoonish for my taste. He's buffoon all the way through. Gareth (Mackenzie Crook) in the British version verged on caricature, but, as with Gervais, you could see through him. Overdoing the buffoon is practically a national pastime on American TV.
Second, the British version only ran two seasons, which meant the Tim-Dawn flirtation could come to a conclusion. I don't know how the American version is going to sustain the tension over multiple seasons. [Tags: TheOffice television comedy bbc SteveCarell]
Posted by self at 05:28 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 06, 2005
The smiley face of hate
Of course Lamb and Lynx Gaede, angelic twin 13-year-old girls, are the new darlin's of the racist set, singing pop songs with lyrics such as "Strike force! White survival. Strike force. Yeah!," and throwing in a "Seig Heil!" now and then. They look simply adorable. Really. And their Hitler smiley face t-shirts are the apotheosis of the cuteness of evil.
But these are nasty nasty girls. For example, the name of their band, Prussian Blue, refers to the supposed lack of residue of that color in the gas chambers, "proof" that there was no Holocaust. (Here's the bright side of Holocaust deniers: They at least think that the Holocaust is nothing to be proud of.) When they performed to raise money for Katrina victims, they tried to stipulate that the money only go to whites. One of their songs praises Robert Matthews, the founder of The Order and a bank robber, and William Pierce, author of the book that "inspired" Timothy McVeigh. (On the other hand, the same song praises Rudolph Hess as "a man of peace." This confuses me. Hess was Hitler's lunatic buttboy who secretly parachuted into the UK in 1941 to offer to leave Britain alone if Britain would stay out of the European fight. He was promptly arrested and spent the rest of his life in jail. He apparently didn't have Hitler's authorization to make this deal. Seems sort of wimpy to be admired by neo-Nazis. Also, Hess was insane, although that seems to be a positive in this group.)
Anyway, here's an mp3 of the girls' song I Will Bleed for You, in which the girls heroically promise that for those men who won't believe, they will believe for them, and for those men who won't bleed, they will bleed for them. They're quite awful singers, although they have mastered the rock 'n' roll accent.
They're sure going to brighten up Hell.
[Notes: 1. It's not clear to me that the twins are anything but unknowns with an ambitious mother and people eager to write about them. (Yes, this includes me, obviously.) 2. No, I don't really know who's going to Hell. In fact, I've placed a firm bet on there being no such place.]
Resources:
Southern Poverty Law Center article
(Thanks to Leah Weinberger for the original link. Leah points out that there's a Hitler smiley-face at this non-Nazi mega-collection of emoticons.) [Tags: neonazis evil PrussianBlue OlsenTwins]
Posted by self at 10:20 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
November 20, 2005
With this EULA I thee wed...
Christina Aguilera required the 150 guests at her wedding to sign a three-page confidentiality agreement before they were allowed into the event. "Banned subjects included the cake, the rings, entertainment, speeches, food, the venue and other guests."
I wonder if her pre-nup has a non-compete?
And on a semi-related note, there's a very good article in the Guardian by Andrew Brown on why thinking of ideas as property is screwy and destructive [Tag: DigitalRights].
Posted by self at 08:20 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 13, 2005
To Emma Love Ben
Here's a short short made by our daughter and her friends, all Emerson College students, as an entry in a Halloween festival. I love it, but I don't want to say anything about so you can see it fresh. [Tags: LeahWeinberger movies halloween EmersonCollege]
Posted by self at 06:51 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
October 23, 2005
Great ad
This ad made me laugh. Overall, it's a terrific piece of work. (Maybe everyone has seen it. TiVo has taken me out of the advertosphere.) [Tags: ads marketing]
Posted by self at 05:50 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
October 09, 2005
If Lucas had directed Serenity
I saw Serenity last night and liked it. But I woke up wondering if I would have liked it as much if the credits had read "Written and directed by George Lucas," keeping all else exactly the same.
I am so disposed to like anything Joss Whedon does. His stuff is compassionate and witty, fantastic and character-based, admits of complexity, and is more true about the love and weakness that binds social groups than what comes from hardly any other popular, mainstream director. Plus he treats his fans like human beings. Not to mention that he wrote the music and lyrics to the musical Buffy episode himself. (How he didn't get an Emmy for that still stumps me. I guess there must have been a Very Special Thanksgiving Episode of Everyone Loves Raymond or a Hallmark TV movie about an intelligence-challenged school crossing guard who teaches her town the true meaning of dignity.)
So, even though I found the Firefly series to be too formulaic — granted, it mixed a couple of formulas — I was eager to see Serenity. But I can't tell how much I liked it because I was pre-charmed by Whedon. Hence my Lucas thought experiment.
[Mild spoilers ahead. Very mild.]
So, if Lucas had directed it, I think I would have been amazed that I cared about the characters. In fact, simply having characters not carved out of birch stumps would be a big advance for Lucas. Did he take a crash course in directing ensembles? The movie wasn't as visually imaginative as usual, but, thankfully, the special effects were appropriate, not show-stopping dance numbers. The big, multi-hundred spaceship battle was surprisingly inept for a Lucas film — who was shooting at what? The dialogue wasn't fake witty repartee, a la Indian Jones, but was actually pretty witty repartee. The blending of genres was a breath of fresh air, although we were stuck with the question why in an age of hyperspace travel they can't make weapons that never miss, not to mention how a six-shooter could still be an effective weapon. It was good to see Lucas get a little more complex about the Rebels vs. the Dark Side battle. But there were some typical Lucas plot weaknesses, such as stipulating that a single video player can insert information into broadcast streams throughout the universe. Also, I'm getting oh so tired of Orcs as bad guys. Three other big improvements from Lucas' previous movies: No ethnic-racial stereotypes, no embarrassing faux-religious themes, and no dead spots. Lucas is fun again!
Of course, he had to become Joss Whedon to do that.
[Tags: serenity sf JossWhedon GeorgeLucas StarWars]
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October 07, 2005
Three shorts
Yule Heibel blogs about three shorts from tiny Paintful Productions — creative and playful. The shorts are hipper than I am (i.e., they don't star Danny Kaye), but they're also a reminder that there's more creativity in the world than there is time. Which is exactly as it should be. [Tags: YuleHeibel, PaintfulProductions, media]
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September 21, 2005
News from BradSucks
BradSucks, the webbiest musician on the Web, has a whole bunch o' news, including that he's gearing up to perform live. Also, he's remixed his most excellent CD, I Don't Know What I'm Doing. And you can get the source of that album. All for free, although you can also pay him, which, if you like his music (as I do), I hope you will. [Tags: BradSucks music]
Posted by self at 01:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 16, 2005
20+ most overrated movies
The September issue of Premiere runs its list of the 20 most overrated movies of all time. Their list, which they run in alphabetical order:
2001
A Beautiful Mind
American Beauty
An American in Paris
Chariots of Fire
Chicago
Clerks
Easy Rider
Fantasia
Forrest Gump
Field of Dreams
Gone with the Wind
Good Will Hunting
Jules and Jim
Monster's Ball
Moonstruck
Mystic River
Nashville
The Red Shoes
The Wizard of Oz
Some I totally agree with (American Beauty). Others I'd forgotten were ever considered particularly good (Moonstruck). Some I think were put there just to be controversial. I mean, knocking The Wizard of Oz for "Technicolor at its most garish" sort of misses the historical perspective that a film magazine ought to provide, doesn't it?
Anyway, here are some I'd add to my own personal list, in no particular order. ((bp= won Best Picture)
Animal House
Dances with Wolves (bp)
Titanic (bp)
The Usual Suspects
Fight Club
Barton Fink
Platoon (bp)
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
It's a Wonderful Life
Norma Rae
Braveheart (bp)
Young Frankenstein
The Piano
Seventh Seal
Being There
Gladiator (bp)
The English Patient (bp)
The Third Man
The Third Man's zither music
This list was compiled at great expense, involving a team of white-coated researchers and the latest in nanotechnology. Thus, it cannot be wrong. [Tags: movies]
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September 12, 2005
Books so bad they inspire technological innovation, and books that think they know it all
I made the mistake of liking one of Michael Connelly's thrillers. Since then, I've picked up one after another, and like a wrong turn that reinforces itself ("Hmm. This street looks familiar. I'll try turning onto it"), I've been disappointed over and over.
My latest airport mistake was to buy The Narrows. It's a sort-of sequel to Blood Work, a book with an interesting premise, ridiculous plot turns, and crappy writing throughout. The Narrows is far worse.
First, The Narrows suffers from Thomas Harris Syndrome. Harris, author of Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs, is able to write about a super-smart serial killer because he understands his characters and has the confidence to write lean prose. He even has the confidence to place his baddie into a comedy (Hannibal) and expose him as a parody. But it's a rare gift, and Harris has inspired more bad imitators than Hemingway. For example, Hannibal Lecter has eaten the brain of Kate Scarpetta.
Second, has Connelly gotten so popular that his publisher has given up on editing him? Holy Mother of Pearl, someone needs to take a buzzsaw to The Narrows! Not only is it bloated — an entire chapter about a character's relationship with his daughter, written so mawkishly that it drops the character from 2-D to 1.7-D — but Connelly makes first-draft mistakes such as introducing a character twice within a couple of pages, as if he'd forgotten he'd just told us about him. This is a bad, bad book.
In fact, it's so bad that it got me thinking that it would bring me pleasure to axe out the really bad portions as I read. And if I were reading this on an e-book, I could do exactly that. Then, having removed the embarrassingly bad parts, I'd be delighted to make my edits available to anyone else e-reading it. Think of the giant steps Grade B literature could make if we were allowed to group-edit it!
For my book, Everything Is Miscellaneous, into which I'm now considering introducing a serial killer with the intellect of a genius but who's covered entirely with fine brown hair, I got a volume of Mortimer Adler's Syntopicon, the topically-arranged companion to his Great Books series. If the expert-based imperialism of the series wasn't obvious enough, the book physically embodies it: The pages are laid out in two-column format with no room in the margins for scribbling, and the paper is so thin that scribbles would show through the other side.
Physically, this book assumes we are coach potatoes. [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous books MortimerAdler]
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August 17, 2005
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Infocom Game
BBC Radio 4 has released a free online version of the 1984 Infocom adventure game based on the Douglas Adams' book. Adams worked on the game. The BBC version has illustrations. And a second BBC version has illustrations done by the winner of a competition.
So, if you have read the book, heard the radio version, seen the TV series, gone to the movie and rented the DVD, now you can re-enact it by typing in phrases such as "Take towel. Look at towel."
Posted by self at 02:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Aristocrats
My wife and I saw The Aristocrats the other night, the documentary about the dirtiest, most disgusting joke ever. Unfortunately, it's not the funniest joke ever — The joke Martin Mull tells, unrelated except that it uses the phrase "The Aristocrats," I thought was funnier — but that's not really what the movie's about. Dozens and dozens of comedians — some of whom I was sure were dead — tell snippets of the joke and talk about the art and craft of filling in the disgusting middle section.
The movie's funny. Not hysterical. But it's very interesting. I don't know if it's worth $9.50 to see it in a theater, but it will be a great DVD rental.
Random notes:
1. I liked Comedian, the documentary about Seinfeld re-building his act, more.
2. You can submit your own performance of The Aristocrats joke and maybe it'll be put on the DVD. (Why are they only putting one winner on DVD? There's plenty of room. Or at least post them on The Aristocrats site.)
3. Some of the comedians I thought were particularly funny, interesting or enjoyable in the movie: George Carlin, Martin Mull, Sarah Silverman, Paul Reiser, Paul Krassner, David Steinberg's teeth. Stand-out dirty: Howie Mandel, Gilbert Gottfried, Bob Saget. Disappointing: Steven Wright, Smothers Brothers, Eric Idle, Eddie Izzard, Emo Philips. Most annoying: Bob Saget. (Note: There are lots and lots of comedians in this movie, many of whom I never heard of and don't remember.)
4. Plan on staying through the credits.
5. Slight SPOILER ahead: The movie builds up Gilbert Gottfried's performance of the joke at a Hugh Hefner roast. It ends with the tape. But they cut into it several times to tell us why this was such a funny performance. They have to because the performance doesn't come across as particularly funny. At least to me. Gottfried is funnier in the other segments they taped.
[Tags: aristocrats comedy humor]
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August 11, 2005
Luxor unlocked
Luxor, the pretty good Zuma ripoff (um, I mean, a game inspired by Zuma) sends you back to the beginning of a level if you fail to make it through all the stages. 11-4 is my downfall, which means I've gotten way too good at levels 11-1 through 11-3. I am tired of those levels.
I tried saving a copy of the data file as 11-4 begins, but Luxor does something funky to foil cheaters like me: It points into some address in a file with data I don't want to monkey with. But it turns out that there's an incredibly easy way to cheat: Start it up by appending "-unlocklevels" or "-unlockstages" and now you can start your day with 11-5. Eat my dust, 11-4! Woohoo.
(To do this, create a shortcut to Luxor.exe, select Properties, and edit "Target" so that it reads, for example, "D:\games\Luxor\luxor.exe -unlocklevels.") [Tags: games luxor cheats]
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August 10, 2005
Oliver Stone (continued)
James Wolcott spanks me for saying Oliver Stone is the worst major director around. Easy for him to say: He didn't sit through Alexander.
James doesn't allow comments on his site, so I've replied by appending to my original post. [Tags: JamesWolcott OliverStone]
Posted by self at 08:53 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
August 08, 2005
Worst (major) director in history
Thinking that we could laugh our way through the bad parts and enjoy the sweeping battle scenes, we rented Alexander last night. Omigod. We had to watch the second half of the third Lord of the Rings afterwards just to get the bad bad movie out of our brains.
Try comparing the two elephant battles. Peter Jackson's LOTR's battle with the oliphaunts is a masterpiece of story-telling. Alexander's is barely coherent, making it far better than the first battle scene in Alexander which we spent asking "Are those the good guys?" and "Wait, weren't they just coming from the left?" even after the strategy had been ploddingly explained in the previous scene.
Or compare any of Alexander's "stirring" speeches to his men with the words Aragorn says before the gates of Mordor open. Or compare the "touching" scene between Alexander and his near-death friend and the truly touching, human scene between Sam and the near-death Frodo before entering the volcano. Sam and Frodo's relationship is far more real and they're freaking, hairy-footed hobbits.
At least Alexander exposes Oliver Stone for what he is: A wildly incompetent director whose subject matter has led us to excuse his embarrassingly bad productions. Find a movie of his — I've seen most, but not all, of them — that doesn't have a cliche-filled script, black-and-white characters, camera-work that needlessly calls attention to itself, actors pushed into career-damaging performances, and self-righteous, unsympathetic, simple-minded political stances. ("U Turn" is the one movie of his I've seen that's exempt from most of these criticisms.)
On the other hand, the popcorn generally was good.
Note: For heaven's sake, do not rent Alexander thinking that there must be some redeeming qualities. There aren't. Half the movie is spent in exposition, including letters read on screen, lectures in caves, a framing narrator, generals talking while pushing models around on maps, and actual maps with animated arrows on them. Ten minutes are spent in battle scenes that make no sense, and not in a "fog of war" way. The rest of it is a lot of wailing and longing looks without a single true human emotion ever expressed. Have I mentioned that it's a bad bad movie? [Tag: OliverStone]
James Wolcott responded to the above. He doesn't allow comments, so I'm responding here. (He also doesn't actually link to me, only to Jeff Jarvis' link to me, which strikes me as odd.)
First, he calls my comments about Oliver Stone's 9/11 movie "jejune." I am certainly jejune, but I didn't make a single comment about the 9/11 movie. Fwiw, I have absolutely no problem with Stone making another awful movie about any topic he wants. It's a free country.
James says the first commenter at Jeff's site "handily disposes" of my "contention that Stone's movies are always melodramatically 'black and white.'" The commenter is a Vietnam vet and thinks Platoon is the best depiction he's seen of the war. Yes, Platoon was a relief after Green Berets. But, the commenter says: "In Platoon and Salvador there are no black and white main characters." Salvador I remember liking ok, but it was a long time ago and after Alexander I'm afraid to see it again. But no black and white characters in Platoon?? It had a good and a bad officer that might as well have had "Good" and "Bad" tatooed on their foreheads — except you didn't need that because Stone flagged the good and the bad so obviously.
When Stone wants to give us a bad character, the bad character has all the subtlety of Gordon Gecko's name. Is Gecko about anything except greed and moustache-twirling evilness? And how nuanced was that first great character that Stone penned, Scarface? Is there a major director — one with a sheen of respectability — who so consistently writes and directs such one-sided, cliched characters?
Wolcott writes: "Weinberger disqualifies himself from serious respect when he alludes to Stone's 'camera work that needlessly calls attention to itself'." He then defends the use of innovative camera work. I refer back to the use of the adverb "needlessly" that would seem to indicate that I'm fine with some camera work that is noticeable. James then produces obvious and indisputable examples of excellence in camera work, but I actually don't agree that they all call attention to themselves. The fact that the opening scene of The Player was done in one shot is impressive to people who care about such things (I do), but if you don't, then it still serves its primary purpose, which is not to impress us with Altman's skill but to set the stage by giving us a half dozen, very funny snapshots of Hollywood at its most jejune. (I'm just looking for a way to reclaim the word.) Likewise for the opening of The Stuntman: It was done in one high-risk continuous take, but it also serves the movie, not just the director's ego. The fact that there are directors who use cameras well so well that we gasp doesn't change the fact that Oliver Stone sucks.
Of course there's nothing wrong with the techniques of art calling attention to themselves. One of the joys of art is in fact being aware that the impossible is happening. Some of ballet is thrilling simply for its athleticism, which is technique making itself conspicuous. Some of ballet is heart-stopping because you know the grace of the simple results from technique that is so hard. When I look at a great Monet my attention enters a weird vibratory state in which I'm awash in the scene depicted and aware of how unlike the scene is the technique by which the scene was created. Nevertheless, that doesn't mean that every time you're made aware of technique, you're in the presence of art. Sometimes it's because the technique is so bad (Oliver Stone) and sometimes it's because it's so pretentious (Oliver Stone).
(Then, of course, there's Natural Born Killers. There the shopworn camera work pretends to be innovative because the theme is so trite, the plot is so ridiculous, and the directors has set the actors on Full Froth.)
Next James takes me to task for saying that Stone pushes his actors into "career-damaging performances," and here James is absolutely right. I should have said that Stone pushes his actors into performances that should have ended their careers but instead leads them to Oscars. We need to compute a spittle-to-Oscars ratio to explain this. No, not every performance in every Stone movie is awful. Just more of them than we can count.
Finally, Wolcott acknowledges that he hasn't seen Alexander. My post's point was that you can't see that movie without reevaluating Stone's previous work. It was the movie he longed to make, he had a huge budget, he filled it with terrific actors, and he had creative control. Yet he came out with a piece that is incomprehensible visually, narratively and emotionally. When a great director like Scorcese makes an artistic dud, it's The Gangs of New York which is — wait, let me get out my slide rule — still 184 times better than Alexander.
So, if Oliver Stone isn't the worst major director around (where "major" includes being respected), then who is?
Posted by self at 12:23 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
Ukulele blog and spam music
The uniquely talented Wikipedian, teacher, and singer-songer writer Oliver Brown has started a blog about ukuleles. The first thing I learned: I've been making the inverse of the "nucular" mistake, spelling "ukulele" as "ukelele." (I wish more of Oliver's music were available for download. You have to hear more than a couple to appreciate his whimsical seriousness.)
[Tags: OliverBrown ukulele]
Canadian superstar BradSucks has put together a CD called Outside the Inbox:
Outside the Inbox is a compilation of songs inspired by and titled after the subject lines of mass-email (spam). I asked artists to choose a spam subject line and then write a song with the same title.
It's just US$5 for the CD, and that includes shipping. Or, you can download the whole thing for free, of course. But, jeez, if you like BradSucks' music and you're not willing to support a guy who lets you listen, rip, mix, and sing along for free, then what hope is there for honest musicians like him? [Tag: bradsucks]
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July 30, 2005
King John
When Tina Packer, founder of Shakespeare & Co., asked the audience on Thursday night who had not seen King John before, I didn't see a single unraised arm. Packer's notes for the show—she directed it—say "I think King John is a rarely produced play because there is no clear answer" to the big issues it raises, which sounds like a director directing us away from her inability to make sense of the play. But Packer does make sense of it. I thought it was actually one of Shakespeare & Co's most successful plays, and we've been coming to them for around 20 years.
Man, this is not a play that reads well, so I came in worried about following the action. Worse, you have to worry when the official synopsis parenthetically explains a character with the phrase "(also called Philip)." That's a bad sign. But, it turns out that the twists and turns of allegiances are easy to follow, at least in this production. Credit Packer, the excellent acting, and the live music composed by Martin Best. The enunciation was bell-clear, as always, and the troupe uses Packer's subtle gestural techniques to clarify who's talking to whom about what. Plus Packer finds the humor in the piece, again as usual, starting with King John (Allyn Burrows) reading the line "Silence, mother" as a kingly shout of the first word and a second that, with a sly, conciliatory smile, acknowledges that the first went too far.
The play moves along until the intermission, but hits its emotional core in the second half. King John is undone more by fortune than by his own faults. Even his clearly evil act of ordering the death of young Arthur only drives him to ruin because the boy accidentally falls to his death, after Hubert has defied his king's orders. Entire kingdoms hang on such events, in this play. It is a convincing and ultimately terrifying worldview.
In a disturbing final scene, we are left with King John dying in agony, poisoned by monks, as the crown passes to his young son who looks terrified at the prospect of being thrown into fortune's maw.
The acting was overall terrific, but I particularly enjoyed Peter Macon as the bastard (the only character who has shown an inner constancy), Allyn Burrows as the king, Annette Miller as Eleanor, Robert Biggs as Austria, Kenajuan Bentley as Hubert, and Barbara Sims as Constance. The play runs July 21-September 3. If you're in the Berkshires, see it. When else are you going to have a chance?
[Technorati tags: shakespeare]
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July 23, 2005
Kirsner on Gilder
Scott had a chance to talk with George Gilder about the future of the movies: "The cineplex becomes the home domestiplex." The whole interview is available for download... [Technorati tags: ScottKirsner GeorgeGilder]
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June 18, 2005
Two books, two whines
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers was worth reading, but I felt used. Paul Erdos was a completely fascinating eccentric who proved that not all mathematical geniuses do their important work by the time they're 30. I won't go through his bundle of oddities because the author, Paul Hoffman, does a good job enumerating them through anecdotes. But don't expect a biography: Hoffman doesn't get much past anecdotes.
That's not, however, why I felt used. First, the title is a lie. Hoffman makes it clear that Erdos loved his mother, loved little kids, and loved — in his own weird way — his friends, many of whom he kept for his lifetime. Second, this started out as a magazine article and it reads that way. It jumps around in the history of mathematics in order to pad out the book. Some of those jumps are interesting, but as a reader, I felt disrespected, as if Hoffman thought I wouldn't notice that he'd changed the topic without even the courtesy of a transition sentence.
When in London I picked up a paperback of Blowfly, the not-quite-the-latest in the Scarpetta series by Patricia Cornwell. I'd pretty much given up on the series, but the book was on sale so I figured I'd give it one more shot. I'm about half way through it and that's probably as far as I'm going to get.
The series started out well — a smart, feisty, female forensic pathologist who solved crimes the CSI way except without the techno beat. (The series undoubtedly was an inspiration, if that's the word, for the CSI sausage factory.) But as it's progressed, Scarpetta has gone from interesting to perfect. The people around her tell us that she is gorgeous, flawless, a genius, perfectly moral, the most caring person they've ever met. This would just be bad writing except I get the creepy feeling that Cornwall identifies completely with Scarpetta.
That's in addition to a standard problem writers of crime stories now face: The Temptation of the Lambs. In the first half of Blowfly, Cornwall spends more time with her pair of serial killers than with Scarpetta. She apparently believes she is a fine observer of character. But, her serial killers are impossibly monstrous and monstrously over-written. It's embarrassingly melodramatic and creepy in all the wrong ways.
O, Thomas Harris, what hast thou wrought?
Posted by self at 08:48 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
June 08, 2005
Two much fun
Those of you who spent most of last summer playing Zuma will be distressed to learn that Reflexive has a knock-off called Luxor that's almost as good. It's $20. (Several elements of my family have also been enjoying playing around with the level designer of Reflexive's Ricochet Lost Worlds, the game that breakout wanted to be.)
For that you could pre-order two copies of the Professional Edition of Bradsuck's CD. You can also download his music for free, but, jeez, what more do you want from a one-person singer/songer band? He should come to your house personally and butter both sides of your whole wheat toast? Jeez! [Technorati tag: bradsucks]
Posted by self at 06:05 PM | Comments (0)
June 06, 2005
Steve Johnson on The Daily Show
He's on it tomorrow night, Tuesday, talking about why Everything Bad is Good for You. He promises to blog about it afterwards...
Posted by self at 05:43 PM | Comments (0)
RocketBoom and Ring Tone: The Movie
Rocketboom's report today includes a substantial clip from the theatrical smash "Ring Tone," starring my daughter. (Well, it's theatrical in the "theater of your mind" sense.) And don't miss the tap dancing at the end of the RocketBoom report.
Posted by self at 02:38 PM | Comments (0)
June 04, 2005
Cigarettes kill...bad guys
The Financial Times reports that India is going to start pixellating cigarettes in movies to avoid glamorizing them. Alternatively, they may run health warnings on screen whenever a cigarette appears.
Doesn't the Indian government know that in American movies smoking is a sure sign that you're a bad guy/gal whose comeuppance will come long before lung cancer can take hold?
The regrettable exception are action heroes who substitute not shaving and smoking for acting talent.
Posted by self at 07:13 AM | Comments (11)
May 30, 2005
Dickens: Better than I thought
I've never been much of a fan of Charles Dickens, what with his two-dimensional characters jostled about by his steam-driven plots. But I started Little Dorrit yesterday. Here's how it opens:
Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day.
A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France then, than at any other time, before or since. Everything in Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and been stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there. Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses, staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away. The only things to be seen not fixedly staring and glaring were the vines drooping under their load of grapes. These did occasionally wink a little, as the hot air barely moved their faint leaves.
There was no wind to make a ripple on the foul water within the harbour, or on the beautiful sea without. The line of demarcation between the two colours, black and blue, showed the point which the pure sea would not pass; but it lay as quiet as the abominable pool, with which it never mixed. Boats without awnings were too hot to touch; ships blistered at their moorings; the stones of the quays had not cooled, night or day, for months. Hindoos, Russians, Chinese, Spaniards, Portuguese, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Genoese, Neapolitans, Venetians, Greeks, Turks, descendants from all the builders of Babel, come to trade at Marseilles, sought the shade alike—taking refuge in any hiding-place from a sea too intensely blue to be looked at, and a sky of purple, set with one great flaming jewel of fire.
The universal stare made the eyes ache...
Best of all, the action in that first chapter takes place in a cave-like jail cell, hidden from the stare. Brilliant, so to speak. [Technorati tag: CharlesDickens]
Posted by self at 07:53 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
May 28, 2005
Star War games
Haiwatha Bray reviews four Star War games in The Boston Globe. And at last a reviewer represents my reaction to Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel: "...the games were giving me a strange new power — the ability to sleep with my eyes open." [Technorati tags: starwars games]
Posted by self at 09:25 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
May 22, 2005
Head-slapper
Here's a puzzle I read in A Beautiful Mind — wow, is the movie a lie! — as expressed at The Ultimate Puzzle Site:
Consider a road with two cars, at a distance of 100 kilometers, driving towards each other. The left car drives at a speed of forty kilometers per hour and the right car at a speed of sixty kilometers per hour. A bird starts at the same location as the right car and flies at a speed of 80 kilometers per hour. When it reaches the left car it turns its direction, and when it reaches the right car it turns its direction again to the opposite, etcetera.
The question is: How far does the bird fly?
I'm going to give you two hints:
FIRST HINT: If you're filling up a page with complex formulae, you're going wrong.
Scroll down for the next spoiler. (This is for those of you readi1ng this as an RSS feed.)
SECOND HINT: Select between the X's to see the hint:
X The two cars are an hour apart X
Scroll down for solution.
SOLUTION: Select between the X's to see the answer:
X The cars take an hour to reach each other. That's supposed to be the easy part. That means the bird is flying for an hour at 80km/hour. Hence, the bird flies 80km. X
No, I didn't get the answer. [Technorati tag: puzzle]
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May 13, 2005
Giving in to my obsession with Michael Jackson's face
Posted by self at 09:53 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
May 11, 2005
Three-word review of Kingdom of Heaven
Orcs Attack Jerusalem
From One Hand Clapping.
Posted by self at 11:53 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
May 10, 2005
A Yawning in the Force
A bad portent for the new Star Wars episode: Even in a carefully posed cover photo for Premiere magazine, Hayden Christensen looks like a kid standing on line dressed up as Darth Vader:
The problem is that George Lucas has not made a single movie that wasn't composed of stock characters. When he wants a movie to be more than a Saturday afternoon diversion — for example, when he starts to believe The Force is more than a plot device, that he's exploring deep themes of good and evil, or that he can write a love scene — he goes off the rails. He can direct large action scenes, and in every movie there's been one or two special effects that have been imaginative and cool — jumping to light speed, those gunner bots that transform from rolling balls — but he is so unaware that he's dealing in stereotypes that he can base an entire movie around Ewoks or dive head first into racism.
All the variables have been explored. He's got a budget big enough to make the movie he wants. He has total mastery of digital effects — which he pioneered, and hats off to him for doing so — so he can make anything happen that he imagines. He's got a built-in audience so he could try experimenting. He has fantastic actors, including Hayden Christensen. So why have his movies marched steadily downhill? There's only one variable left...
Having said that, I expect the new one to be better than the previous two. And no matter how bad it is, I'll go see it. But I will not wear my JarJar outfit. I've learned my lesson. [Technorati tags: StarWars GeorgeLucas]
Posted by self at 08:59 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
May 03, 2005
Emma Bovary, Meet Tony Soprano
Steven Johnson gracefully responds to a bunch of reviews of his book, Everything Bad Is Good for You, including mine.
In his response he says something that I don't recall his book saying flat out:
...the long-format, multithreaded TV drama — when viewed as a single narrative spanning several seasons, and not as isolated episodes — is an incredibly rich platform for precisely the literary values Dave celebrates. We don't have a lot of opportunities in culture to tell a story that lasts a hundred hours, but that's exactly what we're taking in on The Sopranos or Lost or Six Feet Under. I feel totally confident that those shows will stack up very nicely against Madame Bovary a hundred years from now, if not sooner.
My head is swimming with responses. Steve's writing tends to have that effect on me.
First, I want to drop Lost and Six Feet Under from the discussion because I personally don't much like either. The one episode of Lost I saw was (IMO, of course) melodramatic crap — sentimental flashbacks, trumped up Big Events — and Six Feet Under is undisciplined and random; it'll do anything to be interesting. For purposes of Steve's point, we should be able to substitute whatever we think is the best of long-form TV. To my mind, that's The Sopranos. Likewise, if Madame Bovary doesn't do it for you, then pick some other work of literature that you consider to be incontestably first rate.
Second, Steve's point about having 100 hours to tell a story is excellent. That's especially true on networks with the British TV sensibility of ending a series when the story is done. (Are you listening, Will? Are you paying attention, Grace?) A literal retelling of a complex, multi-character novel by, say, Dickens, might equate to, what, one season of The Sopranos? (On the other hand, how do you compare the complexity of a 100-hour series with The Iliad's brief but poignant indications of the "back story" of its mortal characters that open out into the unspoken enormity of death?)
Third, my point initially wasn't about the relative quality of TV and books. It was that books develop a sympathetic understanding that TV (and theater and movies) — and especially video games — don't, no matter how good they are. Those media show us characters behaving in a world. At those media's best, we understand how that world looks to the characters, how they're interpreting their choices, how they understand one another. But books do something different. They don't just show us characters in a world, they show us that world. By "world" I don't mean the things of the world — a show like Deadwood is wonderful at showing us that sense of a world — but the world of interrelated meanings. This does not mean that books are better than everything else. It does mean that they're better at this way of showing than anything else...and this way of showing has moral implications. (Unfortunately, I'm not sure I'm right about what I'm claiming to be a unique feature of books. You should be throwing Shakespeare in my face right about now.)
Fourth, Steve is right that The Sims is a highly ambiguous environment, and thus is a counter-example to my statement that video games present relatively simple, rule-based environments. But The Sims remains a simplification of real life, whereas Madame Bovary reveals the bottomless complexity of real life.
Fifth, there's a practical sense in which I think Steve is wrong about how The Sopranos and Madame Bovary are going to stack up. In a hundred years, even high definition TV images are going to look as old fashioned as hand-cranked silent movies. And, the acting styles and camera styles are going to feel outdated. When you tell your kid that Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever made, there's not a chance she's going to prefer it to Pulp Fiction. So, if The Sopranos stacks up to Madame Bovary in 100 years, it'll only be because both are only ever viewed if your English teacher asigns them.
I actually didn't mean to say in my original comments on Steve's wonderful book that the great books are better than the great TV shows. I only meant to say that books do something valuable beyond what Steve points to when he's defending video games and television. There's nothing about videotape that makes it a medium incapable of containing art. I just don't know how to do the comparison. There are points of similarity between Emma Bovary's story and Carmella Soprano's. In my heart, though, I think Madame Bovary, Sense and Sensibility and Ulysses are better than The Sopranos. (On the other hand, I'd argue for The Sopranos over Dickens any day.) Perhaps part of it is that Flaubert didn't have the luxury of 100 hours, so he expresses more of the world in shorter bursts, and that tells us something about how the world bodies forth its infinite meaning. For me, part of the awe of art is its ability to transcend its own limitations. ( Yes, I do find something wonderful about well-rhymed poetry.) Having a hundred hours relaxes the limits. That doesn't mean art can't happen there. It just makes it very hard to compare it with more limited forms.
Are such cross-media comparisons meaningful in any case? On the one hand, no. They're just too different. On the other hand, I'm confident that The Odyssey is better than Gilligan's Island, so apparently I do think such comparisons are possible. It's only when you get to the best of each medium that the discussion becomes as meaningful as whether wearing your baseball cap backwards makes you look stupid or, for that matter, whether bloggers are journalists. [Technorati tags: StevenJohnson ebigfy sopranos]
Posted by self at 09:17 AM | Comments (14) | TrackBack
May 01, 2005
Finished Half Life 2
I just finished it. It is the greatest video game in history. Ok, within its genre. Inventive, involving, endlessly cool. I liked it better than the original, but most reviewers didn't.
As a guide to my tastes: I'm a big fan of both No One Lives Forever games, loved the original Doom but found Doom III just a tad tedious (load, shoot, repeat), loved every minute of Serious Sam, was surprisingly attached to Pain Killer, and have never made it all the way through a Myst game.
There's a guide to Half Life 2's plot and universe here. [Technorati tags: HalfLife2 videogames]
Posted by self at 08:42 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
Everything bad is good for you is good
I just finished Steve Johnson's new book, Everything Bad is Good for You, and not only do I think it'll climb the best-seller lists, I'll be glad when it does. [Disclosure: The book comes out May 5. Steve sent me bound galleys because we bonded at a conference last year. I was a major fan of his well before that.]
EBIGFY is a persuasive essay. Forget the didactic assignments you got in English class. I've been reading Steve's stuff for some time now and I think I've discovered what makes his writing style so good: He thinks well. He turns corners and pulls you with him. It's the kind of unexpected unfolding that makes narratives work, but Steve does it purely in the realm of ideas. He writes so well because he's so damn smart. (Also, he just writes so damn well.)
This short new book has a strong and simple premise: Pop culture is making us smarter. The bulk of the book argues that pop culture is more complex than it used to be and more than we usually give it credit for. Look past the content of video games and TV, Steve says, and you'll see that their structures are far more complicated and demanding than ever before. (Deadwood should be his new favorite example.) He graphs the complexity of social relationships in Dynasty and 24, for example, and shows that the former is like a family while the latter is like a village. In following 24, we get better at understanding complex social relationships. He compares Hill Street Blues, the first mainstream multi-storyline prime-time show, with Starsky and Hutch before it and The Sopranos after it. There is no doubt: We've gotten far better at parsing interwoven plot lines and making sense of plots that aren't laid out for us like mackerels. Likewise, video games, he says, have gotten a bad rap because of their content, while once again their structure has been ignored. They teach us how to make decisions in complex environments, he says. Steve's quite wonderful at analyzing precisely the ways in which games, tv shows, and, to a lesser degree, movies demand more from us than before -- his examples of "multiple threading, flashing arrows, and social networks," for example, are so insightful that they're funny.
There's no doubt in my mind that Steve is right about that. But does pop complexity make us smarter? Here he gets more speculative, suggesting that the rise in the average IQ might well be correlated with the way our culture is training us to be more actively intelligent. The causality is hard to prove, and Steve proceeds properly tentatively. We certainly have gotten smarter at following entertainments. Does that mean that we've gotten smarter outside of watching TV and playing video games? Or are we only better at following the new rules of TV narrative and video play? Common sense and intuition make me think that Steve is right: The complexifying of pop culture is making us smarter. But then I look at the election results and wonder. We seem more impatient with nuance than ever before in the political realm. Is pop culture training us to be smarter about anything except pop culture?
So, if it's a persuasive essay, am I persuaded?
1. That pop culture is getting more complex and requires more involvement to understand? 100%.
2. That this is making us smarter outside of pop culture? I lean that way but I'm not 100% convinced. Steve acknowledges the difficulty of proving either the fact or the causality.
3. That we should be more positive about pop culture? Definitely. Even so, I think Steve occasionally underplays the value of the old media that compete for our time. Although he's careful to say that he is not claiming books have less value than games and TV, I think for rhetorical purposes he doesn't give books their due. Despite an hilarious few pages about how books would look if video games had come first, books do something that video games, TV, theater and films don't do very well: Show us the world as it appears to someone else. Those media let us view how people different from us act in the world as it appears to them, but only in books do we actually live in that world. This, as Richard Rorty has pointed out, has moral value. Steve refers to this quality of books briefly at the end, but it struck me as ass-covering. And he misses the opportunity to talk about it while developing his argument. For example, in Part One he writes:
Most video games take place in worlds that are deliberately fanciful in nature, and even the most realistic games can't compare to the vivid, detailed illusion of reality that novels or movies concoct for us. But our lives are not stories, at least in the present tense - we don't passively consume a narrative thread....Traditional narratives have much to teach us, of course: they can enhance our powers of communication, and our insight into the human psyche. But if you were designing a cultural form explicitly to train the cognitive muscles of the brain..." (p. 58 of the non-final bound galleys)
To my mind, that seriously underplays the value of books and narratives. Great novels reveal a world; calling that an "illusion" misses the point, like saying Rembrandt's portraits look like their subjects and leaving it at that. To my way of thinking, the most important lesson of narratives isn't that they give insight into our psyches or teach us how to communicate but that they show us that events unfold: The end was contained in the beginning but not in a way that we could have predicted. Narrative is about ambiguity and emergence, and I suspect that Steve, the Brown-educated, lit-crit scholar and author of Emergence - buy it today! - knows that. Had he kept that aspect of books in mind during the section on video games, for example, his point about the complex hierarchy of aims in the game Zelda would have been less convincing. Sure, we make decisions in games based on a nested stack of goals, and we learn the rules of the virtual worlds we're exploring. But those goals and rules are ultimately knowable and completely expressible. Although Half Life 2 is, as Steve points out, far more complex than the previous generation's Pac-Man, for all its amazing physics and integrated puzzles and pretty good pixelated acting, HL2 gives us a toy world. The world of Emma Bovary, on the other hand, doesn't resolve to rules and puzzles. It's messy, ambiguous, and truly complex. Of course Steve knows this, but he underplays it when pointing out the hidden complexity of video games.
Now, Steve is not asking us to decide between books and contemporary pop culture. He obviously loves books. He wants to defend pop culture by pointing out values in its structure that we've missed as we've focused on its often-offensive content. And this he does brillliantly. And entertainingly. This book is so much fun to read. All I'm saying is that in making his case, he undervalues the old culture, which might otherwise have taken just a couple of lumens off the buff-job he's done on the new one.
Let me be unambiguous in my recommendation: Read this book. It will change the way you view pop culture. And you will enjoy every page and every surprising turn of thought. [Technorati tags: ebisgy SteveJohnson]
Posted by self at 12:20 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
April 30, 2005
Cory in CGW
This is from the fine-print crawl on p. 26 of the new issue of Computer Gaming World:
Author Cory Doctorow is promoting his new novel witha virtual book tour. His first stop? The MMO Second Life.
The new book is Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. Cory promoted his previous book via Second Life. This time, though, Second Lifers are trying to create a book object in-world that they can read, with turnable pages, since Cory donated a copy of the text to them.
Not to mention that it's so cool to come across Cory's name in CGW.
Posted by self at 06:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 18, 2005
House of the Rising Sun explained
The Boston Phoenix this week runs an excerpt from Dave Van Ronk's memoir, the Mayor of MacDougal Street. The piece is about how Van Ronk lost control of his arrangement of The House of the Rising Sun, first to Dylan and then toThe Animals. Van Ronk was not on the Lessig side of the copyright battle. Anyway, I bring this up because Van Ronk ends by saying that late in life he discovered that the song isn't about a whore house. It's about the Orleans Parish women's prison.
Add it to the annals of busted folksongnomies. [Technorati tags: vanronk risingsun]
Posted by self at 03:03 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
April 15, 2005
Order of Magnitude Quiz: Death by moose
Fill in the blanks with answers within an order of magnitude and win the satisfaction of having guessed right:
One in ___ people who hit a moose are killed, compared with one in ___ who hit a deer..."
USAToday, April 15, 2005, "Moose brake for no one..." by Trudy Tynan
Select between the X's to see the answer:
X Deer: 1 in 75 .... Moose: 1 in 5,000 X
[NOTE: Be sure to reverse the answers once you've revealed them because I, um, totally screwed this up. Sorry.]
Posted by self at 02:41 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
April 12, 2005
Smartest Guys in the Room
I got a preview DVD of a documentary about Enron that's about to be released. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room will remind you just how shameless the Enron guys were. Rather than dwelling on the thousands of people who lost their retirement money, it focuses primarily on the the conscious, willing, and intentional fraud Enron's executives executed. The movie takes us step by step through the games the execs played, as if they couldn't believe that anything guys as smart as them did could possibly be wrong. These were first class bastards.
The format of the movie is conventional: Some talking heads, some insider footage of rah-rah corporate meetings...although the footage Bushes senior and junior shot to pass their good wishes to one of the execs is a pretty startling reminder just how close Kennyboy and the Bush family are. The documentary takes us step by step down the path that led to Enron going from boom in the good sense to boom in the bad sense.
At 110 minutes, it felt a little long to me, and some of the stock footage (e.g., a guy in freefall) and music choices struck me as too predictable. But it tells quite a story. We can only hope that the Enron boys become the smartest guys in Cellblock C.
The movie will be released on April 22. [Technorati tag: enron]
Posted by self at 09:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 10, 2005
Order of magnitude question: Foul balls
Between five years in the 1990s, how many attendees per year were injured by foul balls hit during baseball games in Fenway Park? A correct answer is any within 10x up or down. Oh, that's too easy. Make it 5x.
Select between the X's to see the answer:
X From 36 to 53 X
Posted by self at 12:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Prisoner #425684932A
Continuing my mild obsession with Michael Jackson's face:
If he goes to jail, how many weeks could he possibly survive? [Technorati tag: MichaelJackson]
Posted by self at 11:36 AM | Comments (16) | TrackBack
Greatest game in history - Now with a sandbox!
Garry.tv has a Half Life 2 mod that lets you use the game's astounding physics engine and its existing objects to build Rube Goldberg-like machines, pose rag dolls, etc. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks amazing. [Technorati tags: halflife2 mods]
Posted by self at 09:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 09, 2005
Damn you, Monty Hall!
My son and I spent a little time this afternoon on the Monty Hall paradox, a topic we'd discussed a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, it takes me 20 minutes to understand the explanation, and I only understand it for 4 continuous seconds.
Here's the situation. You are asked to pick one of three doors. Donkeys are behind two of them, and a new car is behind another. After you choose your door, but before it's revealed to you, Monty Hall (the emcee) opens one of the doors you didn't choose and reveals a donkey. He then asks if you'd like to switch from your initial choice to the remaining door. It turns out that if you agree to switch, you double (?) your chance of winning.
It just doesn't seem possible. Here's how one site, that has a simulator on it, explains it:
The easiest way to explain this to students is as follows. The probability of picking the wrong door in the initial stage of the game is 2/3. If the contestant picks the wrong door initially, the host must reveal the remaining empty door in the second stage of the game. Thus, if the contestant switches after picking the wrong door initially, the contestant will win the prize. The probability of winning by switching then reduces to the probability of picking the wrong door in the initial stage which is clearly 2/3.
Despite a very clear explanation of this paradox, most students have a difficulty understanding the problem...
Yeah, that was real clear. Oh yeah.
The only explanation that's ever worked for me is the 1,000 door variation, which you can find here. And here's the front page NY Times story about it.
Now please don't bring this up for another two years. It's given me a headache. [Technorati tags: paradox puzzle]
Posted by self at 06:03 PM | Comments (20) | TrackBack
April 03, 2005
Deadwood enters into self-parody after only one season, and other TV headlines!
Deadwood has become a self-parody at the very beginning of its second year, beating the previous record holder — 24 — by 4 episodes.
Someone apparently told David Milch, the show's creator and writer, that he's brilliant at dialogue because everyone now speaks like a lead character in a Shakespearean drama, except for the poetry, and half the time I don't have any fucking idea what the fuck they're fucking talking fucking about.
I find the show painful to watch and have only managed this far by thinking that maybe someone will remember that dialogue is supposed to: A. Express differentiated character, B. Advance narrative, C. Not be howlingly pretentious.
Meanwhile, Project Greenlight has become as delicious and difficult to watch as Curb Your Enthusiasm. The Office is better than I'd thought but isn't as deliciously horrible as the British version because Steven Carrell hasn't yet located the odious little man behind the odious outer man. Arrested Development I'm finding funny despite its determination to be whacky. Likewise for Scrubs.
Yes, I watch TV and I'm proud of it.
Posted by self at 12:47 PM | Comments (17) | TrackBack
March 29, 2005
West Wing's indoor and outdoor voice
My wife and I have been catching up on TiVo'ed West Wings and the pattern seems obvious: The ones on the campaign trail are good while the ones inside the White House suck. The cause seems just as obvious: Without the natural drama of a campaign, the writers are at a loss.
AdamAaron Sorkin's genius was his ability to create compelling scripts out of two elements that traditionally are drama-free: a group of people who like one another and political issues/ideas. The new writers have fragmented the group and are relying on ridiculous plot twists: CJ's elevation to chief of staff was totally arbitrary, and the national security advisor is now being given a cloak and dagger backstory that shows the producers think we viewers can't appreciate a well-drawn character unless she's killed someone.
I hope West Wing continues with Santos as president and with a whole new cast, except for maybe Josh and Charlie. If within a year they can't figure out how to make the west wing of the White House interesting, then I'm switching to Joey. [Technorati tag: WestWing]
Posted by self at 09:03 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
February 21, 2005
Smaller than a googol
Enter a mathematical expression into Google and it will return the results. E.g., if you enter "1+2" (no quotes), it will tell you the answer is 3. Enter "half a cup in teaspoons" and it tells you that that's 24 US teaspoons.
So, the lunatic journal, WordWays (I'm a long-time subscriber and love it) writes briefly about Eric Iverson's attempt to see "which alphabetic phrase without any repreating letters generated the largest and smallest number." Why? For that we'd need a psychiatrist and a pick axe. But who cares? Eric has found that the smallest is
nm to parsec = 3.24077649 × 10-26 Parsec
and the largest is
six e pc to nm = 5.03264913 × 1026 nanometers
I am so not tempted to outdo Eric.
WordWays — "The Journal of Recreational Linguistics" — continues to get harder to read thanks to computers. A typical article treats words as collections of letters and tries to find ones that meet some odd constraint. Typical articles used to be about word pyramids and hyphenated words whose letters immediately before and after the hyphen cover every possible pairing. But now that word lists are computerized, the best of the WordWaysians have to come up with challenges that would not only stump a human but come close to stumping computers. I often can't figure out what the hell the challenge is. For example, Simon Norton has an article wondering if all words can be expressed as sumagrams. Here's the second paragraph:
This is what is called a free abelian group, where the second word derives from the name opf the Norwegian mathematician Abel. The elements of this group are sequences of (upper case) letters and antiletters...
Some I can follow, though. Eric Iverson, for example, publishes a list of words made only with letters with diagonals in them, from akavit to zanza. He finishes with a list of the longest words without any diagonal letters, starting with bioelectricities. And Darryl Francis lists all 300 tube stations in London and tries to find something interesting about their names. For example, did you know that Bond Street transadds to deobstruent and sober-tinted? I didn't!
In the current issue, there's also an article by Will Nediger speculating that Douglas Adams took his fascination with the number 42 from Lewis Carroll. And my son and I particularly enjoyed Fender Tucker's list of 11 heterograms placed in perfectly ambiguous sentences, such as:
After breaking into the Sherriff of Nottingham's armory, the flamboyant actor/thief Robin Hood took a bow.
Unfortunately, WordWays has a minimal Web presence — some samples and an opportunity to subscribe. It's just about tailor-made for living on line. [Technorati tag: wordways ]
Posted by self at 12:19 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 20, 2005
Wheeeeeeere's Johnny's blog?
Johnny Carson apparently thinks of five new jokes every time he reads the paper and is frustrated that he doesn't have a stage on which to perform them.
Blog, Johnny, blog!
Technorati tags: carson
Posted by self at 07:33 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
January 19, 2005
MiscLinks
ThereIsNoCrisis is a social security resource worth noting. It maintains -- guess what? -- that the Bush administration is trumping up the Social Security crisis.
Metaphilm has a bunch of whacky film interpretations. For example, did you know that in The Fight Club, Edward Norton plays grown-up Calvin and Brad Pitt plays grown-up Hobbes?
Rebecca Mackinnon has posted an excellent FAQ about the conference on blogging, journalism and credbiility being put on by Berkman, American Library Association and the Shorenstein Center. Bonus: A photo at the bottom of Berkman Fellows eating a kitten for breakfast. (Very funny comments on the Kitten Breakfast at EthicallyChallenged.)
Technorati tags: social security, metaphilm, berkman
Posted by self at 10:32 AM
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There's an article, by Joseph P. Kahn, with lots of fun facts about Tom and Ray, the Car Talk guys, in today's Boston Globe. Here's a snippet I enjoyed:
Targets of the show's humor sometimes fire back. After Tom made a crack on-air about a tailgate problem the Dodge Caravan was having, suggesting in his usual irreverent manner that Chrysler Corp. had "paid off" investigators to forestall a recall, a highly unamused Chrysler representative demanded a public correction and got one — sort of.
Tom did correct the record during a subsequent show, saying something to the effect that no money had actually changed hands and that Caravan passengers were only being ejected through the back doors of moving vehicles, not the sunroofs and side doors as he might have mistakenly said. Also:
Ray: "One of the big [automotive repair] chains approached us, but we didn't want to stand in front of their store and tell people to get their cars fixed there. We couldn't. Because they [expletive] everybody. Car Talk is the most widely-heard show on NPR. And here's a hint: If you tell an NPR producer that you have an idea for a new program, she's highly likely to reply, "Yeah, it's Car Talk for what?", as in Car Talk for computers, Car Talk for health, Car Talk for ventriloquists...
Posted by self at 08:20 AM
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I woke up last night and couldn't fall back to sleep, leading me to be able to declare with some authority that "Cult of the Damned" is the worst movie ever made.
But this is an honor it shares we several other films, including "Head," starring the Monkees and written by Jack Nicholson. In fact, there's a cluster of bad films made in the 60s and embodying the 60s ethos. No surprise, for the properties of that epoch — a drug-assisted sense of humor that insisted that any random juxtaposition must be funny, an unshakable belief in one's own profundity, and a belief that talent and craft are forms of despicable elitism — are just what's required to make truly awful movies.
The only other period in living memory so productive of bad movies was the late 70s when fear and patriotism led to a spate of stupid, predictable, jingoistic macho movies. Then, of course, the streams crossed and we got the two worst successful movies in history: "Platoon" and "Dances with Wolves." But I'd rather not discuss them. They're still too painful to contemplate.
Posted by self at 10:48 AM
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PC Gamer's Feb. issue notices four game-related weblogs:
Ron Gilbert — In 1989, Gilbert wrote "Why Adventure Games Suck, and What We Can Do about It," which led to his creating the wonderful Monkey Island adventures. The blog is spunky.
Unknown — The writer claims to be the spouse of an EA game developer. The "blog" is a single entry pointing to an essay on why life as a game developer sucks. The page also promises a " a non-corporate-sponsored watchdog organization specifically devoted to monitoring quality of life in the game industry" which will eventually be available at Gamewatch.org
American McGee - He was the producer of Alice, a nicely-imagine first-person shooter. He has since been turned into a brand, although his second game — the "brought to you by" Scrapland — has gotten mediocre reviews. He writes in his blog every couple of weeks about industry news. One entry points to the personal website of Norm Felchle, the artist responsible for much of the look of Alice. Among his galleries you'll find a moderately scary collection of photos from fans modeling Alice outfits.
John Romero - Romero was half of the duo responsible for Doom. He's all of the singularity responsible for what may be the industry's biggest fiasco, Daikatana (free 107MB demo here), a mediocre game totally killed by hype. Among the goodies: A collection of game music. (I have to say I'm a little — and unreasonably — put off by the "planetromero.com" url of the site. I think he's maybe up to Village Romero or possibly Canton Romero, but not a whole planet.)
The article doesn't mention, but should, Terra Nova, a blog devoted to the academic study of virtual worlds. Don't let the "academic" part scare you, though. This is a lively place.
Posted by self at 11:55 AM
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From Germany comes this nicely-done game that pits you against the computer or another human, as you each try to take over the world by doing Google queries that turn up documents localized in various parts of the world. The game uses netgeo which finds the geographic location of the IP address of the page. Once you start the Flash app, you'll get instructions in English...
Posted by self at 10:13 AM
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Not only has Internet use cut into this country's sacred TV time, we are not paying strict enough attention to the glowing screens in our living rooms. BIGresearch reports (via Center for Media Research) that a survey of 12,000+ "consumers" shows that we're doing more multitasking while watching TV:
# 66.3% regularly or occasionally read the mail. Please, America, let's focus!
PS: I made up one of those statistics.
Posted by self at 10:02 AM
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Kelly Freas, who I knew as the artist responsible for some of MAD's best early covers, died in his sleep at age 82. Among his accomplishments, according to the AP:
And here I thought he was just the guy who made Alfred E. Neuman famously dopey.
Posted by self at 04:29 PM
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I've reviewed The Lion King musical over at BlogCritics.org.
Posted by self at 09:55 AM
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Modern Drunkard claims to be mainly serious with the goal of returning "drinking to the glorious Rat Pack/Jackie Gleason Era." It celebrates the fun of drinking and rails against what it thinks of as Puritanical forces of repression (including MADD). The latest, and perhaps last, printed issue was published last August. [Thanks to my brother Andy, who is not any sort of drunkard, for the link.]
And with this post, I am now the record holder for the shortest cognitive-emotional distance. Yes! But, heck, it's a blog. We're supposed to have short cognitive-emotional spans.
Posted by self at 10:46 AM
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Susan Crawford did not have a good time at a Bach concert yesterday. I wouldn't mention it except she writes about it so amusingly.
I'm reminded of a conversation my friend Joe Mahoney had with another friend of mine, Tim Anderson. According to Joe, who is an amazing musician, it went like this:
Joe: Can you imagine? Bach had to write a cantata every week!
Tim: Not only that. He had to write a Bach cantata.
(Joe has a great post from November about the joy of growing up with a son and his son Quentin's manic performance in "Cinderella." Unfortunately, I can't find the permalink...)
Posted by self at 03:46 PM
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Q: Which host of Saturday Night Live exhibited the biggest gap between his/her talent and his/her performance on SNL?
A: Robert De Niro. Twice.
Posted by self at 02:32 PM
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The award for the most narcissistic performance by a recognized actor in a real movie, where the aforementioned narcissism is completely undeserved is ....
...Mickey Rourke, after plastic surgery that pulled his face back so tight that it stretched his nose holes, in The Last Outlaw.
(FWIW, I discovered this while lying awake with jetlag at 2:30 am. I may never sleep again.)
Posted by self at 03:56 PM
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Garden State (the movie) has a blog written by Zach Braff, its author and director. He's also the star of Scrubs, of which my son and I are inordinately fond. Zach's latest post tells how he drunk-dialed an Australian movie reviewer. Yes, the blog takes comments...lots and lots of 'em. Yes RSS. No blogroll. No Creative Commons. Yes, a video thank-you to bloggers (yes, complete with a plug for the Garden State dvd).
Posted by self at 08:28 AM
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Brian McWilliams' Spam Kings: The Real Story Behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements is a surprisingly good tale. I was expecting more of a survey of the field, but it's instead a well-told narrative with bizarre characters and unexpected developments. In fact, it's a page turner. You can read the first chapter here. (But what's with the "%*@)#" in the title? Last time I looked, "penis" wasn't a dirty word. Is it so spam filters won't block messages that talk about the book? But won't the spam filters also catch "porn"?)
Posted by self at 09:36 AM
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1. The Doom movie is in pre-production in Prague. Andrzej Bartkowiak (Cradle 2 the Grave, Romeo Must Die) is directing and Karl Urban ("What business does an elf, man, and a dwarf have in the Ridder-Mark? Speak quickly", LOTR 2) will play the lead. The script is not the same as the script of Doom 3, which is the same as the script of Doom 1. which is the same as Die Hards 1-7, Rambo's 1-12, and every psychopathically sympathy-free mow-'em-down tale ever told ... and I say that as a fan.
The writer, 26-year-old Dave Callaham, has no other screenwriting credits. He gives away a bit of the "plot":
In the movie he [the space marine] is reunited with his sister, a scientist on the based named Samantha (to be played by Die Another Day villainess Rosamund Pike). They were separated after an accident that killed their parents and Callaham says, "They are a little estranged" However, strange things are afoot on the base as alien monsters begin to appear and both brother and sister have to put aside their differences in order to survive. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson will also appear as Sarge, the head space marine... In the interview, Callaham says that Id agreed to let him put in some real "character development." That's code for "I really want to make a Doom movie that will not only betray your vision, but will totally suck."
The interview got slashdotted. And here's a 145MB video about the history of Doom. I have not downloaded it.
2. The December issue of Computer Gaming World runs a "Duke Nukem Timeline" that points out: "Rovers Spirit and Opportunity were proposed, authorized, announced, designed, launched, and successfully landed on Mars in less time." Yeah, but did NASA have to worry about pixel shading? I don't think so. Ok, well, actually the NASA imaging software probably did, but, Duke Nukem is going to totally kick NASA's ass!
Posted by self at 06:40 AM
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Gabriel Chafetz, the son of a guy I love, has created a 28-minute film. I haven't yet seen it, but Gabriel says: "It's sort of a hip hop "get out the vote" documentary/musical starring Walter Mondale." How could it be bad?
There's a streaming version here. It's being broadcast in Minnesota on PBS.
Broadcast Times:
Posted by self at 12:26 PM
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Over at BlogCritics.org I've posted a review of the classic British mystery, "The Singing Sands," by Josephine Tey. I liked it a lot when I read it in high school. I did not like it a lot this time through...
Posted by self at 11:55 AM
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I know y'all have read The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith — in fact, I see at Amazon that it's the Today Show Book Club #8, so presumably Katie Couric has read it by the light of a colonoscope — but I just read it. Very enjoyable, if a bit self-conscious. I now know 100% more about Botswana than I did before I read it, which is totally shameful but there you have it. (Anyone have any links to Botswana blogs? I couldn't find any...)
And, while continuing to be hopelessly out of date, a couple of nights ago, our family watched Groundhog Day. I saw it when it came out, I saw it again a few years later, and possibly one time more. Fun for the entire family, even those of us who generally don't like movies that don't have sword fights. Learning to do one day right: A good lesson about lessons.
Later: Ethan Zuckerman found a couple of semi-bloggy Botswanan things in English: A volunteer with a church in Botswana, and Mmegi "...not a blog, but an interesting daily paper."
Posted by self at 04:48 PM
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I know I've already blogged about how confusing I found The Bourne Supremacy, but here's an email (slightly edited) I sent to Sam Allis at the Boston Globe today in response to his "Critic's Notebook" that luxuriated in that movie racking up bigger grosses than either Collateral or The Manchurian Candidate, two movies he considers to be smug, predictable, and coasting on their star power:
Sam,
I enjoyed your piece today and am glad to see Damon get the credit he deserves. But one thing you said irked me enough to write to you, primarily because I just can't figure out what the director and editor were thinking...or why apparently it worked for some viewers.
The very scenes you single out as examples of master craftsmanship I found indecipherable. For example, the long fight you admire has two guys dressed in black, filmed in such short and blurry bursts, frequently with their faces cropped outside the frame, that I couldn't tell who was gouging whom. Likewise, the car chase was a sequence of blurs. Now, I understand that this was meant to convey the impression of speed and action, but...
Lest my befuddlement be attributed to old fogey-hood (I'm 53), my 13-yr-old son came out of the movie with a headache, declaring it to be the worst movie he's ever seen because of the incoherence of the action sequences.
Compare the car chase scenes in Supremacy to the Bourne Identity. The latter was clear, exciting and ingenious. The former was none of those. It failed (IMO) at the basic level of telling the story. Or, compare Supremacy overall to Kill Bill I. In fact, compare it to all of Tarrantino's work. Tarrantino knows how to tell a story, no matter how ridiculous. Uma is mowing down dozens of attackers, all identically dressed, but there isn't a single "What's happening?" moment.
And while I'm disagreeing with you (remembering that the overall context is that I enjoyed your article...really), I'd make a plea for Michael Mann's considerable narrative skills. Even though the acting and the story were, in my opinion, inferior to Supremacy, I'd see Collateral again to watch his directorial technique. If I were to watch Supremacy again, it'd be just to try to figure out which blurry streak is supposed to be Damon's car.
(I'll probably blog this because, well, it's what we bloggers do.)
Best,
David Weinberger
Posted by self at 09:57 AM
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Meta-death: Al Dvorin, the man who said "Elvis has left the building" has left the building.
Watching the Olympics is becoming more and more like watching Florida election returns.
Posted by self at 11:27 AM
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Although I hadn't watched Jeopardy in maybe 20 years, a couple of weeks ago I watched a few featuring Ken Jennings, the million-dollar smart guy. Very impressive. And it struck me how they're cheating...
Watch some reruns before Jennings was on. The questions were much easier. Having dumber questions favors any contestant who is outlandishly smarter than the others. So, while it's not quite cheating, it does tilt the board toward Jennings and lets him run up $50,000 daily totals leaving the other contestants with nothing but a snapshot of Alex Trebeck and a tune they can't get out of their heads.
Posted by self at 12:56 PM
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January 12, 2005
Car Talk Talk
January 08, 2005
Bad 60s films are the worst bad films
January 07, 2005
Gaming blogs
January 04, 2005
Capture the Google Flag
Watching TV while ___-ing
# 60.1% regularly or occasionally go online.
# 55.0% regularly or occasionally read the newspaper.
# 51.8% regularly or occasionally read magazines.
# 0.4% mentally undress Larry KingJanuary 03, 2005
Freas frame
For many years, was the main cover artist for MAD
Designed the official NASA patch for Skylab I
In WWII, he was stationed in the Pacific and in his spare time drew pictures of beautiful women on the noses of bombers. (So he was the guy!)
"Received 11 Hugo awards for his achievements in science fiction, five of them awarded in consecutive years"
Hamlet on Ice
January 02, 2005
Modern Drunkard
January 01, 2005
They played Bach. Bach lost. (Yeah, it's an old joke.)
December 22, 2004
SNL Talent Delta
December 20, 2004
Least deserved narcissism award
November 30, 2004
Braff Blog
November 01, 2004
Spam Kings
October 31, 2004
Doom the Movie (not Doom the Presidential Prediction)
October 23, 2004
Hip-Hop Mondale
TPT 17 Saturday, October 23 at 8PM
TPT 2 Sunday, October 24 at 11PM
TPT 2 Sunday, October 31 at 5:30PM
September 18, 2004
Josephine Tey's "Singing Sands" - Not nearly as good as I remembered
August 29, 2004
Two oldies appreciated
While browsing for Botswana blogs, I found this photo site with some cool photos unrelated to Botswana.
August 26, 2004
The Bourne What's-Happening-acy redux
August 24, 2004
Entertainment news and notes
August 11, 2004
Jeopardy - The stupid cheat