Cat and Girl � Archive � All or Nothing

Cat and Girl � Archive � All or Nothing

I actually do want a hug.

Art thou ready for some FOOTBALL?

If on the seventh day the toil of armoured men - armed with but their wits and strength, protected by their peers, their grunts, and plastic - attracts attention; if the names of Plaxico and Manning conjure faces and fond thoughts; and if the meter of this humble verse tickles fancy or imagination:

read, then, this link.

[Recovered Scenes from the Tragedy Plaxico by William Shakespeare, by Shane Ryan, on McSweeney's. Phenomenal.]

A Soundbite from Sterling

In this year's yearly interview with The WELL, Sterling issues this pronouncement:

I'm inclined to think the model [for local urban resilience in the face of nation-level leadership incompetence] is Italy. Italy has had calamitous Bush-levels of national incompetence during almost its entire 150-year national existence.

So in order to be successful and happy in the face of the kind of collapse that the US may be faced with in the coming years, it has to become more like Italy.

(Aside: one of the problems with this idea is that the USA is geographically much more spread out, and population-wise much less dense, than that boot in the Med is. So the City-State of Boston might work, but Idaho and Wyoming would have two choices: retain a 'state'-like identity and continue to benefit from governmental services (like policing, banking, insurance, and defense) or become homesteaders-with-Internet.)

One Track Mind: Pianos From Hell

X-pressions, the 1997 album from X-ecutioners, is what happens when a group of DJs decide that it's time to step out from behind the masters of ceremony and take the limelight. Pianos From Hell is what happens when those same DJs have the composition chops to leave a beat almost entirely alone for three minutes.  The neat thing is that by doing that, they put the turntablism in the listener's mind.  I couldn't help but think of the scratching I'd do over that beat while it played.  You know how pretentious jazz drummers talk about the space between the noise being as important as the noise itself?  yeah, that.

One Track Mind: Stormy High

Yet Another independent rock band from eMusic's top 88 list (they make almost all my music recommendations these days), Black Mountain's a Canadian 70's-metal band.  At least, they are on In The Future, the only point of contact I've had with them.

The opening track of the album is a song entitled Stormy High.  I'm not sure what it's about - the lyrics are pretty vague - but the opening guitar riff is in 7/4, so they won immediate kudos for that. Then they won more kudos by extending the feel of classic metal - I'm thinking Sabbath vol 4, maybe pre-Wall floyd - through the entire track.  Guitar and bass mostly in unison on rising scale patterns, the keyboards acting more like percussion than anything else, drums that just keep on stomping forward, vocals that - despite the mildly cheesy female moan that surfaces in places - fit into the melody rather than wandering around it.

One Track Mind: St. Lawrence River

Lee Mellor is on eMusic's list of non-American Country artists (He's Canadian by birth). The cover of his 2007 album, Ghost Town Heart, is a moodily-lit portrait of him looking scruffy and tired and shaggy and all dressed in black, like a city dude's impression of what a country singer should look like. He's got a slightly nasal voice, a strong understanding of the tropes and patterns of alt-country, and enough Canadianness in his lyrics that I feel a connection to him I probably shouldn't.  Case in point: the song St. Lawrence River. It's a catchy ballad about bad choices and redemption that could have been set anywhere with a few minor lyrics changes. I've never seen the St. Lawrence; I can find it on a map, to be sure, and I know what it is and why it's important economically and historically and culturally, but it's not home in any meaningful sense of that word.  And yet, listening to Lee, I feel like nodding. You will too - but whether it's a feeling of shared experience, or just moving in time to a really catchy piece of alt-country, is up to you.

Immersion

There's a link on today's Penny Arcade to what Tycho aptly describes as 'a meditation on starting into Fallout 3'. It's about appreciation and immersion, and it brought me to a pretty weird realization about myself.

This entry aside (oh god the irony), I don't spend all that much time in self-reflection; I prefer to live my life over thinking about it, even to the extent of preferring to plan as little as possible and just let events and other people's desires guide my actions. I like to think of myself as pretty immersed in my own life. But when I play games, I'm almost always playing some sort of meta-game, looking for cheats and walkthroughs on wikis. (Scroll down a bit, or ctrl-F for that link text, to see what I'm talking about there.  It's important, and not just for what I'm talking about now.) Even single-player games, where there's no competition, so there's no reward for metagaming. Why do I do that? Why do I have such a hard time turning in a quest without my refer-a-friend buddy there so I get triple XP?  Why do I reload my Civ games when Imperial Japan goes to war with me because of a decision I made 4 turns ago, so that I can repair the timeline and not get involved in the conflict until I have tanks and they barely have musketmen? The few times when the rules and context of a game have made it difficult to metagame -- Prince of Persia's built-in metastory comes to mind, as do the few times I've played 4x games multiplayer -- I've almost always enjoyed the game more.  But I can hardly stop myself from turning to the web when I hit the slightest roadblock, or from urging my friends to use voice comm in MMOs.

How do I just let the stories happen, and not worry about the man behind the curtain?

Media, Messages, Equality thereof, importance of the former to the latter

Ian posted a meditation on the importance of media to messages today. Of course, Mr. McLuhan comes to mind (although his point was more about which of media and messages is more worthy of study than anything else). The choice of medium is an important one for any message; announcing a product with a press conference is different from announcing it with a press release, which is different from announcing it in an advertisement. Heck, this blog would be a different place if it had black text on a white background, or red rather than lime green titles. And you can alter the perception of the words 'I love you' any number of ways, depending on your choice of body language and tone of voice.

I'm tempted to see all this from an anthropological/biological perspective, to return to my constant theme of our monkey brains being way more important than we think they are. How fine is the line between being a good communicator and being manipulative? How much of that distinction is based on mastery of the parts of the message we normally call 'media'?

One Track Mind: My Favourite Book

My Favourite Book is track 4 on Stars' 2007 release, In Our Bedroom After The War. It's a female-vocalist love song with a soft-pop aesthetic: light, thin drums, syrupy organ playing 7ths on the downbeat, flute backup, strings on the bridge. It's as mushy as you'd expect it to be and as universal as any love song. Romance. Long walks on the beach at sunset. Holding hands in the grocery store. Typical Stars.

Atwood on Harper, via Oz

Oz pulled an Atwood quote on Harper today that made steam come out my ears.  Go read it.

I call Godwin. This is ridiculous. Did you seriously* just call Harper a dictator? Did I really just hear you do that? Yes, it's true that dictatorships suppress dissent -- that's the fucking definition of 'dictatorship' -- but this particular excerpt stinks of some overly self-important whiner having to shell out for the top-shelf stuff herself when she's off telling the French how wonderful they are rather than having the taxpayer foot the bill.  OK, maybe that's a bit reactionary of me.  But it does seem like Atwood is overreacting quite a bit - nobody's in jail, nobody's even threatened with jail.   Her overreaction weakens her criticism of a cut to arts funding by leaning on the threat-to-democracy angle rather than the more obvious (to me anyway) angle of the importance of Canadian art over the market's desire for it. 

I do think Canadian art is important.  I think it's good for our government to support it, because there are valuable pieces of art -- paintings, theatre, music, books, among many others -- that won't be made if there aren't grants to support them, because there's not enough of a market here for them.  I disagree with the Conservatives' decision to cut arts funding.

But I disagree more with Atwood's knee-jerk reaction to it.

One Track Mind: Pick Me Up, Beyond, Dinosaur Jr.

I'm not familiar with Dinosaur Jr.'s oeuvre; in fact, Beyond is my first listen to the band past a few 30-second clips of avant-garde noise I turned off before they finished back before music was easy to find. I'm happy I took the plunge and bought Beyond, because Pick Me Up - the 3rd track on the album - has one of the best stadium hooks I've ever heard in this kind of distortion rock.

In fact, the whole album has a Shakespearily familiar feel; Dinosaur Jr. captures the essence of the distortion-rock sound so completely (mostly by being one of its originators) that listening to them is a little like reading Hamlet and learning where those cliches came from.

Blind Men and Elephants

Everyone's heard the hoary old tale of the 4 blind men, the wise man, and the elephant. Here's a decent crib:

Four blind men encounter an elephant. One grabs the leg and is convinced it's a tree trunk. One holds the tail and thinks it's a whip. Another touches the elephant's trunk and decides it's a hose while the fourth man pats the side and is sure it's a wall.

The wise man tells them, "All of you are right."

Ha, ha. roffle roffle, oh isn't that wise, things aren't always what they seem. What that story doesn't tell you is that the wise man can't see either.

He just happened to grab the elephant's dick.

The Legend of Linux

Now that Brother Angus has told us the legend of C, it's time to gather around THIS GUY HERE and listen to the Legend of Linux.

About 15 years after the Univac guys built Unix on C because it was a funny, funny joke, computers had gotten smaller and easier to buy and not nearly so likely to have chainsaw arms. Not that they were friendly yet or anything, but at least they would talk to you without you sacrificing a goat first and lighting some black candles. And this one guy from Finland named Linus Torvalds, who was at the time (1) a student with practically no sense of humour and (2) deeply unimpressed with the operating system his computer came with, decided to write his own operating system. He wanted it to be kinda like Unix only instead of being for very very expensive computers that you had to hire guys with beards to run for you, it would be for small, pretty cheap computers that you had to be a guy with a beard to want to run yourself.

He posted about it on what passed for an internet back then, and decided that the best way to get people to use his new friend (LOOK MA I BUILT MYSELF A FRIEND that's nice dear, now eat your porridge) would be to give it away. And not just give it away, but give it away so hard that the people he gave it to had to give it away as well.

Giving something away that hard is called 'GPLing it'. You can call it copyleft too, if you want, but don't because you'll embarrass us.

So it turns out that giving away something as useful as an operating system is a good way to make friends with people who think it's impressive to give away an operating system, so now Linus has a lot of friends and people who want to be his friend because they're impressed with him. And he can yell at them if he wants, and all they can really do is yell at other people because if they make Linus angry he'll tell them they're bad and they'll be banished to neverland or something, I don't know I never figured that part out.

And that's why Linux is Linn-ucks and not Line-X, because Linus says his name Linn-us. And that's why it's still no good for people who don't have beards, because it's written mostly by a guy who only wants to be friends with people who are like him, who might have made up their own operating system if he hadn't beaten them to it.

Now someone tell the story of Apple!

Advertising

A titan of the advertising industry died recently, and of course metafilter has a comment thread about it. The comments, predictably, fall into two rough categories: "holy crap ads suck" and "I'm in advertising, ripping on me is lame and boring, you're the one with the problem if you can't make rational decisions in the face of advertising".

I'm in the first camp.

But I'd like to think that my position is a bit more nuanced than "I don't like watching ads"; in my opinion, modern advertising is immoral because (1) it manufactures demand, thereby distorting the market and (2) it does so by exploiting human irrationality.

Advertising is a necessary part of a market economy, because without information about what products are available consumers can't send price signals to manufacturers effectively. The problem starts when advertising stops being about adding information to the market ("this product is available, here are its features, this is its price") and starts being about distorting the demand curve ("here's my stuuuuuuffff, you know you waaaaaant it"). I'm not a libertarian free-markets-solve-everything kind of guy who'd tell you that all market distortions are bad, but I do think that markets are a very good way to distribute goods effectively and that distortions to them should be examined carefully and allowed to happen only if doing so improves society as a whole. Demand-manufacturing advertising doesn't improve society. The money spent on bottled water and meaningless tchotchkes and $40 T-shirts would be better spent elsewhere, on products for which demand doesn't have to be manufactured. The economic activity generated by the business model of "create a product, then create demand for that product" only rarely advances society.

The advertising industry, to the extent that it displays any conscience at all, tends to think that those two business models (create product, manufacture demand & analyze demand, create product) are equivalent; they make arguments like "If you the consumer have some sort of psychological problem where you can't stop yourself from buying Acme Co's Air In A Tube (New, improved, fresher!) because you saw an ad for it, that's your problem". But it isn't your problem if Acme Co's ad agency has enough understanding of psychology to use sex and fear and other subconscious mechanisms to sell you air in a tube. Or, even worse, to aim the ad at your kids, who are not capable of rational thought (that's why we don't let them vote or decide what to have for dinner, right?).

As long as ads are aimed at children, as long as luxury SUVs are presented as necessary, as long as the difference between "want" and "need" is blurred on purpose, I'll think of advertising as immoral.

Spread your wings.

Go on, you're not going to hurt anyone. Least of all me.

Give those bastards a good flap, rev the engines, see what kind of dust devils you can kick up. Smell that warm, soft, leathery smell; take a look at that beautiful shadow. Haha yeah, it'd be a metal cover if it wasn't noon on a grassy park lawn. Of course it feels weird, you have two more friggin limbs! All right, now JUMP. Jump and beat. That's it, ride it, don't think too hard.

Fly.

The past tense of 'to cleave'

A popular tool in a butcher's shop is a cleaver. After a cleaver's been used on a piece of meat, that meat is...cleaved? it's not cleft or cloven, but is it clove?

Perhaps the butcher clove the meat, and now the meat is cleaved. Can anything other than hoofs be cloven? can anything other than a chin be cleft?

"There ain't no Moore's Law for neurons"

Watts says, in this comment thread, : "There ain't no Moore's Law for neurons."

Well, OK, but there should be. Maybe this is just my not-so-latent singularitarian/extropian streak talking, but there bloody well should be a way to get this giant piece of almost-meat in my head to be more efficient with its inputs and, as a consequence, develop new capacities.

Stross, Again

Charlie Stross' Hugo-nominated novella Missile Gap is avialable online for free. It's pretty dark fiction; a classic story of war determining not who's right, but who's left. I read it through in a couple hours, and it had a powerful effect. Perhaps a bit muddied with exposition, but overall a very solid piece of work.

Talking about it with the Pharaoh, it occurred to me that Peter Watts (whose full name I'm spelling out here for ease of ego-surfing) and Stross both are teaching me the lesson I've heard Ellison and Bradbury and Spider Robinson (in full-on fellate-Heinlein-mode) blather about: SF as mind-expanding, scary stuff that teaches us as much what we're scared of the future being as what the future will be.

The thrust of the argument never really made sense to me. Their stories all seem...tame. Bradbury's tales of mars-people and sun-rockets and Tall They Were, And Golden-Eyed are...nice. Like, "That's nice, Timmy" kind of nice. Even Ellison seems more like the neighborhood pest of a kid trying to wreck automobiles with a slingshot rather than any kind of genuine menace. And then there's Stross and Watts, holding your head under water together while bellowing philosophy of the mind at you. Demonstrating the finer points of interspecies competition by watermelon-off-a-balconying your dog with a sledgehammer.

And my (grand?)kids are going to read them and think "that's nice, Pete and Charlie."

By Force of Personality

Rob Bray's recent blogpost By What Authority is a quite persuasive argument against the Intelligent Design movement. The essential thrust is that biblical literalism is at the root of ID, and biblical literalism is hard to take seriously in light of the demonstrated functionality of atomic bombs.

In addition to being -- in my mind -- persuasive, it also avoids the trap of talking past its opponents; unlike Dawkins or Dennet or any of the other "bright" crowd (goodness gracious how I detest that term). It argues from similarity, rather than from difference.

the Horror

Things the web thinks have horror in them:

o blimps
o XML
o culture
o Frankenstein (1970)
o Party Beach (1964)
o Iraq, in poetry
o The Heights
o European Colonization
o the Werewolf
o Battery Hens
o Coke
o Software Patents
o Disney's Old Yeller
o going bald

I dunno, they all seem pretty...banal to me. Except possibly Iraq and European colonization.