Black humor

It strikes me again as supremely funny that my stomach medication (without which life would be a hellstorm of constant agony), Aciphex, is phonetically "ass effects."

This is utterly appropriate.

The stone stopped rolling

So the greatest reason to ignore anything that Rolling Stone says, from now until the Apocalypse, is here. Witness Peter Travers' 25 Greatest DVDs of 2005 and weep with agony!

That's right, the stupid fucker put Revenge of the Sith as No. 1. He also claims that James Cameron's movie Titanic is the greatest love story since Gone With the Wind, and brags that "Everyone with a DVD player will have this box set."

Wrong on two counts, asshole. I won't have it, and that's mostly because Titanic was a ridiculous exploitation flick masquerading as cinema. Forget the Discovery Channel's endless pimping of that grotesque September 11th "documentary," Titanic is the prime example of "disaster porn."

What a waste.

Dichotomy of Fantasticness

So I'm weak on the title, sue me. But if you venture over to Penny Arcade!, you'll notice something extraordinary. The selfsame Dichotomy of Fantasticness mentioned above--that this site can put a newspost like today's with a comic like today's is amazing to me, and that both just work even more so.

Okay. Return to post-Thanksgiving basking while I return to work.

Nepotism and art

So I was telling the HR director about the brilliance of a band known as modest mouse, maybe you've heard of them? Anyhow, I was discussing the merits of their most recent album, 2004's Good News For People Who Love Bad News, and a woman who works in coding and credentialing heard me talk about it. She decided that since I was a music buff, I'd appreciate the music made by her son's band.

At first I was skeptical, I admit. She said, "Maybe you'd like to listen to my son's band," without context, which made me think, Crap, her kid's music is going to blow and I'll have to find some way of suggesting it "just isn't me," or something equally facile. Also I guess I'm a bit of a music snob / pretentious ass / jerk.

So she tells me the name of the band, Voxtrot, and hands me a copy of an article printed about them in Spin! magazine. I don't respect media outlets, but it at least gives me an indicator of their scope, i.e., it's not her eighth grader's band playing in their garage.

So I find their MySpace site and I realize, while I don't like all of their songs, "Missing Pieces" gives me a chill when it hits the bridge that I don't normally get from music unless it's something I like.

So I've found the first new local band worth something! Sweet.

Luddism.

By all accounts, an article in Wired magazine with a title of "The Luddite" is probably going to be a contrarian attempt at self-righteous iconoclasm, with a good dose of blind nostalgia and venting about the soulless nature of today. That's pretty much what it is.

I'm glad the copy chief of Wired has time to indulge in tired cliches and worthless retreading of columns written pre-2000, as the emergence of the cellphone, Internet, and widespread adoption of email was what spawned concerns about the dehumanizing face of modern communication technology. So that we get another dose of the same crap in 2005 is surprising, if not new, inventive, singular, or in any way relevant.

His crazy at-least-it's-better-than-sailing-ship-mail argument notwithstanding, I would argue that his delineation of face-to-face contact as the only "meaningful" human interaction is specious. It's the means of interacting with the longest history, but that doesn't automatically rule out the possibility that you are interacting with others meaningfully through other media. He only mentions IM, email, chat rooms, and other Internet-specific phenomena as meaningless communication tools; the telephone, television, and hell, the letter itself doesn't get mentioned in the course of his diatribe.

"So you rot in a cubicle trying to get the money to get the stuff, when you should be out walking in a meadow or wooing a lover or writing a song.... Look around. Our collective humanity is dying a little more every day. Technology is killing life on the street -- the public commons, if you please. Chat rooms, text messaging, IM are all, technically, forms of communication. But when they replace yakking over the back fence, or sitting huggermugger at the bar or simply walking with a friend -- as they have for an increasing number of people in "advanced" societies -- then meaningful human contact is lost. Ease of use is small compensation."

Here's how he's weaseled his way out of easy derailment--suddenly his argument becomes less "tech bad, jibberjabber good" and more "don't let it replace what you're used to." This isn't much more than an eleventh-hour attempt at bolstering his argument with something a little more akin to reason, but it doesn't validate his prior assertions. Technology is killing art? Not really. Technology is creating new opportunities for artists to express themselves, providing new inspiration, and allowing exploration of media that never even existed (interactive Flash experiences as art, anyone?).

The other major fallacy is that everything he cites as good is technology--it's just older technology. Writing a letter is not face-to-face interaction, but because it's been around longer, it gets the okay. Similarly, his assertion that you shouldn't be in the cubicle, you should be writing a song is ridiculous. The people interested in writing songs are doing just that, and I doubt they need your stupid gesticulations to help them out. Further, the increase in availability of powerful technology and the ease of transmission has allowed more people the opportunity to become artists and to find audiences. Garage Band, the MP3, bittorrent. All these things allow budding artists to find new influences, scout new media, and produce new works they wouldn't have, otherwise.

The reaction of the Luddite is to hate the new, because historically, the Luddites were a specific group of individuals who rioted against the industrialization of the factory they worked at. They were afraid not of technology as a whole, but of becoming obsolete in comparison. Did the lower class die because of machines? No, it's actually bigger than ever, but that's a different argument. Nowadays the only ones who are railing against the corporate-consumerist nature of enabling technology are the fools and bloggers who have the time to do so because they aren't busy working on something else. Maybe that's his point. Maybe he's an idiot, because he works for Wired, and if he really held to his convictions he wouldn't.

It's just surprising to me that an outlet like Wired would print an article so half-assed, unoriginal, and ridiculous in the first place.

A second chance for Websnark

I thought, upon hindsight, perhaps I was too harsh in my condemnation of Websnark. I thought, Let's give it another chance, right, governor?

So I did.

It's still narcissistic trash masquerading as theory and art.

God, I hope Eliot Spitzer is on top of this one...

So the State of Texas has done something I finally agree with, namely, suing SONY BMG for their rootkits. In case you haven't been listening, the rootkit is a series of files and registry hacks used to hide certain files (namely, the copy-protection files on the CD) from appearing to the user. However, the rootkit was written incompetently, and any hacker using the same prefix, $sys$, can hide their files on your computer, too. Further, SONY's official cloaking-removal tool doesn't uninstall their software, and it opens up further holes by compromising your registry and your internet security. Unofficial attempts to remove the rootkit, unless you know what you're doing, will disable your CD drivers, rendering the entire drive inoperable. Or, if you're really lucky, Windows will just break.

Hopefully, the AG of New York--the guy who went after Big Tobacco, the major investment scandals, etc.--is cruising Slashdot...

A thought about Websnark

(Note that I'm providing the link not for endorsement purposes but really just for posterity. Read me first before clicking!)

There is a website ostensibly for the purpose of webcomic criticism named Websnark, but primarily it devolves into weepy self-pity and indulgent back-scratching between the commentors and the authors. Why this bothers me, I don't know. Part of it is probably because there is no other real resource for criticism focusing on an ephemeral medium that might not last all that long, nor will gain any artistic credibility among the mainstream in a hundred years or so. But that's not entirely the point.

One of the things Websnark did originally that attracted my notice was a feature called "You Had Me and You Lost Me," in which Eric Burns (principal author) would catalogue the features of a webcomic that caused him to generally lose interest. One of those webcomics was Megatokyo, which I was in the middle of losing myself (it started all right but became an exercise in glacial patience).

I'm all for people writing about what they want to write about, and perhaps my criticisms of Websnark are insincere or hypocritical (feel free to point this out if you so desire). The first step toward Websnark's losing me was its own loss of focus. The aims of the blog changed more from analyzing the webcomic as an artform and more for allowing Burns to write about the traumas, real and imagined, that had dominated his on/offline life. Which is fine, as well, if this is what you've advertised, but to switch horses midstream is somewhat disingenuous and not entirely psychologically healthy. What he seems to have created is an atmosphere where he maintains a facade of hiding these traumas, only to let them out in preordained intervals and preordained manner, so that when one of these massive expository dumps does occur, his audience feels not only privileged to have listened, but encouraged to admire his own skill with words and personal conviction.

Note also, in the recent (and by "recent" I mean several months ago) occurrence of Internet Drama between the artists of Penny Arcade! and a good majority of the indie comic world. There was a documentary made about webcomics, Penny Arcade! didn't agree with it, and they called the makers of the documentary on their pretensions. Eric Burns seized on this satire and immediately charged Tycho and Gabriel of incredible insensitivity toward Cat Garza (a man portrayed in both the documentary and the parody), even going so far as to demean Penny Arcade! as nothing more than video game jokes and the color purple. The end of the article was, and I'm not paraphasing, "Fuck you, Penny Arcade. Fuck you guys."

What bothers me about this is not that Burns is missing the point of Penny Arcade!, nor that he's a hypocritical douchebag. It's mostly that he's manufacturing some kind of insult to himself as a way of generating pathos. In the thrust of his argument against PA, he mentions how much he's been ridiculed his entire life by "the cool kids." He positions himself as the underdog to PA's Goliath. Somehow, he even dredged Aaron Sorkin's show Sports Night into the matter. There was much bluster, much self-righteousness, much indignation.

And it was all shit. By all means, stand up for what you believe in. But if someone parodies another person, and if the target of that parody does not mind (nor even by all accounts notice), don't attempt to create a crusade for your own embittered past. No one made fun of you, Burns. No one even mentioned you. Cat Garza does not need you or your help. And your attempt at laying PA in their place is, in fact, doing what you believe PA to have done in the first place. Tycho and Gabe made fun of Cat Garza only superficially; namely they were leveling criticisms at pretensions to the revolutionary in a new medium. Especially pretensions toward being revolutionary when you're only repeating the footsteps of the genuine forefathers you're unaware of. To say that PA's seven-year presence on the web means nothing, to sneer at them for playing video games, to mention that they're not even really artists (when Burns until only recently did not have a webcomic), is sneering self-righteousness of the worst sort. "Fuck you, Penny Arcade"?

Shut up, Eric Burns.

That isn't even the original point of my post... one of the points of this post was to argue that Burns has created a pathology among his commentors and frequent audience that generates this odd ego cult. The recent inclusion of Wednesday White, Burns's romantic interest and now co-author, is indicative of the strange me fixation present in Websnark. Perhaps it's odd to call someone's vanity on a project that deserves little more than vanity, and perhaps it's doubly hypocritical to do so on this blog, but at least here, we've acknowledged that the primary focus of this is Us (Genie and Djinn) and not some other subject matter. To force someone looking for other material to wade through the detritus of your shipwreck life is self-absorbed. To initially position your material as the documentation of your own life is fine. To masquerade it is not.

Take his posting about November 19th, which is up right now. What he would like for you to believe is that these posts are about his friend Richard, who is deceased. This is not the case. What he has really done is manipulated the telling of his friend's death into a cause celebre for his own steadfastness as the "good friend." It's not a post about how Richard was a good person. It's a story about how Burns has remembered all these years, and my God, shouldn't we be glad Burns is gracing us with these notes from his exemplary life? Oh, look at the poor dear, he can write so well. Richard's death is nothing but the springboard from which you should leap to the conclusion that Burns is a great writer and a sensitive person. This, at least, is what he wants you to believe.

It's disgusting not only that he's coopting his friend's life for his own self-satisfaction, but more that everyone at Websnark is buying it. Stop patting him on the back. That his commentors are as blind to his presentation is not much of a surprise. To return to Websnark requires delusion of the grandest sort, and to participate requires swallowing the Kool-Aid with a smile on your dying face.

"Fuck you, Penny Arcade"? No. Not quite.

Fuck you, Eric Burns.

Whee! Two posts about race/ism in one day.

So I was reading on CNET's "Blogma" feature, which I guess is a pun on the word "dogma" but kind of hope it isn't, insofar as it's not entirely clever and puns should be retired, and I ran across a section dedicated to the XBox 360's lackluster reviews. Not delving into the truth of the matter, there is something interesting to be found in the comments section (and by "interesting" I mean "infuriating and stupid").

One poster makes a fairly blanket statement that the 360 will be the greatest thing ever. The next poster argues that the incremental improvement strategy usually favored by Microsoft in their OS development will bite them in the ass, because if you drop four hundred dollars you want a hell of a lot more improvement than another notch on the belt. The remark is also made that "The controller is huge, and I'm not a nine-year-old Asian kid."

This isn't, actually, what I take exception to. More on why I don't in a minute.

What I take exception to is the next post, cleverly titled "What are you talking about" but with no question mark, says, "Why does the kid have to be Asian to have small hands? Racist."

I swear to God, that's what this person wrote. Here's why he bugs me more than the poster initially discussing the trend toward delicate digits in those of an Oriental geographic persuasion: The original XBox was a god-awful disaster in Japan. It bombed. All over the place. Didn't make a dent in the PS2's sales, and hell, even the Gamecube sold better than the Xbox. The reason for that is twofold: first-generation games were horrible, and second, the original controller was a giant piece of plastic that even I, with my Nosferatu-like fingers, found difficult to get used to.

Penny Arcade! famously had a comic where Tycho replaced Gabe's controller with an adult grizzly bear. Gabriel says, "Did you get a new controller? This one feels smaller."

Anyway, the allegation of racism is 1) baiting the initial poster to discredit the allegation that Microsoft and the Xbox might not be the Second Coming of Jesus and 2) utterly missing the point. You're right, the child doesn't have to be Asian to have small hands. That's also not the assertion. One reason for the Xbox's failure in Japan was its lack of consideration for the specifics of Japanese society, namely, the extraordinary limitations on living space. Building a gargantuan console with a gargantuan controller reeks of American imperialistic arrogance (plus you can't handle the damn thing).

That's what the poster meant. Christ, I'm all for calling people out on their stupid biases and assumptions, but make sure you're right before you start throwing invectives and loaded signifiers. This is why you keep the Irish off computers.

Derivatives, "found art," and the public domain.

On the mailbox at work:

WE ARE NOT A NATION
OF MASS IMMIGRATION

Proposed:

THE ONLY PEOPLE IN THE NATION
NOT HERE THROUGH IMMIGRATION
ARE STUCK ON THE RESERVATION
YOU PROBABLY ARGUED AGAINST INTEGRATION
SO QUIT YOUR PROTESTATIONS,
YOU GODDAMN IDIOT.

Inevitable disappointment.

Look here, people. We need to talk. In particular we need to talk about World of Warcraft. More precisely, we need to talk about gender.

Let's say you decide to play WoW. Say your girlfriend got you a subscription as your anniversary present. You log in, enroll, and love the game. Now say you make an alt that's, oh, I don't know, a human female warrior. Are you a) exercising your right to roleplay, b) enjoying the character creation capabilities that your account lets you exercise, c) harmlessly role-playing, or d) unwittingly inviting every creep with thumbs to hit on your fake person?

Big surprise, it's d.

To set the record straight, internet: I'm a dude. I've checked. Doctors have checked (my god, they've checked, and let's not have any more of that checking, ok?). The innocent Belgians across the road in Rome have accidentally checked. They all agree. I don't "have a nice rack," I'm not "a sweet piece," nor would I appreciate your illiterate attempts at bringing off "cybr plz????!?1??"

Recap: 1) No boobs. 2) I don't want you staring at them even if they aren't real. 3) Totally a dude.

Thanks for your time. Go back to your, your Etch-a-Sketch, and your Tinker Toys, and, and your Moby Grape, you horny bastards.

Bias in the media at work

Maybe it's because the subject matter is ancient history (literally), but these two articles I read today demonstrate the ways in which a particular news source colors the news you get.

For instance, take Article #1, from Nature. Let's start with the headline and brief description of the article.

Short-snouted snapper surprises fossil hunters: This unusual looking crocodile would have had a hard time catching fish.

Now, we look at Article #2, from my favorite comedic website, CNN. Again, we'll start with the headline and short description of the article.

Scientists reveal prehistoric terror: (CNN) -- Scientists say they have discovered the intact fossilized skull of a marine crocodile with a dinosaur-like head and a fish-like tail that likely terrorized the Pacific Ocean 135 million years ago.

Honestly, I think we need look no further. "Terror?" "Terrorized?" The creature was "probably 12 feet long," and honestly, in the scheme of 135 million years ago, that wasn't that big. I know that Nature and CNN have two distinct functions in reporting different types of news. However, CNN has unnecessarily sensationalized this particular story. The article at Nature isn't even overly scientific. It's clear and interesting, even to laymen, especially if you have an interest in dinosaurs (and let's face it, who as a child didn't go through a dinosaur loving phase?). You don't have to be a scientist to understand and enjoy it. On the other hand, CNN assumes that you'd have to be an idiot to understand or enjoy their take on the story.

"Welcome to No-Choice America" (link to Mischief to Data)

It's like Dan Savage (of the Onion AV Club's Savage Love says every now and then--it isn't just gay people they want to control (and by "they" I mean the people supporting the "culture of life" movement as Dan Savage defines and refers to it), it's everyone. Why we think that they'll just stop at telling gay people what to do, I don't know. We heterosexuals are just slightly out of their sights, and with shots like this, even that's in doubt.

As for where I live, which is now Texas, we just passed a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. If I could have voted, I would have voted against it hardcore. (The rest of my county voted against it, but we're the only county in the state that did so.) I wanted to put out my own fliers--I got one on my car that said the gays were bussing people in to vote, which I thought was darkly funny--that mentioned the Ku Klux Klan's antihomosexual rally that happened in downtown Austin on Saturday.

Like South Park: "Oh no, we've got gays wantin' to marry! What'll scare them off?"
"Ghosts?"
"Right, everyone's scared of ghosts! Let's dress up in these sheets and pretend to be ghosts."

Don't like gays? Don't like abortion? Turn your ballot from a sheet of sinful choices into a sheet of life! Vote Klan, 2005.

Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.

So now I've finally got my own job, my own place, my own everything. And today was the first day of Real Work, which was also cool. Until I realized that the project I'm working on--managing a database of exported stuff from another billing firm--is so huge, like 200,000 transactions huge, that if I don't get it done soon, there's a chance the firm I work for is screwed.

Bigtime screwed.

For our anniversary, however, Genie got me World of Warcraft. It's awesome. I leveled to 14 in three days, because it consumes the waking hours I don't spend on Adult Swim (also My Name is Earl and Boston Legal).

You want to look me up, I'm the 14 Night Elf Druid named Theramide (or the 3 Night Elf Rogue named Ramiel).

Also? Watch the Boondocks. Seriously. It's excellent. In a way that hasn't been seen on TV since All in the Family.