Ultimate Post - The Llamas Have Been Sacked

I'm a bit late on this but I put it down to wearing out in the last mile. I was also having a great deal of trouble figuring out what to title my new personal blog. I've got it knocked now, and more on that later. I've really enjoyed my Composition II class, but then I've always enjoyed English classes that don't involve angry humorless nuns. That deserves a bit of explanation, so before I tell you more about wonderful this term was, lets talk about my worst English class ever.

It was my senior year of high school, and my English teacher was in fact, a former nun from Ireland. I didn't hate her or anything, but her class was not fun. This is how things started out - we were assigned a short essay on Beowulf. We were to say what we believed the message of the work was, the central theme. I was, as I am now, a bit of a smart ass. Much in the same way the ocean is a bit wet.

So I wrote my take, that Beowulf was a cautionary tale (much in the same vein as an After-School Special) about the dangers of alcohol abuse. I used direct quotes and paraphrases to support my position and I thought it was quite clever - funny, even. I realize that wasn't why the author wrote the piece, but that wasn't what she asked us to write about. My grade? A ZERO "F." It would've been better to have gotten a bit of extra sleep than to work on the assignment. I'll concede it was an unconventional take on the story, but it fulfilled the conditions of the assignment and I enjoyed writing it. Of all the papers I've done for school, that is the one I'm most proud of - though sadly I don't have a copy of it.

On with the positives now. The thing I enjoyed most in this class was the blog you're reading. If SPC offered a class on blogging (or perhaps online writing), I'd take it in a heartbeat even if it weren't part of my program. I received some very nice compliments from my instructor - both in class, and in the comments here (thank you, by the way) but I still feel I have a lot to learn.

I need to be better about planning ahead. I tend to work "on the metal" - I write a post, I do a little (very little) proof-reading and post. This was an area I got cited on in regards to my papers in class as well. I think I'm a somewhat competent editor . . .  with other people's work. I have a lot of difficulty spotting errors in my own; worse - I find it hard to work up enthusiasm for editing a piece. When I'm ready to write, there isn't anything that can stop me; when it is time to proof-read, I start thinking that it's been a long time since I've organized my blank CD collection by age, brand name and logo.

Follow through is a problem area for me. There were a lot of things that I wanted to do that I never got around to, for instance my piece on Star Trek. I will try to pick some of these up on my new blog. I think part of the problem here was that I had an insane schedule - three express classes, one that had a workload designed to crush your spirit and remove your will to live (Thanks LAN Concepts!)

I need to be more regular. Is it wrong that snickered as I typed that? What I mean is, I need a regular schedule for posting, and to stick with that. I need to be realistic about what I can do while I'm in school. I originally wanted to post here every day. In addition to that I was writing on 750words.com (which is still awesome - I completed the challenge for April, but I've decided to slack a bit this month), in addition to all the other nonsense that I usually pursue in a day. As much as I love writing, I think I may have pushed myself a little too hard.

As to the class itself, I really enjoyed everything I did. Particularly the research paper and the critical interpretation, though those are also the assignments where I had a few "off the hinges" moments. I really liked the fact that the instructor was unafraid to try new things. Seriously, she could teach the instructors of my more technical classes a few things about being innovative. Office hours on Skype was particularly great.

I enjoyed the poetry section more than I expected to, and I ended up showing the poetry slam pieces I selected to a few of my friends. Alas, I still have no sense of rhythm, so I don't think I'll be the next Poet Laureate. I think it might be fun to try sometime though.

As to what I'm doing now blog-wise now that the term is ended, I'm writing a blog for my Javascript class here, and a personal blog here. I decided to keep them separate because I understand that not everyone shares my fascination for Wonkery. I hope you enjoy them, and that you have a great summer!

The Penultimate Post - Games As Art

My post tomorrow is the last one on this blog, my Composition II class will be complete. I've had a great time here. Be sure to check back tomorrow evening and see what I'll be doing next. In the meantime, this games as art thing is something I've wanted to write about for a while.

Recently, Roger Ebert declared that video games "can never be art." Later in the article he retreats to saying it won't be in the current generation of gamers lifetimes that games will be considered art. These statements produced a good bit of "Argle bargle bargle ARE TOO ART!" in the gaming community - this isn't that kind of post. Ebert is an intelligent man, he's entitled to his opinion - I just think he's wrong.

Ebert's article was a response to this TED talk from Kellee Santiago, who says that games already are art. While I agree broadly with her, I find a lot to quibble with as well. I'm going to look at both opinions and give you my take on the subject - and it is worth exactly what you paid to read it.

Let's look at Ebert's arguments first - stripping away the excess verbiage, he has a very definite idea of what constitutes art:

- Usually the creation of a single artist.

- Games are primarily about the "win" condition - IE points scored, levels completed, etc.

- People naturally "know" what great art is.

- No game can be compared with the great art works in other fields.

To be fair, perhaps I've missed something but these seem to me to be the main points. Ebert also notes that what a given person (versus a culture) considers art varies.

A Man Alone . . .

This statement was made in the context that video games are evolving from a primitive state to more sophisticated art. The example being, early cave paintings versus the old masters. Ebert points out that even in collaborative work, there is usually a single artist that gets the ball rolling. He believes that video game development, typically being a group effort, disqualifies it.

I'll even admit that I sympathize with his opinion, that I want to share it. I dislike "organized" art, such as schools of painting or sculpture. But I feel his opinion is irrelevant at best. If you go back to early gaming, even where the final product was developed by a team (the early Build engine games, for example) - there was still a lead developer who had a vision for what the finished product would look like. We could say the same thing with a more modern game like Brutal Legend, which was started by Tim Schaffer's vision and added to by other artists. It really isn't any different in that respect from a tribal dance or a group of cave paintings.

I really don't think his statement here is in any way important. Even if video games development didn't have a lead, even if it was wholly a collaborative effort from #include to the end statement - it doesn't really say much about the finished product.

4 teh Win!11!


Some games have "win" conditions. Halo, Civilization 4, Zork, Pong, Atari Combat - all these games have win conditions. It doesn't necessarily follow that they are not art. Just being "different" from paintings, music, dance, motion pictures, etc is not enough - you have to specifically state why having a win condition disqualifies games as art.

Ebert recognizes that some games don't have a win condition:

Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

This is wrong on a couple of levels. Most adventure games have neither points, nor hard and fast rules - they are primarily about the story that the designers want to tell, but they are not the same thing as a novel, audio book or visual presentation of a story. There is still a subtle win condition - completing the game, but it isn't the same as Space Invaders or Left4Dead. At the same time, I don't see how you can say that a game without a win condition isn't a game.

For instance, it is impossible to win World of Warcraft or Farmville. I'm only going to speak to the former here - I really don't understand what would possess someone to play Farmville. In the case of WoW, there isn't really a win condition set by the game - the player decides what constitutes winning. Due to the changing nature of games like these, even that is not a constant.

Some players just want to get their character to the level cap; others need every character they have on a server to reach that cap. Some don't want to level at all - they reach a certain arbitrary point (say, level 19) and decide to just do player versus player combat at that point. For other players it is having the very best gear available at any given point. The last is probably the most common goal, but as those goal posts are always in motion, there is no final end game until Blizzard stops developing the game. I'll provide a clearer example from my own experience.

I started a druid on the Khadgar server several years back named Devothumb, I still play him today. In the original WoW, leveling a druid was very difficult. This was because druids were a healing class, and by necessity didn't have a lot of damage dealing abilities. So to begin with, getting my druid to level 60, the level cap at that time was my goal. WoW had a storyline back then, but it often felt fragmented, often as not, I thought about my story of Devothumb the Druid and created ideas about what sort of person he was. Later, when I reached the cap, I started raiding.

Raids in WoW are really big dungeons that require a lot of people working together to complete. Back then it was 40 players, and you could try once a week. As I said, Druids were initially healers, but moreso the reason you brought them to raid was to help another healing character class - priests. I chafed under that requirement, I wanted to do something different and eventually reached that goal - I raided in Blackwing Lair as a Moonkin (damage dealing) druid after the 1.8 patch made it barely viable. After the Burning Crusade expansion was released the rules changed again, and so did my goals. Today, I'm back to healing when I have time which isn't as often as I'd prefer. My goal is simply to be a good healer and help people finish lower end content, five man dungeons. I'm pretty happy so far.

I Don't Know What Art Is, But I Know What I Like . . .


I take issue with the idea that people naturally know what great art is. Cezanne's early works were critically panned and physically attacked by some patrons. Few would argue that he was a great artist. I think it's telling that often as not we only award someone with the mantle of "great artist" after they are safely dead.

Both Santiago and Ebert talk about what is and isn't art. I hate to be vague, but when they say this I think they are using it as a stand in for "these are things I don't like." I don't think that's a valid way to approach the issue. By that rationale, Alas, Babylon a critically acclaimed novel isn't art. I don't care for it and think it was one of the worst novels I've every read.

Santiago specifically mentions The Simple Life as an example of where television went wrong, where it did something that wasn't art. I've never seen the show, but it doesn't look like something that would interest me. Frankly, most television and movies don't light my fire - but I won't write either medium off as "not art." I suspect there might even be good arguments for the show she mentioned as an artistic work. Who is right? It's a matter of personal preference.

Yeah, but It's Not Shakespeare . . .


Apples also are not oranges. But if nobody had compared gaming to television, movies, drama or novels, let me be the first. I think the game Sanitarium is as good as anything done by Hitchcock. I think one thing that hurt Santiago's argument here is that she focused on commercially successful independent developers. I think it's okay to show work that hasn't been rewarded by the market place, great art often isn't. That was certainly the case with Sanitarium, it was the only work produced by that development house, and it was a failure commercially. I think it is okay to show off the work of large studios and "AAA" games. They can be art too, even if they are successful in the market place.

But Do We Really Have To?


The argument that I have the most sympathy with in Ebert's essay is this. I'm not sure it is a good idea to have games considered as art. I think the art world and the Games-As-Art movement can often be so stodgy that they are a parody of themselves. At the end of the day, a game should be fun. If it fails in that, than I can say hopefully without contradiction that it might not be art.

Ebert wonders why it is important to "gamers" to have their medium declared art. I think there are a couple of reasons for this; recognition for the creative work that developers do is one of them. But the games as art movement is trumpeted louder by players than developers, so I think that is culturally speaking an afterthought. I think the reason that players want this is that we've been marginalized by the mainstream culture for a long time. The stereotype of a "gamer" is an overweight, socially maladroit male who lives in their parent's home longer than is socially acceptable. As with any stereotype sometimes it is true, but more often - especially today as game become more accepted culturally, it is not.

Additionally, it is a bulwark against the worst excesses of the mainstream media. Fox News reported that the game Mass Effect featured "full frontal nudity" and was "marketed to children." This was in no way true, this sterling bit of reporting was sourced as "I heard it from a friend." The same network claimed that Modern Warfare 2 is about "being a terrorist." Other mainstream outlets have treated the media with the same scorn and disregard. The majority of stories about video games (and all stories about video games with mature subject matter) are negative; absolutely without exception.

I think that because video games are a different medium, they are consumed differently than other forms. I think art is sometimes created (or is at least driven by) the player, not the developer. House of the Dead 2 & 3 for the Nintendo Wii, at least as it is played by my friends is a good example of this. It is a rail shooter - you move through a linear story, shooting zombies for score. The localization of this game is very poor resulting in a high quantity of "Engrish," and playing it is almost like an episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Whereas a novel or a movie is mostly a one-to-one experience between the author and the consumer.

Fin


I think that both parties have it wrong. I feel that Roger Ebert does not have the necessary qualifications to determine whether video games are art. He is not, so far as I know, well versed in the medium.

In some ways though, Kellee Santiago's arguments make me even more uncomfortable. I agree with her that games are already art, but I'm less sure that you can point to game one (say, Braid) and say this is good art and point to game b (Grand Theft Auto) and say it isn't. At least not until well after the fact. The idea of using a study to promote a particular viewpoint on games as art feels to reminiscent of Socialist Realism or the Surrealist school that rejected Dali because his paintings sold.

I think we have to let these sleeping dogs lie, and after we are long cold in the ground, the people who come after us get to decide which games, novels, plays and movies are good art. I think creators should be free to make what they like, and while this will sometimes produce wonderful games, it will also occasionally produce something ugly or daft. We have to move forward being okay with that.

Walking on the Moon

I only have a week to go before my critical analysis paper is due and I'm panicing a bit. I want to do a story from Sex and Violence in Zero G, but I'm not sure which one. I'm now leaning towards the first "Captain Future" story. First, let's take a look at the Near Space saga as a whole:

- Influenced by Robert A. Heinlein

The Near Space stories are a tribute to Heinlein's Future History stories. The first story in Near Space is "Walking on the Moon", a homage to Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon" an early tale in Future History. Like Future History, Near Space is told from precommercialized space travel in Walking in 2010 to "Mister Chicago" which is near the end of the timeline in 2093.

Heinlein is featured in the wall of photos at Diamond Back Jack's, with Jack Baker the proprietor of the bar at a science fiction convention when he was a kid.

- Not A Randroid Stroke Book

Heinlein's characters were often two dimensional. Harriman in "The Man Who Sold the Moon" was typical, a coiled spring of "Can Do" and all the positives of big "C" Capitalism in action. While I think an argument could be made that this was the gold standard of science fiction pulp writing at the time, you can see that Ayn Rand used this style as a model for her characters.

Steele is clearly a Heinlein fan, but takes the opposite tack. The big space companies as a group are portrayed as being obnoxious, meddlesome, clueless and occasionally sinister. Skycorp (later ConSpace), the first space company is the most directly portrayed throughout the series. Whereas Harriman himself is a focus throughout Future History, McGuiness the CEO of Skycorp never gets any screen time and is only referred to in a few stories.

Our first view of Skycorp is in "Free Beer and The William Casey Society." This story shows Skycorp (and NASA) as stodgy by enforcing a "no booze" regimen in space.

Later, in "The Return of Weird Frank" (my favorite Diamond Back Jack story, for the record) when the author describes the boredom of working in space ("People often compared the wild nightlife on Skycan to that of Deadhorse, Alaska.") and when discussing The Sex Monster. "Skycan was a small, closed environment, and the company frowned on sexual congress in space ('insurance problems' was the catch-all phrase, as was for almost everything else which was fun.)"

In "Sugar's Blues" another corporation with operations in space is portrayed as sinister. The story compares the spacers who hang out at Diamond Back Jack's with company men "They were company men. Any company; pick one, they all look alike." Attired from JC Pennys, flat top haircuts and used car dealer mustaches - that is more or less how the author describes them. Versus the workers who are in jeans, Skycorp caps and cowboy shirts.

The company, Spectrum-Mellencamp a biological firm, frames Sugar ('because everything I do comes out sweet') Saltzman and his crew for drug use after they destroy a space station module containing the company's plans for the first street legal recreational drug. After Saltzman allows the narrator (a journalist on the space beat) to publish what happened, the company gets revenge by burning down Diamond Back Jack's.

In the novel Orbital Decay, we see Skycorp collude with the National Security Agency to place a satellite in orbit that will act as a tap on every line of communication in the world. It is tested on American citizens.

- A Paen to the Working Man

Steele's Near Space stories take blue collar workers and put them in the role that test pilots and astronauts filled in Wolfe's The Right Stuff. His characters are bawdy and weird where test pilots and the early astronauts are seen as the figurehead of America.

This contrast is particularly sharp in Orbital Decay and Clarke County Space. Decay has its protagonists many of the spacers mentioned in the Diamond Back Jack stories:

- "Virgin" Bruce Neiman, a former biker on the run from the law.

- Lisa Barnhart, a shuttle pilot.

It also adds

- Popeye Hooker, a depressed former shrimper, believes he is on the run from the law.

- Jack Hamilton, a botanist who is more than he seems, and the narrator of the story.

Their antagonist is Captain H. G. Wallace, the project supervisor of Skycan, Skycorp and the National Security Agency.

Captain Wallace is a deliberate twisting of a sci-fi trope. When Hamilton first meets Wallace, he recalls seeing him in interviews. He looks like someone who just walked out of The Right Stuff. Crew cut. Rugged build. Lots of talk about man's destiny in space.

Upon meeting him, he has crazy eyes, sallow, sunken features - he seems a shadow of his former self. Note Wallace's initials H. G. W. - it is a reference to Herbert George Wells, an early science fiction author, and the first author to write a fictional account of a trip to the Moon. Wallace could easily be compared to Captain Queeg from the Caine Mutiny, or General Ripper from Doctor Strangelove. It isn't simply that all three of these characters go insane, but the way they go insane - they live in a particular reality, informed by their prejudices and enforced by their role as commander.

Wallace believes that those who settle in outer space are the next step in mankind's evolution. They must be morally and physically superior to average men. This is similar to Wolfe's The Right Stuff, in that Wolfe suggests that test pilots and astronauts are a breed apart, that they possess a special quality that most men and women do not have. His crew are mostly blue collar workers, odd ones at that, who have been driven nuts by isolation and boredom. The clear difference between what should be and what is drives Wallace around the bend.

This is apparent in a number of places in the novel, and as the story winds up Wallace begins to isolate himself from the crew. He has a Queegesque moment at the end of the novel when he claims that the crew's demands to keep the offspring of two cats brought up for research purposes is the beginning of the mutiny.

In Clarke County Space, the conflict is between the New Ark - a sort of hippie commune and Clarke County Corporation, the company which built the Clarke County Space Station. There is also a conflict between a mafia hitman (the Golem) and the Sheriff of Clarke County that intertwines with the main plot - the struggle between the farmers (New Ark) and the tourism board (3C).

This story is an homage to the Heinlein novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. In both stories we have a revolutionary struggle. In Mistress, the average Lunar citizen is a prisoner - either criminal or political. New Ark party members can be readily compared to them, Clarke County was written during the Reagan years when being referred to as a "hippy" was an insult and the political left was on the wane. In both novels, the colonists use weapons of mass destruction as a deterrent force - in Mistress the colonists actually use the weapons. In the case of Mistress, this weapons takes the form of large chunks of the regolith hurled from the lunar surface by catapult at the Earth - these catapults were formerly used to send raw materials to Earth orbit for processing. In Clarke County, the weapon is an illegal 100 megaton nuke that was secretly placed in Earth orbit. In both revolutions help is given from an unexpected quarter. In the case of Mistress it is given by the Moon's central computer which has been sentient for some time, though this is not known by society at large. In Clarke County also has a secret artificially intelligent computer who styles itself "Blind Boy Grunt" after Bob Dylan, because he wishes he was Dylan. Of the two, Blind Boy Grunt has a more developed personality and a very hackish sense of humor. Both end with the founding of the first off world nation, in Heinlein's work it is just the Moon, in Steele's it is an alliance between Clarke County, Descartes Station on the Moon and Arisia Station on Mars called the Pax Ad Astra. The actual formation of the Pax is not shown in the novels, but Steele shows us a seen from the later independence struggle in The War Memorial. The War Memorial is a stark contrast with the scenes of combat in Mistress. Death is swift, horrifying and impersonal in The War Memorial. The memorial referenced in the title is a person whose combat space suit malfunctions after a nearby artillery strike renders his suit immobile. He watches as the invading force he is a part of is slaughtered by the Pax Militia's long range guns, helpless to save his comrades or himself. He dies in his suit, which except for a piece of piping in the CPU housing of the suit (shrapnel from the artillery strike), is completely untouched by the ravages of war. When a Pax Militia patrol finds him, they leave him untouched except for a small circle of stones at his feet to remember the fallen.

Heinlein was a product of World War II, combat in Moon and all his novels is idealized as a righteous struggle. Action sequences are always a matter of good versus evil. Steele is a product of the baby boom, and Vietnam - the first televised war. In "The War Memorial," the conflict of Pax versus Earth is not shown in this way, but through the eyes of the protagonist - full of fear and the knowledge that death can strike at any moment before his suit malfunctions; afterwards is the knowledge that he will die, and very soon.

The main character of Clarke County, Jenny Schorr (later Jenny Pell) bears examination. While she is one of several protagonists, Schorr is the one who changes the most, and moves the plot forward. She cuckolds her husband with Sheriff Bigthorn whom she is in love with. Her husband Neil Schorr, is both distant and unfaithful to her - both with his female admirers and the New Ark Party itself. She pushes forward the idea of independence for Clarke County when she sees that there can be no compromise with the Clarke County Corporation and that her husband is content to fruitlessly debate with them. She declares her independence from him and 3C. While Heinlein is noted as one of the few pulp era authors who had strong female characters in the leading role, they often resembled his male characters - coiled springs of can do and resourcefulness, often unemotional or critical of emotion. They were essentially his male characters with a sex change. Schorr is convincing as a female character. While she has moments where she is confident, she is also uncertain, emotional and even self-criticizing. I am not saying these are feminine attributes, they are human attributes. Jenny Pell is more believable as a person than Heinlein's protagonists.

- The Palace Coup

This isn't directly covered in a story, but is treated as history after a certain point, we see it discussed in "Zwarte Piet's Tale." Pell's Pax Ad Astra falls to a palace coup. Pell's party attempts to rule by consensus, which is nigh impossible considering the distances involved between Clarke County, the Moon and Mars. Her former husband Neil Schorr and a number of conservative elements within the Pax form a Monarchist party, supporting a constitutional monarchy. There is a coup. Mars and the Jovian moons declare their independence from the new Pax. The constitutional part is a sham, after Queen Macedonia is crowned, the government of Pax shows an active disregard for the rights and happiness of its citizens.

This is seen in "Zwarte Piet's Tale," the Pax tells would-be defectors to Mars that the Martian government will shoot down any Pax lander in their air space.

In "Kronos," neither the crew of the Intrepid nor the Royal Rapid Response Militia sent to Titan are trusted with the particulars of their mission. The crew is felt to be untrusted because they are "superiors" (humans bred with adaptions for space travel) and many superiors sided with the Jovians when they declared independence. The Royal Militia is deemed untrustworthy because it is made up of common citizens, drafted into national service.

Later in the Captain Future saga, Pax Naval Intelligence blackmails the protagonists into a kidnap attempt on Jenny Pell. They want to bring her back to the Pax to face treason charges and to interrogate her for information regarding the Earth facility on Mercury - the only colony owned by an Earth company in the inner Solar System. This also appears to be an attempt at revenge by Neil Schorr, her former husband who is now Prime Minister of the Pax Ad Astra.

If the original Pax represented the political left, the new Pax represents the American right. While they are more efficient at accomplishing their objectives due to the authoritarian structure of the government, they are also seen to be petty, corrupt and indifferent to the needs of the citizenry. Their primary goal is the perpetuation of the monarchy and the extension of its power by any means necessary.

This part of the Near Space saga is more in agreement with Heinlein's work. Heinlein was also anti-authoritarian, though the views presented in his novels come closer to small "l" libertarianism than the traditional left. Both author's used their series to decry prejudice. This can be seen in Heinlein's work in Stranger in a Strange Land; in Steele's work it can be seen in both The Pink Triangle and in the Captain Future saga. In particular, Steele highlights that it is okay to be different, and even to be uneasy at the differences in others, but that you are ultimately responsible for your actions.

Okay, game off - I know this is talky, but I wanted to get some of this out there so I could figure out how I want to approach this. I'm still not one hundred percent sure of which Near Space tale I'd like to do, or even if I'll be allowed to do it. There really isn't anything in the literature text that excites me. Ursula K. Guinn? Yuck.

Loot Runs

I was thinking of computer role-playing games in terms of my future paper while I was playing Fallout 3 the other day. The progression curve seems backwards to me. When I talk about "progression" here, I mean it in the sense of the difficulty curve, but that affects story progression too.

Most CRPGs start the players out as level one schlubs. Rats and wild boars are a major cause of death among level one characters. As they defeat these rather modest enemies and advance the story they gain in levels; they get new equipment that adds to their stats. By end game they are a walking engine of destruction, almost invincible save for the end boss or falling asleep at the keyboard. Measuring progression by level is part of the problem.

CRPGs are the descendants of tabletop RPGs and those trace their roots back to Dungeons and Dragons. Early D&D had its own roots in tabletop wargaming. D&D used level based progression, and thus CRPGs use it today. But there are some serious mathematical issues that can come from this scheme. I recall two games of Robotech back when I used to play tabletop games regularly. One gamemaster followed the developer's advice of parcelling out experience points, which are used to determine the player's level, very sparingly. In his game it took six months to a year of regular weekly play to hit the next level. The other gamemaster handed them out like candy on Halloween. His players quickly passed the level that the designers recommended for character retirement (the player character becomes a non-player character used to introduce adventures by the GM) and on to the level cap. Characters in Robotech really weren't designed to be played at that level. A single five player party would take on whole alien armadas - by themselves. This is roughly the equivalent of five soldiers winning World War II. My Fallout 3 game on the PS3 has reached this point. There really aren't any enemies that are a threat to me anymore, and that kills a story dead.

I think there might be a better way of handling progression in computer games. Imagine if we turned this equation upside down. The player begins as a major hero - at the "level cap," they are well skilled and equipped - we can skip killing 1,000 boars for experience. The game designer uses this period of nigh invulnerability to teach the player how the game works. Over time though, the player gets progressively weaker. His stats and skills don't go down, but his equipment starts to wear out, in a modern game ammunition might become scarce. This reverse progression means that enemies don't have to scale upwards as dramatically as they have to using a more conventional progression scheme. Players have to make choices about when they want to use their equipment - they're less likely to pull out the +12 Sword of Awesome or the Man Portable Nuke Cannon against the diseased rat if they know it might not be available against a more threatening monster. I think this system allows more freedom for the writer - players out leveling content is less of a concern.

Really Simple Syndication, Google Reader and Students

Despite the fact that I'm roughing it tonight, I'm just going to soldier on. We need to talk about Really Simple Syndication or RSS. As a student, this is something you need to know about. RSS allows you to know when a website, like this blog has been updated with new content. It's used all over the web from Boing Boing to ZDnet. In order to take advantage of RSS you need to subscribe, either through your browser's RSS feature or through an RSS reader. To do this in a browser you click on the feed symbol.

This is what the RSS symbol looks like in Safari on Mac OS X 10.6.2.

This is the standard broadcast symbol for RSS.

Often, syndicated content will have a link in each post asking you to subscribe as well.

This is what Lifehacker's subscription page looks like when you subscribe in Safari.

This is the RSS screen in Opera 10.

I don't use a browser to read RSS though, I prefer a reader. There are a variety of local readers available for just about any operating system, but my preference is Google Reader.

This is Google Reader. I like it because it can go anywhere you do. It works on your desktop, notebook and many internet connected mobile phones. This can be a real advantage when say, your desktop dies, as mine just did. I didn't lose any of my RSS feeds and everything stays up to date. It's also integrated with Google's new social networking product Buzz - as you can see in this picture. This allows people I follow to share their favorite articles with me, and vice versa. In Reader, you just copy the address you want to view in reader, press the add a subscription button, and paste. Then you can organize it with folders like I have, and it's immediately available for reading.

You can also have persistant Google searches show up in Reader, this is a real benefit for students - you can put in a term that you're writing a research paper on, see the initial search hits and see if new ones turn up each day. It's like having a research assistant right in your browser. It also allows you to see stats, hence why I know that I have three subscribers on this blog, though it doesn't say specifically who they are (I know two of the three subscribers I have personally.) You can see how often each blog you're subscribed to updates, how much of each blog you've read and a variety of other information. If you're into that kind of thing, and I most certainly am.

In addition to using a search engine like Google, Google blogs, or Technorati to find blogs you're interested in, Reader will also suggest blogs based on what you're currently subscribed to. Again, if you're doing research this can be invaluable. Best of all, it's free. I've experimented with a few local (as in on your computer's harddrive) readers, but none has impressed me as much as Google's.

If there is an RSS reader you're using, I'd love to hear about it or maybe you have a question, please let me know in the comments.

Public/Private Permissions: Is Privacy Dead?

Welcome to another day, ladies and gentlemen.

I really want to follow up on my experiment with Google Docs, this blog and a few of the other experiments I'm working on with technology and education. Also, I have some new theories on my research topic to run by you. But, I was puttering around last night and ended up watching Penn Says on Youtube. I'm a pretty big fan of his as a magician, I used to play around with stage magic back in the day, but I wasn't very good at it. I also think he's an interesting person. We agree on a lot of fundamental issues, we disagree strongly on a lot of others.

Penn Jillette is a pretty famous person. A celebrity, in fact. He does stage shows in Las Vegas, has a series on Showtime. I recall that he's had a few network TV specials as well. With his partner Teller, they've put out two or three books as well. The Penn Says series is basically his video diary. He puts it out on Sony's video platform, and it eventually trickles down to YouTube. He talks about whatever happens to be on his mind that day, and often addresses comments from the audience. Pretty cool.

In a previous show, he talked about sending his kids to a fancy private school in Las Vegas versus his lower middle class background. The episode is called "Have I Revealed Too Much," and there's a lot of harsh language in it - so if you're at work, or offended by that kind of language, I'd recommend not clicking the embedded video below.



For those who didn't watch: Mr. Jillette, after making that video I described above went to the parent's orientation night at that private school, and it turned out the principal was a fan. He watched Penn on his Showtime series, and on Penn Says. He said he hoped that they could make Penn feel good about sending his children to this private school. Penn felt uneasy about the principal watching him in a program he puts out for the public.

Now I want to contrast this with Penelope Trunk. I don't know that I would call myself a fan of her work, but I think it is interesting. She seems to write about her life, especially her personal life in a very open fashion out here. She's been called on it by commenters on her blog, people on twitter, and people in her personal life.

One interesting difference between them - Mr. Jillette is only a bit younger than my parents. He would have been entering high school the year after they graduated. Ms. Trunk is a bit older than me, there are about seven years between us. According to this article, and several like it people younger than me are very willing to share personal information online. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, was recently raked over the coals for saying "Privacy is Dead" or "Privacy is no longer a social norm" depending upon which site you're reading. The only issue here, is that he didn't say that. He essentially said that social norms regarding privacy are changing, and that people are willing to share more of their lives online. This is not immoderate statement and I would challenge even my most critical reader to deny it.

If the social norms are changing, and I believe they are, what does that mean for us? I can see a few advantages to a more radical version of this change through the lens of my upcoming paper as being a relative "good thing." I can also see why it would scare people, and even I find it a bit unsettling at times.

Welcome to the future, ladies and gentlemen, cake will be provided shortly.

Happy Valentines Day - Or Err Something?

So we're nearly at the big day, Valentines day or the international geek day of mourning. Of course, I'm not doing anything special. Writing perl. Working on this blog. Working on my social book marks for my side project and if I'm very lucky, seeing what Syria has in store for the main character of Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars. But I don't want to be stingy, or seem bitter - I want to give you a Valentine's day gift. Click the link below.

Violet. 

You're welcome. Violet is a text adventure, or interactive fiction game. This is one of the genres that I grew up playing, and I've never lost my taste for them. Sadly, you will never see them on the shelf at your local EBstop, but on the upside you can find them on the internet for free. An IF game is similar to a book in that it is text-based (any IF game which contains graphics is a heresy and must be purged), and all the action takes place between your ears. Unlike a book, you have to earn the content. Typically IF games are arranged around puzzles or riddles, and this works at two levels. The first level is what do I need to do to solve the current problem, the second is how do phrase that in a manner which the game will understand. Luckily, I'm a nice guy - Violet is a very forgiving game. It reminds you of which problem you're currently working on at the top of the screen and if you type "hint" it will give you a series of clues on how to solve the problem.

The original Infocom games were like novels, and I'm talking high throw weight novels like War and Peace or Ulysses. On your first play through you could easily burn hundreds of hours, if not more. Violet is short, and quite sweet. You could probably play through it in a lunch hour without using the hints.


Violet is also kind of rare (besides being quite a striking young woman, I'll admit that on my first play through I was a little smitten) as it is a romance. So far as I know Plundered Hearts (a pirate romance) by Infocom is the only example of IF in that genre that was released commercially. Before you start getting visions of Fabio or the women that typically grace the covers of romance novels, I'll remind you that this is geek romance - we do things differently here. "I don't think you have the upper body strength to pull that off, budgie" is a parser response in this game.


Which is odd as romance is the single largest fiction genre in American literature. The sales team for the average big five publishing house's romance division is usually larger than all the other divisions combined. I've never believed the common wisdom that female geeks and more specifically female video game fans, are rare. I've met more than a few, some of my fondest memories are of going down to the Treasure Island arcade with my elementary school crush and her father. She demolished me at Pac Man, but I ran Xevious. People make a big deal about women who game, but again, they out number us - the entire "casual" (a term that has gained traction in the gaming world which I detest) genre of games is geared toward women. They are the number one demographic who plays them. My favorite tank, and my favorite DPS (damage per second - a player class who focuses on dealing damage) in World of Warcraft, both were the same woman.


I think the problem is one of perception. I think some people, particularly male gamers, (another obnoxious word, gamer) choose not see how many how many women share their hobby with them. Maybe many women don't feel comfortable discussing their hobby with their friends and family? I think that's what happened with that girl in elementary school, she seemed to love the arcade as much as I did, but I suspect she worried about whether her friends would think it was "cool."


I think geeks are coming up in the world by necessity though. It's been a long slog from the days when brute strength was attraction++, to now when as a survival and income generating attribute intelligence is more heavily weighted. If you want examples, just look at the movies. From back in my day we have John Cusack's roles in Savage Steve Holland's films. A case could be made that he didn't play a geek in Better Off Dead, as he participated in a sport (downhill skiing), but I still say the way the characters acts screams "geek." Matthew Broderick played geeks in both Wargames and Project X. More recently, in Zombieland the romantic lead is a geek. So perhaps there's hope for us yet, but in my specific case, I'll refrain from holding my breath.



I think I've gone on long enough, and my Nintendo DS is calling - so as I've been taking a trip down memory lane, let's go out with a song:









I'll be back on Monday, and we'll have lots to talk about - my experiments with Google Doc for MLA formatted papers, some thoughts on my upcoming research paper, and more. In the meantime feel free to gloat, commiserate or point and laugh in the comments.

Some Minor Kvetching, and More on the Facebook Automation Labs Hoax

Okay, so I just had my first American National Government class. I'm not so sure that went well for me. It is a subject I'm interested in, I'm very familiar with the material, the teacher is personable. However, I have serious Gordon rule problems (this is why this is on topic) - the only time I pick up a pen is to sign my name. There is a great reason for this. My handwriting looks like something that would be written on the side of a flying saucer in a "B" movie. This is not something I can readily change - my hands are agile, but very weak. I've been typing since I was about five or six years old. So yes, I do get the same muscle-brain stimulation that someone writing notes by hand gets when they put pen to paper, like I said this is what I grew up doing.

My notes for each test in government are to be handwritten and turned in for credit towards the Gordon rule. Because my letters (even in lower case) are quite large, I take up more page real estate (even when concentrating, and taking my dear, sweet time forming the letters), thus I get less words. On top of that when writing at speed, I'm still about three times slower than everybody else. I'm not worried about the tests, I'll ace those handily - I'm concerned about getting my Gordon rule credit. I stressed this multiple times. I'm not asking to use Google on my tests, but even being able to PRINT my notes would be nice. Maybe I could actually read them. I'm also a touch irked at being forced to do things like everybody else when I have a documented problem in that area.

I will now cease ranting.

Let's talk MLA instead. You'd think I would be ranting here, but I think MLA has improved dramatically since I last used it in Comp I. I don't think it is there yet, but it at least looks like they're starting to treat electronically formatted documents as real documents. I applaud the removal of the url from web cites. This is awesome - it was a cause of major formatting woes on my papers in Comp I.

Now I want to talk about what they could do to make things even better. They need to tighten up some of their citing formats - I'll use the email interview cite from number five on our MLA exercise:

An e-mail interview you conducted with Nora James on November 1, 2008.

This is how I cited it, and I believe it to be correct using the current MLA format:

James, Nora. No Subject. Email to Nora James. 1 Nov. 2008. Email.

This is how another student cited it:

Student Name Redacted -Ed., and Nora James. "Interview." Message to the author. 1 Nov. 2008. Web.

I think his method is more correct than the current MLA standard. I might even go so far as to put it: Interviewer Name (last, first). Interview with Interviewee Name. Interview Date. Email or Web. Most mail is "web mail" - very few people use an email client like I do so I feel "Web" is a valid medium. I could see some quibble room there though. Why does the interviewers name come first? Because the interviewer typically controls the interview. Interviewers write the questions, ad-lib follow up questions as needed, comment on interviewees responses. They typically have a point that they want to lead up to when interviewing someone, that is they are interviewing a person for a reason.

I could see reasonable arguments for making the citation more like a cite for a message board post. While only Google currently is using "threaded email conversations" as a model, you can see how they got there even in the traditional multi-level quoting system used by most mail clients. I think Google's model is a step forward and that eventually it will become the standard - just as most other email providers stepped up the amount of mail you could store in response to Gmail. But the key word there is "threaded" - just like a message board thread and the original post/responses on it. Just like Angel's message board system. There are more similarity's in the medium than differences, thus this is a reasonable way to handle cites where email is the medium.

The real solution to this problem is larger in scale. MLA, APA, and the administrators of the other systems need to sit down, take their hats in their hands and admit that they don't "get" the internet. That's okay, no shame in it. It isn't their job to figure out the internet. It is the World Wide Web Consortium's(W3C) job and when they are done with that moment of self confession, they should go have a friendly chat with them.

Sooner or later, this needs to happen and I can explain why. I've lived on both sides of this fence - my Dad had a typewriter shop when I was young, I learned to type at age six and I got good at touch typing when I was eleven. While I've been using a computer continuously since then, I used typewriters in the early days as much as I did my C64. Word processing on a computer hadn't quite arrived yet, though I had the means to do it, it was very expensive. So I learned about things like picas, that nobody in their right minds uses anymore. That's one of the things they need to discuss with the W3C - standards and measures.

On an MLA formatted paper you need one inch margins, double spacing, a header with your last name and page number. None of this works all that well on the web, and yeah we aren't doing papers here yet (PDF doesn't count), but I guarantee you that my youngest classmate's children will at the very least. Why not prepare for that day now and do it right, rather than trying to hash it out when it's needed? Specifically the reason it doesn't work on the web deals with "scaling" - good web pages do. MySPC and Angel designers please note this, this is what SPC's own web development curriculum has taught me this. It is also a W3C standard. What that means is that no matter how large your browser window is, the page's proportions adjust to fit it properly. The Firefox window on my iMac's viewing area measures: Viewport width: 1827px Viewport height: 968px. I run my browser very large. Because my Macbook's screen is smaller, the measurement in pixels (px) will be smaller even though the window takes up the same percentage of the screen. Designers typically test pages at 1024px wide by 768px tall and sometimes at 800px wide by 600px tall.

Things like margins and indents are possible, but things like non-breaking spaces in tables (you would likely use a table for citations for example) can cause issues in some browsers. Cough. Internet. Cough. Explorer. Cough. Excuse me, too many cigarettes, I need to quit. Just like people need to quit using IE until they commit to making it into a real browser. Sorry, mandatory cheap shot.

Arguing about browsers aside, if the MLA and the W3C got together and discussed standards, perhaps we could find a better way to render this stuff. Using tables, divs or non-breaking spaces is a very clumsy approach. I feel I am pretty good designer and I don't know how consistent my results would be creating papers for use on the web. New elements could be added or existing elements could be modified to suit academic uses. This would be a great thing.

The question I haven't answered above is "why" - why should the MLA bother with all this? Why can't they keep doing business as usual and ignore the web? Because nobody can. I don't care if you're Ted Kaczynski. If you are going to communicate with people, to share information, you cannot ignore this medium. The MLA's job is essentially organizing information, they especially cannot afford to ignore it. There are a number of positive benefits too. Coauthoring and peer reviewing become a great deal easier when you have a tool like Google Docs, or perhaps Google Wave in the future. I might even revise my stance on group work (hate it more than death) if it were done under a system like that - because you can see exactly who is contributing and who is not. Everybody wins when you can share information with more people - it's just that simple.

So let's talk about Facebook and the automation hoax. There are still some great questions left here: What's unique about this situation? Why did the message move to email as a medium? Why are so many commenters unwilling to believe this is a hoax?

Let's look at the current status of the posting first. Some stats: 1,280 likes (I put a like on it for ease of tracking so it displays as 1281), 395 comments since Wednesday. I'm seeing comments in multiple languages, the hoax has definitely spread in French and some are citing this as the origin of the hoax. I am not seeing any direct evidence of this, though French speaking users do seem active in propagating it. Greek and Turkish language speakers are also propagating it. The likes seem about the same as when I last viewed it late Friday night, there are about 45 additional comments.

Here we need to discuss the concept of "Opt In" which is kind of complicated. Let's watch a video that discusses how opt in impacts communications and I'll explain how it relates. The relevant part of the video is about five minutes in, but I'd like to encourage you to view the entire program. It's a great presentation.

So what does this have to do with viral communications (email forwards, facebook statuses, retweets)? All viral communications are an opt-in process with very few options. Forward that email, forward it with an addendum or don't forward it at all. So in economic terms, we can say each message has a "cost" though it may not be an easily measurable cost in financial terms. In terms of viral communications this is a sliding scale from the high end such as the Craig Shergold emails that ask the recipient to take action in the real world down to Facebook statuses that require a very small investment of time or effort.

As Dr. Ariely points out cost is not the only factor, nor is it the primary factor in a user's decision to believe in the Automation Labs hoax. In my opinion several other factors converged to make it possible: 1) Users unfamiliar with the way Facebook operates. Arthur C. Clarke said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." That is the average user's view of how the internet works - ask a non-technical person how he thinks his computer connects to the internet sometime, I guarantee you the results will be fascinating. In this case our user not only failed to understand how suggestive search operates, but how Facebook accounts work though they use both daily. 2) Facebook's response.

Facebook's response is notable as this is a somewhat unique situation. Facebook is a very closed system, in that all the content is focused on their site, even if you're bringing in content from a site that participates in Facebook Connect. As such they can moderate content when they choose to and have a mechanism in place to do just that.

Additionally there are other parts of Facebook security that are partially crowd sourced. If enough people report a status, comment or link as breaking the terms of service, someone will investigate it. As you might imagine these are very busy people.

Compare this to 1989. In 1989 chain letters were typically sent by email, occasionally you'd see one on USENET. Both of these are radically decentralized. While it was possible to report a sender to his ISP, it was never a given that anything would really be done about it. At the core, there really wasn't anyone in charge or a moderator in most cases. America Online was a new service at the time, and had an internal component which you could compare to Facebook as well as a gateway to the internet. Chain letters inside their system or through the gateway to the internet email system were not typically with the same zeal as other termination of service offenses.

Because of this closed system, where all roads lead to Facebook, they were in a unique position to try to cut the chain. While I'm not specifically versed on the inner workings of Facebook, but I can make an educated guess on how they did this from a technical perspective. They wrote a script which looked for certain word combinations in a status - it does not seem to apply to comments, and if the test is true then you block the user from posting the message and return a message saying why you're blocking it. One problem with this approach that we've already seen is that they did not write a script for every language used on Facebook. French, Greek and Turkish posters could continue to post this to their statuses.

Next, Facebook security linked to a debunking of the hoax. That link is in my last post, but you can also see it here. Unfortunately, someone or more likely several someones reported the link as "abusive." This prevented users from visiting it and seeing the debunking information. This caused further speculation and rumor mongering.

I'm not convinced that the debunking would have really had any effect, most people who already believed the hoax would continue to believe it in spite of the evidence. This is because these stories tend to not be a matter of "correct" or "incorrect," but a signifier - either of group membership, individual prejudices or a combination of the two. This is what my preliminary research has shown, but more on that later.

Two important events were also occurring in the background while this took place. The first is Facebook's change in look and feel. I suspect many found this unsettling - it really is a large and sweeping change. Many commenters in the thread about the Automation Labs hoax made noted very negative feelings towards the new look. Also, there is the continuing debate about privacy on Facebook. Recently the CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg declared privacy "No longer a social norm." While I do not think the average transmitter was aware of the statement, I don't think it is impossible that it plays some role in these events.

A little more on the Automation Labs hoax

It has been suggested by the editor of All Facebook that the Automation Labs hoax may be a viral marketing campaign.

I think this is unlikely. First, Automation Labs produces a software robot (called a "bot") for the very popular Facebook game Farmville, developed by Zynga. Bots play a game or take in game actions on behalf of the player when he is not present at the computer. I'm not by any means recommending the game (and certainly not the bot) - I feel Zynga does business with some very shady people (see this Tech Crunch series and this Consumerist article.) However I might feel about them as a company, Automation Labs product violates their terms of service, players that use this software are likely to be actioned (banned, warned or some other punitive measure taken against them). This is particularly relevant in the aftermath of Blizzard Entertainment vs. Glider, a software bot formerly used in the popular MMO World of Warcraft.

In essence, the court found that the developers of the Glider bot violated Blizzard's copyrights, particularly in reference to their game client (the software players use to access the game.) Since then, while bot makers are still active, they are leary of litigation as this case is a possible precedent in future actions. Looking at the WHOIS lookup for automationlabs.org, the address in the administrative information section leads to a mail center in Brea, CA and their telephone contact is an unpublished number in Los Angeles, CA. This may mean they have some assets within the U.S. and could be reached by the U.S. legal system. Many bot makers exist in countries with poor records when it comes to IP protection such as China or India. If they are located within the U.S., then putting themselves on the radar like this would make no sense.

Also, this hoax uses their company name in a fairly negative light (and in most gaming communities botting software is already considered in a very negative way), making those that searched for the term less likely to buy their product. Are you eager to buy a legally questionable product from someone being accused of hacking by one or more of your friends? That's what I thought.

I concede the possibility that this may have been started by a competitor, but I would think that Automation Labs would have to be seen as a leader in the field. Their website does not lead me to believe this is the case, and a Google search for Farmville bots (no, I am not clicking those links even with my shields up) has Automation Labs product ranked fifteenth - below the fold (on the second page of results) for most people searching Google. I would expect a serious competitor would rank in the top five.

Additionally, bot software developers tend to avoid the light of day and this has shined a spotlight upon their community in Farmville. When awareness of botting goes up, so do user reports and game company enforcement efforts. I noticed this during my time in World of Warcraft. There is no positive evidence that this was a viral marketing campaign either by Automation Labs or one of their competitors.

Another possible scenario: Users who utilize bot software tend not to be the most security conscious people around. Because people want this software and it is not socially acceptable, it often comes with a little something extra. Malware. Key-loggers, root kits, worms, etc. I'm not specifically accusing Automation Labs of dispensing malware, but this was often a source of infection in WoW community. So our user downloads something with malware in it and panics - he starts checking all his online accounts, changing up his passwords and secret questions. He checks his block list on facebook, and he types in the name of the company he thinks infected him - and a whole list of people pop up because of Facebook's suggestive search. He gets the totally wrong impression that these people have access to his account and after blocking them, posts a status about it. And so it goes.

This seems plausible based on user behavior I've seen in the past, I cheerfully admit to having no evidence whatsoever as to its validity. Just musing while I wait to see if netLibrary is going to cooperate with me.

Meet the Old Dread Pirate Roberts

Yarr! Me Hardies, Grab a Pint o' Grog an' Sit Down for a Tale of a Pirate's Legacy

I have been wanting to discuss intellectual property law here, but I'm trying to find a way to do it with the dudgeon level turned to something other than "eleven". It is not an easy thing for me. So I have decided I would start by focusing on how I interacted with IP in the past.

Once upon a time, I was a pirate. This was well before the term "pirate" entered common speech in reference to IP - back then a pirate was a guy like Edward Teach or Sir Francis Drake. People pictured the eye patch, the peg leg, the parrot. But I had none of these. I was eight years old, the year was 1982.

I had received my first computer from my parents that year. A brand new Commodore 64, I was pretty lucky, I almost ended up with a Coleco ADAM. I received it so I could improve my hand-eye coordination, my childhood testing showed my as having a problem in that area. I was also to learn how to touch type on it, because my handwriting was terrible. Of course, I quickly discovered the huge catalog of video games available for the C64. I loved Blue Max, Spy Hunter (the C64 version was arguably one of the better ports of this game), Lazy Jones (the most self-referential game ever), and Zork.

I purchased a lot of games. All the Infocom classics, a number of titles by Mastertronic, and quite a few others that I've forgotten. I also joined a user group, and that's where my tenure as a pirate began.

The C64 users group I joined was based around sharing software  piracy. It was a huge group. We met in a church once a month, brought our keyboards, 1541 disk drive and a portable television set and set them up on long tables. Then we'd walk the rows looking at what other people had made copies. Most of the users were around my age and had their parents with them, there was the occasional teenager or adult as well. One of the nice things about the group was that you could get games that were not available at any American retailer. Lazy Jones, for instance, was a product of the British software boom. The American gaming market had just collapsed. No American retailer stocked it, not my local computer shop, not Service Merchandise, or Kmart. But I got a copy at the group. My Dad, my cousin and I would also occasionally get games through friends. One of my friends had a cousin who was part of a pirating group - I forget which one, but I remember his particular moniker. He was Weird Beard the Pirate. It should be noted that Weird Beard wasn't old enough to grow a beard. I think he was about ten years old at this point.

I eventually moved up to MS-DOS around my fourteenth birthday, my first IBM PC was an Amstraad. My Dad got it as a credit card perk from AMEX - but it didn't turn out to be a very good perk. Similar to the Coleco ADAM, it was a complete system. That is, it came with a printer, and the monitor, disk drives and computer were a single unit. It shipped with MS-DOS 3.2, and was not very compatible with most software available for DOS at that time. I think I returned at least one fourth of the software that I purchased, not because I was pirating (retailers were becoming better informed about piracy at this point), but because it would not work on the Amstraad. To give you an impression of how bad this machine was, Sears - one of the few American retailers that stocked it, originally advertised it as a computer. Within two weeks of advertising it they began advertising it as a word processor and cut the price by something like fifty-percent. At this point I was buying more software because copying was getting more difficult. Rights management systems included things like needing to type in a certain word from a page of the manual, or the use of a code wheel to play the game. Additionally some software had code in the program itself to make casual copying difficult.

At first glance, this looks a lot like current rights enforcement systems and that it is working. I have bad news for you if you believe this. Every single technique was defeated rather quickly and those methods filtered down from professional pirates (IE those who sell illegal copies of these programs - this is particularly prevalent in Asia and Eastern Europe today) to hobbyists like me. Yes, at this point I definitely sussed that IP piracy was "wrong."

License keys came next, when you installed a program to your hard disk, you were asked to enter in a long sequence of letters and numbers. If you fail to do it correctly, the program tells you that you're wrong and waits for you to do it properly. There were always rumors that failing to do it correctly would do horrible things to your computer. I've heard people even claim that an incorrect entry could cause your computer to explode. I wish I was kidding. These failed because those codes are generated based on an algorithm. Once someone figures out the algorithm, they can generate "valid" keys all day long. This system combined frequently with a part of the package that "phones home" to the producer's server is mostly where we are today. Ask anybody in the industry, piracy is still rampant despite the use of the "phone home" defense.

I used Napster occasionally when it first released. Napster was great because I found music that I'd never encountered before. I recall one song that was a musical interpretation of a Robert Anton Wilson novel - and it included the author in the production. But this is the point where I gave up my life of piracy and went legit. All of those songs are gone, they died with my old P4 single core.

So why did I give up a life under the good auspices of the Jolly Roger? That's a question media companies ought to be asking, but aren't.

Primarily I gave up piracy for security. Not security against being sued, but computer security. File sharing sites are rife with viruses and malware. I was never infected but the thought was always worrisome. A single song, even priced at CD pricing could cost me a lot of time reinstalling Windows.

Convenience was another factor. Using a p2p like Napster was pretty easy, but it was often difficult to find what you were looking for - of course finding things you did not intend to was often very rewarding. Also assuming you found something you wanted the download took a long time to complete - even if you had a good connection (I was on dial up back then), it didn't mean the other guy did. Frequently the other party would get disconnected in the middle of a transaction, so you might spend an hour downloading and not get the song.

Cost was also a factor. iTunes was less expensive and had a better selection than my local record store. The price was still reasonable, and you didn't have to get a whole CD just to get the one or two songs you actually cared about.

Notice a trend in my reasons? Its all about me. Here's something from the software companies that failed to convince me:



Yeah, I'm really sorry about that. That is horrible. If I were still a pirate, I'd get a billion lashes under the Articles.

The iPad Wrap Up

I needed a little bit of time to collect my thoughts on this and restrain my fanboy-ism. Let me start out by saying that I think it has the potential to be a great device and to be a category killer. The category in question is netbooks. Small, low powered notebook-like devices designed primarily towards web browsing and basic office tasks. These typically have a long battery life. The only place the iPad doesn't beat a netbook is on price, and price competition has typically not been a part of Apple's marketing strategy.

I think iBooks looks very interesting indeed. It is in ePub format, which makes it a game changer. ePub is supported by a lot of different devices - Sony's entire ebook reader line, iPhone OS (using Stanza), Barnes & Noble's Nook reader, in addition to the software available for Mac, Windows and Linux that will handle ePub. I suspect iPhone OS devices are the only ones that will directly sync with iBook, but it should be possible to use other devices by copying the file as you would to a thumb drive. How all of this works out will depend upon how digital rights management is handled with the ePub file, there is no standard for it at the moment which means Publisher A may use a very sensible set of rules, while Publisher B may use DRM that is overly restrictive or hampers the operation of the reading software.

Another nice feature of ePub is that it has been around for a while, and there are plenty of people who are knowledgeable in working with these files. Tools for creating ePub files are abundant and available across all platforms (Windows, OS X, Linux). The barriers to being a published author are dropping fast.

When I was in high school, and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I had the opportunity to attend a writers workshop as part of my junior year English class. Nothing in the entirety of my academic or professional career did as much to turn me off towards writing as a profession as that workshop. It wasn't criticism that steered me away from writing, it was the business model.

The focus of the workshop really had nothing to do with writing as a craft, it was focused on how to get your work published. They showed off the writers guide and taught us how to read the entries, how to decipher what each publisher required from their submissions, etc. They had published authors describe how they got their book published. Send in your manuscript to somewhere between ten and thirty publishers per day, wait for a response, continue submitting. The average time until publication seemed to be about three years. They also talked a little bit about intellectual property law as it applies to publishing. It is baroque in the extreme. First rights, anthology rights, magazine rights, audio rights, and on and on. It doesn't surprise me that piracy is so rampant. Professional authors and lawyers have difficulty with the subject, how is a layman that has no interest in anything but reading content supposed to know or care about this? I'll save my rights rants for another essay though, you're welcome.

Electronic publishing is by no means a new thing, nor is the ease of access new. In the late 80s I downloaded my first electronic book. This was a few years before I had my first internet account - I got it from a BBS in Clearwater, FL. It was huge, weighing in somewhere around 1.2 megabytes. I think it took about three hours to download. It was the Jargon File, a dictionary of computer terms and geek folklore. These days you can find it here if you're interested. It was created as an ascii text file, browsing through it was slow and ponderous.

The real trouble with eBooks has always been formats. Because no single format has managed to emerge as the standard, there is always the question of "will my device or program read this?", "can I port this to a new device?", "what format should I publish in as an author?" The web itself is a great platform for publication, easy, simple to update, cross platform and available to a wide audience. The two problems with the web as a publication platform are 1) how do I make sure my customers can find my content? and 2) how do I monetize it? The iBook store solves both problems handily.

The iBook store has a large existing customer base on two of the three platforms (sadly, iTunes is not available for linux and I doubt the iBook store will be either), it has search and is organized as customers would expect. A striking difference between it and Apple's App store - but I won't get off on that rant.

The dollar and cents part is still an open question at this point, and a place where publishers can really trip this up. The customer expectation is that eBooks should be less expensive than their physical counterparts. This is not an unreasonable expectation. While eBooks do provide additional utility such as search and annotation, these features are not a selling point for most readers - they are attractive primarily to students and academic professionals. On the value negative side, you do not own a physical thing when you own an ebook, you own a license to use the content. This license if full of incomprehensible legal jargon, but usually the gist of it comes down to the fact that the retailer or the publisher may pull (or deauthorize) the content at any time, and without providing reason or recompense. This is well illustrated by the 1984 debacle on Amazon's Kindle eBook reader, see this New York Times article for details. While I believe the resolution provided by Amazon (replacement with a legal edition of 1984 or a refund of the purchase price) was ethical, the readers who had annotated the book lost their work. Additionally, readers are smart enough to know that electronic editions of a book cost a fraction of what a printed edition does to produce. Far too often, the pricing on the ebook edition in Amazon's store is very close or on occasion exceeds the MSRP of the printed edition. Additionally readers know ebooks cannot be loaned, resold or traded. B & N Nook does have a very limited and largely worthless loaning feature. I do not expect to see a similar feature in iBook.

I want to point out this article from A Newbies Guide to Publishing (which I just subscribed to) on the monetary differences between traditional publishing and self-publishing in eBook format. I would like to particularly draw attention to the pricing differences between his works published with Hyperion books (an arm of the Disney media empire) and his self-published works on the Kindle eBook platform. Hyperion is coming in at traditional paperback retail pricing, which runs from $5.99 - $9.99. Looking at it from a retailer's perspective, the numbers on his Hyperion books are not exceptional. No offense intended. Now look at his self-published work. It is sold very cheaply, but the numbers are considerably higher. Simple business 1000 level stuff, but publishers seem to have forgotten it. You can see the same process repeat itself on the iTunes app store. Software priced at the $9.99 or greater mark has few sales, at the $.99 to $1.99 level, lots of sales.

I've wandered a bit from my original topic, and there is a lot more that I want to say about this issue, but I think it is time to wrap this up. I think the iPad will be very successful based on what I've seen. I think the iBook Store will be good for publishers if they can put aside their experiences with more traditional publishing models. I think it will be a boon to small publishers and authors interested in self-publishing. Most importantly of all, I think it will be great for readers.

Modern Myths and Legends - Jean Shepherd

So this morning I'm chasing my textbook for LAN Concepts again. I have one of two, and I've been searching for the other, LabSim for Network+ for some time. I've been to the Clearwater bookstore, where a clerk assured me they had it in stock. Nada. I went to the library over the weekend, where my instructor told me they had a copy on reserve. Nope. So now I'm off to Gibbs campus, to once again attempt to purchase it. Wish me luck.

But my text book puts me in mind of another book. I, Libertine by Fredrick R. Ewing, a book on nineteenth century erotica which was published in 1956. It was a runaway bestseller, bookstores couldn't keep it on the shelf.

The only problem with that, is that of all the facts presented above, only the publication date is true. Even that is only true because the hoax gained so much momentum. I, Libertine was a hoax born out of frustration. It was created by Jean Shepherd, best known as the co-writer and narrator for the film A Christmas Story. At the time though, he was a radio disc jockey in New York. He was annoyed that New Yorkers would only patronize art that somebody else had vetted first. A city run by lists.

Shepherd was working the graveyard shift show at the time, and on this particular show he discussed these lists. The ten best dressed list was a big deal in New York at the time. "Top 40 music" had just arrived. The Top 40 music format was born in 1949 and was the dominate broadcast industry until the late 1980s. The New York Times bestseller list came into being only a little more than ten years earlier on August 9, 1942. Jean Shepherd had doubts about this system. Rightly so.

His theory was that were two kinds of people in the world. Day people and night people. Day people led a very orderly and uncomplicated existence. All the lists acted as the teeth in their clockwork. They told them what plays, books and songs were worthwhile. They never considered for a moment that these lists were not the truth-with-a-capital tee handed down from on high. As Mr. Shepherd put it: "They believed in file cabinets, they believed in luncheons, they believed in meetings . . ." By contrast, night people had some doubts. Doubts about whether any of this was worth taking seriously.

He decided to test out his theory with the help of his radio audience. He asked them to go into a bookstore the next morning and ask for a book that did not exist. Together, Mr. Shepherd and his audience ironed out the details. The title, the author's life story, and the publishing house. Soon enough, people all over New York were talking about this fantastic book, many claimed to have read it. The archdiocese of the Catholic church in Boston put it on proscribed works list. In the end, Ian Ballantine, head of Ballantine Publishing after a desperate search for the author of I, Libertine, he wanted to secure the paperback rights. He met with Shepherd and author Theodore Sturgeon over lunch and they revealed the truth, after which Mr. Sturgeon was hired to write the book under the pen name of Frederick R. Ewing. When it was published it sold quite well, even making the bestseller list. All of the proceeds were given

I think this might be the greatest hoax of the twentieth century. But don't listen to me, take it from the horse's mouth. You can listen to an interview with Jean Shepherd on Long John Nebel's radio program from 1968.

Publisher's note: I originally intended to cite this up properly as practice, but I am far too tired after several days of catching up for another class. I apologize for the lateness of this post, I really do want to try to produce something interesting every day. Rather than delaying this post further still, I want to move on to the next item in the series. My primary source for this article is the interview with the author linked above. I'll be back soon with a remarkable set of coincidences that happened while researching this post, and another interesting character that writers ought to know about. Coincidentally, it involves a hoax too.

It's All In Who You Know, Old Boy

This is the rare case of something people say all the time which is actually true. I think that it goes double for people with an eye towards writing fiction.

Tonight I want to talk to you about a subject near and dear to my heart. Eccentrics. Cranks. Weirdos. Kooks. I'm particularly partial to that last adjective. As a writer you should know these people. A simple conversation with a kook can produce enough ideas to launch a thousand novels. But you must be careful. Everybody is weird in some way, and while that's interesting in and of itself, what you need as a writer are olympic grade weirdos.

Britain, is of course far ahead of the Americas in eccentricity. To be fair they had a bit of a head start. The Protein Man is an excellent example. He walked the street in London town, advising couples against eating too much protein as he felt it promoted lust. See his complete pamphlet here on Flickr. The Protein Man is referenced in Robert Rankin's The Da-Da-De-Da-Da Code, in which the Protein Man's printing press which is housed in the Gunnersbury Museum provides a vital clue. Rankin also frequently mentions Count Dante, the deadliest man alive in many of his novels. Count Dante's old advertisements may be seen here and here.

I'll concede that Count Dante may not qualify as a kook per se, but he is certainly a notable character. Being knowledgeable about these subjects gives Mr. Rankin a ready supply of good characters, artifacts and settings. I think the author himself is a bit strange, or an excellent showman . Perhaps both. The videos below are excellent evidence.

Robert Rankin's works are also fun to ask for at American bookshops. With titles like The Sprout Mask Replica, Armageddon the Musical and Nostradamus Ate My Hamster. I say ask because they are incredibly difficult to find in America. Barnes and Noble has his work sporadically though. You can find out more about Robert Rankin here.

When people think of Joshua Abraham Norton, they think of him as an American. However this is incorrect, he was born an Englishman though the exact date and location of his birth have been lost. Joshua Norton has been written about by quite a few people, but the ones I am most familiar with include:

• Neil Gaiman in The Sandman comic book series, specifically in Three Septembers and a January
  
• Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Norton inspired the King.
  
• Tim Powers in Earthquake Weather.
  
• Robert Anton Wilson in The Illuminatus Trilogy
  
• Kerry Thornley in The Principia Discordia
  
• Kenneth Hite wrote a column in Steve Jackson Games Pyramid magazine 1/29/99 dedicated to Norton and the symbolism surrounding his life.
  

More properly known as Emperor Joshua A. Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico started out as a mere successful businessman in nineteenth century San Francisco. He cornered the market on rice just in time for a large shipment from South America to wipe out his fortunes. He was wiped out. After disappearing for a time, he returned to the city and crowned himself Emperor. Though a mad man, he was humored by an entire city. He demanded and received a suit of royal finery from the Presidio army base, which he is usually portrayed wearing. He ate free in area restaurants. He minted his own currency and his proclamations were printed free of charge in the city's newspapers. The newspapers even created a few of their own. Upon his death over three thousand people attended his full masonic funeral.

I believe I can even see the Emperor's features in Uncle Sam from John Kessel's Good News from Outer Space. This scene takes place in a bus station in an economically devastated America.

"The only person left out there was a man dressed in a navy blue swallowtail coat over red and white striped trousers that were too long for him. Their soggy cuffs bunched around his ankles. He wore a top hat painted like an American flag. With his white beard and hawk nose he looked like a run-down Uncle Sam (125)."

Uncle Sam goes on to describe his fall from academia to his present career selling genuine American made calculators in a bus station and his misadventures with his university employers, his family and the law on the way(125-130).

Kessel shows the power of using an eccentric person as a model, much as an artist or painter uses a model for their work. History is rife with odd characters that can be used as a canvas for an author to create their own "characters." Of course, it doesn't hurt to be a bit of kook yourself. Takes one to know one.

Works Cited:

• Kessel, John. Good News from Outer Space. New York: Tor Books, 1990.