"i should have believed stalin"

This video sums up exactly why I won't be going to see the Watchmen movie... a shame that the person who finally said it was... Hitler? [Contains spoilers.]

For now, at least, I'll have to stick with my fond memories of the 1980s Saturday morning adaptation.

Labels: geek culture, media commentary, rants, videos

Friday, March 06, 2009
12:55 PM
2 comments

six things that bugged me about heroes S3.E01

So last night was the season premiere of the third season of Heroes, a show that I have a sort of love-hate relationship with, albeit one that is increasingly slipping towards "hate." I should preface this by saying that even when the show was at its best I always thought of it as little more than junk food. Even junk food has its hierarchy, however, and by the end of the second season the show had slipped in my mind from being somewhere around "basket of cheese fries" to somewhere around "fistful of jimmies."

The third season is being promoted as a return to form, but as I settled down to watch it I sent out a Twitter update predicting that it would make me cringe with dismay at least six times. Did it?

They didn't rely on their most aggravating plot device, that of having major characters run into one another at random, but there were still some serious annoyances. Roughly in order from most to least "cringeworthy":

1. Hiro's unwillingness to travel backwards in time still doesn't really make sense. Every time-travel narrative, from Primer to Back to the Future, inevitably touches on the perils of messing with the past, and those perils are real enough that we could reasonably expect a character to be reluctant to do it. But a blanket refusal under all circumstances strikes me as a Lazy Writer's solution to the problem of having invented a character who is too powerful. We should be able to expect that where the reward for going backwards is great enough (or the risk of not going backwards is severe enough) that the temptation to do it should at least be acknowledged. In this episode, Hiro takes a secret formula out of a safe only to have it stolen out of his hands by a gamine with super-speed, yet he never even considers going back in time to stop himself from taking it out of the safe. Recall that it is only Hiro's willingness to bear messages into the past in Season One that allows the other heroes to "save the world."

2. Mohinder's current plotline is cribbed directly from David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly. Crawling up the wall, amping up the sugar intake, becoming hyper-masculinized and -sexualized, and then... observing hideous transformations in the bathroom mirror! If you're going to be derivative, The Fly is pretty good material, but it's such a lift that it smack of laziness.

3. Giant shockwave that destroys Future Tokyo. Pretty cool-looking effect, but isn't that really only one degree removed from the "giant shockwave that destroys Future New York" that governed Season One? Come to think of it, Season Two's "apocalyptic plague that destroys Future New York" was also only one degree removed from Season One. It's like they're using a broken combinatoric wheel to write this stuff. At this point, I'd love to see a season from this show that wasn't based on Having to Avert an Apocalyptic Future.

4. Nathan's "religious conversion" at this stage seems... random? This strikes me as the kind of thing you do when you aren't sure what to do with a character. It would bug me less if the Heroes writers weren't already struggling with writing consistent characters.

5. Subtitles have Hiro say "discrete" when they mean to have him say "discreet." In reference to detectives. "These detectives are very discrete." As in they do not blur together into a single detective.

6. Usage of standard-issue black street thugs and introduction of a black "Level 5" supervillain doesn't improve the show's track record in terms of African-American representation.

There are a few more, but those are some of the big ones. Should I stop watching this show?

Labels: heroes, media commentary, rants, writing

Tuesday, September 23, 2008
8:51 AM
1 comments

assorted frustrations

Ever since I migrated to the quote-unquote "new Blogger" (I think on New Year's Day) , I've been unable to use it to update any of my blogs at the imaginaryyear.com domain (including this one). I'm guessing that the error stems from my webhosting company, iPower, blocking the "new" Blogger IPs, and I promptly communicated this to the iPower tech support people, in the hopes that they'd be able to let me know whether this is or is not the problem. That was twelve days ago, and so far no luck, but I remain optimistic.

Unrelated frustration: I just went down to Borders to return a book I'd inadvertantly purchased a duplicate of, and I decided I'd cash it in for a different book. But I spent a good hour wandering around Borders, looking mostly in vain for even a single book that felt like one I would like to own. I'm not sure why I was having such trouble. After all, I think of myself as an avid reader—I read close to a book a week, for God's sake&151;and there's absolutely no shortage of books that I'm interested in... but for some reason, there's just something about a Borders or a Barnes and Noble that just drains the life out of books for me. There are other bookstores that are the opposite: certain stores I can't walk out of without piling up a dozen great-looking books and then painstakingly winnowing it down to what I can afford. I'm not even necessarily saying that indie bookstores have better books; I'm sure that indie bookstores and corporate bookstores have a considerable amount of overlap in their selection. It must come down to the way the books are displayed, or something: one type of store makes books seem like desirable objects, and the other makes them seem like anonymous stock. Has anyone else had this same experience, or am I just losing it?

Labels: rants

Tuesday, January 16, 2007
4:03 PM
2 comments

About six months ago, I promised a rant on The Believer, then I got distracted by other things and never delivered.

At the time, I wrote that the "short version" was that I was "undecided," and there is some part of me that badly wants to love The Believer. I could justify this desire in a handful of simplistic ways: I could point out specific articles I found interesting in their pages in the past; point out how sometimes they publish authors whose work I enjoy. But when I come to really love a magazine, I'm responding to more than just the sum of its articles and authors taken together: I'm responding to the whole editorial ethos of the magazine.

So I've been trying to put my finger on exactly what The Believer's ethos might be, and I've come to conclude that it's characterized by a certain smug knowingness, a certain breezy dismissiveness.

This explains part of the appeal—after all, it's comforting to find yourself agreeing with a group of people who seem able to confidently reject individuals, aesthetic movements, entire schools of thought. These folks seem to have all the answers—who wouldn't want to be in their club?

And, of course, there's a value to reading writing by knowledgable people. But I find that the certainty that characterizes the collective tone of The Believer—smugness is the word I keep coming back to—begins to rankle me: I'd rather take the feelings of intellectual insecurity that comes with having to admit that I don't have the answer. I'd rather have the company of someone like Robert Creeley, who at his reading quoted Franz Kline: "When I paint what I know I bore myself; when I paint what you know I bore you; I try to paint what I don't know."

This problem is compounded by the fact that, often, what ends up being dismissed by The Believer are cultural developments (of one form or another) that strike me as politically / aesthetically / intellectually progressive. This can perversely be mistaken as "edgy," by the same sort of people who think it's somehow "daring" to set up and knock down various straw men labeled "politically correct." (VICE Magazine is also commonly guilty of aiming for "edginess" in exactly this way; functioning as a sort of street-level cousin to The Believer's ostensibly high-minded liberal-artsiness.)

I should not need to point out here that it's not daring to be culturally conservative. This is embedded into the very meaning of the words.

So if I was thinking all this six months ago, why the rant now? It's because The Believer recently ran an article ("Hyperauthor, Hyperauthor!") that touches on the Kent Johnson controversy and (predictably) dismisses the idea that Double Flowering might raise interesting questions and (predictably) makes the overall (conservative) claim that readers "need" an author. The article isn't online, but Typo Magazine has published thirty letters, many by poets, which criticize The Believer article and make many of the points I make here more succinctly and eloquently.

I like this bit:

"In the end, Atkinson's treatment of Johnson and Yasusada is just MEAN: he trots out the weirdo, calls him names, tells him that nobody will ever love him or buy his book, pulls his pants down, rubs his face in the snow, and sends him back to the other freaks: readers and writers of poetry who, despite Atkinson's pronouncements, DO read the work and DO get many, various, polymorphous and perverse pleasures from it. "

Labels: magazines, rants

Monday, April 19, 2004
9:32 AM
0 comments

David Weinberger on why he hates Friendster. The most interesting bit, for me, is this one:

"Look, I want to say to the Friendsters of the world, we already invented a social network for friends and strangers. It's called the Internet. Why are you privatizing it? Why do we need a proprietary sub-network to do what the Internet has already done in an open way?"

Excellent questions, although one answer might be that the proprietary sub-networks have a gentler learning curve—these proprietary networks are appealing (I think) to people who aren't particularly web-savvy. Just follow the link in your invitation and fill in the blanks and within three minutes you can be enjoying some of the pleasures of connectivity. It's a closed, limited network, yeah, one that walls out most of the bewildering wilds of the Web, but if the success of AOL has taught us anything, it's that what some people want out of the Web is a managed (or manageable) experience.

This does beg the question of whether the more-managed (closed) parts of the Web might be hurting the less-managed (open) parts. The Web is not a finite resource like geography: each managed "area" does not take the "place" of an unmanaged "area." But attention is a finite resource, maybe the key one in talking about the Web, and when a service like AOL steers its users around and around in its own little content ghetto it siphons that resource away from the rest of the Web. Some of the better social networking websites (Flickr, Orkut, Tribe) are less guilty of this, since they allow you to include a link to your webpage in your profile, appends a little arrow that points "out"...

Related: Caterina's continued enthusiasm for social networks.

Labels: internet, networks, rants

Sunday, April 04, 2004
9:36 AM
0 comments

A while ago, in one of my social software critiques, I wrote:

"What would actually be useful is to be able to rate my friends in terms of the intensity of the bond between us. There are eight people currently listed as my friends in Orkut. I am, indeed, fond of them all. But two of them I've never met. Two more I've only met on one occasion. One is a casual acquaintance who I haven't had contact with since he moved away from Chicago six months (or so) ago. Two are people who I enjoy some degree of intimacy with, people who I could call on the phone just to say "how are you?," people who I have had dinner with (once or twice) within the past year. And one is a guy who's been my friend for fifteen years. This information has obvious relevance to anyone who's trying to make a meaningful use of my network, but to Orkut (or Friendster or Tribe) all of the bonds are of equal intensity, creating a picture of me and my network of friends which is weirdly distorted to the point where it is practically a fiction."

What's needed in order to solve this problem is a workable taxonomy of types of relationships, and I had given some preliminary thought of some basic categories that such a taxonomy would contain. But now I've learned that Ian Davis and Eric Vitiello have cooked one up already: Relationship (which appears to have been designed as an attempt to formalize some sort of metadata protocol?).

Clay Shirky critiques Relationship (he actually describes it as "self-critiquing"), and he does so mainly by pointing out some of the predictable difficulties of establishing any sort of taxonomy (grey areas, etc.). Still: to my mind even the flawed Relationship taxonomy is better than the current model used by most social software, where all human bonds are equivalent.

Shirky's final point in rejecting the taxonomy is as follows: "the madness of the age is to assume that people can spell out, in explicit detail, the messiest aspects of their lives, and that they will eagerly do so, in order to provide better inputs to cool new software."

Thoughtful, but I think he might be wrong. I think the assumption that people would (if they could) is actually an increasingly safe assumption. The madness may be not the assumption that people will do it, but the fact that people will do it.

Labels: internet, networks, rants

Wednesday, March 17, 2004
11:12 AM
0 comments

My old pal Brian S. sends along one link to this social software weblog and one to an article on Club Nexus, an online social network at Stanford. (The article is co-authored by Orkut Buyukokkten, the Orkut that gives Orkut its name, and Club Nexus appears to have inspired at least a few of the Big O's quirkier features, including the sexy/trusty/cool thing that I hated on last week.)

The bulk of the article is dedicated to a variety of statistical observations made from sorting and sifting the data-sets of user information in various ways. For instance, correlations can be observed between the way users describe their personalities (via personality-descriptors selected from a menu) and what those same users describe as their interests. (Appendix A, which begins on page 14, entertainingly records these correlations.)

This is an interesting use of the technology, although it's worth noting that this view of the "big picture" is only available to the system administrators, those who have the access and the tools necessary to organize the big picture into meaningful data.

Question: is there a social networking website that offers total information openness, by which I mean a site that allows all of its users to access, navigate, and sort all of its accumulated information? Because it's worth thinking about not only the value that these sorts of systems provide for their users, but also the value that they provide for their administrators. I would bet that the information that these sorts of systems may yield will turn out to be worth actual money, and as a result it's worth trying to develop a sense of exactly how much of a gap exists between what the administrators can learn from the system and what the users can learn from the system. Reading this article gave me the feeling that we may all be merrily participating in the world's largest market research scheme, and for the first time it made me think that there might be a political point to feeding noise into these systems.

Labels: internet, networks, rants

Tuesday, February 10, 2004
11:13 AM
0 comments

Follow-up to this post: Brian Eno has contacted Matt Jones. I admit that I'm impressed, although they haven't actually had the sit-down chat yet, and until they do I'm not convinced that the project has been successful. (My interest in the project is strictly to see how well a data-exchanging network can provide an experiential pleasure: one that is not exclusively data-oriented. Having Brian Eno post a comment on your blog is undoubtedly pleasurable, but it's a data pleasure, only one order of magnitude above the sorts of pleasures that the Web already excels at delivering. (If one is prone to thinking of all experience as being data, processed by the mind, then one could possibly argue that all experiential pleasures are also data pleasures, but I'll argue for the distinction, given that the data involved in an experience like an actual sit-down face-to-face conversation is massively richer than the data involved in a blog exchange.))

Other tidbits: Crystal sends along a Memepool link to an interesting essaylet about the social networking technology used by French dove breeders of the 17th century, complete with karma mechanisms and fake profiles.

The "state of the state of social software" posts on this blog and elsewhere have mostly been occasioned by the launch of Orkut. I've been fooling around with Orkut for the course of the past week, and I've made some observations:

On the plus side, Orkut does one thing well: it provides me with the meaningful-blurb-under-the-photo that Friendster doesn't give me (This is the third of the three "things I want to do that Friendster won't let me do." Orkut doesn't allow me to do the first two, but at least they're managing one out of three.)

On the drawback side, Orkut has what strikes me as a truly useless friend-ranking mechanism, where you can rate friends as "sexy," "very sexy," or "super sexy." (Also cool / very cool / super cool and trustworthy / very trustworthy / super trustworthy.)

First off, this mechanism bizarrely makes ranking someone as merely "sexy" into kind of an insult... my guess is that this will lead to the kind of inflation known to characterize EBay's feedback reports, where people are unusually free with the perfect scores, because anything less seems critical. (Orkut attempts to minimize this problem by making the rankings anonymous, but, still, I find it difficult to visualize myself giving my friends anything less than the highest rankings.) If everyone in the system ends up being 90% cool (even typing out such a stupid phrase makes me gnash my teeth) then the listing that indicates a person's "coolness level" is meaningless, noise in the signal.

There's the germ of a good idea here, though: in order to provide meaningful data, social networking websites need to allow you to rank the people you're connected to. But rating them in terms of coolness or sexiness is absolutely the wrong way to go about this (not least because of the vagueness: what's the difference between "very trustworthy" and "super trustworthy" anyway?).

What would actually be useful is to be able to rate my friends in terms of the intensity of the bond between us. There are eight people currently listed as my friends in Orkut. I am, indeed, fond of them all. But two of them I've never met. Two more I've only met on one occasion. One is a casual acquaintance who I haven't had contact with since he moved away from Chicago six months (or so) ago. Two are people who I enjoy some degree of intimacy with, people who I could call on the phone just to say "how are you?," people who I have had dinner with (once or twice) within the past year. And one is a guy who's been my friend for fifteen years. This information has obvious relevance to anyone who's trying to make a meaningful use of my network, but to Orkut (or Friendster or Tribe) all of the bonds are of equal intensity, creating a picture of me and my network of friends which is weirdly distorted to the point where it is practically a fiction.

</grouchy>

Labels: internet, networks, rants

Tuesday, February 03, 2004
10:36 AM
0 comments

Over at Black Belt Jones, Matt is attempting to use social networking technology to attain a specific goal: he wants to sit down and talk to Brian Eno within the next two months.

This experiment reminds me of the chapter in Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone where he critiques the Web because it primarily provides its users with information, and fails to fulfill desires for anything other than more information. For Bey, information is useful only inasmuch as it enables the fulfillment of real-world desires (especially forbidden / illegal ones), and he views most of the information available through the Web as irrelevant to attaining these desires. Dating sites like Nerve, or social networking sites like Friendster, which hadn't emerged at the time of Bey's writing, present themselves as tools for the fulfillment of specific real-world desires (friendship, sex, lunch with Brian Eno), and, as such, they seem to be offering the right carrot, but the real question is how effective they are at delivering on this promise. So I'll be intrigued to see whether Matt Jones gets his wish.

Labels: internet, networks, rants

Wednesday, January 28, 2004
3:54 PM
0 comments

Darren B writes in to ask "What is it people expect of networking websites that isn't being delivered?"

Let's take an example of a real-world situation that I'd like to be able to use this sort of site for.

Let's say a friend invites me to a party at her place. I don't know many of her friends, but I know she has a Friendster profile, so I think "maybe if I browse her friends via Friendster I'll be able to see who might be coming to this party, so that I can find someone who might share my interests, someone who I might be interested in talking to." So I go check out her profile. There are 50 friends listed there (commonly more). I click on the first one, oops, that's someone from Maine. I click on the second one, that person's from Somerville, MA. I click on the third one, that's a fakester profile for "Beer." Suddenly clicking through the other 47 is seeming less appealing.

At this juncture there are three things I'd like to do that Friendster won't let me do:

1. Arrange the list. In this case I'd like to put the people who live closest to me at the top. Sorting it so that people who shared multiple connections to me might be interesting; I can also see wanting to sort the list by gender, or by who's single. But I can't do any of these things.

2. Search within the list. Within this group of people, who lives in Chicago? Who shares my interests? Who's single? Is there a way to find out without having to click 50 times?

3. Barring a way to arrange the list or perform a sub-search, I'd like to be able to at least quickly browse all the friends linked to my friend's page for some useful basic information. Which of them live in Chicago? A little blurb under the photo with just their location would at least enable me to know more-or-less at a glance which of these people I have a realistic opportunity to get to know. But all I can see are their names and, in some cases, their faces: information that holds no meaning given what I am trying to do.

I think Friendster has lost sight of the fact that the information that's most useful to us when looking for friends or people to date is local information. Friendster should be continually sifting by geographic proximity as well as degrees-of-separation proximity. Not "here's a random person in your network" but "here's someone in your network who lives next door."

Internet networking makes it easy to connect to people all over the globe, but unless I'm looking for correspondents, knowing that I'm two degrees of separation from someone who shares my interests but lives in Wyoming does me very little good. What I want Friendster to tell me is that I'm two degrees of separation from someone who shares my interests and lives two subway stops away. And the really frustrating thing is that Friendster has that information, but its interface isn't smart enough to let me ask for it.

To be continued (when Friendster repairs its broken search feature).

Labels: internet, networks, rants

Tuesday, January 27, 2004
2:39 PM
0 comments

I just joined Orkut, as I joined Tribe before that, and Friendster before that.

But I have to admit, I don't quite get the appeal of networking websites.

And it looks like Warren Ellis feels the same way: "[W]hat can you actually do aside from invite all your friends and piss about on a couple of small message boards? ... What happens after that? After you've gotten all your friends in—whom you send email to or IM regularly in any case, presumably. That's it. All done. Until, I guess, yet another social network system opens and you start all over again."

In fairness, I can see how they'd be interesting to study (see Danah Boyd's Apophenia, or, even more relevantly, the archives of her defunct Connected Selves blog). But, even with my interest in networking technology, my experience is similar to Ellis': I go to the sites, sign up, wander around for a bit browsing the profiles of strangers, and then wander away.

I might feel differently if I were actively looking to date someone new (I'm not) or if I were trying to do business networking (?).

Have any of you had rewarding experiences with these sites? E-mail me at jeremy [at] invisible-city.com.

Related: Village Voice article which draws rather lazy analogies between Mark Lombardi's drawings, Friendster, and a species of invasive blackberry (Rubus armeniacus).

Labels: internet, networks, rants

Monday, January 26, 2004
7:02 PM
0 comments

I'm still reading Cryptonomicon, and on lots of levels I'm still enjoying it: it's full of lots of fun geeky bits, and just sentence for sentence it's snappily written and acutely observed. I've read over two-thirds of the book now, and I intend to finish.

But one thing keeps bothering me, and that's the ideological difference between Stephenson (or Stephenson's characters) and myself. This isn't a new problem for me: even when I read Snow Crash, I thought to myself "this book has some problematic subtexts." But in Cryptonomicon they're not really subtexts anymore, they are the text, and attempting to ignore or gloss past those passages of the book gives me a sort of low-level migraine.

So I might as well just grapple with them directly. Premises put forth in the book that I'd take issue with include:

• that the work of female cultural critics is primarily motivated by issues they're having with their boyfriends
  

• that "post-modern, politically correct atheists" are essentially socially retarded because they have lost their "instruction manuals"
  

• that the Nelson Algren notion of "hard work = success" is the most valid way to think about the American class system
  

• that racism is primarily a matter of intent (that you cannot be unintentionally racist)
  

• that couples who talk about their feelings with one another have boring sex
  

• that women control the world through a conspiracy designed to control and monitor male ejaculation
  

Admittedly the book presents that last premise in a pretty tongue-in-cheek fashion, but at best it is the kind of joke that a lame stand-up-comic would make, and at worst it is the kind of statement that helps to justify the paranoia of the really hard-core anti-feminist types. (Stephenson should know this: he is, almost above all else, a writer who has a keen sense of the way ideologies and beliefs can travel virally from mind to mind.)

If he could hear me raise these objections, Stephenson would probably accuse me of being one of those emasculated, feelings-oriented, sensitive males that are so easily offended. But it is wrong to take offense when someone basically insults you or the people you care about over and over again?

Labels: book_commentary, rants

Tuesday, November 18, 2003
9:39 AM
0 comments

The online magazine Tekka recently caught my interest. It covers topics that are near and dear to me: new media, software, narrative... In particular, I was interested in reading Bill Bly's article on "artifactual fiction":

'By "artifactual" I mean fiction made up not of simple narration but of objects, each of which has a story (it could be a document, but could as well be a photograph, a map, a song). The object may tell its story itself (as would happen with, say, a journal entry), or the object may have to be "read" -- analyzed, dissected, contemplated, then related to other artifacts in the vicinity -- before its significance can become clear, its story understood.'

But I'm put off by the registration fee—$50 is pretty steep for a year's worth of access to an online magazine. "Writers have to eat," says the site, and I know that as much as anyone. I have no serious qualms about charging for content—even charging a lot for content—but if you're going to do it, you should at least do it right.

The prime reason I'm resistant to coughing up the $50 is because there's no good way to assess the quality of what I'm paying for. If Tekka were an actual, physical magazine, I could go to a bookstore and pick up an issue, sampling the content for a low-cost, one-time investment. If I liked it, and thought that I might be interested in reading it regularly, then I'd be much more likely to put out the money for a subscription (especially if it would result in a savings over the newsstand price). Tekka isn't a physical magazine, but there are simple ways that they could mimic this model. They could make some articles available to the casual browser. Say, one feature per issue. Or just the book reviews. Or just the back issues. (Instead, they offer the first couple hundred words of each article—but the real "meat" of an article—what I most need to assess in order to make an assessment of quality—is rarely, if ever, found in an article's introductory passages.)

Perhaps they could emulate the "newsstand factor" most faithfully by allowing people to purchase a pass to all the articles in one issue. There are going to be four issues of Tekka in 2003: I'd happily pay $12.50 to read the one with the "artifactual fiction" article in it.

If we step outside of the "subscription paradigm" and the "newsstand paradigm" and think clearly about the qualities of data online, we can find other solutions as well. I've never bought a paid subscription to anything online—but I've bought individual articles online on several occasions. My most recent purchase was from the Chicago Reader archive, which charges $1.95 to $3.95 for an article (depending on length), a non-prohibitive amount. Data in an archive is, by its very nature, fragmented, nonlinear, and hypertextual—you can sell it piece-by-piece just as easily as you can sell full access to it. (Perhaps the back-end programming is trickier, but a magazine about "creating beautiful software" should be able to find someone who can manage this problem.) Our engagement with information on the Web is often context-specific, noncommittal, promiscuous, and specialized—given these truths it just makes sense to make your articles available individually, at an easily-absorbable cost, rather than asking, up-front, for a full year of pricey committment.

I'd expect the people who are thinking critically and intelligently about new media to be the ones who understand that the most.

Labels: internet, magazines, narrative, rants

Thursday, August 28, 2003
11:25 AM
0 comments