Subversive Puppet Show

We're Done Here

2012-01-27T00:27:00.004Z

I registered JasonMical.com in 2005 and intended to migrate this blog over there back then. Hey, 2012 isn't too late to finish the job.

There will be no more updates here. The show will go on at jasonmical.com.

If the Play's the Thing...

2012-01-18T21:34:00.001Z

My friend Roger Whitson pinged me early on Twitter yesterday and directed me to a post by Mark Sample on Play the Past: What Comes before the Platform: The Refuse of Video Games. It's a good article and makes some very salient points about a side of gaming that people don't want to talk about, what Sample sums up as "Pre-Platform Studies:" what goes into making the things that play the games we play?

Specifically Sample's talking about the long lines of supply that go into producing the raw materials that are fed into the factories that are made by workers into things they will never personally be able to afford. It's a tale of slavery, coercion, warlords, organized crime, exploitation, and Western consumer ignorance. Go read it - it's a good post and hits the points better than I could myself.

If you don't feel some measure of guilt over this, you should.

Something bothered me after reading Sample's post though, and (like any good netizen) I turned to Twitter to discuss it with @rogerwhitson. Why did Sample pick on video games specifically? Why is it so important to video game studies that we include the amount exploitation that pervades the supply chain? Does it actually matter to the study of the game itself? Shouldn't we then study the deforestation and supply process that goes into the creation of books (I asked Roger)?

Our discussion went off on a tangent about the importance of the influence of capitalism (Rog's label, not mine, although he later admitted it was shorthand for what I referred to as a technologically advanced society. After all, the Soviets weren't exactly known for their Earth-friendly or nonexploitive labor practices, and they built video arcades too.) Sidenote to readers: don't use "capitalism" as a synonym or shorthand for "technologically advanced society." It's wrong on several levels.

That's more like it.

What we came back to in our conversation was that Sample's point was most definitely important: people don't really know about the awful things that go into making the things upon which we play our games, and that should be part of the conversation. But at what level?

Let's start with a few statements and assumptions.

1. Is platform important to video game studies? Yes, absolutely. "Platform" covers the hardware you use to play the game, which includes graphic and sound capabilities and input: two important overall aspects of the gaming experience. It also includes lesser-important things like media (although load times do affect the game experience) and multiplayer capabilities and experiences. So yes, it's important.

2. Is platform important to other studies? Well... sort of. Is a book on Kindle fundamentally different from a book on paper, to the point where it would change the overall experience? If so, the difference is more of an Xbox 360 vs. PS3 instead of an Xbox 360 vs. Atari 2600 argument: in other words, relatively insignifiant.

But what about, say, music? Listening to a recording done on a home casette recorder is significantly different from listening to a recording done with professional recording equipment. So too is listening to both recordings on a tinny mono speaker instead of a high-end audiophile system. The experience changes both ways, therefore the platform does influence the study.

Movies are the same way. A film shot on an 8mm handheld is vastly different from a film recorded with DV and postprocessed on massive server farms to add CGI to every frame. Watching them is a different experience on a small black and white TV than on a 9-story IMAX screen.

John, stop the car, Ringo's got out again.

I realize I'm talking in degrees here, but if anything I'm searching for larger context in the overall conversation to answer my previous question. I left the conversation with Roger yesterday and took the dog for a walk (a sure way to clear my head if ever there was one), and came back and Tweeted that the thing that bothered me about Sample's article was that he didn't offer solutions. Actually, I was wrong. He did offer solutions: the importance of including the Pre-Platform studies in video game studies.

Creeping a bit (because that's how I roll) I saw an earlier conversation Sample had with one of his followers about the book question, and both of them mentioned books that are (I'm paraphrasing) ethically created - not printed in countries where they would deforest land for pulp, or mistreat workers in the paper mills.

That's where I left things last night.

This morning I realized perhaps the best comparison to what Sample was proposing wasn't from another art form at all, but instead from the food industry.

Pre-Platform Food? How about ethically sourced, local, and/or organic food? Chances are, thanks in no small part to the rise of the online foodie movement and the ease of access to films like Super Size Me or Food, Inc., you're at least aware of these options as being healthier for you as well as better for local producers and the environment. You're probably not calculating the carbon footprint of every meal you consume (although if you are, bully for you!), but there is a much higher level of awareness around these things at the consumer level.

Waggle Wiimote to pick locally-sourced food.

But this isn't just a movement at the consumer level: chefs prefer these sorts of ingredients when they're creating food. Case in point: local Seattle chef Becky Selengut's book Good Fish, which is as much about seafood preparation as it is about the ethics around the seafood supply chain: an issue around which there are as many moral problems for Western societies as the consumer electronics supply chain.

And that is the crux of my reply to Mark Sample: Pre-Platform Studies should be part of conversations around not just video games, but any artform that ties so closely into supply chains. Where DOES that paper come from that your novel is printed on? Aren't there just as many third-world miners, raw materials, factories, and exploited workers in the sound system I'm listening to, the Kindle I'm reading on, the television I'm watching, the cameras and computers that went into producing Avatar as there are in games?

To rephrase as a statement rather than a question: this isn't just about video games, and it's frankly a larger conversation that just video game studies. It is (marketing hat on) a consumer awareness and perception issue that goes way beyond video games. As a technologically advanced society we become increasingly reliant on things from which we are further and further divorced, whether it's our phones, TVs, Xboxes, cars, food, or even the houses we live in or the places we work and play. I'll admit, as savvy as I'd like to think I am about such things, I have no clue about how most of the stuff I use is made. Even the table I'm typing this on was made in India, and I can only imagine the state of the furniture factory that created it or the processes that went into harvesting the trees - and my imagination is not good.

I don't want to think about the exploitation it took to create these pixels.

This is what I was looking for in Sample's blog post, because it is a broad and extremely important consumer issue in an increasingly global society. It's not like we can all whip out our local Shaker-made iPhones and connect to the Organic Locally Sourced Cellphone Network. At least, not yet. It is good to have goals after all.

So the conversation Sample's proposing seems to me less of one central to video game studies, and more of one central to overall consumer awareness and the impact of a technologically advanced society such as ours. There are indeed a lot of conversations to be had about exploitation at all levels of the games industry, from the aforementioned supply lines to the more First World Problems around game companies overworking staff members around launch and then firing them shortly thereafter.

Video game screenshot of the awful working conditions at a fictional video game company. Meta as fuck.

But whether this is integral to the study of the game itself is another story. I'm coming down on the side of "not really," for the same reason that the context of the paper the first edition Moby Dick was printed on isn't integral to the study of Moby Dick, or the way that the oil that powers a sports car isn't important to the performance of the car itself on a test course. Which takes away nothing from the broader point that this is a very important issue. It just strikes me as a consumer ignorance and awareness issue rather than a critical one.

Four Tips for Interacting With A Formerly Fat Person

2011-12-16T19:18:00.000Z

I meant to write this post a month ago, but my experiences coming home for the holidays reminded me I never got around to it, and it seems like as good a time as any to put this down.

What inspired this is the variety of reactions I get about losing weight from my friends and family, especially people who haven't necessarily seen me in a long time. I can tell it makes some people uncomfortable (for whatever reason - it's not my place to speculate) but it also elicits some well-intentioned behaviors in others that, frankly, are a pain in the ass to deal with. So undersand that I've written this as a friendly and helpful tips, and I fully understand that the last thing my friends and family want to do is hurt me; I just don't think people realize how things come across sometimes. I want people to see things from my point of view without coming across like an overbearing jerk, so please take this advice in the spirit it's given.

So, some tips for interacting with a former fat guy.

1. You don't have to keep offering me food; or, no means no. Food is wonderful; it tastes good, and it's an inherent social driver for our culture. It's also something that I had a very self-destructive personal relationship with that I have repaired for my own health and well-being.

A key part of that process for me was identifying both what I wanted to eat and in what quantities. I'm really good at keeping my diet sustainable. I know full well how much and of what I can eat. You don't have to go out of your way to prepare super-healthy stuff when I'm around, but if you're serving biscuits and gravy don't expect me to take a massive bowl of it.

Let me put it this way: it's very obvious that I've lost a good deal of weight in the last seven years (it's hard to hide the physical change of 150 pounds off.) Looking at me is a reminder. You know I've lost a lot of weight. So, please ask yourself this: if I was a recovering alcoholic and you were aware that I used to have a self-destructive relationship with alcohol, would you offer me a drink? Would you continue to offer me drinks throughout the day if I politely refused the first one (or two?) How do you think I would feel if you did, even if I knew you were doing it out of politeness?

Apply that to food. It's not a perfect correlation but I would argue that what I'm recovering from is very similar to addiction, and the mental processes I use to stay healthy is similar to how recovering addicts make it through the day.

I don't like to throw food out but if you heap a bunch of it on my plate after I tell you not to, I will. Also understand that it's a lot harder to control portions once the food is on your plate. I still nibble. I'm only human. I know my weaknesses, and I control them by not putting the food on my plate in the first place. Like the booze, I know where the food is and if I really want to make that choice I'll do it myself.

2. Yes, I'm still self-conscious about my weight. Please understand that as much as I'm proud of what I've done that being fat left lasting psychological damage, in no small part related to the fact that my weight gain was directly linked to my depression. You don't have to reassure me. I appreciate it, but honestly it's best just left alone. And yes, looking at pictures of me when I was much heavier is very uncomfortable for me. That's why I've personally only kept a handful myself.

3. I want to inspire you but in a healthy way. I've noticed that when I'm out with people they'll often pick up on the fact that I'm ordering healthy, smaller quantities or loading up on fruit at the salad bar and skipping the full-fat ranch dressing. Then they turn around and order something way outside of what they would normally eat. Cool, let me inspire you; in fact, that's one of the best parts about having made such an achievement is helping others see that it is possible. That being said, understand that the me you see now and the way I eat now is the result of seven years of constant, hard work.

Say you went to a martial arts competition and saw a guy jump through the air and break 15 bricks with his hand, and you thought, "that's freakin' awesome. I want to do that!" and you go and break your own hand trying to break a single brick. That dude worked up to where he is; so have I. If you try to jump on the train at my stop, you're going to end up hurting yourself, or worse doing something unsustainable with your diet and turning around and getting even madder when it doesn't work out.

Having spent seven years gaining weight and seven years losing it, I can say this: it's not something that comes easy and it doesn't happen overnight. You're going to make small failures and backslide and lose heart and hope along the way. But if you want to lose, really want to lose, then talk to your doctor and start doing something sustainable. You may have to lose a bunch to kickstart yourself (like I did with two different low-carb diets.) You may need way more exercise than I did. It's going to be different for you, but it is do-able. Don't break your hand trying to smash some bricks. Train up to it. It's really the only way it will work.

4. I'm not judging you. For some reason I get the impression that people feel judged, especially around their choices at mealtime. Guess what: it doesn't matter to me what you're eating (unless you feel guilty and try to get me to eat more because you're feeling that way, in which case see #1.) I don't care if you're fat or skinny or eating a ton or eating like a bird unless I feel like you're directly putting yourself in danger, in which case as a friend I would say something - just like I would hope you're doing the same for me.

Please understand that, if you feel like you need to lose weight, what I want most is to inspire you, not judge you. You'll have to make that decision on your own though. Hopefully my experience will help serve as a realistic way to show you how it could be done.

The Kids Are Alright

2011-11-22T15:09:00.001Z

I started not understanding Occupy Wall Street's purpose. I fell into the media trap of reciting a talking point: they have no message! But the more I spoke to members of the movement, people online, people at Occupy Seattle itself (yes, I've been a few times), the purpose and message became more clear. Occupy started focusing itself as well, which helped. Switch to Credit Unions? Yeah, I get that. And old friend who worked in finance until 2008 (heh) has been telling us the same thing for months. The Beautiful Competition's been saying it for years.

The more I learned about Occupy, the more I realized I've seen this before. I was quite an activist in my college days: supporting Nader in 2000, working on a certain filmmaker's TV show, railing against corporate greed and a fundamentally corrupt system.

Youthful Indiscretions

After Bush was elected and 9/11 happened any sort of discourse about these subjects came to a grinding halt for several years--while the very interests we sought to highlight proceeded to continue their ruin of our economy. Not just the American economy mind you, but the global economy.

It's been a strange past month. I've watched as friends and family attack the Occupy movement with a variety of strawmen and non sequitors. I've seen relations of those family members struggle to try to find a job several months out of college--hardly a unique phenomenon, and one that's central to the heart of the Occupy movement.

Yes, it's the protesters who are messy.

They're not too proud to go and flip burgers (despite being told that incurring tens of thousands in debt is the way to avoid burger-flipping): it's just that there aren't enough burger-flipping jobs available. "They should shut up and get a job" in response to Occupy is the response you'd make only if you were utterly clueless about the economic situation in this country (and now spreading into the EU.)

There is a certain amount of irony here: the very boomers whose protests in the civil rights movement and against the Vietnam War are the same people who simply don't understand Occupy, for whatever reason. I was reminded yesterday of a verse written by these very boomers more than 45 years ago, which are oddly prophetic for Occupy. Here's a video to accompany it.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

Much of this coalesced last week when I read this stunning article about a Catholic's loss of faith after the Penn State pedophilia scandal. It's not so much about a loss of religious faith but a loss of faith in institutions, leaders, and those who should be serving as role models. In a way it's the loss of faith in the boomers who protested war but put us in this situation by allowing the monied interests to have their way with America. I grew up on The Simpsons: the first episode to hit Fox came out in my very formative fifth grade year. The Occupy grew up on South Park, a far more nihilistic cartoon lampooning literally everything. For The Simpsons generation, there are institutions we should still be able to trust. For the Occupy generation, the South Park generation, just a few years younger than me, they have been raised to suspect and distrust literally everything.

It's an isolating proposition. It's the ultimate existentialism, a body of internal self-reliance that would probably scare the ever-loving shit out of most people who rely on religion, leaders, institutions, or something for meaning. As the boomers drift around like boats on the ocean taking refuge in new age nonsense while ignoring the economic ruin they've enabled if not condoned, the South Park generation is taking to the streets.

Occupy Paper Street

In a Facebook conversation the other day about the above article I mentioned how much that nihilism reminded me of the film Fight Club. If there's a movie that encapsulates what we were trying to achieve (or at least, Cassandra-like, trying to bring attention to) in the last 90s, Fight Club would be it. It isn't a glorification of violence and anti-establishment behavior: the film is a warning that a corrupt and awful system stacked against those who enter it at a young age will inevitably reach a breaking point.

The Simpsons generation still trusted too much in the ability for things to sort themselves out. We were drowned by the jingoism following 9/11, the patriotism suppositories forced on us by the extreme right who said anyone who questioned their actions were traitors while the literally robbed us blind and ruined 99.9% of us while they made out like the bandits they were.

This isn't to say that we don't have our place in Occupy, as do the boomers who have joined and supported it, as do the Vietnam vets who are protesting, the 84-year-old retirees who have been pepper sprayed, as does anyone who understands what's happening here (what it is, is exactly clear--if you've been paying attention.) But fundamentally it isn't our movement. It belongs to the South Park generation.

They've watched as the institutions they have been told will uplift and protect them have repeatedly, fundamentally and systemically failed. And rather than accepting this fate they have taken to the streets, formed General Assemblies, put into action fundamental democratic principles, and enacted steps to raise awareness and start taking things back. They are doing what we tried and failed to do 10 years ago.

Despite the movement's many shortcomings (see, we can't do anything without questioning the institution!) it has the best chance of success of any political movement since the 1960s. It's their time. They have my support. Their success won't be stunted but enabled by their fundamental distrust in the institutions that lead us here--all of them. Those kids are alright.

Red State Welfare

2011-11-13T15:49:00.001Z

Because I'm trying to get away from subjecting my friends and family (OK, my family) on Facebook to my political views, I'll post this here instead.

One of my favorite little facts about America: those states who receive more federal money than they contribute to the tax base are almost identical to the states who routinely support candidates who propose doing away with such programs. This is not a new trend at all.

Attention conservative red state welfare queens: I'm tired of my hard-earned tax money being taken out of my state and reallocated to yours, where you guys don't work hard enough to support yourselves. Why don't you go get better jobs you lazy right-wing conservative bums? I mean seriously, surely there must be some well-paying jobs in your states somewhere. That's why all of us fled for the coasts, right?

Until then though we should put your fantasies into reality, remove the subsidies us blue-staters are paying into your states, and watch your states roads, schools, and infrastructure crumble even more. Because that's how a community ought to support itself by your own rules and standards, right?

Or maybe we could all, you know, support each other. Like us awful class warfare liberals have been advocating - and you all have been taking advantage of while calling us names and taking away our rights in the same breath.

Hypocritical jerks. There, I called you a name. Although I'll just use a conservative argument and say I'm "refusing to be politically correct" and you can't argue with me, nyah nyah!

Man I'm out of practice at this whole rant thing.

NaNoWrMo Or Something

2011-11-07T18:34:00.002Z

Hey, did you know its National Novel Writing Month?

I realize it's supposed to be a way to motivate aspiring writers to actually get off their asses and, you know, write.

For some reason it always turns into feelings of guilt and anxiety when I see a half-dozen writerly friends updating their word counts and I don't realistically have time to plow through several thousand words a day for a month.

The problem is my own. I need to set lower goals first: I've got some short story ideas knocking around I should finish off. With the ease of e-publishing these days, I could just release a collection of stories on Amazon, post it on Facebook, get a few dozen sales from friends and family and I'm on my way!

Call that "National Writing Anything To Keep Some Kind of Momentum" month.

Blogging

2011-11-05T15:22:00.001Z

Blogging's a funny thing. You don't do it for more than a year, realizing you've just kind of left a part of yourself dangling out there (and let's face it, a pretty esoteric closing post to boot.) Then you write one letter to Google and tell yourself "hey, I should publish this somewhere other than Plus so I can actually, you know, find it in a week" and all of a sudden you've got ideas for blogging again.

Blogger's gone and got itself a new interface. It looks like the rest of Google's interfaces: less Web 2.0 and more Tech 2015. I feel like I'm using an interface designed by Apple's interns.

My life has changed in many ways in the last 15 months. New job. New tech. New games played. New hobby (winemaking). The anti-greed movement I've been a part of since college has gone and made itself more mainstream by camping out in public parks. My dog's grown up, and one of my cats has moved on. In other words life is moving forward.

My problem with blogging has been writing for the sake of writing. Therefore my previous mission statement still stands: I will only write if I feel I have something of value to add to the conversation.

Otherwise, you can just catch up with my personal shit on Facebook, and my more newsy shit on Plus. And when I occasionally dip back into Twitter... well... I don't reliably use it anymore because the value just wasn't there.

An Open Letter to the Google Plus and Reader Teams

2011-11-01T19:52:00.002Z

Dear Google Plus and Reader Teams,

I've been tracking closely the development of both Plus and Reader; I was excited to try the former and have been a long-time user of the later. Reader has been an important tool in my digital toolset for years; I use it personally to track and read important news and updates from friends' blogs, and I have used it professionally and semiprofessionally as a monitoring tool for blogs, social media, and news.

Like many other Google Reader users I met the announcement of Reader's integration into Plus with some skepticism; at best I was cautiously optimistic. When I finally switched over yesterday I found the new UI different but nothing that would cause any permanent harm; I have suffered through UI and design pages on services beginning with the Prodigy network back in 1990. Although they cause short-term confusion there hasn't been a single instance where I've ceased to use a service because of a UI change. I would prefer something with more color delineation between posts, but you're receiving enough feedback about that from people far more qualified as designers than I am, so I'll leave that be.

The main piece of feedback I have about the new Reader is around its social sharing features. Reader's sharing features were, for myself and many others, a self-selected and silo'd social network. I followed users (offline friends mostly) who actively shared news and other content I found interesting, and would occasionally comment on that content and have conversations with each other. Rarely would these develop into full-blown conversations (and if they did we typically moved to IM), but the information discovery mechanisms of this service were invaluable to me both for professional development and personal enrichment.

I understand how to share content through Reader into Plus; this is not the issue. The frustrating thing about this change is that I no longer have the option to filter content from others in the same silo I had in Reader. This, frankly, was functionality I expected when Plus launched (if you check my account, it's one of my first Plus posts.)

Reader gave me a way to get content from a few people without drinking from the social media firehose of less-relevant updates. I love my friends to death but I don't want to have to filter through 10 pictures of their kids to get to the one news story they found interesting. Facebook doesn't allow for this kind of filtration, and neither did Plus when it launched – which would have been its defining competitive factor. This is the beauty of Reader's old system; if was a filtered network.

In short: rather than cloning Facebook's functionality, I wish Plus had been more like what Reader was in its content filtering.

My recommendation then is twofold:

1. Make a feature in Google Reader where you can automatically create a Plus circle from the people you've followed. This was a basic exporting beat Google completely missed; why should I manually have to recreate a circle of followed friends from one Google product into another? That should have been one click, or done automatically, behind the scenes. Google's value proposition is its platform ubiquity; this was a missed opportunity to demonstrate this is actually the case.

2. Within that circle (or within any circle in Plus) allow me to filter posts from people in that circle to only show +1s from Reader. I love my friends to death but don't want to cruise through a dozen pictures of kids in Halloween costumes to get to important news.

To put this a different way: turn circles into content silos, not just person groups.

In fact, this kind of filtering is what I expected from Plus in the first place. It would be a true differentiator from Facebook's platform, which forces me to filter in reverse, by blocking updates from certain apps like Farmville. Instead, Plus should allow you to filter down, only showing updates from certain apps that I self-select – like Reader, or Twitter, or a photo sharing site.
I will still continue to use Reader for my RSS feeds, and look forward to a Google app that duplicates the closed nature of the network in Reader I had come to appreciate and enjoy – and for which there is now an enormous gap (and opportunity) within the digital landscape.

I have long been an advocate of Google's services and overall value proposition for years. I may be one of the few Wave fans still left in existence. I understand that decisions like this are made at far larger levels than one piece of consumer feedback can ever hope to affect and change, but I certainly appreciate any consideration you'd give to the above recommendations.

Questions for God

2010-06-04T23:02:00.002+01:00

Rather than "why?" I'd ask "how?"

If I knew "how" I could do it myself and then I could figure out "why."

But then again my reasons would be different than His.

Artificial Intelligence

2010-05-28T22:29:00.002+01:00

A higher difficulty level in a strategy game should mean that I'm playing against a smarter opponent who makes strategically sound moves.

It should not mean that the rules of the game alter to favor my opponent, who is still playing as dumb as he was on the easy setting, but now with fuzzy math that means things end up in his favor more often than not.

How is this so hard to program?

Attention Criminals

2010-05-21T22:42:00.003+01:00

I would like to see the following threats to American security report to Guantanamo Bay Prison immediately:

Every employee of British Petroleum, and their agencies;
Everyone connected to the Bush administration and everyone who voted for them;
Everyone who purchased a vehicle that gets less than 20 miles to the gallon between the years of 1993 and 2010

It is time to be held accountable for your crimes against this country, the environment, and the human race.

Dreaming

2010-05-11T22:50:00.003+01:00

Anyone who interacts with me long enough will have the pleasure of hearing my Sean Connery impression. It's just part of what I do, no different than breathing or washing my hands twenty times a day.

I often have strange dreams when my wife is out of town, which she is. That is important to our story.

Last night I dreamed I was at at dinner party, and one of the other people at my table was Sean Connery. I inadvertently did my Sean Connery impression in front of him and then tried to play it off as a joke. Sean was not amused. In fact he got very mad and I had to start running away from him.

I hid in someone's house but their dog found me and started chasing me. Then the owners of the house chased me.

Good times.

A Question of Character (and System)

2010-05-05T23:50:00.004+01:00

I'm getting back in the groove of running a regular role-playing game, and I chose a very different genre for me: a sci-fi game set in the universe of Richard K Morgan's Altered Carbon books. I also decided to give a new system a spin: Eclipse Phase. I've had a really good experience with the Eclipse Phase team (they helped me out when I really needed it - seriously, excellent customer service), but it doesn't look like the system is going to work with our group's style. More importantly, with my GMing style.

I thought about this after reading a list of story-driven RPGs on The Mighty Atom, many of which I've at least read if not tried. My GMing style tends to be very story focused. I see the game as a chance for a group of friends to sit down together and tell a collective story, and the game system has to be an enabler for this. The system is designed to give the game some structure and resolve conflicts that arise in the story in a reasonable way (characters fighting other characters being a common conflict.)

Eclipse Phase turned out to be slightly too clunky for my tastes. It's not a bad system at all. It's a very good system, but it focuses a little more on simulation over story. This fits some people's playstyles perfectly but not mine. One of the reasons I was happy with the d20 system was that I knew it very well, including its limitations, and it did a fair job of simulating a character's abilities without getting in the way. The system was easy to push aside when you simply wanted to focus on story.

I've been thinking a lot about this in relation to other game styles that I enjoy. I agree about 99.99% with Shamus Young's comparison of Saint's Row 2 vs. Grand Theft Auto IV that he published on Twenty Sided. The money quote for me:

In GTA IV, the mission designer has all the fun, designing something for you to enact. In Saints Row 2, the designer just fills the world with toys and you get to do the creative part.
This carries over into the characterization as well. In Saint's Row 2, you design your character from the ground up. He (or she) has no name. His history is painted with broad stokes, allowing you to fill in. In GTA4, your character is so specific that I'm certain there's a 100-page biography sitting on some brand manager's desk somewhere in Rockstar headquarters. It's fine for a movie. It's awful for a game.

RPGs, especially online RPGs, have had a hard time walking this line. Early RPGs like Bard's Tale or Wasteland had no 'stock' characters. You rolled your own, decided your class, named them, and they simply interacted with the world. This is the same model that most offline RPGs use, except all of the hard math stuffs are automated. The funny thing is, most of these early RPGs were very light on the story (if it existed at all.)

Eventually this changed, notably with games like Baldur's Gate or Planescape: Torment. The character was still largely up to the player but he or she had a defined background and history. You were no longer playing a character that was your own. Japanese RPGs are even worse in this regard, essentially plopping you in the role of an anime character where the only customization they allowed was swapping of gear or possibly changing the name. Which is fine if you want an interactive film, but not so great if part of the joy of playing the game is imagining yourself in the role.

RPGs have since swung back towards the Baldur's Gate or Torment models. In Fallout 3 players can define their character and even play through and define some of his or her background (within a set of parameters) and are then presented with a series of puzzles, missions and quests that they can solve pretty much any way they wish.

This is the design ethic I like to use in the games I run. I admit that it's been a long personal road getting to this point (what do you MEAN you're not going to do what I thought?!? There's four hours of planning down the toilet!!) This may not be a universal rule, but I'd be willing to bet that the system one chooses will match one's playstyle and storytelling style as well.

Does it matter in Just Cause 2 whether my character, a CIA operative with unlimited parachutes and a grapple wire-thing attached to his arm, is skilled in an AK-47 assault rife, an M16 assault rife, or a pistol? No. He can pick up any of these guns (in fact, assault rifles are just 'assault rifles' in the game) and blaze away at his enemies because it's more fun than him picking up one of several kinds of guns, looking at it stupidly and saying 'well, can't shoot this! without a -20 penalty! before dying in a hailstorm of enemy lead. Why? Because that's lame. It isn't any fun for the player.

Just Cause 2, much like Saint's Row 2, presents you with a bunch of options and lets you do things and solve things pretty much any way you want - it knows when to get the hell out of the way in favor of a fun time and progressing the game along. That's the kind of system I need in the games I'm running.

I'm not trashing Eclipse Phase - I have nothing but respect for the designers and the team. With a different group (and someone else as GM) I would absolutely love it.

The kind of game I want to run will hopefully be as fully defined by my players' imaginations as my own. Here's some stuff, you guys come up with a way to overcome it, hey that sounds reasonable, this is how it all plays out. It's the foundation for all RPGs but games of all genres too often get hung up on the fiddly parts and forget the fun parts.

Ecoterrorism

2010-04-30T20:47:00.002+01:00

I hate that phrase. Really hate it. It equivocates obstruction of business and loss of profit, or at worse destruction of property, with the taking of life for a political gain. I guess it's simply a matter of perspective, and the ultimate utilitarian argument: I agree with the ends, therefore I can justify the means.

I find myself becoming more utilitarian in this regard, mostly because I feel a room full of Kantians would never accomplish anything. Progress is often predicated on a strong sense of ideology, but also a willingness to enter into compromise.

This is problematic in and of itself. If Gandhi or Martin Luther King had compromised, would they have accomplished as much?

At what point does a stubborn 'right' turn against itself? Is Paul Watson, for example, a terrorist? If he had strictly used peaceful means, would he be a Gandhi, or pejoratively compared to Osama bin Laden? Just because I agree with his goals am I overlooking what is a form of terrorism, by definition?

I have no answers to these questions. I'm just tossing them out there because I haven't made up my mind, and I'm not sure what to think.

Oysters

2010-04-23T20:43:00.002+01:00

Last night I went out for dinner with a team visiting my office from Korea to a local seafood place. On the menu: oysters, crab legs, a little bit of fish, and some bread.

Normally oysters are something I eat in my mom's stuffing at Thanksgiving or Christmas. I don't dislike them, but I've always found them kind of gross.

Last night I eschewed that and had quite a few (for me) oysters. And in retrospect, they weren't half-bad.

As I get older, I find my palate changing, accepting things I would not have eaten before. I love bananas. Black pudding in the UK was good. The Beautiful Competition even turned me on to fois gras, which I admit is really damn good. I feel like there's a new world of culinary delights out there yet to be discovered as I open my mind and taste buds more and more.

Still not going to eat any raw oysters on the half-shell though.

40 Years

2010-04-22T23:16:00.006+01:00

Today is the 40th Earth Day. Today, I rode the bus to work for only the second time since I've been back (this was not planned, it was a coincidence.)

I admit that most of my efforts are token at best. I recycle, I owned a hybrid car (but now drive a far-less efficient Jeep.) I carpool when I can and I compost, but still continue to directly participate in a system that encourages wasteful and unmitigated consumption that is ultimately unsustainable.

I'd like to think I did my part this morning. Our secretary was going to drive three hours south to Portland to pick up 3 iPads because there aren't any left in Seattle, then drive three hours back. iPads. Calculate the carbon footprint on that.

I convinced her that if she really had to go 200 miles to pay $600 a pop for some fashionable gadget, she should at least take Amtrak.

She also had no idea it was Earth Day.

40 years from now, I'll blog that today is the day I truly felt and understood the meaning of the term Phyrric Victory.

Edit: here's something a little more positive.

Fundamental Beliefs

2010-04-21T20:30:00.004+01:00

Health care is not a luxury item. It is not an iPad or a BMW or a bottle of nice wine. It is not a vacation to Fiji or a seven-bedroom mansion.

Health care is a utility, like sewage and sanitation, police protection, fire departments, good roads, a strong military and other utilities that keep society safe and operating well.

Mistakes

2010-04-20T22:44:00.003+01:00

I've made a lot of mistakes in my life. Most of them are the sort of laundry I don't care to air on this blog, but I will admit to and apologize for this one.

When I was a freelance writer trying to make my name, I sold out my integrity as a movie reviewer, Star Wars fan and as a writer by penning a good review of Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones in exchange for the chance to see the movie a week before the rest of the world.

I'm so very sorry.

Christology

2010-04-19T17:34:00.002+01:00

I'm now about 99% certain what the Bible was referring to in the story of the loaves and fishes.

Jesus said, bread and anchovies? Awesome. Let me get a little red sauce and I'll show you guys a real miracle - of flavor!

You heard it here first kids.

Chicken Coop For The Soul

2010-03-24T18:06:00.003Z

So one of the things that Elizabeth and I found in London was a thriving locally-sourced food scene. Locally-sourced foods are great for many reasons: fewer preservatives, healthier, you know what's in them and how they were grown, and it bolsters the local economy rather than massive corporate farms that are good for no one except investors. We decided to become very serious about looking into the possibility of entering the scene as more than just consumers, and although we still don't know what that will look like we decided to try to start 'easy' with a few chickens for eggs.

So we now have five hens, a chicken coop and 9 eggs after two days. A small portion of our yard is taken up with the chicken run, but apart from a long weekend of hard work and a lot of Internet research on the part of the Beautiful Competition most of the intensive labor is done.

I'll post more about this as things develop but 'going local' has always been a priority of ours, and this is the first step to becoming that change we want to see.

New Horizons

2010-02-24T23:11:00.003Z

I've been fairly tight-lipped about this but for good reason. The 11th was my last day at Edelman, as I accepted a new position with a gaming company. Today we announced ourselves to the world, so I can say that I work for En Masse Entertainment, an MMO publisher, on their first title TERA.

I'm the Community Director here an En Masse, and we're putting a huge focus on community before, during and after the game's launch. It's an amazing opportunity for me not only because I'm back in the games industry and working with an awesome group of people, but it's possibly one of the best moves I can make for my professional development. We're going to do some kickass community work and I won't just be a part of it, I'll be leading it!

BrotherMagneto is back in the old community saddle!

Top Six Ways First-Time Social Media Engagement is Like Your First Time Having Sex

2010-02-18T21:51:00.015Z

I can't recall the presentation that made the cheeky point 'your first social media engagement will be like your first time having sex,' and I'm more than happy to credit it for inspiration of this post if anyone cares to point it out. The 'awkward first time' thing is actually pretty apropos for social media engagement, and I was reminded of this fact recently with some clients at my old agency who were enamored with the act and not nearly enough with the approach. So without further ado, and tongue planted firmly in... cheek, I give you: the Top Six Ways First-time Social Media Engagement is Like Your First Time Having Sex.

Goes without saying some of this might not be work-safe if your company can't handle a little grown-up fun.

6. Those who talk the loudest are rarely the most experienced. Remember the braggart jock in high school who used to like to talk about his conquests in the locker room? And remember how your parents told you he was full of hot air? Guess what: there's a lot of that floating around in social media too. Those who can, do. Those who can't, have slickly-designed blogs and write about it a lot. Not that there aren't some perfectly legitimate people out there with well-designed blogs who have intelligent things to say about social media. Unfortunately, those people tend to be few and far between, and the number of locker-room bragging is going up. Beware someone who hasn't actually been doing this for several years, unless that person is young and has been doing this in their off-time before doing it professionally.

5. It's easy to get hung up on the toys. Unless you lead a very un-exciting life, in which case I apologize and recommend you spice things up a bit, you have probably experimented with toys at some point. But rarely are toys the sole focus of what you're doing, and very rarely are toys a major part of your first time. So while it may be exciting to think about sinking hundreds of thousands into a YouTube channel, remember that these toys are really just something to supplement the overall experience - not central focus of what you're doing. Sure, they can be used in some very interesting combinations and when used correctly can greatly enhance your social media experience. But keep them in your pocket in case the mood takes you there, don't whip them out over dinner and declare that this is where things are headed. Unless you're into that kind of thing, I guess.

4. There's a lot of porn out there. Porn exploits people. People choose to allow themselves to be exploited for money. Porn also creates a series of completely unreasonable expectations about sex, because porn is designed to do one thing and one thing only: scratch a biological itch and make money doing it. When's the last time you had a sexy plumber over while you were wearing nothing but French-lace panties and he lost his shirt and you ended up re-creating 3/4s of the Kama Sutra in your kitchen? Or when is the last time you had one of those 'Dear Penthouse, I never thought it would happen to me?' experiences?

Yeah, I thought so.

A good deal of the social media sales is like pornography. Slick gurus put out titillating books, post to well-designed blogs and talk about how if only you fork over $100,000 to them for consulting fees you're assured a front-page success story in the Wall Street Journal. It's all as airbrushed, posed and fake as porn, baby, but like a generation raised with the Internet and without the need to hide a crinkly stack of Playboys under their mattress (warning: link NWS), it has created extremely unreasonable expectations about the act itself. So let me be blunt here and repeat something my mother told me when I was about fourteen (ahem): it's designed to titillate and make money, nothing else. Real quality interaction comes from long-term work, trust and relationship-building. You can start rolling in the hay right away or wait until a few dates in, but anyone can tell you that if you're putting the effort into it then it will pay dividends. It's all about the quality of the relationship, not the flashy airbrushed fiction.

3. Size doesn't matter. 1,000,000 Twitter followers is better than 10,000, right? Wrong. It's perfectly natural for us to take peeks around in the locker room and do a little compare-and-contrast. We see what the big studs are doing with their massive groups of followers - Stephen Fry has fans hanging on his every word, The Real Shaq can activate a small army with a single Tweet, and Starbucks' massive group on Facebook is a 150-slide case study in and of itself. But like the old saying goes, it's not the size but how you use it. Starbucks and Shaq, ahem, are so successful because they're using it well, not because of the size and girth of their follower numbers. In fact, there's a strong argument to be made that the only reason their numbers are so high is because they're using it well.

Avoid anyone who promises you 250,000 views, or 10,000 followers for a lump sum. It's a bullshit sales pitch designed to take advantage of people who only care about that number (a scummy old advertising trick, surprise surprise.) 1000 true fans following you, hanging on your every word, buying your products and supporting your company are way better than 1,000,000 indifferent people or robots. And if you talk to your 1,000 fans in a kind and loving way, then the size of your group won't matter nearly as much as all the other ways you can show them love.

I'm sure there's a slightly less male-centric comparison here too. Um, yeah, boobs.

2. There might be crying involved. Especially if your promotion metrics were invented by a bunch of marketing people who have only read about social media in PR Weak, and your raise this year depended on you taking your Facebook group from 1000 members to 1,000,000 members in six months. You really might want to consider what's reasonable to do in a reasonable amount of time. The above four points might be an excellent guide, as will other success stories based on relationship-building.

1. It's going to be awkward, fumbling and you're going to sit there thinking 'what the hell was that all about?' Because there's a lot of expectations out there, misplaced and unreasonable as most of it is. Four years ago my job consisted of convincing companies that social media is important. Well, mission accomplished. If you don't think social media is important then congratulations, you're a dinosaur and I cannot wait to have your office and salary someday soon. Nowadays, my job is to convince people to do social media right. Because doing it right is sometimes very un-sexy. It takes time and work, like a relationship. But like a relationship, it's far more fulfilling than a one-night stand, and way less awkward than your first fumbling gropes in the backseat of a Chevy.

Take your time. Know your audience. Build a relationship. Make some effort. Social media, the unsexy part, is going to be a slow burn. But like a relationship the payoffs are well worth it: trusting and loyal customers, an excellent reputation, evidence of your efforts to anyone with a search engine, positive word of mouth and correlating sales data to prove you're doing it right.

Coming soon: The Top 10 Ways Social Media Engagement Is Not Like Having Sex.

Growing Up

2010-02-08T19:46:00.004Z

In one morning I've used Rogaine and listened to the Dead Kennedys. This, dear readers, is what growing up and adulthood is all about.

Also that's an admission for me: yes, my hair is thinning up top. I can no longer pretend it's just falling funny or maybe my pillow is wearing a spot in my head like a baby. It's definitely thinning. I wonder if the Rogaine kicks in what it will look like. Will there be little peach fuzzy hairs there for a while? I dunno.

All I can think of is that in the future, they can replicate food, eliminate money, peacefully explore the stars, create entire realities in a holodeck - but they can't cure baldness.

Clearly science has failed.

Tonight

2010-01-20T08:30:00.001Z

Tonight I wrote a poem.

When I was done, I read it over and thought it looked like a puddle of vomit in the toilet.

Unlike a puddle of vomit, I've saved it.

Like a puddle of vomit, I don't think I'll show it to anyone.

I mention this only because I'm still writing which is better than not writing at all.

Buffalo Sauce

2010-01-19T16:23:00.000Z

I go through strange food cravings. Not the kind of craving that a pregnant lady has, 'I have to have this right now or a small nation will suffer!' or the kind of craving you might have after work, 'gee, Mexican food sounds great tonight.' My cravings are much more constant and low-grade, but consuming in that it may be the only kind of good that sounds good to me.

When I was in London, twice I had tomato cravings. Both of them lasted six weeks. I ate fresh tomatoes, tomato sauce on Italian food, roasted tomatoes, tomato soup, tomato paste. If it can be made from a tomato, I probably put it in my cakehole. The Beautiful Competition was extremely tolerant of these cravings despite their nonsensical nature.

I've gone through others, but much less pronounced. Red meat. White sauce. Different kinds of cheeses. But these haven't lasted nearly as long.

Since I've come back to America, I've craved Buffalo sauce.

That's not entirely true. I didn't crave it the moment I landed. In some small town in Oregon, while the Beautiful Competition and I were driving back from Oklahoma, we ended up in a Denny's at 11 at night (the only thing open) and the Buffalo Fingers sounded good, so I ordered some. The waitress brought extra Buffalo sauce on the side, in which I dipped my fingers (the food, not my attached fingers.)

And.. bam.

Ever since then, I'm craving Buffalo sauce. This is definitely the 'strange craving' category. I've imagined a world - this world - where I could buy a 50 gallon drum of Buffalo sauce, the kind you'd only find in a school cafeteria or a fallout shelter. And take it home. And just start drinking it. Despite the fact that I'm well aware that this would be a Very Bad Idea.

I'm typing this up in an airport on the way out of town for a business trip. I just had some Buffalo wings. They were nothing more to me than a Buffalo sauce delivery system. There was a nice paste of sauce on the bottom of the plate when I was done. I wondered whether I could just suck it up through a straw and drink it. (In case you're wondering, propriety won out and I didn't attempt it. To my fellow Sea-Tac travellers: you're welcome.)

I cannot explain this craving. But right now, if I could eat Buffalo sauce for three meals a day, I probably would.

Om nom nom.

On Time

2010-01-18T22:31:00.003Z

Back to the Future had it wrong.

Time is linear. If time travel were possible, it would only happen within the context of a single timeline, which is to say that anything 'changed' in the past would actually just be part of the same timeline, which is to say that it wouldn't change at all.

You can't actually go back in time to kill your grandfather before your father was born.

However you could go back in time to arrange to buy stock in a company that did really well, and have the money all delivered on the same day. Say, like, several billion dollars. Preferably by dump truck for maximum dramatic effect.

Then you could use your money to devote your life to building the same time machine that you used to give yourself money in the first place.

In fact, I would very much like to do this.

No dump trucks have arrived at my house today.

From Genocidal Madman to Serial Killer

2010-01-17T18:39:00.003Z

There's a piece of wisdom among writers: Kill Your Darlings. I first encountered this adage in Stephen King's brilliant On Writing, and it's one of the best pieces of advice anyone's ever given me about writing. Sometimes writers become too attached to things they really like and just won't give them up. Sometimes, those darlings just aren't as good as we think and they need to be smothered in their sleep.

You might have noticed this blog isn't updated nearly as regularly as it used to be. In 2004, I made more than 600 updates. In 2008, I made 80. Last year, I made 11. And although I started on a personal project, I haven't written anything of consequence in the last couple of years either, darlings or otherwise.

It's not that I've been killing the occasional darling, it's that I've been engineering an active campaign of genocide against my creativity.

Of course I didn't see it that way, but the net result is the same. Stagnation. Devotion of my energy to things inconsequential. And an appalling slip in grammatical correctness that I'd love to chalk up to me being artistic in this post but cannot.

There's a lot of (re)new going on in my life right now. A major component of that for me is writing and tapping back into the thing I love the most, and one of the things I love about myself the most. It means going back in and finding some darlings and not just putting them against a wall and shooting them before they find themselves on the page. That's hardly fair is it?

A colleague of mine once told me that tomorrow is always too late. This is true, and this is why today I'm going to stop this horrible campaign of destruction against my darlings and instead go back to simply killing them on an as-needed basis, rather than the extermination of the entire darling race.

You can also expect more updates here.

One of the things I've felt this blog has lacked in the past is a certain degree of focus. I can't simply make it 'general' because I'm just not that interesting. I can't make it specific because it's already been my Puppet Show for so long that turning it into Jason's Subversive Puppet Show and Scotch Tasting Notes doesn't seem like it would work. So instead I will focus on what it says in the description: a writer re-igniting his love for the craft. I'm not sure what that will look like exactly but I hope it'll be interesting enough.

2010's the future. I may not have my flying cars yet or worlds to explore except Europa but I can at least say that there is the here and now and that my creativity has been on hold long enough.

2010. Now. Today. Because tomorrow is always too late.

Step by Step [UPDATED]

2009-10-10T13:51:00.002+01:00

A small lurch forward.

1728 / 50000 words. 3% done!

UPDATE: 7% is way better than 3%:

3691 / 50000 words. 7% done!

A Novella of 50,000 Words...

2009-09-20T13:18:00.001+01:00

Begins with the first thousand.

1056 / 50000 words. 2% done!

Where I've Been

2009-05-31T14:12:00.002+01:00

Lots of red on these maps.

visited 45 states (90%)

visited 13 states (5.77%)

The world map will have more red on it by the end of the year.

Interesting thing about the 50 states map: you can tell that my family liked to take road trips for vacations when I was young. I've somehow missed Mississippi and Alabama, and despite living in Washington never saw Montana.

Excerpt from Planets by Kate Rusby

2009-05-26T18:07:00.002+01:00

On nights like these
I could fly up to the sky above me.
Like Superman
I would change the course of earth below me.

Through the world I am wandering, wandering,
A soft breeze blowing, I am wandering now.
Through this world I am wandering, wandering.
These are the days I live now.

I can see
The planets are aligning for me.
And I dare not breathe for then
The clouds will come and then deny me.

A Game That Matters

2009-05-02T09:48:00.003+01:00

One of the members of the Alliterates pointed me towards this great editorial on The Escapist: How A Board Game Can Make You Cry. It's a really great look at what Brenda Brathwaite has been doing recently in terms of designing games that make you think - starting with a game about the Middle Passage she made to illustrate how horrific the slave trade was, so that her ten-year-old daughter could make an emotional (and logical) connection to the facts taught in her school.

The article then cites a game called Train:

Nazis have featured prominently in games for a long time, typically as the enemy, whether it was Wolfenstein's chaingun-wielding Hitler or the recent flood of World War II shooters on the market. Nazis are kind of like zombies in that they've become sort of an abstract enemy, relentlessly evil and fodder for headshots.

Very few, if any, games featuring Nazis ever touch on the Holocaust, and if they do it's usually some muscle-bound mook with guns liberating a death camp where you don't actually see the victims.

What makes Train - and, I would argue, any game whose mechanics make the audience think (Braid, I'm looking at you) - so interesting is that the connection it creates to its subject matter is both rawly emotional and rationally engaging. In the example about the African slave trade, a game mechanic involves the players arranging groups of slaves by tribe and family, and then picking up slaves by the fistful, so that the full impact of separation is both observed and felt. All that hard work - to work of building a life and a family - is laid to waste, and then the true 'game' begins.

There is an argument about whether games can be art. Things like Train and designers like Brenda Brathwaite prove beyond a doubt they can.

Curtains Up

2009-04-26T17:29:00.001+01:00

Performances of the Subversive Puppet Show will resume shortly, albeit at a reduced schedule. Thank you for bearing with the Management during these past few months.

Sonnet 138

2009-03-24T16:27:00.003Z

I realize this is just something I could share in RSS, but it's so beautiful I can't not post it here. Dave McKean imagines Shakepspeare's Sonnet 138 as an animated film.

25 Things Meme

2009-02-05T20:48:00.002Z

This is not a return to blogging, just reposting the Facebook meme here.

25 Things You May Not Know About Me

1. I like listening to Country music. Commercial country, old country, whatever. The cheesier the better. Hank Williams, Garth Brooks, Tim McGraw, Loretta Lynn, Brooks & Dunn, Carrie Underwood, Charlie Daniels – all on my iPod right now.

2. I am an Eagle Scout, and it is the one thing I have on my resume / CV from before college. It is also the oldest thing I have on my CV that isn’t my name, as I first put it on there when applying for a job in high school.

3. Although a flaming liberal in almost all of my opinions (by American standards, anyway) I believe strongly in the 2nd Amendment and the right to bear arms. Part of this comes from the belief that if there is a populist, communist or anarchist revolution, we stand a much better chance of success if we’re armed with fully automatic weapons.

4.I have suffered from (and been treated for) depression on and off for my adult life. In the last six months, I’m doing better than I have been since I was in my late teens. The prior six months were probably the worst in my life in this regard. If you’re depressed, seek counselling. It will help. I promise.

5. I thought Grand Theft Auto 4 was an unfun piece of shit. I thought Grand Theft Auto 3 was an unfun piece of shit. On the other hand, I thought Vice City and San Andreas were awesome. Go figure.

6. I called the last of the Final Five Cylons a year ago. I also used to infer from clues what mythical creatures or pulpy homages Mulder and Scully were facing on the X-Files before they were revealed. Often during the opening teaser.

7. I’ve been bungee jumping, and it was the closest thing I’ve had to a religious experience.

8. Speaking of, I envy people who have strong religious convictions as I have none whatsoever. It’s not that I disbelieve in a higher power (an atheist I am not), but I have seen no compelling argument for belief in one either – even though sometimes I desperately want to. One of my friends is a very devout Jew and many of my family members are devout Christians, and I look at their experiences and faith and wish I could believe something so strongly as well.

9. I enjoy playing through old classic adventure games from my youth. I play through Hero’s Quest and King’s Quest 6 at least once a year.

10. I was terrible with math in school. Algebra II was my worst subject (and as far as I made it down the Great Highway o’ Math), and was my only D in high school. The one exception to this was the semester in Geometry that focused entirely on proofs and theorems; during that time, I scored higher than 100% with all the extra credit. To this day I’m not sure why I was much better with Geometry.

11. I cannot abide working with people who I feel have nothing to offer me, especially when they are in positions of authority. I want to work with people from whom I can learn, or with whom I can be creative. When someone is neither, they’re wasting my time.

12. There was a point in my life when I watched Jerry Springer daily.

13. I own a full-on (and about 90% authentic, in terms of the materials and clothing patterns) pirate costume for cosplaying, but have never used it for cosplay – yet.

14. I have purchased more pairs of shoes for myself in the last year than I have in the previous seven.

15. My favourite superhero is either Captain America or Hellboy, and I like them both for many of the same reasons.

16. As a kid, I had strep throat a lot. I’m not sure how many times but if I had to hazard a guess it was thirty or so. I have never had it since I was about 13, despite having been exposed to it several times. I secretly believe this is because I am now immune to every strain of strep on the planet.

17. I have a recurring nightmare where my friends or family are in trouble, typically from some massive threat (zombies, war, etc.) and I’m trying to tell them to run or prepare and they ignore me until it’s too late. Yes, I’ve told my shrink about this nightmare.

18. My ideal video game is a sandbox-style Jurassic Park game, where you could play as a variety of dinosaurs as well as a human. Why someone hasn’t made this yet I don’t know. Dinosaurs! Guns! Vehicles! Missions! Come ON, people!!

19. I am an optimist, almost to a fault. My optimism has only increased since moving to London and seeing some of the incredibly nice things people have done for total strangers in such a large city.

20. The very first ‘adult’ (i.e., not intended for a younger audience) novel I read was either The Lord of the Rings or The Hunt For Red October – I cannot remember which, and I read them right around the same time.

21. I love watching horror movies but cannot watch them alone as I get genuinely terrified.

22. Although I’ve never made a secret about this, I don’t actively talk about it either. So a lot of people don’t know that I interned for Michael Moore on the second season of his TV show “The Awful Truth.”

23. Which is because it was my dream to become a filmmaker. I made my first movie when I was about 8 or so. I made movies throughout high school. Now, I’m in PR and occasionally I do PR for other people’s movies. Sigh.

24. Similar to #1, I also enjoy hardcore gangster rap, but only when it’s political in nature. I think Eminem’s political rhymes are some of the best rap of the past 10 years.

25. I enjoy memes like this and I was secretly hoping someone would send it to me so I could do it. In fact, I was probably going to do it anyway just for the hell of it.

Curtains Down

2009-02-01T17:48:00.004Z

This is going to be the last post on the Puppet Show for a while. Possibly quite a while. Here's why.

I have several things I'm trying to do with my life: sort some things out, get healthy, get into writing again. In fact, these have been goals of mine for some time now, and I have felt like I'm under pressure to do all of them and haven't been able to fully devote time to any of them - and the result is that I feel as though I've come up short of my goals. If I had spent one year concentrating 100% on getting healthy, than another year concentrating 100% on writing, I'd have another novel and I'd be a lot healthier.

So that is my new personal experiment, and if I have to prioritize things in my life my health is most definitely the most important thing for me. So the Show will be going on hiatus for a while while I concentrate more fully on my health. Eating well, and getting in shape.

I've registered for a 10k run in July. That's my short-term goal: to be healthy and fit enough to participate and finish. And I've got a ways to go.

I will still maintain my other blog, A Yankee In London, with tales of my life in L-town. But the Show will be down for at least six months. I am also going to mothball my current writing projects so I don't feel so pressured to complete dozens of things and end up completing none.

I've worked on this blog almost continuously for more than five years, and I will be back someday. But other things in life need to take precedence right now, otherwise I'll be in the exact same place in two years with the same general regrets and the same problems.

See you all on the flip side. Thanks for being my loyal Puppeteers.

Thought of the Day

2009-01-21T10:58:00.003Z

One of the most humbling moments of your life is when you realize there are books you will never read, games you will never play or finish, places you will never see, trails you will never hike, mountains you will never climb, stories you will never write. Planets you will never visit and conversations you will never have.

Accepting and even enjoying this seems to be a necessary phase of what the experts call 'growing up.'

Me? It just causes the landscape of my particular life to come into sharper focus, to enjoy the relationships and experiences already gone and those to come.

Peace In Our Time

2009-01-03T19:22:00.004Z

It is hard to avoid the steady flow of information about and from Israel and Palestine about the Gaza War, or the War on Gaza if you prefer. And I've tried. People bring it up in conversation, and my Twitter stream is practically humming with news, statistics, death tolls, opinions. Wasn't the web supposed to be an opt-in experience? Is there a browser plugin to simply block it all out?

Before you accuse me of burying my head in the sand, please understand: I have friends and family members all over the spectrum of this issue. Pro-Palestinian people who view Israel's very existence as the latest affront (or certainly the worst) in a long string of European imperialism in the Middle East. People who believe Israel should exist because the Jews are God's chosen people, and more importantly it must exist for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ to occur, and therefore support anything Israel does. Jewish people who are not violent or supportive of wars, but who see the very real need for Israel to defend itself against threats and terrorism. Other Jewish people who believe the Palestinians should be expelled once and for all to make Israel safe. And even other Jewish people who think that Israel's actions are wrong in this instance. And a whole host of people who don't know what to think.

I don't pretend to be an expert on Middle Eastern affairs, and I see validity in many of the positions above. There are many forces at work: the remaining fallout from imperialism both in Palestine and other parts of the Middle East; religious hatreds that are far beyond my understanding (on both sides); the history of the Jews' oppression by other powers; the Holocaust; Western and specifically American guilt and sympathy (again, on both sides); some fundamentalist Christians' exploitive support of Israel; people still living in refugee camps sixty-some years after they were forcibly removed from their homes by a UN mandate; the list goes on.

There is an incredibly compelling argument for Israel to defend itself against Hamas, and Hamas no doubt timed these recent attacks at a point when America's leadership is changing. But Hamas is not a government; it is a terrorist organization, or (perhaps a more appropriate analogy) - an organized crime syndicate. The reason Hamas receives so much support is that, like a mafia family, it does favors for people - it supports the building of schools, hospitals and infrastructure. It offers protection for people. And when people whose lives have been helped by Hamas are then in trouble or called upon to act, especially when they tend to view Israel as the cause of their troubles, it is not really a mystery why they are supported and loved among those who are or see themselves as oppressed.

So while Israel is well within her right to wage war on Hamas and defend herself, the question is what will this all do long-term. I challenged myself the other day to name one instance when a military power fighting a terrorist organization has actually succeeded in wiping it out. I drew a blank. I could list all the counter-examples, but is that really necessary? No. But I thought of something else that's interesting and worth mentioning here.

The UK fought its own long, protracted and extremely costly (in terms of money and lives) war against a much-loved and highly political terrorist organization who fought for the freedom of an area occupied by another power. The Irish Republican Army, in one form or another, carried on this fight for almost 100 years. You are reminded of this every time you look for a trash can on the Tube; they don't exist because they used to make such a nice place to deposit bombs. And yet, in 1997 after the Belfast Agreement, the terrorists stopped the killing - and they have laid down their arms, having won both political clout and a vote for Northern Ireland's independence (which did not pass - and they abided by that decision.)

It is not a perfect parallel of course, but the similarities are remarkable. And more importantly, while the UK government maintained that 'it did not negotiate with terrorists' in the public sphere, it was in fact engaged in negotiations with the IRA and various other Republican groups throughout the 1990s - negotiations that lead to the Belfast Agreement and the eventual end to terrorist activity by the Irish Republicans.

I could take a moral high ground and say that violence is wrong no matter what. I believe this. I could take the logical high ground and say that killing people - mothers, fathers, children, uncles, cousins - only creates hatred and resentment, the exact kinds of things that lead people to pick up guns, bombs and rocks and become terrorists. I also believe this, and I believe this is the exact reason why the war in Iraq was wrong (and justified for the wrong reasons.) I could harp on the historical example above, and say that the the only way to truly defeat terrorism is to listen to the reasons people are acting so horribly and give them a seat at the table and actually take action to address their concerns. I also believe this.

As the song says, nobody's right if everybody's wrong. Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King achieved great things through non-violent resistance. But the Middle East is neither Imperialist India or the American Civil Rights movement. The fact of the matter is, I could say a lot of things, and I have - but I don't know what's right. I don't know what the solution is here.

All I know is that something isn't working. Nobody's right, because goddamn everyone seems to be wrong here.

Maybe it's time to sit down and talk all this out like civilized people. Or at least start there.

Merry Christmas To All

2008-12-25T15:09:00.000Z

And to all a good night!

Reaffirmation

2008-12-05T22:44:00.003Z

Tonight one of my coworkers asked me if, because of being married at such a young age, I regretted missing the ability to date people in my 20s. After a moment of reflection, I answered quite honestly that I didn't.

It's not that the romanticized notion of being a bachelor doesn't appeal to me, but the fact of the matter is that I see my friends and coworkers struggling with their own relationships, trying to make them work and trying to overcome all the crazy little dramas and baggage we all bring into our interactions with other people, and I can't help but think how glad I am to not have to deal with that anymore. At least in the same way they are.

It's funny; at the end of the day, we are all good and well-meaning people who do the best we can with what we're handed, whatever the context of that might be. And so many of us choose to dwell on what we don't have or the idealized version of what we think we need or want that we simply forget to stop and enjoy where we are.

So if you're reading this, stop and take a moment to enjoy where you are. Because it's a great place, in its own way. Really.

Fallout 3

2008-12-03T07:11:00.002Z

I've been following the release of Fallout 3 for more than a year now. The game is out, I've played it all the way through once, and I might as well throw my opinion into the Internet's sludge pool about the game, since everyone else already has.

If you haven't finished the game, or don't want (minor) spoilers, you might want to read something else.

I kept my expectations for Fallout 3 firmly in check, not because I didn't enjoy Oblivion (I did, repetitive as it could be sometimes) but because of my history with Fallout and Wasteland, and - yes - the heritage of the series. If my expectations were low, then I couldn't be disappointed. I had my doubts about a lot of things about the game, but at the end of it I walked away feeling satisfied, and like I had a lot of fun. What more can you ask for?

Fallout 3 is shorter than Oblivion but somehow more engaging; the world seemed a little smaller as well, which helped everything have a more immediate feel to it. You quite literally start the game as your character comes out of the womb and in a pretty innovative starting sequence, you choose your gender, race and stats as your character grows up. You finish off your character by making choices in a standardized test, or you can simply do the gamer thing and assign yourself some skills and start rocking.

The main quest involves you searching for your dad, and I suspect you can tear through it pretty quickly if you ignore all the other stuff going on around you. But why would you want to do that? While the world may be small it is very lush (as lush as a post-nuclear wasteland can be, anyway) and it seems like there is always something new and unique to do and discover. There's also a hell of a lot of latitude as you go through the world to approach things on your own terms, and I suspect I only scratched the surface of the depth of some of the puzzles and areas in the game.

The final mission is really awesome, until the end which seems almost anticlimactic. I was a little disappointed that the game forces you to stop playing at the end as well; there was a whole world out there for me to keep exploring and I wanted to see the rest of it, damn it!

The Good

VATS. Action-based RPGs aren't my thing. I prefer to stop, look around, assess, and make decisions in combat. Oblivion felt more like a shooter than an RPG when it came down to brass tacks. VATS was an excellent solution to this problem.
The depth. There was a lot to do in this game, and so much of it purely optional or fun that the world felt more fleshed out than Oblivion did. Add to that locations that had enough variety to feel fresh as well.
The setting. It's Fallout. And this was a Fallout game, no doubt about it.

The Bad

Herding. I felt herded at times, especially when I was supposed to be travelling through the city and I couldn't just walk through the streets or over piles of rubble, I had to run through some predetermined dungeon funhouses to get there. Ugh.
Slightly unpolished. There are some strange things - I noticed this the most during the final battle, when I had to load the game several times just to get the robot to walk the path correctly (once, he got stuck in the air and wouldn't come down. No, he doesn't fly.) Of course, comparing Fallout 3's polish to the absolutely unplayable state of Fallout 2 when it released if kind of a joke in and of itself.
The plot. The plot never changes. I'm going to go fanboy for a second, but my biggest pet peeve of this game was that it was a frankenplot of previous Fallout games. And evil overseer who turns you out of the vault? A quest for water? The need for a GECK? The Brotherhood as mysterious allies, the Enclave as antagonists? All straight from other Fallout games, which were set on the other coast. I wanted to see new organizations, new enemies, new problems to solve. Not the same stuff in a different setting with a different game engine.
Power. Last but not least, a tiny bugbear of mine. How the hell was there still juice running through the destroyed DC power grid to power vending machines and neon signs in the metro system? In my best comic shop guy voice: as if.

Fallout 3 was fun, and apart from my pretty minor complaints an excellent entry into the series. The previous games were not perfect either, and this one can join its slightly flawed brethren on my shelf any day.

War. War never changes.

Scotch Review: The Isle of Jura Single Malt

2008-11-30T09:30:00.005Z

The bottle declares that this is 'The only [aged 10 years] single malt Scotch whisky from the Isle of Jura' and that the distillery was founded in 1810. Fair enough, but my observation is that this is the beginning and the end of what this whisky knows about itself.

I picked this up because it was only a couple of pounds ~~cheaper~~ more expensive than Famous Grouse at Waitrose and I needed a Scotch for a recipe, so I figured: the price was right and if it turned out to be terrible I'd just use it as a cooking Scotch. And as a cooking Scotch, it's excellent: strong and maintains its flavor in meatballs. But that isn't why I like Scotch and everything that makes it a fine ingredient makes it seem very bottom-shelf as far as a sipping Scotch.

The problem is that there's too much going on, and it's strong everywhere. I've found the Scotches I like the most often have one or two very strong qualities - peatyness, etc. - whereas Jura just seems to be strong all over and no one quality wins out over the other.

Still, it does make a fine ingredient for Scotch-infused meatballs.

UPDATE: I realized I reversed the cost above: it was actually a couple of pounds more expensive than Famous Grouse.

Survivors Episode Two

2008-11-26T21:04:00.002Z

On its second episode Survivors started to come into its own, whatever that might be. I am far more positive and optimistic towards the show than Quiet Earth's Survivors review and I'm holding out to see where they'll take it next. The acting isn't all that great, but neither is it terrible. Compared to a show like Jericho where they have 20 episodes to get into a story arc and develop the post-apocalyptic world, Survivors has all of six episodes and they seem to be using them well.

Character development started in earnest in this episode, with Al, Tom and Greg all going their own ways. Tom's turning out to have more depth than I expected, and although the secondary characters are essentially two-dimensional tropes that I can identify from a mile away they're still interesting.

Any post-apocalyptic story that begins before things go to hell needs to do a good job of portraying the steady breakdown of society (which they're doing) and the potential rebuilding (which they're hinting at.) The only thing is, it feels like they're doing it in lurches and bursts rather than as something gradual; there are some significant plot holes and the subplots are like tertiary brush strokes that bleed through the canvas and stick out more than they should.

I actually thought this was a better episode than the first, and it looks like there's going to be some meta-story going on behind the scenes as well, with the scientists locked in their holes. The interesting thing will be to see how the series goes when there are no more shops and warehouses to loot, when people like the guy with the shotgun end up doing more than driving around in a Land Rover, and how our plucky little group of civilization-loving survivors deals with those developments.

Next Tuesday, more action!

Survivors!

2008-11-24T13:05:00.003Z

Not the show where people compete to stay on the island, but the BBC TV series Survivors about a band of people who survive a super-flu that wipes out 90% of the world's population in a matter of a couple of weeks. It's like The Stand without the good versus evil - at least, not yet.

Survivors is based on a series that ran on the BBC back in the 1970s, and has been updated for modern audiences. The first episode opened right as the 'flu crisis' was starting to destroy Europe. After a period of two weeks, the flu has wiped out the aforementioned 90% of the population (although it actually seems much higher than that, with London largely devoid of all life at all in some shots.) Infrastructure breaks down, power and water and cell phone service shut off, and people have to start thinking about living for themselves.

Spoilers may follow...

What I liked:

They didn't spend a lot of time on the apocalypse itself. The show was called Survivors, not End of the World, so that was nice.

They trotted out some pretty tired tropes (the Group Mom, the Quest for the Missing Family Member, the Jaded Scientist, the May-Be-Bad, May-Not-Be criminal, the Girl Whose Mind is Broken by Death, the Loner Survivalist) but managed to update them pretty well. The scene where the kid gets up from praying in the mosque and realizes everyone around him is dead was a memorable 'stay with you' scene.

Lots of strong women.

They're kicking off the survival part pretty fast, and it looks like that will be the focus of the series, at least in the short-term. Reminds me of early (great) and middle (greater) Jericho episodes.

The scene at the petrol (gas, for you American Puppeteers) station was unexpected and awesome. More like that, please. Pleasantly surprise me and I will continue to support you.

What I Didn't Necessarily Like:

It was a Very British Apocalypse. Which is to say, the bodies didn't decompose, there weren't very many of them and things were orderly. People literally died in queues waiting for medical assistance (this is even funnier to an American, I think.) But I expected London to be in flames by the end of it. I realize that part of that was budgetary limitations, but if you want a lesson on what would happen in a sudden apocalypse, watch the first 10 minutes of the remake of Dawn of the Dead: that's the new standard.

The tropes were a little, well, tropish. My wife and I took turns calling out what would happen next, and like the X-Files, we were right the vast majority of the time. A little less predictability would be nice.

Apparently the ratings weren't all that great, so here's hoping the show doesn't turn into another Jericho for me.

Thoughts:

The show is off to a very strong start, audience numbers notwithstanding, and the previews for the next episode look even stronger. I'll stick with the show and keep writing about it as it develops. Next episode airs 9pm on Tuesday (tomorrow) on the Beeb...

Fight Knight Round 2

2008-11-22T13:34:00.003Z

Recently I wrote a blog post comparing The Dark Knight and Fight Club, and Roger and GZ both gave me a run for my money (in a good way) in the comments. The essence of the original post was:

Both Fight Club and The Dark Knight are cultural artefacts, capturing something essential about the sociological contexts in which they were made. Fight Club features a vaguely anarchist anit-hero that attempts to overcome a similarly vague sense of ennui through various small acts of terrorism (and in the end, detonating a series of empty buildings of credit card companies.) Dark Knight's villain is a far more sinister psychopath, who thinks nothing of taking innocent lives in a quest of seemingly senseless rage.

After the discussion from the last post and having had the pleasure of watching The Dark Knight again since, I think my prior conclusions may have been wrong, specifically about the Joker's motives and what that means.

Understand: the Joker is an unreliable narrator at best, and his story does change based on who he's talking to. When speaking to the gangsters, he puts things in the context of money and power. When he's talking to Harvey Dent, he becomes the 'dog chasing cars.' His 'how I got my scars' story changes every time he tells it, and in the end how he got the scars isn't important, because his motivation doesn't necessarily stem from a logical (to us, if not him) reaction to something in his past. There's a habit of trying to assign meaning and motivation to characters based on past experiences, and there's a good deal of scientific evidence to back up why we do this; even over-the-top real-life sociopaths or serial killers like Ed Gein or John Wayne Gacy have troubled pasts, events that influence their later descents into madness. No doubt the Joker had similar experiences, but the film pointedly decides not to explore them, as the point is more than his plan is somewhat more motiveless. If anything, whatever he experienced separated him so greatly from reality that his view of humanity is of a species no better than animals, where the rules of civilization are just lies constructed over the massive id lurking beneath the surface.

This is most obvious in his conversation with Batman at the end of the film, but the pivotal moment comes before, when the Joker is talking to Batman in the interrogation room. Batman has but one rule: no killing. But, the Joker tells him, he'll have to take one life to save another - either Rachael or Harvey will have to die (and indeed, one of them does.) But this isn't Batman's choice per se, it's more of a Sophie's Choice moment. That one will die is inevitable, and Batman's finger isn't on the trigger - he just decides who will die (incorrectly, it turns out, but nevermind.)

Rewind even further to the beginning of the film, when Bruce and Alfred are talking about Rachael. Alfred asks if Bruce will have him (Alfred) followed on his day off. 'If you ever took one I might,' Bruce quips. 'Know your limits, Master Wayne,' Alfred responds seriously. 'Batman has no limits,' Bruce replies.

Except he clearly does have a limit, and that is what the Joker is trying to push. His murdering cops and innocents (and innocent cops) is nothing more than a function of trying to get Batman to break this last limit. Harvey Dent was relatively simple to turn into Two-Face, but Batman's single principle turns out to be far harder, and it's clear that this fascinates the Joker. If anything - 'we're going to be doing this forever,' as he says, is his motivation. His various plots may be nothing more than ways to get at Batman and make him break, because if he can do that then truly everyone is corruptible. Harvey was Gotham's 'White Knight' in public and it was important that he not fall, despite privately doing so, and conversely Batman could be the 'Dark Knight,' tarnished when he needed to be, because in the end the only people to whom it matters whether Batman is a killer are the Joker and Batman himself. This is, in a way, the 'point' of the film but it's worth clarifying here.

So while Tyler Durden is anarchy and action for the eventual sake of liberation and being constructive (in his view, anyway), the Joker has no such noble pretensions; in fact, his ultimate goal doesn't concern people at all, but merely Batman himself as a kind of plaything for the Joker's own amusement. So what does that say about us, that our villains have reached a point where the events in their lives that influence how the ended up no longer matter, where their motivations are personal and a body count in the hundreds is quite literally collateral damage? I could make some meaningless political connection, or try again to connect it to the military-industrial complex, but I don't necessarily think either would be correct or honest. I just don't know. Instead, I'm going to leave the question open; Fight Club didn't make sense to me in its sociological context until several years later, and I reckon that The Dark Knight will be similar.

So watch this space in five years' time for an additional post on the subject.

The Only Thing I Want For Christmas

2008-11-20T21:29:00.002Z

I've already told the most important person, but I should note this for the rest of you Puppeteers: one of the formative experiences in my life, Free to Be... You and Me is being re-released for its 35th anniversary. I wouldn't have known except for Cory Doctorow's post on BoingBoing about it.

Free to Be... You and Me taught me a lot about tolerance, understanding and being yourself. I am not kidding when I say that it had a profound impact on my life and who I am as a person.

Here's a bit from the movie adaptation, which is one of the few bits I can still recite large parts of even though the last time I saw it was more than twenty years ago.

Yeah, it's that good.

WizKids: RIP

2008-11-14T12:47:00.002Z

If you're tuned into the gaming industry, you probably already know that WizKids closed its doors permanently on Monday. The word from inside is that employees showed up, the announcement was made at 10 am and they were told to be out of the building by 2.

I knew very few people still left at WizKids (and in fact, there were very few people left, thanks to Topps' repeated layoffs, cutbacks and - yes - horrid and ludicrous mismanagement.) The news hit me a bit like hearing an old friend had died. I joined the ranks of HeroClix fans who crashed HCRealms' servers by trying to get some news, and talking about what just happened.

Topps' announcement that they were trying to find a new home for HeroClix sounded pretty disingenuous, but as things have started to shape up over the last few days it actually looks like it might happen - there is an organized effort by former employees to try to buy the property and license, and oddly enough it might actually work. All the more power to the people trying to pull this off.

I had long ago prepared for WizKids being closed. The proverbial writing has been on the wall for some time, and the company as I knew it was already dead. And that's really too bad, because WizKids was as close as I've ever come to sharing an experience with a bunch of kindred spirits rather than just showing up to grind away at a job for clients I could sometimes care less about. It got me out of Oklahoma as well, so there's more than a few reasons to look back fondly on my time there.

Rest in peace, WizKids. Even at the end you were still much-loved.

The Rise and Fall of the McCain Campaign

2008-11-09T13:50:00.002Z

So where did the other side go wrong?

I'll be honest: I've been writing this post in my head on and off for the last month. Even today, I was thinking of new things I wanted to put in it just as Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber are beginning to fade into Trivial Pursuit-style obscurity.

But it's an extremely relevant question: where did the Right go Wrong?

It didn't start during the McCain campaign. Or even the Bush presidency. Or even during the so-called Neoconservative Revolution during the early Clinton days.

It started around 1931 or so, just as America was dipping its feet in the last major economic crisis. In addition to electing FDR, it was the first time there was a Democrat majority in the House in 11 years. In 1933, the Democrats took the Senate - and held control of both branches (with two exceptions) until 1981.

This meant that any Republic president until (and oftentimes during) Reagan had to fight and compromise to put their platforms into action.

It also meant an entrenched Washington ruling class of politician, the kind that almost personified the growth of government and the taking of kickbacks.

Apart from the Nixon administration and the Eisenhower years, Republicans were often forced to concede points to the entrenched Democrats; the Goldwater Republicans compromised and dealed when they could, but they could never quite secure the power they needed for any real change. Until Reagan, of course.

But Reagan represented the first stages of change in the Republican party, one that culminated in the Neoconservative revolution during the 1994 elections that put the Gingrich machine into power. For the first time, the Democrat machine was weak but the Republicans still needed a way to appeal to 'swing voters' who were simply used to punching Democrat and voting along party lines. That's when they looked towards so-called 'social conservative' causes; things that traditionally belonged to Democrats, especially in the South. Johnson was not kidding when he said that passing the Civil Rights Act would 'lose [Democrats] the South for a generation;' the surprising part was that it took Republicans so long to figure this out.

But they did and adopted many social conservative causes; anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, anti-flag burning, pro-institutionalized prayer in schools, pro-censorship, pro-guns, anti-science (or pro-intelligent design, but anti-science is more accurate.) Apart from abortion, which depending on your belief system involves the taking of innocent life, these are not life and death issues for many; they are simply the kind of thing people focus on when economics, complex international relations or other major crises are either irrelevant to them, unimportant or too hard to understand. I'm generalizing but the point is that none of them are important causes in and of themselves and very rarely affect the daily lives of people.

But putting measures on ballots to bring out the people who do care about such things will also enfranchise segments of the voting population who might not have been motivated to vote otherwise, and through clever media manipulation (and say what you will about the so-called Liberal Mainstream Media, the Republicans are masters of media control, even now) their candidates are associated with these causes - so the social conservatives vote for the Republican candidates. Wham. Instant Republican voting block.

So the party of business owners and middle-class office workers concerned about keeping their taxes small adopted groups of people who wanted to see American law replaced by the first five books of the Hebrew Bible (among others.) It was an extremely beneficial relationship at first and I don't think anyone can argue that the first few years of the Neocon revolution, in which Clinton and Gingrich balanced the budget and our economy was chugging along nicely, were some of the best in the last thirty years. Compromise will do that. Take note.

Sometime during the late 1990s - and I had a front-row seat for this in the middle of the Bible belt - there was a subtle shift of power. Suddenly the business owners and middle class were nudged out in favor of the other side of the party, the hardcore religious side. It was a gradual process, but somehow the adopted messages became the real messages and fiscal responsibility and smaller government became the adopted messages to keep the so-called 'base' part of the party. The election of candidates like Rick Santorum, who equated homosexuality to child molestation and bestiality (in an interview published April 23, 2003 in the USA Today if you want to look it up) and their subsequent elevation to high levels of leadership in the Republican party was the most obvious indication of this shift.

There's something else important at work here; these voters are often motivated by fear. Fear of the blacks or Hispanics moving into their neighborhoods. Fear of immigrants taking their jobs. Fear of homosexuals who will prey on their children. Fear that God may forsake them if they don't fight for prayer in schools or the teaching of anti-science doctrines. When I said that the Republican machine was brilliant at media manipulation, part of what I meant is that they learned how to read, use and more importantly manipulate this fear.

So when the Bush administration started rearranging the Federal Government after 9/11, when fear was at an all-time high, people barely noticed that the Goldwater ideals had been flushed so far down the toilet Saddam might have waited for them to pop out the other side. Security meant that government could - and did - grow if it meant we'd be safe. It meant that basic rights we've enjoyed from the very beginning of our nation have been taken away by the Patriot Act in the name of keeping us secure.

Except chinks started to appear in this fear-armor. Hurricane Katrina and the debacle of the federal response to it or when the economy tanking at the same time a $700 'economic stimulus check' looks like a poke in the eye. And something else happened. The same middle-class workers and small business owners who were the Republican party's main voting base started to look around and go 'what the fuck is going on here?' As did more than a few swing voters who came along for the ride.

I've always said McCain should have been the Republican party's nominee in 2000, and not only because he was set to win until Karl Rove and his vileness quite literally destroyed his campaign by insinuation (among other things) that McCain's adopted daughter was conceived out of wedlock. McCain is not like the others; he's much more of the old school Republican, and at one time most certainly a maverick. He was in part responsible for one of the best pieces of legislation passed in the last ten years, the McCain-Feingold bill. And his nomination among Republicans this year was indicative of the fact that many of them were starting to reject the center-stage politics of fear the Neocons have so fully embraced.

Sadly his defeat seems to be directly related to that very thing. The selection of Sarah Palin as vice-president was a cynical move on two levels; they thought they would pick up some of Hillary Clinton's supporters just because Palin was a woman, and they thought they'd appeal to the far-right base because of Palin's politics. They did. They succeeded. But in so doing, they alienated the other half of the party, the dog that has been wagged by the Neocon social conservative Santorum-like tail for so long.

And here's why McCain failed, plain and simple. People are tired of the social conservative nonsense. Gay rights has come along quite nicely in the last 20 years, despite the efforts of people like Santorum. There's still no flag burning amendment, and abortion is still legal - this despite years of Neocon control of the Presidency and Congress. And the economic situation looks more like the Democrats of the early 1980s rather than the party of Goldwater and fiscal responsibility. I think the lights are on, and the roaches scattered.

The ultimate example of this to me was during a McCain rally - I tried to save the video, but don't have it, but it's on YouTube - when someone at the crowd yells 'kill him!' about Obama. McCain steps out of character for a moment and says 'no, you know what, he's a great guy and an honorable Senator' and is booed by his own crowd. He didn't want to deal with the pets of the fiscal conservatives, the people Republicans brought along for the ride who are one generation away from the cross-burners who fought Martin Luther King. I think, quite frankly, it really pissed him off that he had to try to appeal to those people and in the end he alienated those who wanted a maverick by going after the people to whom what two consenting adults do in their own bedrooms is the most important reason to go to the ballot box.

The post-election meltdowns on conservative blogs, on Fox News (Hannity has a countdown to 2012 ticket on his show), on message boards and no doubt in FW>FW>FW>FW> emails across America has been truly representative of how divided the Republicans are. They're literally attacking and destroying each other; the well-honed far-right smear machine is now poised to launch Operation Leper against McCain campaign staff that dared speak out against Palin's lack of ability to be president should something happen to the 72-year-old bypass patient candidate. And Restate.com is not some far-right screed blog like Free Republic; it's as mainstream as you can get in right-wing circles.

The anti-Obama rhetoric is coming out in droves, and frankly this may be the best thing for Republicans as they try to regroup. They have something else to fear: two out of three branches of government controlled by the other party. The party is going to realign itself, and it's not clear if the two sides will come back together and if they do who will start wagging whom. Will they elect another Bush in the name of social conservativism who will make another mockery of everything Goldwater stood for? Or will they put someone like McCain out there instead?

Consider this: Obama is more conservative than Richard Nixon. Let that sink in. On a political scale, Obama's policies are more conservative than Nixon's. Seriously. Obama is more conservative than Nixon. And this is the guy the fearmongers think is going to turn America into Stalinist Russia.

Will the Goldwaters come and work with Obama? Or will the militia movements from the 1990s resurface and the Republican tail head for the hills?

It'll be an interesting next couple of years.

Yes We Did

2008-11-05T11:02:00.003Z

I'm still in shock a little. Is this real? It seems to be. I've been so used to not winning, I kind of forgot what winning feels like.

To say this is surreal is an understatement, but I feel vindicated. Not because I feel that 'haha, we showed you guys, we beat you!' But because, for once, people turned out and chose hope and dignity over cynicism and playing on people's fears. If there's one thing that sticks with me throughout this election – and indeed American politics for the last decade – is that there has been a push-and-pull between those who tell us we have to be afraid, that we need them to protect us, that we need to walk with God otherwise Satan's forces (in whatever form) will defeat us; and those who take our hands and say 'let's do this together, let's work to build a better future.'

I've always been an optimist. Angela reminded me that I wrote way back in 2004 that I thought Obama would one day be president. I'm glad it has come to pass because it represents the first triumph of the desire for change and hope over the rule of fear and exploitation that has been the hallmark of the neoconservative movement.

I don't think McCain necessarily represented this, but some of his supporters certainly did. There are some especially choice quotes floating around right-wing websites and forums this morning, many of which are simply not worth repeating, linking to or even acknowledging apart from being the reactionary rants of people who just lost an election (and hey, I've been guilty of that myself in the past.) I'll compose a post later about where I think McCain went wrong, because I have something to say about that.

But right now, I'm still stuck in surreal mode. I wanted to run down the Tube car this morning high-fiving everyone there (good way to stick out as the American!) I bought all the newspapers so I have headlines to remember this day when I'm old, because this is history. I want to remember. I want to remember what it feels like to be part of a movement against cynicism, a movement for hope, united if not in geography then in spirit with my fellow Americans and indeed the rest of the world who looks to America as a symbol of the best of all possibilities.

Moving abroad has taught me that the American dream is not dead, whether it means working to try to better your family, a black man becoming president thanks in part to the votes of the children of people who were slaves, or the symbol of freedom that America still represents to the rest of the world even after all these years and mistakes. People are ultimately good and want the best for themselves, their children and the human race as a whole: I firmly and wholeheartedly believe this.

That is why I feel vindicated. Because yes, we did.

Just Woke Up

2008-11-05T04:52:00.002Z

4:52 AM, November 5, London time.

Read the headlines.

Thank God.

Jericho: And So It Ends

2008-11-04T21:25:00.002Z

This weekend I bid an old friend goodbye. It was already departed; long departed, really. I was holding onto its memory as a little piece of hope and a way to preserve the effort that went into giving it a second lease on life.

I've blogged a whole lot about Jericho before here, including how much I enjoyed its excellent narrative, the fan effort to save the show for a second season after the first season's cliffhanger, and CBS' decision to actually renew the show for seven more episodes. I think it was pretty obvious at the time that those seven episodes were a bit of a 'Hail Mary' - a way to shut fans up, to stop the boxes of nuts arriving at CBS headquarters, and (thankfully) to give the narrative its much-needed closure.

In the meantime I've done a lot of things: moved to London, convinced other people to watch the show, even sat down at the same table as the executive at CBS who made the decision to renew the show (her name is Nancy T., and she's exceptionally cool) and discussed the nuts campaign with her. But what I never did until this weekend was watch the rest of the second season. I saw the first three episodes, then I stopped.

Why? The episodes move really fast, and almost all of them are cliffhangers themselves. I loved the show. Why wouldn't I watch?

Because I didn't want it to be over.

I enjoy the journey as much as I enjoy the destination, and with Jericho it was easier to leave it sitting on my table than to watch the last three hours of the show and complete it. I vaguely knew what would happen by reading summaries on the Internet, but it was still an unreal abstraction.

This weekend though I thought I'd go ahead and bid Jericho goodbye.

I'm glad I did. The last seven episodes form a hell of a good story arc. The show takes a decidedly different turn, heading into 24 territory for a little while. I wanted more of the small-town stuff that made the first season so great, and that drew me into the show in the first place, but I really liked where they took the show as far as the connections they drew between the plot and historical contexts. (I won't spoil it for you, it was a pretty nifty reveal.) It was a satisfying ending, and although I wanted the show to continue I was content with the story as it was.

I actually felt very similar to how I felt when another cultish favorite show of mine ended, Carnivale. The story could be further developed - but it didn't need to be. The characters can live on in imagination, or you can simply take their story as a start-to-finish plot, like a nice book you come back to read from time to time.

Reckon I'll be doing just that in a little while.

Thanks for all the awesomeness, Jericho. You will be missed, gone but not forgotten.

Go Vote!

2008-11-04T17:43:00.003Z

What are you waiting for? Why are you reading this stupid blog? Go vote already!

I'm Only Doing This Once

2008-11-03T16:12:00.001Z

Dear Conservatives,

I'm writing you to tell you something very important.

In the past, I have been called many things by you. A homosexual, or a 'queer lover' for supporting gay rights. I LIEberal, insinuating I am a liar because I'm a liberal. A DEMONcRAT, insinuating I'm a demon and a rat because I vote democrat. Among other things. My beliefs are based on a lifetime of experiences - my own life - and firmly held moral convictions about right and wrong and the value and sanctity of human life and dignity. You have slandered me because of my lack of firm belief in a specific Christian God, been called a coward and a pussy because I have argued for finding peaceful alternative solutions to problems other than fighting, and been made fun of for supporting the ACLU, an organization which ironically exists only to defend our First Amendment rights to call each other names (and have rational discourse.)

You know what? That's all OK. I've been discussing video games and politics on the Internet since I was dialing into Prodigy in 1990. That's a long time: longer than some of you calling me these things have been alive. I have a thick skin and frankly I believe that a plurality of opinions makes for good discourse and ultimately good compromise, which is the basis of American democracy in the first place. If we can't troll each other at least a little bit, what's the point?

But I will say this: you guys way overstepped the line with questioning our patriotism for opposing the Iraq war. You called us traitors to America for daring to oppose Bush and question whether the war was justified and whether we were being mislead by the administration into the way. That's right, you called us traitors. I realize that not all of you did this, and I realize that there was a certain fervency sweeping the nation at the time. But the whole 'if you're not with us, you're against us' thing hurt. Because the reason we questioned the war and questioned Bush was our patriotism and love of our country, and our support for our troops. We don't want America associated (any more than it already is) with unnecessarily meddling in foreign affairs, and we certainly don't want to see our friends who enlisted in good faith sent to fight wars for the wrong reasons.

We'll never see eye to eye on this, and believe me there's part of me that looks at the polls right now and thinks, well, it's pretty much going to be Obama. I'm not celebrating early, but I'm what you might call cautiously optimistic. And there's a part of me that is enjoying watching conservatives self-destruct and bicker and fight amongst themselves, and wildly accuse Obama of this and that (the latest bit about his not actually being born in the United States is pure Rove). The hand-wringing over how he's going to turn the US into something resembling Soviet Russia is pretty funny, the accusations of him being a radical Islamic sleeper agent are hilarious, and the racism that's being exposed among Republicans (not all of you, but the fringe is certainly coming out of the woodwork) is frankly a little freaky.

But there's another part of me that thinks this: turnabout is going to be fair play. But you know what? It isn't. And here's why. It's not going to be wrong to criticize Obama's tax plans. They should be questioned and inspected and not simply rubber-stamped. It won't be wrong to speak out against the President, against the Democratic majority in Congress, against the government in general. Because as Americans this is our right. This is (one of the reasons) why my ancestors left oppressive environments in Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire, this is why your ancestors came over, and when you talk about American soldiers protecting our freedoms, that is the freedom they are fighting to protect.

I'm not going to call you a traitor for questioning the President. I'm not going to question your patriotism for challenging him, for making him own up and be honest, and if you don't like his answers I won't call you names for voicing your discontent. That, my friends, is your right and it is a right I would fight and die for you to keep.

So call me names if you'd like, LIEberal or DEMONcRAT or coward or traitor. Knock yourselves out. And I'd fully expect, if we win on the 4th, for there to be a bit of celebrating on our side - we've had eight years of your guy, and frankly he's kind of run things into the ground. But you will not hear from me any name-calling or insinuations that you are anti-American because you are exercising your American rights should you question us, should we actually manage to win.

As I said, I'm only doing this once, and that's the closest I'll come to gloating.

This Post Is Unique

2008-10-31T22:46:00.005Z

This post also breaks completely new ground for me.

It is the first post to this blog I'm writing on an open-source operating system on a computer I own.

After several weeks of research inspired in no small part by my read through The Pirate's Dilemma earlier this year, I took the plunge, partitioned my laptop's hard drive and installed the new release of Ubuntu, a version of Linux.

Linux is a completely free piece of software, and what 'open source' means is that the code is freely available to distribute and alter, as long as you agree to distribute your altered code. So anyone can work to improve it and make it better. Think of it a little bit like Wikipedia: a whole lot of minds working on various parts of a project to try to improve it, and while not everything will be an improvement, it eventually gets there.

There are several reasons one would consider switching to Linux. Security: not really a problem, since my home wireless network is locked down tight and viruses are only a problem online like they are in real life - avoid the scuzzy back-alleys of the Internet and you're fine. Stability: also not really a problem for me. Computers crash, hardware goes out, it happens. Microsoft sucks: well, they're my client so I can't really claim that and I know it's really more of a bureaucratic institution than anything intentionally evil. I'd considered a Mac, but the only thing worse than closed source computer software (which OSX is), is closed hardware. You require me to buy my RAM only from your overpriced store? Go to hell.

But here's the crux of why I switched. Because open source, like Wikipedia, is an entirely different business model and one that I firmly believe is on the rise as more and more of us migrate to the cloud. Old business models are based on consumption, from the end user and from the corporation itself. A company must grow. Right? Maybe. What happens when it doesn't, or when it grows in a different manner? Can a company not only give away its product for free, but give away the secrets to how its product is made for free and let people make changes as they see fit?

Apparently it can be done.

To be perfectly honest, from a practical point of view, this is an experiment. I don't expect to use Linux all of the time, and I know I won't be able to play a lot of my games in Linux so I'll be back in Windows when necessary. But for most of my computing tasks - writing, surfing the Internet, listening to music - there's no reason not to at least try it out.

Oddly enough my tipping point came from a piece of software that can't even run on Linux yet: Google's Chrome browser. I'm a hardcore Firefox user and have been for ages, but I've been doing about 95% of my browsing in Chrome lately because I like the interface and its speed better, despite not being able to do some of the things I want it to do. And I realized that if I was willing to learn a new browser (which is where I spend most of my time on any given computer anyway), then there was no reason not to try something new on the operating system front.

I'm still learning my way around but I like it a lot so far. It's very fast and slick, and so far has done everything I need it to do with ease. I can easily dual-boot back to Windows if I need it. If I end up getting a new laptop this winter, one of the first things I'm going to do with it is put Ubuntu on it as well.

Bob and Angela - you guys ought to be proud.

A Game That Matters

2008-10-26T08:21:00.002Z

Normally I wouldn't spend an entire blog post talking about one Xbox Live Arcade game, but in this instance I'm going to make a massive exception. I pulled out Braid the other night and finally finished it. And I'm happy to say I did it about 99% on my own, without looking at a walkthrough (that last 1%, well…)

Much has been made of Braid's great puzzles, ambiguous plot, amazing look and feel and innovative gameplay so rather than parrot what I've read other places, I wanted to talk a little bit about why I liked it so much. Which was all of those things, but more.

The guys at Penny Arcade referred to Braid non-ironically as 'a game that matters,' and I agree although not because the plot itself is anything that groundbreaking. Don't get me wrong, the plot is great, a puzzle unto itself and is a Nautilus shell spiraling inward with layers of meaning and interpretation (just look at the various attempts to explain the plot online for proof of that.) But the narrative structure itself is what's so groundbreaking and ultimately satisfying about Braid.

At its heart, the game is a traditional platformer. The time mechanic is cool, but isn't exactly 100% original (Prince of Persia: Sands of Time did something like this as well, as a way to fix mistakes, much like in Braid.) But Braid does something no other game has managed yet: it takes the platformer mechanics – including the time-rewind bits and other parts – and actually makes them part of the narrative itself. POP: SoT anticipated this but never fully followed through, and Braid takes it and cements it as a central part of the game.

I'd compare it to a television narrative or play that broke the fourth wall. Doing it once or twice can be funny or make a dramatic point, but when it becomes part of the narrative itself it's something totally different. The best literary analogue I can think of is a live performance of Copenhagen by Michael Frayn, where the audience becomes part of the play's narrative itself.

The thing that's surprising about Braid isn't that the platformer has been changed so elegantly into a piece of the narrative itself, but that it hasn't been done sooner. You could argue that this is what video games – if you take the 'games as art' route, which I don't see any reason not to – have always done. The narrative relies 100% on user input, on decision-making or at the very least pushing a stick left and right to make a character move around. And yet somehow it was always a secondary element to the plot of a game, apart from RPGs that relied heavily on user decisions (Fallout, Torment) or simply 'progressing the story' by moving a character closer to his goal.

Braid even plays with this concept, because as Tim (the main character) progresses through the game his 'goal' gets farther and farther away. I'm not going to spoil it in case you want to play, but suffice to say that even the 'push your joystick to move the character closer to his goal' mechanic becomes subverted and even an important part of Braid's narrative structure – in both traditional and altered forms.

So check Braid out on Xbox Live Arcade or on the web. It's the highest-rated game on XBLA and for good reason. It's a game that matters, because it sets a damn high standard for what can be done with video games, even platformers that may not seem like the most obvious venue for storytelling. I can't wait to see what Braid inspires.

Knight Club

2008-10-21T20:00:00.003+01:00

I was discussing art with the Beautiful Competition over a lovely dinner of Italian food, pink Champagne and lemon gelato last evening (it's a difficult life, isn't it?) and we got on the subject of film. I've been thinking a lot about The Dark Knight lately, which I've reviewed before, as a cultural touchstone or artefact: that is, something that captures a certain kind of zeitgeist. I realized that I like Dark Knight for many of the same reasons I like another artefact film: Fight Club. They're excellent films to examine side-by-side.

Fight Club came out in 1999, and managed to capture the late Clinton-era zeitgeist in a way that no other film can claim. The notion of office workers, bored by their jobs and betrayed by promises that they would be ‘rock gods or movie stars' turning to small-scale domestic terrorism to show their dissatisfaction reflected a growing ennui among the young professional class. It was a film born from economic safety, a remote threat of real terrorism (can you imagine Fight Club being released after 9/11?) and a view that the villain is not only likable, he's something to which we might aspire as he's just an aspect of us.

Other images I associate with this time are almost straight out of the film: the pictures of the impotently-smashed windows of Starbucks' and McDonalds during the so-called Battle of Seattle WTO protests. Rather than striking at the true culprits, it's as though the anarchists decided upon direct action for direct action's sake, vandalizing franchises that represented something tangentally associated with the targets of their rage. They struck against the same coffee shops where they purchased their own tall skinny soy lattes, as if what they hated the most was something inside themselves.

Then consider Dark Knight, where a much more separated hero battles a villain who is more like a force of Nature. Bruce Wayne is the military-industrial complex, a do-gooding rich person who feels that the best way to alleviate crime is not to redistribute wealth or fund educational programs, but to physically beat criminals and purchase hotels by writing personal checks. His superpowers consist of nothing more than access to the latest military weapons technology that in turn fuels his vast personal fortune when he's not using it to hit escaped mental patients.

On the other side is the Joker, a literal wildcard who makes quite clear that he wishes only to cause destruction and chaos. He has no logical plan or reasoning – he is, by his own admission, a ‘dog chasing cars, and wouldn't know what to do if [he] caught one' – acting entirely on instinct. His villainy comes not from any rhyme or reason; in fact, it's difficult to even call it evil as it doesn't appear to be motivated by a need to cause harm other than the opposite of the established order. In a way, it's a perfect and safe Western dream: good people in the military-corporate network keeping us safe from forces of darkness that cannot (or we simply refuse to take the time to) be understood.

Don't get me wrong; I loved the Dark Knight but its overtones are difficult to ignore. It's interesting to compare the two films as far as what they indicate of the national mindset, what makes a ‘hero' and what's acceptable both for heroes and villains. In fact, are the villains actually us? How much are we like them? These questions are nothing new to comics or stories, but the ways in which the answers change are very indicative of how our mindset shifts, however subtly. In this case, I think it reflects a growing cynicism, that the ennui of the late 1990s was replaced first with a renewed optimism and faith in leadership, government and military which was the squandered and eventually taken advantage of, creating a reaction possibly more cynical than the previous one.

Oddly enough, it's not the heroes in these films that are the most accurate reflections of the times but the villains themselves. Tyler Durden's rage against the corporate machine manifesting as minor acts of terrorism and simple human empowerment with material denial is a perfect model of the aimless feeling of basic dissent we exhibited at the end of the 1990s. Clinton lied, but he lied about getting blowjobs. The economy looked pretty good. We weren't involved in any foreign wars, and had the full backing of NATO and the UN in Kosovo.

The Joker is us now, rage without focus, the anti-structure. Whatever's in place is bad, because it's inherently corrupt and probably going to screw us anyway. Piles of money in shipping containers? Just stuff to be burned, because hey, the guys at the top have been bleeding it out of the good citizen of Gotham anyway. And we should probably be punished in some way because we're complacent in putting these power structures in place to begin with. The commoners are as much to blame as anyone else, and it's better just to burn it all and start again.

It's hard to imagine a Joker smashing a Starbucks', but it's also hard to imagine Tyler Durden forcing commoners and criminals to face a prisoner's dilemma. And it's hard to imagine us accepting either doing those things, exactly because it would be so out of context of the times.

My Read-Roll, Updated

2008-10-19T19:40:00.002+01:00

About a year ago I posted my read-roll, the list of blogs I regularly read through RSS. I do approximately 99% of my reading through RSS now and I'm taking today to do a little housecleaning, both around the house and around the blog. I realized some elements of the old Puppet Show are woefully out of date, including the Control Panel that still had WizKids page on it (nuked that just now) and the blog roll, which is really just a list of friends.

So here's my updated read-roll, with the associated reasons why I regularly read these blogs and why you should check them out. Pardon my simplistic classification system. If your blog isn't here, why don't you drop me a line in the comments with a link and I'll check you out?

Apocalypse Blogs

Post-Apocalypse UK News. Post-apocalyptic things - movies, books, etc. - with a focus on the UK.
Quiet Earth. Simply put, Quiet Earth is the blog I'd write if I had time to write a blog full-time. Comprehensive in the way only the best news blogs are, it covers every scrap of news about post-apocalyptic and apocalyptic fiction in all of its many forms. Should they ever need a new or additional London correspondent, they should get in touch.

Comics
The Fate of the Artist. Eddie Campbell, who illustrated From Hell and was kind enough to link to my From Hell Walking/Riding Tour post, blogs here. I cannot say enough good things about him or his art, so I'll let the link speak for itself.
xkcd.com. Fast becoming an online standard, xkcd is probably the only online comic I read every strip, and enjoy about 90% of the time.

Cool Stuff - AKA my catchall category.
Anacrusis. You may remember this blog from last time I did this exercise, and I'm happy to say that it is as good as it was then if not better. Still an enjoyable daily read.
Boing Boing. I get most of the good links if my friends' shared items anyway, but old standard Boing Boing is on my list.
Flying Pizza Kitty. I don't remember how I found this blog, but it consists of animated GIFs of a cat on a flying carpet in a variety of situations. Has a very distinctive 8-bit feel.
Francesco Explains It All. Francesco Marciuliano, a writer and cartoonist, posts here. His posts are generally that kind of dry, biting humor that makes for an excellent read after a long day at work.
Gibson Blog. Author William Gibson writer this blog. It is exactly what you'd expect from that equation.
I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER. I'm almost ashamed to admit I read this every day, and occasionally even laugh out loud at those crazy cats with their Impact font expressions.
io9. Gawker Media's Sci-Fi blog. Comprehensive, thought-provoking and often chock-full of interesting content.
Jericho Blog. I keep this in my feeds in the hope that someday it will be updated with news of Jericho Season 3.
John Cleese's Cleeseblog. Yes, former Python John Cleese has a blog. Still in its relative infancy, it is rapidly becoming a must-read.
Laughing Squid. As noted in the prior read-roll post, I found Laughing Squid during the Vista launch days. I still read it every day, and Scott is an excellent source for various artistic strangeness.
Lifehacker. I admit I largely skim Lifehacker as it is far more comprehensive than I have time to read, but there's always some really cool content there.
Mashable! Mashable is kind of the 'it-girl' place for the social media industry. If you're on Mashable, you're 'it.' I've never been on Mashable.
Mr & Mrs Smith Boutique & Luxury Hotel Collections. Doesn't exactly roll of the tongue, does it? A blog run by a travel company catering to couples and run out of London, they offer occasional deals and more importantly inspiration for travelling.
O Chateau Blog | Stuff Parisians Like. A blog by Olivier Magny. My French coworker linked me to this blog, which is routinely hilarious even if you aren't Parisian, French or in either place. It reads exactly how I'd imagine a Parisian's blog to read.
Offbeat Earth. I cannot remember how I found this gem, but it's a (mostly) picture blog about some of the generally crazy stuff you can find in this strange world of ours.
Paleo-Future. They haven't updated in over a month so I hope everything's alright. Paleo-Future collects old news stories that predict what the future will be like, and compares them to how things have actually turned out.
Proton Charging. I'm a Ghostbusters fan, and this site is your number one source of news for Ghostbusters-related things. And yes, there is news for Ghostbusters-related things. More than you'd imagine, probably.
Something Awful Frontpage. There's a frontpage?
Strange Maps. Another blog that I cannot recall how I found, but I read consistently when it updates. The blogger celebrates strange maps, either fictional, real, or just plain unusual.
The Big Picture. I just added this within the last week, through one of my friends' shared items feed. It offers big pictures.
YesButNoButYes Stories. I literally just added this feed yesterday. This is another collection of strange and interesting things.
Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted). Have science, will travel. A scientist's blog about science things and her travels, although it seems to be more of the later than the former. She also has a cool 'mystery bird' that she posts each day during the week so readers can try to guess/research what the bird is.

Cricket Blogs
Cricket-Blog.com. One of the two cricket blogs I read in my quest to try to make sense of the sport.
King Cricket. And here's the other one.

Friends and Family
Accidentally Jewish. My friend and co-worker Leah's blog, about a variety of things, but often about experiences related to her conversion to Judaism.
Become What You Behold. My friend Roger's blog.
Being(s) Abroad. My buddy Brandon recently moved to Israel with his new wife, and this is their ex-pat blog.
Bhagwan Redux. My friend Scott's blog.
Confessions of a Palindrome. My friend and former co-worker Hannah writes this blog.
A Doodle A Day. Buddy and fellow Alliterate Stan! posts, as you might guess, a doodle a day here.
Dthon. Scott, former coworker and fellow Alliterate, blogs here from time to time.
Grubb Street. Friend and fellow Alliterate Jeff Grubb's personal blog.
High School Poetry. Angela hasn't updated in almost a year, but I know she will someday!
Knit Jenious. I've linked to my friend Jen's blog recently and it's still worth checking out.
Nothing good can come of this.... My friend and former coworker Jon's blog.
Ober Dicta. My friend Seth doesn't blog much anymore, but I keep his feed warm just in case.
Stephen D. Sullivan. Although I've never met him face to face, I owe a lot of my current fiction writing career to Stephen Sullivan and his Blue Kingdoms anthologies.
The Monkey King. Friend and fellow Alliterate Wolfgang's blog.
Vault. My friend Bob from college blogs here from time to time. I wish I could register to post comments there.
Who's Your Baba? A little experiment from my family to see if they could blog. So far, I think everyone's updated once or twice and kind of let it sit.
Tipping the Scales. My friend and coworker Amy started this blog, which I'm sure will start to get rolling when she's more into blogging.

Gaming
Adventure Classic Gaming. These guys are trying to keep the spirit of the old-school adventure game alive.
Adventure Gamers' Blog. From the site AdventureGamers.com, a community of - yes - adventure gamers, including guys who love the classics.
Avant Game. A blog by Jane, an ARG designer who it turns out helped work on Superstruct, where I've been spending some of my time lately.
My Xbox 360's Blog. Smart little machine, isn't it?
Classic Let's Play. Videos of old adventure games, run by yours truly.
Darths & Droids. Hilarious webcomic about gamers and RPGs, set over a campaign spanning the Star Wars films.
Dennis Detwiller's Blog. One of my favorite RPG writers/designers blogs here.
Fallout 3: A Post-Nuclear Blog. This blog has been tracking Fallout 3 news since the last time I did this post, and will likely shut down once the game releases officially later this month.
Gamerscore Blog. Microsoft's gaming blog. More advertorial now than anything else.
Grand Text Auto. Calling GTA a 'gaming blog' is a bit like calling the Louvre an 'art gallery.' These guys are into the theory behind interactive fiction, and a whole host of other things too.
Grumpy Gamer. Ron Gilbert, designer of Monkey Island, occasionally blogs here.
How They Got Game. This blog, although updated infrequently, is always a great read about the history of video games.
Kotaku. Hey, I have to get my current gaming news from somewhere.
Online Fandom. It's really tenuous to classify this with gaming blogs, but it's the only category I could see as being close. Online Fandom is a great read about events and theory behind interaction online - focusing on entertainment. Which can mean gaming, and ARGs specifically.
Play This Thing! Daily (kind of) reviews of games, from video to tabletop and more. A great discovery mechanism for finding new games.
Robin D. Laws. Robin Laws is a big name in the RPG industry, and his blog about gaming and writing is consistently thought-provoking. He also does some pretty funny webcomics.
Roleplaying Tips 2.0. Not so much a blog as it is a journal, RPGTips2.0 still has really good - you guessed it - RPG tips. I have used a lot of their suggestions as DM in the past, and will do so again when I'm back in America and DMing regularly.
The Escapist. I subscribe to this mostly for Yahtzee's reviews, which you can't get in their own RSS feed.
Total War Center Forums. Some forums actually have RSS feeds for their news! TWC is my source for news from the Total War series, of which I am a hopeless addict. There's a new one coming out next year...
Twenty Sided. Despite being named for a dice, Twenty Sided does gaming news from across the spectrum with insightful commentary as well.
Wonderland. Wonderland is run by Alice Taylor, who works on 'social software' - IE, multiplayer games. I'm not sure how I found this blog originally but I find her posts original, insightful and thought-provoking.

History
(pre)texts. I just subscribed to this blog on Friday through a link from one of the other history blogs I read, so I can't much vouch for its content yet. Yes, it's half in Greek, and no, I don't speak Greek.
Roman Archaeology. Guess what this blog covers? News about archaeological finds of Roman ruins. Archaeology, specifically the Iron Age, is a hobby of mine so I read every word of every update on this blog.
Roman Times. What Roman Archaeology doesn't cover, Roman Times does. Roman Times is more like an online scholarly journal, but updates regularly and frequently.
The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World. A grad student authors this blog, which covers his adventures as an archaeologist focused on the Greeks, Romans and other inhabitants of the Mediterranean.

London Blogs
An American in London. She's not in London anymore and doesn't update much, but I still keep her on my read-roll because she was so helpful before I moved.
diamond geezer. 'Geezer' doesn't mean 'old guy' in the UK like it does in the US, and as far as I can tell diamond geezer isn't old. In fact, his tours of London neighborhoods are absolutely fascinating, extremely well-researched and a pleasure to read. I learned of this blog because some people at Edelman talked to him once, I checked it out and was hooked.
Going Underground's Blog. A blog devoted entirely to the Tube. Yes, and it's probably one of the absolute best London blogs. Annie Mole does an amazing job of collecting news, making interesting posts and taking pictures of people's shoes on the Tube. She's also a very nice person in real life.
London Bloggers. The blog for the London Bloggers meet-up group. Transparency notice: I worked with them on behalf of one my clients once to sponsor an event, but was a 'member' of the group before then. Not that there's actual membership, mind.
Londonelicious: A London Restaurant Blog. Nothing but reviews of restaurants in and around London. Helpful, since the Beautiful Competition and I enjoy eating out.
Londonist. I know a couple of the people who write for it, and it's a member of the Gothamist network. It's also the single-best source for London news online as far as I'm concerned.
Prince Charles Cinema. They publish their showtimes as an RSS feed. Isn't that helpful?
Rachel from North London. Rachel's from north London, I'm from north London. I can't recall how I found her blog, but I read it faithfully.
That Canadian Girl. Blog written by a Canadian ex-pat in London; I found this through Twitter, believe it or not.
The Daily Mash. The Daily Mash is The Onion for the UK, except it posts three or four new stories each day.
The London Review of Breakfasts. One of my favorite blogs, because the Beautiful Competition and I love eating breakfast together on the weekends.

Music Blogs
Ceci N'est Pas un Blog. Cover songs, but hasn't updated in a while.
Cover Freak. An awesome cover song blog. Consistently posts great songs.
Cover Lay Down. Another awesome cover song blog that focuses on folk covers. That would be folk artists covering other songs, mind you.
Cover Me. Cover Me has an amazing variety of cover songs, and regularly posts stuff I've never heard before.
Fong Songs. Cover and more covers. If you're into covers, Fong is a must-read.
Hectic City - The Kleptones. Blog for The Kleptones, my favorite mash-up artist(s). This is how I find out about new Kleptones music.
My Old Kentucky Blog. This is basically the be-all, end-all of music blogs online. Pitchfork wish they were this cool.
Sideshow Cinema. Music from the movies. Of interest because of a project I might undertake...

PR and Marketing
HorsePigCow. When I first joined the digital practice, I asked one of my coworkers about good digital marketing blogs and they suggested HPC among others. I haven't looked back.
Bokardo: Social Design. I think this one harkens back to that same request for blogs. Also a great read.
CC Chapman. This is his personal blog, but Managing the Gray was a must-listen podcast before I even joined Edelman. I read what's up in CC Chapman's life here. Hopefully that's not creepy, because it's not intended to be.
Carsonified. I started following Ryan Carson on Twitter, discovered this blog, and continue to read it. Good stuff.
Church of the Customer. A lot of people in PR are coming around to the notion that online PR is a lot like customer service. These guys were on top of it years ago.
Edelman Digital. I thought this blog was supposed to be called 'Authenticities' but hey, there you go. This is my company's blog. I contribute there from time to time. So do many other thought leaders at Edelman.
Fallon Planning. Another of my must-reads, from the same 'what are some good digital blogs?' question.
It's Not A Lecture. I found this through Twitter, and it's a great look at online conversations, with a special focus on American politics and how politicians use the Internet to foster conversation (or don't, as the case might be.)
Jaffe Juice. Joseph Jaffe is one of the big hitters in digital PR, and this is his must-read blog.
Jazamatazz. I met Jaz at the London Twestival, and have been reading her blog ever since. She's a fellow digital PR person, and she gives me serious neighborhood envoy (she lives in Shoreditch, I live in, um, Holloway.)
Magazine Death Pool. I probably shouldn't celebrate the death of the old media, but I probably shouldn't have spent an hour this morning playing Duke Nukem on my Xbox 360 either.
Make Marketing History. More marketing than PR, but a great read nonetheless.
Managing the Gray. CC's podcast. The very first content related to digital PR I consumed online.
MediaShift Idea Lab. A blog about shifting attitudes in media, specifically social media, from none other than PBS.
Musing and Marketeerings. Danacea works for a London-based comic shop and is responsible for their online PR and marketing. She blogs here.
Neville Hobson. If there's an inner circle of great digital PR people, Neville would be on it's leadership council. If you're in this industry and not reading Neville's blog, something is wrong with you.
PR Squared. This is one of those blogs that I cannot remember adding to my read-roll, but somehow couldn't live without. Although I have to say I wouldn't help them with Seth. He's mean.
Richard Edelman - 6 AM. Richard is our CEO, and actually runs a hell of a great blog.
Simonsays. Simon was a colleague at Edelman in London before he joined the Beautiful Competition at Weber. He's also responsible for getting me thinking about anarchism as it relates to online communities, is a fantastic friend and a major rising star in our field.
sizemore. @sizemore isn't really in digital PR in the same way I am, but I don't know where else to classify his extremely insightful and well-written blog. It's a good read on a variety of subjects.
Social Media Explorer. I'm saying this right now: Jason Falls will be one of the major thought leaders in our industry in the next few years. He's already making a hell of a name for himself both on his blog and on Twitter, and I expect only great things from him moving forward.
Social Media Snippits. I just added this blog a couple of days ago and can't really offer a good opinion of it yet, but it looks promising.
Techno//Marketer. Matt Dickman is another big name in our industry, and his great blog is here.
The Bad Pitch Blog. I use this blog all the time, mostly to show my co-workers how not to engage with the media. The Bad Pitch Blog is an amazing collection of screw-ups from digital PR people, and regular PR people who think the Internet works like traditional media.
The Jeff Pulver Blog. Jeff Pulver isn't a digital PR guy per se, but he is an extremely well-respected thought leader in digital sociology (for lack of a better term.) And for good reason: he's ahead of the curve. He's also one of the most positive people I've encountered online, which is a refreshing change from the typical cynical negativity I see so much online.
The Long Tail. Long tail distribution is only tangentially related to my every day job, but I can't think of any other way to classify Chris Anderson's blog - yet.
The Marketing Blagger. This blog is run by Andy Bargery, who also runs the London Blogger's meetup. He also writes a highly recommended blog about digital marketing.
The Pirates Dilemma. Matt Mason's book completely changed my perspective on what we can achieve online, and has helped shaped how I approach PR - and business in general. And this blog is an excellent complement to the book.
The Way of the Web. I can't recall where I found this blog either. It stands out though as a great source for insight.
Web Strategy by Jeremiah. Jeremiah Owyang is one of the brightest stars in our industry right now, and is a living, breathing example of doing everything right online. He's one of those people I look at and think 'hey, I want to be him someday.'

Writing
Authonomy. The blog behind HarperCollins' Authonomy project, which still needs a bit of a push to get off the ground.
Jane In Progress. Jane writes for Battlestar Galactica and has written for Firefly in the past. She offers brilliant commentary on the TV industry, but more importantly she offers brilliant tips for writers.
Permuted Press. Permuted publishes apocalyptic and zombie-related fiction. 'Nuff said.
WEIRD TALES. The horror/sci-fi magazine. I keep hoping they'll publish something other than art, but hey, the art is cool too.
JamesMelzer.net. James publishes a serial called The Zombie Chronicles. Check it out, if that's your thing.

And that's my read-roll. It's a lot longer than it used to be, eh? Again, if your blog isn't listed here, hit me up and I'll list it. There area few private blogs I read that aren't on here, so if you run a private blog you think I might read, don't worry.

Thinking About Supporting Great Indie Music? Here's a Great Opportunity

2008-10-15T21:46:00.002+01:00

I occasionally check the website for my favorite band, Roger Clyne & The Peacemakers, for information about upcoming shows and CDs and such. They put some cool new t-shirts in their store, but I also noticed that they're offing a hell of a deal on their music: The Whole Enchilada, or all eight of their CDs for only $50.

Eight CDs for $50 is damn good, but eight damn good CDs for $50 is the kind of deal you can't pass up. It's got six out of the seven RCPM full-length CDs (there are two digital downloads you can't get there, but you can score them on the site easily enough if you're a completest; the newest album isn't in the deal yet.) The package includes the full versions of their two live CDs and four of their five studio albums, as well as the two studio Refreshments CDs.

I have followed RCPM/The Refreshments (as they were once known) since I was a junior in high school, and will go to their live shows whenever I get a chance. It's honest, good-hearted southwestern Rock and Roll with more than a little 'salsa' feel to it. This deal will also score you 107 songs - that's only $0.46 a song! - or about 7 hours and 5 minutes worth of music - that's only $0.11 a minute!

Seriously, if you're into the Peacemakers casually and held off buying their CDs, this is your chance. If you're a dirty pirate that would steal from small independent bands, this is your chance to do right. If you've never heard of the Peacemakers before reading this post, I suggest you maybe listen to some of their stuff on YouTube - keeping in mind a lot of it is recorded by fans at shows - or listen to some samples on iTunes.

This is a great deal. Don't pass it up!

Five Years Young

2008-10-15T10:35:00.002+01:00

A lot can happen in five years. Your friends can have kids and those kids can be in Kindergarten. People get married, divorced, fall in and out of love. Two presidential elections (almost), stories published, an entire career built on a job I didn't know I'd be doing.

Five years ago - five years and a handful of days, since I miscounted - I started this blog.

I still haven't found a consistent 'voice' or topic. I have started two other blogs, both of which are far more consistent in their voices and topics. I started ranting about politics, and after a long break from doing so the two posts prior to this one are rants about politics.

I'm OK with all of that. I started this blog as a way to keep up my writing, at the suggestion of two people I'm glad to count as my friends, Jeff and Jon. It has succeeded at that, and I never intended it to be anything more, although it's certainly become more. A way to communicate with my friends and family and keep them informed about my life, a place to jot down thoughts, and a place to discuss interesting things about my job, writing and gaming. Sometimes all at once!

I toyed with the notion of using it as a professional platform to develop my own 'brand' as a 'PR thought leader,' but then I realized I didn't really care so much about that - and more importantly, I just didn't have anything all that interesting or original to say that wasn't already being said somewhere else. Which took me right back to the beginning of the blog, and here I am again.

It's been a strange, long trip and here's to five more years of running my mouth on the Internet.

The Invisible Hand is a Actually a Destrucive Three-Year-Old's Fist

2008-10-10T11:15:00.006+01:00

Watching the 'economic crisis' in London has been a bit of a trip. On one hand, I feel strangely distant from what's happening in the US, but on the other hand we're feeling its effects along with the rest of the world. Yesterday, the entire nation of Iceland - considered one of the strongest economies in the world not six months ago - declared bankruptcy, taking £20 billion in UK assets with it. Today, the UK is using anti-terror laws to seize as many assets as it can so it's not a total economic loss.

It would be an error to state that this is 'all America's fault,' but seeing how all the world markets affect each other has been an eye-opening experience. News is reported differently here, and seeing the Asian markets affecting the EU's markets, and in turn the effect that the American market has on all of it is sobering to say the least. I'm no economist so I'll save my opinions about what this all means, whether a 'bail out' will work, and whether it will get better or worse for my own personal musings. I will however copy and paste this paragraph from the Wikipedia article on the Great Depression, which I feel is extremely relevant, especially considering the recent announcement that consumer goods purchasing is at its lowest levels since the early 1990s:

My point with all of this isn't necessarily a post about the economy, but the effect that American policies, be they economic, social or otherwise, has on the rest of the world. Many conservative Americans take a 'who the hell cares what Europe, Asia, or anyone else thinks' approach to politics (and I'm not really sure many American liberals are any better, to be fair.)

This attitude is not just inherently ignorant, it's downright dangerous in a world economy where so many things are linked, as I see played out day after day in the media and online. Simply put: we can no longer afford an ill-informed, ignorant and provincial view of the world. The last eight years under Bush have been, as Green Day rather un-poetically put it, a 'redneck agenda' signified by pandering to this exact kind of ignorance. It's the same agenda that leads to cowboy international relations ('you're either with us or against us!') and it's disastrous consequences in Iraq. It is the same agenda that gave the Bush administration and the Republican Congress of its first six years a blank check to get rich from a false economic 'bubble.' And it is the agenda that lead McCain to cynically choose a running mate thinking she'd syphon votes from former Clinton supporters simply because she was a woman despite the fact that most any woman who would vote for Hillary wouldn't vote for someone who is on record as saying dinosaurs and cavemen existed at the same time.

Don't misunderstand. I'm not saying that Americans should vote based on what the world will think, or how the rest of the world will respond. I believe firmly in Jeff's view that all politics is local. But the image of America as a flailing toddler woefully ignorant of the destruction it can cause as it flails its arms without regard to its surroundings is an apt one. It's not that they necessarily mean harm to their surroundings, but when you look at their motivations, they are as infantile as possible. Not mature. Underdeveloped. Child-like. Example:

The only way to reconcile these two things is that Americans (and the rest of the world) need to rethink policies at the local level with an awareness of how they might affect things at the national and global level. The simple fact of the matter is that nothing exists in a vacuum anymore - no town, no state, no county, no country, no matter how much people might like to pretend otherwise. I'm not even saying that Obama is the answer to this, or that McCain wouldn't be. I'm saying that something fundamental needs to change at the most basic of levels in order to avoid a potentially scary scenario should the world plunge into a major economic depression, which seems like more and more of a possibility with each passing day. As I typed this, the Beeb announced that Vienna's stock exchange has suspended trading. Things are literally happening by the minute now.

It is only if economy and policy are re-examined and more importantly redefined at the local and community levels - with full awareness of how policies affect those around us - that we can avoid the abyss now open before us. To cop a line from Clinton's campaign in 1992, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. The era of trickle-down Reaganomics, neoconservatism, ignorance of fact, unawareness, whatever you want to call it is over. It was tried, and it failed so spectacularly that it has dragged the world to the precipice and is continuing to do so as I punch the keys on my keyboard.

Something's gotta give, one way or another. Let's hope it's the good way.

Update: Another excellent proof point:

Update 2: I want to clarify that I do not necessarily believe that the majority of the American right are a bunch of ignorant, mouthbreathers. Nor do I believe that people who are religious should be in any way barred from holding office. (I do however have an issue with someone who ignores fundamental scientific principles controlling science budgets, and someone who cannot pronounce 'nuclear' with the ability to fire nuclear weapons - that should be a basic prerequisite.) I have the utmost respect for people of all faiths, and liberalism has a proud history of being associated with religion, be it the liberation theology of South America; The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's own pseudosocialist - yes - vision for a united America; or the Founding Fathers' own preservation of religious freedoms.

I do feel that the American right, specifically the majority of the religious right, has been summarily manipulated and cynically controlled by elements within the Republican party who have used religious principles to ensure their candidates are elected and can pass legislation that benefits no one but the elite that drafted it. In fact, I find it doubly abhorrent that Republicans have repeatedly abused the goodwill of the American religious right to gain votes and win elections.

Update 3: I just can't help myself, these videos are gold. I'm not sure what's more telling, that Obama is a terrorist himself and a Muslim according to these people, or the guy just yelling 'Commie faggots' at the Obama supporters.

Adapting Tradition

2008-10-05T19:01:00.004+01:00

London has taken on that particular smell I associate with autumn. The air is crisper, somehow cleaner, and fallen leaves crackle as I walk through the park. It's a hint of the oncoming winter, but there's enough nice weather that I don't need my thick coat yet. It's that back-to-school, raking leaves, harvested corn, pumpkins-on-the-porch time I remember from being a kid. Trick-or-treating isn't far off and the last desperate days of playing outside before winter fill afternoons.

Autumn is my favorite season. It's the time when I feel most alive, and I love the world around me more.

It's also the time for one of the few personal traditions I actually follow: my yearly reading of Washington Irving's short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I'm not sure how long I've done this, but I have a distinct memory of reading it in the autumn in the 9th grade, and I know I bought my current copy in 1995, so it's been about 15 years or so. There's just one problem: my current copy is in a storage unit about 9000 miles away from my flat.

So like other traditions, I have to adapt it a bit. This evening the Beautiful Competition made a gorgeous pumpkin pie because she happened to find canned pumpkin one day at the store; she had not seen it there before, and has not seen it since. It may not taste exactly the same, but it's as close as we can get.

And it's not going to be my well-worn Classics copy, but there are at least two different free versions online, so it looks like I'll be able to read my favorite seasonal story - even if it is on a printout or a computer screen.

In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town. This name was given, we are told, in former days, by the good housewives of the adjacent country, from the inveterate propensity of their husbands to linger about the village tavern on market days. Be that as it may, I do not vouch for the fact, but merely advert to it, for the sake of being precise and authentic. Not far from this village, perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley or rather lap of land among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker is almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquillity.Ah, autumn.

About the Weird

2008-09-21T21:14:00.005+01:00

"You're so weird !"

If only I had a nickel for every time in my life someone told me that.

I know this blog has picked up some new readers recently, not that this was an unexpected development. After all, Google my name - it's the first thing that comes up. Frankly I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner. Last weekend my inlaws told me that they found the old Puppet Show, and while I don't know if they're regular readers, I generally assume they are. The thing is, I really don't publish anything on here I wouldn't want my mother (who has been a faithful Puppeteer since the launch) or my grandparents (who may one day stumble upon this blog) to read. But the more in-the-world realization triggered a brief audience review of material (I went back to make sure I hadn't said anything extraordinarily stupid, and I hadn't). But I realized there's some, well, weirdness going on here.

Like all good latticeworks of coincidence, this story continued yesterday as I walked into Forbidden Planet, London's mega-comic-shop, and was browsing while waiting for some friends to finish their business. I randomly picked up an art book about the gracefulness of machines, cables, and circuitry; something I'd never considered 'beautiful' or even 'graceful,' but certainly was as the artist depicted it. Some of the artwork though one could easily have labelled 'weird.' And yeah, it was pretty out there.

But this triggered another slightly existential thought process. I have rarely, if even, apologized for my being 'weird' when I occasionally say some goofy non sequitor at work or described one of my 'wouldn't it be cool if' scenarios to someone who clearly may not have ever considered attaching 'cool' to whatever concept I might be floating.

And yet this is the very bread-and-butter of my existence. It is the root of who I am, my very personhood relies on these 'weird' connections between things that don't seem to go together. I used to turn away from Cubist art because, I claimed, "I didn't understand it." I still don't understand it but I can certainly appreciate it more now as I grow older, because I see in it possibilities and connections that never occurred to me before.

Speaking of my grandparents, for my high school graduation my grandfather got me a carved rock for my desk (OK, a paperweight) with an inscription in it: 'Some people see the world as it is and ask why. Others see the world as it could be and ask why not.' I don't like dualisms and have asked 'why' as much as I've asked 'why not,' but if I had to choose I'd put myself in that later category.

Sure, these things may not go together. But they will. I may not understand how something works within a system now, but that's very likely because the system isn't understood, or the framework is wrong, or the thing misunderstood.

It's a big old world out there, and another thing I realize the more I go on is that it's far more full of wonder than most people give it credit for, if only they'd see and hear and taste and feel and create.

Photo: Grilled Shrimp at Creek Cafe by mamamusings.

Talk About A Pirate Day

2008-09-19T14:45:00.002+01:00

In honor of Talk Like A Pirate Day, I wanted to talk a little bit about intellectual property, copyright and a slightly different kind of piracy.

I'm still digesting The Pirates Dilemma and trying to figure out exactly what its implications are but with each passing day I'm becoming more and more convinced I'm working within a broken system, and my attempts to apply a new framework to the old system will ultimately be doomed to failure – at least as far as my career appears to be going at the moment. But's another kind of post.

Before I start to organize my thoughts on piracy, I want to be completely upfront and transparent: I am a pirate. I have pirated intellectual property in the past. Here is a list of offenses. Consider this the sheet they'll hang on me when I'm swinging by a rope on Ratcliffe Highway.

When I was young, I pirated computer software, mostly because my friends and I couldn't afford to pay $50 for a new adventure game. So we'd all pool our money together to buy one copy and then share it amongst ourselves. More on this later, because it's an interesting concept of shared ownership that I think is being overlooked in the piracy/copyright debate.
When I was a teenager, I owned several cassette tapes that were copies of albums I did not pay for. I can honestly say I eventually paid for many of those albums (and owned CDs of many, many more albums than I had pirated tapes for.)
Here's the hardcore stuff. My sophomore year of college was the year that Napster hit the scenes. Before this, my friends and I would rip our CDs to MP3s and maybe pass them along to each other more out of convenience and curiosity. I was a complete nerd and hooked my stereo up to my computer so I could fully experience playing Quake with a subwoofer, so I could actually play MP3s through my computer speakers and not have it sound like a tinny mess, which most computer speakers still sounded like at the time. But Napster made finding music we didn't own incredibly easy. It also slowed our college's T1 connection to a crawl because of all the trafficking we did with it. I don't have many MP3s from those days anymore, mostly because the sound quality isn't that good compared with modern rips, but I've got a few still knocking around my cover song library.

As much as I'd like to say Napster lead me to buy more music, it didn't, at least in the short term. Before Napster I would often purchase a CD for one or two tracks and never listen to the rest of the album, or listen to it a couple of times only. Typically – and this is important – this was because I was buying a CD for a song that received heavy airplay on the radio and I wanted to listen to it on my own, maybe in my car or in my room. For those familiar with the Long Tail model, this is the ultimate 'short head' model – not even listening to an entire CD, but only the hits on the radio. And I know there were lots of other people who did it too.
After moving to the UK I discovered how easy BitTorrent is to use. I'd used BitTorrent before but purely for legal things. Since moving here, I started using it to grab Season 2 of Jericho because the show wasn't being aired here and while I was available to watch completely for free on CBS.com, I couldn't watch it because I was in the UK. Battlestar Galactica episodes? Ditto, I didn't care to wait a week, especially when an American audience could watch the whole thing online for free. And I admit I have also downloaded movies that aren't available here yet as well.

So I may have just painted a colossal target on my chest but I want to talk a little about how piracy has changed my buying habits – one of the key pieces of The Pirates Dilemma. I no longer buy short head CDs for one or two songs; if there's a hit I want badly enough, I can purchase it for less than a dollar from Amazon.com's DRM-free store. But this isn't a story about short heads, it's actually a story about long tails and legitimately purchasing more music. I don't listen to the radio anymore ever; all my music is discovered through my friends or other recommendations. I no longer buy CDs for one or two tracks, but for full albums by artists I like and have sampled online. I'd say that my music purchasing dropped off in the short term but now that I've started to tap into musicians I prefer and never would have heard on a top-40 terrestrial radio station, it's going back up again. And it's almost 100% digital. The only exception is when I buy a CD at a concert.

I'm not going to generalize everyone else's habits based on my own, but I certainly suspect my story is not unique. It is discoveries of this sort that will eventually reframe the business model as The Pirates Dilemma (and The Long Tail) suggests. Apart from the obvious applications of this principle to digitally distributed entertainment, I'm most interested in where it can go from here into other practices. Communications being a prime example.

There's a meme going around about brand hijacking on Twitter; I first became aware of it last week through this post, which cites an earlier incident this year where someone named Janet pretended to be an Exxon employee for three days. As a PR rep I can say with a high degree of certainty that this kind of hijacking would make even the most Internet-jaded old school communicator lose sleep at night: what if someone out there is pretending to be you online? Or worse, pretending to speak for your company and you couldn't control the message?

So much of how companies are trying to engage online depends on their reactions to these kinds of 'pirates.' People are talking about my brand online? Holy shit, are they staying on message? They aren't? Damn, I better get in there and either a) shut them down or b) make sure they've got the approved talking points!

Someone's hijacking my brand on Twitter? Holy shit, I'd better set up an official Twitter for my brand so everyone knows it's officially official!

Chris Lynn, the blogger who wrote the post above, made an excellent point about this in his post and specifically how to properly address it:

Back in the old 1.0 days of the Internet, you could be pretty much anyone–a 40 year old man pretending to be a 13 year old girl–and no one would know otherwise. In the Web 2.0 world, however, our identities are built on and confirmed by our relationships.How many companies actually get this? And how many communicators get the why of all this? If we look 'under the hood' to we understand why we're being forced to change, that the rules no longer apply? To use a piratical reference – here there be monsters. The rules are being rewritten, and not by us.

But the rules are being bent and broken elsewhere. I realize this post is starting to get long and rambly and I doubt anyone's still reading, but to follow up on some points I made in a blog post on my company's corporate blog we're at a point where piracy is going to begin to force major changes in the way we think about and do business. It's not going to be as simple as just 'let's make some Twitter profiles and talk to people;' what's going to happen is that companies will be forced to reconsider how they do business from the ground up.

Collective ownerships much like my friends and I going in on expensive pieces of software won't just exist among consumers but among companies as well. Take the cooperative business model: what if this was applied to a games company? What if it was applied to a book publisher – not a giant short-head-based publishing house, nor tiny individuals putting out books for their 1000 Fans, but something in between, a publishing house owned as much by those with the presses as those writing and consuming the books.

Let your imagination run wild on the possibilities there. Cooperative banking? Cooperative real estate developments? Cooperate government taxation structures? It's all a long way away from kids pooling their money to buy King's Quest 5, but in the end it's not so different after all.

Let the revolution begin.

Quote of the Day

2008-09-17T10:04:00.002+01:00

Hawksmoor

My 2008 Blog Day Recommendations

2008-08-31T17:35:00.003+01:00

It's Blog Day 2008, and here are my five recommendations for blogs this year. I'm trying to keep the spirit of the exercise alive and well while focusing on this part of the mission statement:

different from their own culture, point of view and attitude

Emphasis mine. So here are my five recommendations to Puppeteers. All are from different cultures, areas of interest or points of view:

Ace of Spades HQ - Is it a surprise that my first recommendation is a conservative American political blog? It shouldn't be. I'm not a regular reader but I've seen stories from here pop up in my RSS feeds from time to time, and it won an award last year as Best Conservative Blog, beating out Michelle Malkin. The writing still falls into some of the same political pundit pitfalls that many political blogs do, but hey, I challenge any conservatives to recommend Daily Kos.
Knit Jenious - I admit that I've been reading my friend Jen's blog for a while (since I've known about it, anyway) but knitting and I don't exactly go together - so I recommend you take a look if you're into it.
King Cricket - I'm trying like hell to learn about the ins and outs of Cricket, my current home's baseball-like sport. This blog was recommended to me by a cricket coach (!) on Twitter, and is rapidly becoming a great daily read as I try to expand my understanding of the cricket world.
Persian Paradox - An English-language blog written by a female Muslim from Iran. But not just any female Muslim - Masoumeh Ebtekar, the "first female Vice President of Iran" and "the spokeswoman of the students who had occupied the US Embassy during the Iran hostage crisis and ... a critic of the Taliban's oppression of women." (Source: Wikipedia). Why don't you give it a read and see if you can tear down one of your own mental stereotypes.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith Boutique Hotels - And to end on a lighter note, a blog devoted to boutique hotels for couples. If my subscription to this doesn't reflect my changing values as I age, nothing does.

That's it for Blog Day '08. See you next year!

Gustav Rising

2008-08-31T11:56:00.001+01:00

Meghan, Karissa: if you're still in the area, please stay safe. Positive thoughts heading your way from London.

John McCain Scores a Critical Hit

2008-08-21T14:26:00.003+01:00

How could I not blog about this?

Late Monday, John McCain aide Michael Goldfarb blogs negatively about Obama supporters, saying "[i]t may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman's memory of war from the comfort of mom's basement." Cue nerd rage as the (fairly liberal) D&D community screams 'no we're not! This is the same bullshit we've dealt with since high school when the Young Republicans made fun of us there!' (Full disclosure: many of my D&D playing friends in high school were, in fact, Republicans.) Much moaning, wailing and gnashing of teeth as real issues were ignored and one aide's flippant and Rove-esque logical fallacy takes center stage in the blogosphere.

Goldfarb later apologies (albeit on a third-party site.) He says:

If my comments caused any harm or hurt to the hard working Americans who play Dungeons & Dragons, I apologize. This campaign is committed to increasing the strength, constitution, dexterity, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma scores of every American.And in so doing, rolled a natural 20 for John McCain among the D&D crowd.

My mind was made up long ago, and nothing sort of Obama crawling out of his skin and claiming to be the Prince of Darkness himself would make me consider voting for a Republican. And as Seth slyly pointed out in his Google Reader notes: this is so irrelevant to actual issues facing Americans that it's almost a joke that it became a concern in the first place.

That being said, it's a hell of a case of knowing your audience and apologizing to them in their own language, and putting a human face on something that people tend to dehumanize. So credit where credit is due.

Note: never thought I'd use the 'Dungeons and Dragons' and '2008 Election' tags for the same post...

Quote of the Day

2008-08-14T17:23:00.001+01:00

"That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves."

- From Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Existentialism and Poetry

2008-08-13T23:54:00.002+01:00

The older I get, the more French Existentialism makes sense. And inspires me. Take the following from Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus:

Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it.

Emphasis mine. So I have this:

Building by Jason Mical

Stone and brick make this place
My fort.
My tree house.
This thing I cleared with a stick
and summertime persistence.

Time flows oddly here
Days in seconds
or seconds in days.
I'm eighty, wrinkled and out of breath,
I'm ten and can't sit still.

Entropy House I call it,
my carved-rock place,
where I rule as King and cannot be touched.

Speaking of entropy,
I return here more and more
The older/younger I get/feel
I don't want to waste my key after all.

A tower, a cave, an elevator to space.
A roller-coaster.
Magic it is and was, something ineffable,
Least of all by me and I'll be damned if I'm telling you.

I've never left this room,
doorless, windowless,
The way blocked by a triangle
of insecurity, fear and ennui.

Some days I am Spider-Man, climbing walls with my hands.
Some days I just am and call it good.

Live, Crowdsourced Content Creation

2008-08-10T08:26:00.005+01:00

Stephen Sullivan, author of dozens of novels and the Origins Award-winning Podo and the Magic Shield, is hard at work on a project called Tournament of Death, a 'live-novel' written entirely during the Olympics. He's also relying heavily on user input and feedback to develop the story. For example, there's a poll on the Tournament of Death blog asking 'Things [you] want to see killed in the Tournament of Death are:' Of course I voted 'everybody' because it's a tournament of death!

Stephen's project combines two really interesting things in a way I'm not exactly sure has been done before: crowdsourcing plot points by asking community members and readers what they want to see happen and allowing them to have a real effect on the events in the novel; and a restrictive writing environment. In this case, writing only during the 2008 Olympics. It's a fabulous little experiment and the first post is pretty awesome.

Also, Stephen wrote a hell of a press release for this, which I'm going to simply copy and paste here because it's so great. I wish my clients would let me write press releases like this for them. It's a short story in and of itself.

Tournament of Death

www.stephendsullivan.com

stephendsullivan.blogspot.com

GoodReads.com

Walkabout Publishing

Tournament of Death

Full Disclosure: Stephen is a member of my writing group, the Alliterates, and is the editor of the Blue Kingdoms anthologies in which some of my fiction has appeared.

959-Word Movie Review: The Dark Knight

2008-08-03T17:40:00.002+01:00

I realize I’m doing one of the single-most boring things a person can do with a personal blog: review a film. But I just got back from The Dark Knight and I wanted to share my impressions, because films often change in my mind and I want to record exactly what I’m thinking now.

I loved it. Absolutely fucking loved it. It’s been a long, long time since I sat in a movie theater and thought, yes, I’m glad I’m seeing this in a theater because I’m having a great time. And it’s been a long, long time since I walked out of a movie theater and though that was an incredible experience.

The Beautiful Competition and I were discussing the film afterwards and I said that I liked it better than Batman Begins and probably better than any superhero movie before. True (at least, as of right now, give me a while and I’ll probably get lost in the film’s flaws.) It wasn’t a perfect movie, but is there such a thing? It was a fantastic Batman movie. I had to check to see if Jeph Loeb had anything to do with it (he didn’t.) It was a great superhero movie, and it was a fantastic film.

One of the things I like to explore both as a reader and as a writer is the way moral codes and philosophies survive at extreme conditions. Oddly enough, the best to cite about this is Elie Wiesel’s Night, a book I did not particularly enjoy but the crux of which was the very absolutist view that no morality can survive in the most extreme of conditions – in that case, the Holocaust. I’ve never thought that thesis was particularly true, except perhaps on a meta level, but lives are not lived and decisions are never made on the meta level. They are individual things. And that is exactly what The Dark Knight addresses, head on.

Spoiler Alert

Heath’s Joker is probably my favorite villain in a comic book movie, because his crusade forces Batman’s hand. At first, it seems he’s playing the same game as the rest of the mobsters that Batman’s been fighting: why else would he want to work with them, to ask for their money? But it eventually becomes clear his motivation really is, well, utterly unmotivated by anything except a desire for absolute anarchy. There’s a brilliant scene where Bruce Wayne and Alfred discuss The Joker’s motivations and how to get in his head and stop him. Bruce says that it’s easy for Batman to stop the other villains because in the end, they are motivated by money and fear. Even dyed-in-the-wool psychopaths like the Scarecrow (who makes an awesome cameo, by the way) are motivated on some level by these same sorts of things. But how does Batman deal with a criminal who is only interested in causing chaos and destruction? Something that’s more of a force of nature than a motivated human being? And is it possible to deal with someone like that in a way that allows you not to compromise your moral principles?

There’s a brilliant bit of foreshadowing, where the characters discuss the Romans and their practice of handing over power to a dictator in times of crisis. In all instances but one, the dictator (eventually, the historian in me says!) resigned his position and returned power to the Senate and People. But it only took one - Caesar – to annihilate the Republic and create the Empire. Batman cannot win his battle without a compromise, and the one he decides to make is just as interesting as the other moral situations in the film. Even better is the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which is ripped straight from Game Theory (and, I should note, Matt Mason at The Pirate’s Dilemma covered quite eloquently.) As Mason notes, that scene is where The Joker slips and where The Dark Knight truly shines as an exploration of morality in extreme conditions. The outcome of the situation (I won’t spoil the particulars) actually left me quite stunned, but in a pleasant way. And it did give Batman the chance to beat The Joker, after all!

But this complexity is the greatest pleasure I can take from a film or a book. It’s simply an abstract form of what I like so much about horror movies, specifically zombie films – which are in and of themselves just the next iteration of post-apocalypse films. It is being forced to make decisions when confronted with the absurd. The day-to-day decisions aren’t so important: decisions made when faced with the most absurd and extreme of conditions – a ferry full of prisoners and a ferry full of normal people, with each holding the other detonator; a motivationless psychopath who won’t stop killing; the dead returning to life to feast on the living – these are all things that remove a person from the norm and force them to look at things in a new way. I use the word ‘absurd’ in a loaded fashion, because it’s exactly how Neitzsche, Heidegger and specifically Camus refer to what life and meaning are in the first place: ways to deal with these extreme conditions that, in the end, are something we must make and be responsible for on our own.

[Note: I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that Harvey Dent / Two-Face actually progresses from being responsible for his decisions to his infamous coin-flipping, leaving choice and more importantly responsibility up to fate as the movie progresses. Which is really an entirely different essay, but adds a good deal of flavor and another layer of depth to the film.]

So there I am: The Dark Knight impressions. Holy freaking crap it was a good movie.

Three Word Movie Review: The Dark Knight

2008-08-03T16:51:00.001+01:00

Holy freakin' crap!

ARGs and the Changing Face of Fiction Online

2008-07-28T12:49:00.005+01:00

A fascinating pair of posts ran recently on two separate websites about the ARG (alternate reality game) marketing techniques around The Dark Knight (which, as it just came out in the UK, I have not yet seen.) The first post on Movie Marketing Madness describes in excruciating detail every piece of 'alternate reality' created by the Dark Knight’s agency. It is an amazing and exhaustive list: I don't think it's hyperbolic to state that this is probably the most complex and involved ARG to date.

The second was a post labelled [RANT] on sci-fi blog io9 called The Argument Against ARGs. I wouldn't even call it a rant: the author does a good job summarizing the basic history of ARGs (although the excellent ARG for Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero album isn't included, and it beats the socks off iheatbees) but outlines a very real problem with ARGs. Money quote(s):

ARGs seem to have no lives of their own – they feel like they exist solely to advertise another story

[w]hat I'd like to see are ARGs for their own sakes — ARGs that involve fans not because they give away posters or free showings, but because they are genuinely compelling tales that you actually want to interact with.

Emphasis mine.

This is exactly my problem with ARGs and why they may very well be the next great form of entertainment.

Allow me a digression for a moment. One of the best books I've read in the last five years is Mark Z. Danielewski's stunning House of Leaves, which is many things to many people: a very unique horror novel, a satire of literary criticism, and potentially 'just plain fucking weird.' The book itself is a labyrinth of footnotes that lead to more footnotes, different colors of text that may or may not have meaning, size and positioning of text, stories within stories and stories within footnotes. There's even a 'soundtrack' of sorts – the author's sister is indie music artist Poe whose album 'Haunted' is essentially a soundtrack for the book. Many of the track names mirror chapter titles in House and the title track specifically mentions 'this house of leaves' in the lyrics, and has other references to the book as well.

As I read House I began to wonder: how would this book work as a movie? Is there any way to translate these disparate elements, many of which are intended to be clues to discover the underlying plot, to an entertainment medium? My answer at the time (keep in mind, this was 2002 or so) was to release it as a DVD and include the footnotes / secondary stories as extra features accessible during the movie, or as a commentary track.

Which really isn't a bad idea, but doesn't really account for the full breadth of the book's rich puzzle and mystery. House of Leaves is essentially a mini-ARG in that it combines several elements to form a mystery with various clues. It follows a tradition of literary 'puzzles,' most notably modernist works like Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's poems, and takes it a step further by introducing a different world of magical realism and strange happenings, where houses can be bigger on the inside than the outside. A mini-ARG.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Cathy’s Book, an actual ARG and bestselling book by Jordan Weisman and others (full disclosure: I worked for Jordan's old game company, WizKids, and many of my friends for his new company, Smith and Tinker.) In fact Cathy's Book is exactly what the io9 writer was talking about: an ARG for its own sake, not selling a product. But even Cathy's Book just scratches the surface of what's possible with the myriad variety of content deployment mechanisms the Internet provides.

My job forces me to think about how to bring those mechanisms together to 'tell a client's story.' Storytelling is what PR really is, when you get down to it. Except online those stories are less about shouting at people or performing a play for them and more about involving them in writing the story yourself. Kind of like (nerd alert) running a roleplaying game. Although you have a goal in mind, the way in which you get there is based as much on player input (community input) as it is your own 'story.' The nonflexible gamemaster sucks, as does the nonflexible PR storyteller.

But it also affords massive opportunities to do exactly what Jordan did and what the io9 writer proposes to do. If 'all media is multimedia,' surely we gamemasters and storytellers should discover new ways to tell our tales online? And surely, purely from a storytelling standpoint, we can do that with ARGs for their own sake?

I pose this not as a marketer but as a writer: if literature is already becoming more gamelike and games are becoming more literary, doesn't it make sense for us to be thinking of this space not as a way to sell tickets to movies or things only tangentially-related to the ARGs that marketers create but as a new and unlimited canvas for us to start telling engaging tales to audiences who clearly want this sort of thing?

The ARG's future and its literary possibilites and implications are something to watch indeed.

Photo "Art Is Resistance - London" (from the Year Zero ARG) from Jennaphoenix' Flickr stream.

Starfish and Coffee

2008-07-22T13:06:00.004+01:00

"Why the hell would I want to read about what someone ate for breakfast?"

My colleague Simon and I ran our digital PR 'boot camp' training for a couple of clients last week, and we got the inevitable question about the relevance of blogs, cited above.

I've always been amused by that question because it goes back to some really early Internet conversations about, well, breakfast. Actually it goes back to some of my friends' personal websites and conversations we had in college about the content there – which sometimes included what we had for breakfast.

But the breakfast meme is one that goes around often, and I suspect it's the easiest way for people to think about blogs, which are a personal publishing platform. Personal means you talk about what happens in your life, which means you blog about breakfast. Right?

That is an extreme oversimplification but I suspect it is, at its root, true. But it is absolutely a legitimate question because there are enough personal diary blogs and Twitter feeds out there: why would I want to read about what someone had for breakfast?

But for the first time I didn't just capitulate and say 'yeah, the blogosphere sure is funny huh?' Rather this was my response. Or something like it, since I now have the pleasures of hindsight, a word processor and HTML.

Actually I do want to know what people had for breakfast – sometimes. One of the greatest joys of my marriage to the Beautiful Competition is our Sunday breakfast ritual: we go to a restaurant we enjoy and have a nice breakfast, and our calorie counters can disappear for an hour or so. We talk, catch up, start enjoying the day on the weekend when we make time for us and ourselves.

In Bothell we had a favorite haunt: Alexa's Café, which I still maintain is the Eastside’s best breakfast outside of a Denny's. And really, who does a good Sunday breakfast at Denny's?

But here in old London Towne we have yet to find 'that breakfast place.' There is no Alexa's here. Hell, there isn't even a Denny's. The restaurants in my neighborhood are alright but they aren't great. They're all greasy spoon style places which isn't bad at all, except that the quality tends to be a little... suspect. But that hasn't stopped me from looking. And where have I been looking? Online. On blogs.

In fact, there is a blog called 'The London Review of Breakfasts' that does nothing but – you guessed it – review breakfast places. Big time London blog Londonist also reviews breakfast places, among other things. Their review of The Diner Camden led to not only a new and relatively satisfying breakfast adventure last week, it also led to a fun day out at the market. All the things I look for in a weekend. It's not the only London-based breakfast blog either! The Greasy Spoon (which, to be fair, covers more than breakfast) blogs about morning places to nosh as well.

In the meantime, the search for my perfect London breakfast will continue, and it will continue online.

My point with all this was to illustrate that there actually is a very legitimate reason why people might want to read about what someone had for breakfast. In fact, there's a very legitimate reason why someone might want to read just about everything. Too often we lose sight that people blog as a hobby, that they write about their experiences to share them as well as get their thoughts down. With a potential audience of six and a half billion people it stands to reason that someone out there is going to be interested in what you have to say no matter how obscure and silly you might think it is.

This isn't a call for people to blog, or a plea for my clients not to dismiss blogs because there is valuable content online. If anything it's an observation that goes back to what I discussed about white noise and tuning in to what's important to you in the vast sea of mediocrity and irrelevance online. Yes, somewhere out there is something of relevance to you. That's the beauty of all this: it may be utterly worthless to many other people but as long as you find it significant, there isn't any reason not to find, follow and participate.

Photo 'English Breakfast' by zo-ark on Flickr.

For My Friend

2008-07-14T20:45:00.004+01:00

Sometimes
I have to help
You jump up to the dresser now.

And your fur
Has more mats than
It used to.

I promise I won't be mad
When you miss the litter box a little
And I won't push you down
When you jump on my lap
In the morning.

Blog New World

2008-07-14T14:52:00.001+01:00

If I had to choose one fiction book to preserve in case of a nuclear war, it would probably be Brave New World. It was the subject of my final research paper in college, and I can say with a high degree of certainly that it is the single most influential book I’ve read. The thesis of my research paper was that as society – specifically American society, but the increasingly global society as well – comes closer to resembling that of Brave New World the people in it must decide how to deal with the knowledge of its inner workings. Do we, as John Savage did, take the final exit and commit suicide with the knowledge that we will be powerless to change the overall society as individuals? Or make a different existential choice?

Re-reading my paper I stand by my thesis that suicide is existentially irresponsible, and what I’m interested in at the moment is the way in which society is looking increasingly like that in Brave New World (for the sake of brevity and clarify, I’ll refer to that society as BNW as opposed to the full title of the book.)

Brave New World often plays second fiddle to its cousin, Orwell’s 1984. Both are dystopian novels, but postulate two very different futures. Byfar the best summary of the differences is this excerpt from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

I emphasized what I consider the most relevant part of Postman’s summary of the two novels. In BNW people are conditioned from birth to have desires and wants, to have a driving need to consume but no capacity for reasoning why and when they ask why they are socially outcast and given drugs. Contrast this with 1984 and its poor, oppressive, tyrannical society. In short, BNW is a capitalist dystopia while 1984 is a communist dystopia.

Political and economic theories aside, what interests me as a digital strategist is the BNW take on information, specifically the flood of information that would ‘reduce us to passivity and egoism’ and ‘the truth [being] drowned in a sea of irrelevance.’ At the time Postman wrote that book, the Internet was in the hands of the government, the World Wide Web still a twinkle in the eye of some college hackers, and things like blogs, Twitter, RSS, social media and even forums completely alien. There was Usenet seven years before the Endless September, but was hardly a common media type.

In other words, with the explosion of the Internet, the Web, push-button publishing and what has become collectively known as Citizen-Generated Media (blogs, YouTube videos, podcasts, and so forth) the sheer amount of information to which we have access has increased. I’m not sure by what factor, but I’m willing to guess it’s in thousands if not the millions. In other words, that sea of irrelevance just got far bigger than the few hundred magazines, few dozen TV channels and local newspapers of Postman’s time.

We were already teetering on the brink of inanity before; how do we keep from completely drowning in it? What makes information accountable in digital media? Or have we already sunk so low into the ocean that we’ve simply been reduced to passive observers, willing to blog about something but little else?

There seem to be arguments for several sides and positions within this discussion. I’m reminded that while war and genocide raged in Darfur the citizens of Digg were more concerned with the suppression of the code that would have allowed them to steal HD DVDs. Two of the most widely-read blogs online are about celebrity gossip and captioning pictures of cats with grammatically incorrect jokes. This certainly seems to support the white noise and irrelevance argument.

Take Wikipedia, which despite having ranked higher than forums, blogs, social networks and other online sources of information in Edelman’s own Trust Barometer still has a (somewhat deserved) reputation as a source of credible information as long as you’re looking for references in DragonballZ, Pokemon, or Buffy. This xkcd cartoon from the other day illustrates the point in a humorous manner, and it sparked a conversation with Seth shortly after I read it and shared it. Seth turned me on to Wikipedia which, despite its flaws, is an amazing source of information. Sure, there is some inanity on it, but part of the Wikipedia user experience is to flag it or improve it for other readers (and myself). This is the important piece that makes Wikipedia work: it’s self-correcting and the vast amount of information therein can be filtered and adjusted as necessary.

Another example of the contrary argument is how quickly the online community picked up on Iran doctoring the press images of its recent missile launch. Less than 24 hours after Iran released the images to the international press, the online community noticed they Photoshopped it (poorly) to make their missile launch look more successful than it actually was.

It remains to be seen of course whether unmasking Iran’s Photoshop shenanigans will spark and real debate that might lead to actual change in the policies that have created that state, from internal and external influences. So it’s arguable whether there is any real ‘value’ in the online community responding so quickly and accurately as far as long-term debate and dialogue go. But it certainly appears that despite the vast sea of information out there, the truth is not drowning in the irrelevant white noise yet.

Or is it? As I have been composing this post, a fascinating post went up on the IdeaLab about Polymeme and diversifying what it calls the echo chamber. I particularly like the opening bit:

The post goes on to describe the Polymeme tool, a service that scours RSS feeds for related content to introduce users to new stories.

The idea that this moves beyond the echo chamber is what roused my interest. Digital Media’s greatest strength, and that which allows it to avoid becoming a sea of complete irrelevance, is also its greatest weakness in that the most relevant can easily be lost: it is an echo chamber for most. Even so-called news aggregators like Digg are fuelled by their userbase and what that userbase feels is important, which leads to situations like the HD DVD crack being the news of the day over Darfur genocide.

The takeaway here isn’t that it is still unclear whether the digital space will liberate us from our own BNW, or be the thing that finally encapsulates us in it. The popularity of the echo chamber versus discovery tools like Polymeme is disconcerting to say the least, but even my own Twitter group leads to me discover things I never would have before. At the very least we can stave off our willing slavery for a little while longer.

Image "Savages Row" from Ruddington Photos Flickr stream.

From The Management

2008-07-08T09:17:00.000+01:00

The management would like to apologize for the previous post. Those responsible have been disciplined.

Communism, Corporation, Community

2008-07-07T23:56:00.000+01:00

There's an old Polish proverb which states "Under capitalism people exploit people; under communism the reverse is true." I recalled this after a discussion with my coworker Simon the other day as we talked about our various challenges when dealing with large corporations.

My job has brought me into contact with several large, multinational companies. Some are my clients, some aren't (and full disclosure: this is not a 'naming names' post, it's a general philosophical post.) Dealing with these corporations has been an eye-opening process for me; before agency PR, my background was at a startup games company and an Oklahoma state government agency as well as some freelance writing and editing gigs. I worked for State Farm for a few summers, but never really got a taste for the full company, and State Farm isn't a multinational anyway. So my exposure to business was limited to smaller and middle-level companies, and of course government.

What strikes me about massive companies is there is a kind of internal bureaucracy normally associated with socialist and communist countries. In fact, it is the exact kind of bureaucracy many libertarians and Goldwater conservatives oppose in goverment: the kind that is a barrier to progress. I'd be remiss if I didn't indicate that it is exactly the kind of bureaucracy that the Neocon Bush Administration has spent the last eight years creating in America. The same that lead to the ultimate failure of and subsequent distrust in the bureaucracy and the administration that created it following the disasterous and murderous breakdown of the system following Hurricane Katrina. The events following Katrina justify the Goldwater conservative / Libertarian view of bureaucracy in a way that no pseudophilosophical blog post ever could.

The resemblance to this justifiably hated bureaucracy in the internal structure of large companies is remarkable. I'm not claiming that it is as dangerous as a failure of infrastructure, but the process to affect change within these bureaucracies is ultimately so convoluted and Byzantine, especially (from my point of view) as they seek to embrace social media, as to be harmful to the company and its consumers both. I realize that these internal reviews and management structures exist precisely to keep things from changing too quickly, but in the digital world it is as much a liability as it is an asset when preventing change. In fact, it's probably far more of a liability. Bureaucracy is the single-largest barrier to adaptation and positive change in either a company or a government.

But how much of a liability? Dangerous to the company certainly. The ability to not react quickly to customer concerns and to rethink PR and communications as one of interaction and customer service is something that will ultimately doom those companies seeking to engage online and go about it the 'old way' and all that implies. But don't take my word for it: Carl Ichan, CEO of Ichan Enterprises (who owns, among other things, Blockbuster) said it best in his post 'Corporate Democracy Is A Myth:

Many American corporations are dysfunctional because corporate democracy is a myth in the United States. They run like a decaying socialistic state. Our boards and CEOs exist in a symbiotic relationship where the boards nourish the CEO with massive stock options that are re-priced downward if the companies stock declines - making them forever valuable. They reward the CEO with pay packages and bonuses when the stock is floundering or the CEO is leaving the company. Corporate performance and the shareholders welfare seldom enter the picture. What kind of democracy is this? There is no accountability.Accountability is a word I've thrown around before when discussing the same despicable layers of bureaucracy the Neocons created, as ultimately what bureaucracy does is absolve anyone of responsibility. To go back to Katrina, the only one who really lost his job was Michael 'Brownie, you're doin' a heckova job' Brown, a man who was so criminally underqualified for his postion that whomever appointed him should be tried for the murder of people who perished in the days after Katrina. The bureaucracy created so many layers of confusion that in the end, no one except a crony stooge was accountable and the only action taken was he was fired from a job he wasn't doing and didn't need the income from anyway.

This invites other business-government comparisons as well, some of which are exceptionally relevant to engaging online. I could be snide and say Apple is a fascist dictatorship run by one man's cult of personality, but I won't. Or did I? But I'm more interested in the startup mentality from my experiences at WizKids.

The flexibility and freedom of a small to medium-sized startup is far more anagalous to an anarcho-syndicate collective working together to produce things (as opposed to a commune, which works together for the common good, an important distinction Simon pointed out earlier.) This is interesting in that it elegantly mirrors the behavior of many online communities; even within large 'communities' like Facebook people naturally congregate into smaller collectives to serve their specific interests. I realize that's an oversimplification but it's an interesting insight that the companies best equipped to take advantage of online behavior and step around the (you guessed it: bureaucratic) Old Media are those whose internal operations reflect that online behavior.

I can only speculate as to why this is; a company, like a government, in the end is nothing but a bunch of people with artificial structures. When the media structure operates in the same way as the company or government, then it seems - from a relatively small and nonscientific sample - that it is easier for the two to interface. This may be why large companies are so hesitant to embrace social media, as it reflects a system and structure so fundamentally different than the internal bureaucracies they've created that it is too alien for them to comprehend.

I certainly welcome thoughts from anyone who bothered to read this entire rambling piece.

The Same Dream

2008-07-03T12:20:00.000+01:00

The way it begins varies but it always ends up the same: I'm in some kind of large store, always with my wife. People are buying strange old things like broken furniture, giant rolled rugs and cardboard boxes. It's extremely colorful and garish, and there are piles of old things just sitting around as if they were garbage but they're for sale too.

I run past all this and I realize I've got something sharp in my mouth. Most of the time it's a bunch of nails but sometimes it's sewing pins or needles or razor blades. I try to find the bathroom but I can't speak to ask where it is, and I have to stop to keep one of them from sliding down my throat, physically by putting my finger in my mouth. It's hard because I can feel the other pins there and they poke my finger.

I finally find the bathroom and it resembles a cross between a YMCA locker room and a slaughterhouse. The floor is made of olive-and-yellow tiny square tiles but it is covered with what I know is small pieces of blood and flesh, each maybe the size of a ball of cotton. I run over to the sink and spit out the pins, but some of them have stuck in my skin. Some have even poked all the way through my cheeks. I pick them out one by one and the holes start to bleed a little.

And that's typically about the time I wake up.

The picture above is by Polish artist Z. Beksinski and is available for sale at this gallery online.

Wizards of the Coast VS. WizKids: What the Hell?

2008-06-27T06:51:00.000+01:00

Imagine my surprise when this story rolls through my RSS feeds this morning: WotC, WizKids Settle Lawsuit. The details:

Wizards has granted WizKids a license for the Pirates PocketModel Game to United States Patent No. 7,201,374, and all related patents that might issue.Granted WizKids a license? For fuck's sake, I came up with the term constructible strategy game. Me. Jason Mical. I take full credit, because it was one of the things I was quite proud of as a 25-year-old marketing noob.

In fact, it says so in Wikipedia, providing some WotC revisionist doesn't get their hands on the article first. I've taken a screengrab and there's always the page's history should the revisionists arrive.

Update
~~Lawyers truly are worthless, soulless human beings.~~

I really should think before I type. I know two very good lawyers, a good friend and my father-in-law, and I did not mean to offend. A more accurate statement would be that corporate greed turns people into soulless human beings.

Sorry guys!!

Avast Me Fiction, Mateys!

2008-06-26T11:02:00.000+01:00

It's a good time for me as a writer. How good? Really good.

I'm working on two stories for two separate anthologies, one about ghosts, the other about zombies. And in July, the next Blue Kingdoms anthology comes out featuring a new story by yours truly: "Keva's Six." It's a mixture of fantasy pirate action and classic heist tale starring the lovely Keva the Freemariner, the character who originally debuted in the original Blue Kingdoms anthology, and her crew as they attempt to break into an unbreakable vault and take treasure from a pirate who won't appreciate being the target of such rank amateurs.

Are you going to Wizard World Chicago this weekend? If so, Fearless Editor (and fellow Alliterate) Stephen D. Sullivan will be there at Booth 5910 selling copies of Buxom Buccaneers and other Blue Kingdoms things. The book will also be available on Amazon.com soon (I'll post a link when it is.)

Get yer copy me hardies, or I shove ye off the plank! Arr!

The Jurassic Park Award

2008-06-19T11:09:00.001+01:00

Do you know an old media dinosaur that needs to be put into a zoo before they go extinct? Celebrate their devotion to the outdated manipulate-and-control nontransparent media model with the Jurassic Park Award! Click for big version, suitable for printing, framing and shaming.

The Dangers of Inauthenticity

2008-06-13T14:51:00.000+01:00

Is inauthenticty a word? Maybe in the spirit of Stephen Colbert, it is now. We need something for the opposite of authenticity. That's the word. Here's an example.

I caught on SA a news story from the US about a high school 'scared straight' stunt where students were told their classmates had died, only to discover later that it was a deception intended to 'shock' them about the realities of drunken driving.

Quote from the article:

On one hand, I applaud the school for teaching their students to distrust authority figures and question the veracity of what they are told. Not that high school students need much encouragement in that area, but it's always a good lesson to reinforce. So bravo to the administrators for that.

But there's something even more deeply disturbing here that relates to my job. I realize I haven't blogged about work recently, but I'm going to start doing it again, so bear with me.

Manipulation is something that is so ingrained into so many people for so many reasons that it can become justifiable to them in instances like this. The administration's argument, that the ends outweigh the means, is faulty. I could post statistics that show being honest and straightforward with kids (and people) is the best way to influence their behavior. I could post a rant about schools manipulating their students (as soon as you're born, they make you feel small.) But instead consider it from the side of authentic communications, in which my company has become a major thought leader.

The fact of the matter is the old model of manipulate and obfuscate doesn't work. At some point your deception will be discovered, and the ends do not justify the means. Ever. Some marketers view the public as children to be manipulated. Traditionally, this thinking may work. It may get headlines. But like the student response to this deception, is the backlash worth it? If the administrators had instead sat down and shown them something equally shocking but not deceptive, for example, photos of DUI victims that you can easily find online, they would have achieved their goals without the need for lies and without the inevitable negative backlash and loss of trust.

The quote by the girl at the end really sums up the risks and dangers of inauthenticity: "You feel betrayed by your teachers and administrators, these people you trust."

The Highest Compliment

2008-06-10T20:56:00.000+01:00

The other day, I was paid the highest compliment I have yet received as an up-and-coming writer.

An editor thanked me for my 'consummate professionalism.'

It made my week. I may not be a best-selling writer (yet) or a best-smelling writer (ever), but I'll take consummate professionalism over either of those things.

Blogging Ain't Easy

2008-06-07T07:41:00.000+01:00

That's not true: actually it's really easy. In fact even my mom is blogging now. These are indeed crazy times.

No, what isn't easy is coming up with good content. That's been the Puppet Show's problem since the beginning. With RSS and Google Reader Shared Items, I don't feel like I have to make blog posts about other blog posts unless I have something really significant to add, which I typically don't. I could be blogging about PR and marketing but who really wants to hear about that? Creative blogging is alright but I don't do it nearly enough to make it the focus of this blog.

So I'm sure I'll keep inundating you with randomness and hopefully have fewer filler posts, but I also feel like I only have so much I can devote to blogging and writing and sometimes I have to direct it in other places - a story, the other blogs I work on, and so forth. So please pardon me if I don't update but a couple of times a week. It's not from lack of desire, just lack of time and energy.

When What You Think You Know Isn't True

2008-05-28T10:39:00.001+01:00

Going through my RSS this morning, I found a shared item from Kevin about Bob Ballard, discoverer of the Titanic, and what really happened when when the wreck was found:

Ballard's search for Titanic was a very important part of my childhood development. It captured my imagination in a way that many other things did not, and helped put into context for my young mind history, determination, exlporation, science, learning, archaeology, and what could be accomplished with hard work and determination and scientific know-how.

And now I read that the reason Ballard didn't find the wreck immediately is that he was secretly looking for submarines, not that he was looking and didn't know where to go.

I realize as an adult that all of those things I listed, imagination, history, exploration, science, learning and so forth require money to accomplish on a grand scale and that money often comes from sources dedicated to many of the direct opposite of those things. Dear God, I recognize that my job allows me the security and time to travel and be creative. Well, sometimes it does. And that's a trade-off.

But it's a little mind-blowing to see that what I once thought was an expedition for pure science was really an afterthought of a military operation and accomplished because Ballard had already crossed the Ts on his creditors' mission, and that even he was beholden to those creditors.

There's a lesson here. It's a cynical one and something I really don't care to think about.

I need to wash my hands.

Scotch Review: The Peat Monster

2008-05-24T14:01:00.000+01:00

The Peat Monster

Scotch Review: The Peat Monster

Who could resist a Scotch called The Peat Monster? That was probably what the marketing folks at Compass Box Whisky were thinking and it worked. This was an impulse buy as I was selecting another Scotch, and I had to try it. Glad I did.

The label description:

I have to respectfully disagree with part of their label copy: Peat Monster makes a fine afternoon sipping whisky as well. The 'monster' is a bit of a misnomer; the label is right in that this is an exceptionally well-balanced scotch. It is peaty but not too peaty, earthy without being overwhelming. What works best about this whisky is that no one element overwhelms the other, making it a pleasant drink all around.

I took their recommendation and had mine neat. The yellowish color gives a hint of its general properties: mild isn't the right word, and I keep coming back to "balance" so I'll stick with it.

Highly recommended.

Oops

2008-05-18T21:46:00.000+01:00

I just restarted my account for the book social network Goodreads, and while I thought I was only connecting with the 10 people from my Gmail account who were already on the site, apparently I spammed all 492 people in my contact book.

If you're one of those (many, many) people, I'm very sorry. I blame Goodreads' shitty UI and not-very-transparent 'invite' system.

Update: Jesus, I spammed DeepDiscount's help system, Best Buy, everyone. Good fucking God I hate systems like that.

Note: If anyone out there is a programmer, add a fucking warning box when you want people to import their entire Goddamned address book or at least make it DAMN clear that's what you're doing.

Fucking assholes.

A Matter of Time

2008-05-15T08:26:00.000+01:00

This post may be more appropriate on my Yankee In London blog but it's a little more general, so I'll put it here.

Today is a very important milestone for me. I almost didn't notice it was happening. Nine years ago today I returned from studying abroad here in London, after a raucous trip to Scotland and a semester living in another country. That means two things:

I have now lived and been outside of the United States for longer than I ever have before.

I am approximately one-quarter of the way done with our contractual obligations to be here in London, should we decide to come back immediately. Our work visas only last that long anyway.

It's a strange feeling since in a way it seems like we just got here and our lives are still in chaos. At the same time, it's even less remarkable since the real milestone happened about a month ago for me, since I came about a month early this time. Yet there's still that chaos. Things aren't quite settled yet and they may never be.

Of all the things I miss, my friends and family are byfar the largest thing. There is barely a day that goes by where I don't think 'hey, X would love this,' or 'I wish I could show this to Y.' I thought the same thing when I was here before and having the Beautiful Competition here to share this with me certainly helps but I still miss my friends and family greatly. Admittedly, my webcam and Xbox Live does help me keep in touch in ways I wouldn't have been able to do before, but they are still stopgap measures.

As I continue to reevaluate my life as I lurch ever closer to my next birthday (which I'm not officially celebrating, by the way) I realize more and more what's really important and know that I'm adjusting my life accordingly so I can enjoy every bit of time I have with the people I care about. Life's just too damn short to do otherwise.

Apologies for not posting in a while, the weather has been fabulous. This is the first morning it's rained in weeks. Which may be affecting my mood slightly.

Gone Silent

2008-05-05T08:35:00.000+01:00

I realize it's been pretty quiet around here lately, mostly because I haven't had a hell of a lot of time to update things. Part of that is how busy I've been at work lately; another part is because GTA4 came out and I've been playing it a lot. A third part is that when I get home from work I just don't care to sit down at a computer and type more stuff. It's also gotten a lot nicer in London lately and I've been outside a lot more.

Last night I finished a new short story that is bound for the next Blue Kingdoms anthology. A Yankee In London has its new banner art. It's a bank holiday today and I'm planning to get out and doing something even if I haven't decided what that something is yet.

On Marketing

2008-04-28T13:23:00.000+01:00

From the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

Cha-Cha-Cha-Changes!

2008-04-23T21:24:00.000+01:00

There's a nice new picture on the right nav bar, courtesy of a particularly talented graphic artist. You may recognize his art from the Something Awful forums and the hand-puppet avatars in the comic book subforum there. If you're interested, his site and contact information is here. I'll be plugging him again.

This cosmetic change is the first of several that will take place around the various puppet shows; it will culminate in the launch of a new professional blog, because as much as I'd like to avoid it, I don't think I can get away from blogging as part of my job - because it will ultimately be a necessary networking and platforming tool.

In the meantime, enjoy the new artwork and look for more changes soon.

The Long Weekend Road

2008-04-14T11:53:00.001+01:00

I'm sitting on a National Express train back to London after a great weekend hiking in North Yorkshire. I needed a little time off, to myself, by myself. Booked three nights in a roadside inn (constructed 1680), grabbed some ordinance survey maps, planned some hikes and enjoyed getting away from London.

The trip originally had three purposes: to relax (done), to write (also done), and to try to figure out a general direction for myself. I'm pushing 30 and feel like I've been drifting, planless, long enough.

But what I realized before I left was that life isn't necessarily about plans. I discovered that I've never really gotten over my aborted plan to go to New York and Make It Big in Publishing, which was the sum total of my plans after college. In retrospect, as the magazine and publishing industry continues to contract and I'm enjoying a fairly lucrative career in digital PR, I'm not disappointed that I didn't Make It Big. But I've felt as though I've spent most of the last eight years adrift with very little in the way of a 'plan.'

My realization was this: life isn't necessarily about plans. It's about opportunities, about recognizing them and taking advantage of ones that are good for you. It's about seeing something that could potentially be good, whether it's for a career or a relationship or a hobby, and just doing it if it's right. Like moving into digital PR, or moving to London. Or taking a long weekend to Yorkshire and cranking out 10,000 words and a bunch of story and novel notes.

For the first time in my life I feel alright with not having a Plan. I regret some decisions I've made, but they have taught me much, and I stand by each one either as being good for me overall or at least teaching me some kind of lesson. And I can get caught in a snowstorm and still be prepared for it and recognize my limits - when it's time to turn back and try the mountain again the next day.

The funny thing about this is that the insight came before the trip on which I wanted to have it. I'm not complaining. I did get a lot of writing, and hiking, and thinking done. And had some really good Yorkshire ale. The black pudding, not as good. But still an experience.

I feel wholly confident that I can make time to do what I love and to separate my personal life from my work life - something I haven't been great at recently. And my Plan? To enjoy it as it comes. To go with the flow. It's funny: in college, if I'd said that, I would reply "that's Taoism, you took an entire course in that philosophy, remember!" And it only took eight years for the lesson to sink in.

Let Us Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Consoles

2008-04-05T18:24:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I got up early to pack my 360 and all my Rock Band kit into a suitcase to drag it down Holloway Road, ride with it through the Tube, then drag it into my office so we could do our first planned office morale activity: play some Rock Band. That's doubly-cool because Rock Band isn't out here yet, so no one has had a chance to play around with it. I set up the Xbox, plugged it in, got all the instruments plugged in, ran through a test song to make sure everything was working correctly, turned it off until the session was about to start, came back and turned it on, watched as the menu froze, then watched as the startup screen froze, and then got the symbol you see above.

The Red Ring of Death.

The Red Ring of Death, or RROD, is what happens when there's a critical failure inside a 360 - it flashes three quarter-circles of red light to indicate that it's got a bit of a problem. It also means your console isn't working anymore and you have to send it to Microsoft so they fix it - and wait, console-less, for them to do so.

Now it's no mystery that I worked on the 360 account in my first days at Edelman, initially on the Corporate team and then on the Community team, before moving on to other accounts (and, that takes care of my transparency disclosure too.) I was excited to work on the 360 account because I came from traditional games, I thought the 360 was doing a lot of things right, and I liked the original Xbox a lot. I don't want to say that I was chugging the cool-aid, but I did buy the first 360 I could as soon as I could.

That one lasted about three months before its DVD drive failed, scratching some of my discs.

The next one lasted about six months or so before its DVD failed.

The one you see above is my third Xbox 360.

Additionally, I packed it into a box to ship over here around the first of November, so until recently I had been Xbox-less. It took far longer to get here than anticipated, so it was sitting unused in its box for a good part of the last few months. Since it got here, I haven't put it through any use it hadn't been through before - often I'm very good about turning it off and not playing for too long at any given time - not that I have time to do otherwise.

Now I've had a lot of consoles. I had an NES. It did start to get wonky, because some NES' had problems with their connectors going bad. Fixing it is an easy open-screw job. I have a Genesis. It still works fine. I had a SNES. Going strong. I have a Dreamcast that works like a charm. I have purchased a 2600, an Intellivision, a Colecovision, a Sega CD and Sega 32X, a Jaguar, a Turbo Graphix 16, a Saturn, and and Xbox, all of which work as well as they did when they rolled off the assembly line. I also have a PS2, which I had to replace twice, both times for the DVD drive failing. If I had purchased a piece of consumer electronics that failed three times on me, I would simply not buy it again or replace it after the third time.

Except in this instance I have hundreds of dollars of games for this device, so I'd really be screwing myself. So I will wait, patiently, for my the repaired console to come back.

I offer no judgment on this situation - I leave that up to you, Puppeteers. I'm only neutrally reporting what's happened to me and the fact that I will now likely have to wait two more months to get my console back. I also have to request my specific console back, because it's a US 360 and 360 games are region-coded - meaning if I just went out and got a UK 360, none of my games would work on it. And since I have to send it to the UK repair center (centre), I run the risk of them not returning my console to me at all but instead giving me one that won't work with my games.

In the meantime, as much as I'd love to play Rock Band or Crackdown with my friends back home - sorry guys, I'm going to have to sit the next few rounds out. I suppose you could send game requests to the repair center (centre) - I hear they have a lot of consoles there.

2Cats1Box

2008-04-03T12:49:00.000+01:00

The cats have arrived and have adjusted nicely to living in a small flat. Well, almost nicely. The Beautiful Competition has discovered that she's allergic to them moreso than she was before - if she pets them and rubs her eyes, she has to take a Benadryl. I'm holding up alright but I can definitely tell the space is smaller.

But the biggest change is the box. I realize I run the risk of turning this whole post into some kind of poop joke, so I'll try to keep it to a minimum. But this is the first time both cats have used one litter box, and the clumping-nosmell-bakingsoda litter we used to use isn't available here. The flat is small, and the space for the box is minimum, so it's in the closet right as you walk in. So if it's dirty, you know.

Now don't surf away so quickly you read skidmarks: it's not as bad as some spoiled chocolate, only that you have to keep it clean. It's really just a matter of being careful, like stepping around roadapples or cowpies, or like you're repeatedly mulching your garden every spring. It's a matter of dilligence really. If you keep it free of floaters and regulate the tootsie rolls to the candy bowl, it's not much trouble.

The smell can get downright horrible however, as you might expect. Sometimes it's enough to give you the runs, and as summer approaches I fear that it will become even more craptacular, especially considering the overall flow of air in the flat isn't real great when we're away at work. We'll have to unplug things so that everything comes out in the end as the temperatures start to rise.

On Apple Keynote

2008-03-27T09:54:00.000Z

I'll be the first to admit when I'm wrong, but in this instance I feel more justified than anything else. I'm also one to avoid a hype bandwagon, sometimes (I'll admit) to my own detriment when something I would normally find cool is hyped to the point where it can't simply be that good. Especially when the person doing the hyping is one I tend to disagree with.

But I digress. I've had the pleasure these last couple of days of working extensively with Apple's Keynote software. For you PC scrubs out there, Keynote is to Apple what Powerpoint is to PC. Well that's not entirely true, because you have to own Apple-branded hardware to run this Apple-branded software (monopoly cough) while you can run Powerpoint on a Mac. But seriously, why would you want to?

When it comes to one functional program over I generally don't really care what I use. Features are the first dealbreaker; OpenOffice, for example, fucked up the formatting on my work documents so I scrapped it after a couple of weeks. UI is the second dealbreaker; how easy is the program to use? More importantly, how intuitive is it? I don't have a problem changing my habits to switch from one version of a program to another if the learning curve is low enough that it doesn't matter - and to its credit, Office 2007 is awesomely easy to learn.

But Powerpoint has always been my nemesis. I have never had a violent impulse from a video game, but Powerpoint has made me contemplate murder and other kinds of sociopathic behavior. Its autoformatting is a piece of shit and it just isn't easy to use - it's not intuitive.

Keynote is Powerpoint without the annoying bits. It is so ludicriously intuitive you'd think it was reading your mind. It gives you everything you need to adjust your slides automatically rather than making you hunt for them through a series of nested menus. It's almost fun to use.

I doubt I'm going to run out and buy a Mac anytime soon, but this does offer one answer to my favorite question for Macheads: what about a Mac actually makes it better than a PC (other than 'It's not Windowz LOL' or 'it just works,' which is a crock of shit.) Keynote kicks ass. I wish I could buy it for my PC.

Transparency Disclaimer: I worked (but no longer do so) on Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit PR team in the Digital realm.

Paper

2008-03-26T21:21:00.000Z

There's something about the texture and feel of paper that I like. I don't feel the need to read things on paper - I'm fine with the movement of fiction to digital forms - but paper itself, the pulp beneath the ink, is something irreplaceable. My favorites are heavier and grainier varieties; construction paper, comic book paper, the stuff they made paperback novels out of in the 1980s. It has a certain dry feel to it like nothing else and makes a strange and chilling noise when you rub two sheets of it together. In my memory it is forever associated with reading in the back of the classroom in grade school, in stuffing a copy of Jurassic Park in my earth science book in junior high, or in buying copies of Groo before it changed to the higher-quality glossy format.

I also remember my mother taking me to COSI in Columbus and showing me the papermaking exhibit on the Street of Yesteryear, which is another vault of great memory all on its own.

For all my digital knowledge and my daily use of computers and the sheer volume of text I read online each day, I suppose there is a reason I've never read a novel on the Internet before and have no plans to do so.

Dealing With Culture Shock in a Healthy Manner

2008-03-20T12:50:00.000Z

Allow Myself To, Uh, Play With Myself

2008-03-12T13:04:00.000Z

So one of the things I've been doing in my free time lately is playing through old Sierra games - specifically, Quest for Glory games. I got the idea to try a 'Let's Play' for these games on the good old SA forums. I realized after investing quite a few hours into this that I should probably make a more permanent record than SA for these things - so I started another blog. Classic Let's Play. For playing classic games.

If you're so inclined, check it out. It's not up to date with the actual LP thread yet, but I'll keep updating it when I have a free second here and there.

Also if you don't know what the hell I'm talking about as far as Let's Play goes - it's a subculture of gamers and people who watch other people play video games and attempt to make humorous comments along the way. Yes, it's geeky. It's really geeky. But at least it's not fan fiction.