Posts Tagged ‘blog’

Call me a follower, but I love reading these things. Here’s my contribution to the meme beast.

1. I’m pretty sure I saw an e-mail version of this list in the late 90’s.

2. I’ve yet to learn anything really terrible from these “25 Random Things” lists. (Knocks on Wood)

3. My Wife says I make a Chewbacca noise when I get upset.

4. I have had exactly one job after university that had any expectation of permanence. The company folded their office just in time for Christmas.

5. I lament the fact that World of Warcraft has all but killed table-top Role playing games.

6. My first two cars were red ford tempos.

7. I can remember the exact moment when I learned to read on my own. I was 4 years old, the book was “Go Dog Go”, and I was trying to read before bedtime.

8. I rarely drink, and when I do, it’s usually with people I trust and the harder the stuff is, the better. Maintaining a buzz gets expensive when you’re my size.

9. I have worn costumes outside of Halllowe’en.

10. I’ve been told I look like Dwight Schrute from The Office. I wonder if this is affecting my career at all.

11. My so-called “published works” include: 1 play, a webcomic, a newspaper article, this blog, and a letter in “Wired” Magazine.

12. I have delusions of learning how to draw well.

13. My relationship with my wife is proof that you can change your life for the better by just saying “Hello”

14. Actually, I said “Excuse Me”, but the lesson is much the same.

15. My first celebrity meet-up was with Phil Brown, who played Uncle Owen in the original Star Wars. It was at the San Diego Comic-con in 1998.

16. I can live without television, but only because internet technology has gotten so advanced.

17. People have told me about the harmful effects of the aspartame in my Diet Coke. They never mention that it’s also addictive.

18. I suppress my consumerist urges by maintaining a sizable amazon.com wishlist.

19. People who I know have blogs, but I wish would blog more: Theo Hua, Tarra Nakatsu-Hua, Erin Stoody, Sandy Deng, Phuc Tram, Melissa Quinn, and Chris Vance.

20. My collection of Gundam models has an armistice with my wife’s Cherished Teddies figurines

21. My Favorite PC game of all time is Master of Orion II.

22. I’m often tempted to question people when they make cryptic Facebook statuses.

23. I believe that the 1990’s killed the idea of Artistic Integrity.

24. I never wear sweatshirts because I tend to overheat. I don’t know why my body does this. Maybe I need a once-over with a geiger counter to make sure I’m not radioactive or something.

25. The Hershey Sidekick was the greatest candy bar ever.

I’ve been on the micro-blogging site Twitter for about year now, and I’ve avoided blogging about because it struck me as the dumbest thing ever. If you’re going to blog using only 140 characters at a time, why do you need a separate platform to do so? I still use it, I enjoy it, but there is no way I can justify its necessity to the real world. The Twitter people don’t seem to be making any money from what they do. Some people are benefiting from Twitter via new subscribers to their websites, but they have no way of sharing this success with Twitter even if they wanted to. The service crashes more times than it should, and frankly it sounds like the whole thing could collapse at any moment.

Yet somehow, Twitter.com keeps growing as a phenomenon. Twitter surpassed Digg.com on Obama’s inauguration day as one of the top social news sites on the internet. Here’s a visualization of Twitter.com’s usage during the inauguration. As the network gets bigger, it gets more interesting. And just like any other social situation, emergent and unwritten rules start popping up. If someone starts following you, it’s polite to follow them back. Consequently, following people is a great way to get people to follow you. Every time I start following people, maybe two people will start following me back. Half of them have “social media expert” or some variation thereof on their profile. I don’t know if their using a twitter robot program to pick me up or if they’re just obsessively following everyone in their friend of a friend of a friend’s twitter lists.

Twitter also has something called an API, which allows people to write programs that help you deal with your ever-expanding friendlist. Tweetdeck is a desktop application for windows that automatically loads new twitter posts (also called “tweets”) and allows you to divide twitter users into groups. You can use services like Tweelater.com to auto-follow your new followers, but personally I want to find something I can host from my own server before I give someone else a new username and password I can forget the next day. The Twitter app on facebook attaches your twitter account to your facebook account, and vice versa. I use Twitter Tools on my wordpress blog to make a new tweet when I have a new post, and the twitter widget posts my twitter feed on the sidebar.

Twitter is a blogging platform that is meant for people who want to be found. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom that people want to protect their information from the internet. Celebrities seem to love it. You can follow Arnold Schwarzenegger, Britney Spears, and half the cast-members of Star Trek. Another funny thing about the platform is that it is not fundamentally different from wordpress, facebook, or any other blogging platform. There is no Twitter equation that anyone can patent. A few standards of usage are changed and voilà, you have the next social media phenomenon. I still think that Twitter is weird, its success is weird, and that is precisely why I’m going to keep experimenting with it and see where it takes me.

No one has to tell you that it’s the information age. Most of our money is tied up in securities buried deep in our bank’s web servers. Our worth to society is tied up in a series of numbers, cards and passwords. When we talk about protecting that information, we call that privacy. But as we all know, we are more than our bank cards and social insurance numbers. We have likes, dislikes, experiences, and relationships. We can reveal those things on the internet to make new connections, justify our opinions, and even help ourselves professionally. But how much information is too much?

I want to introduce you to the Brazen Careerist, run by Penelope Trunk. She runs a consulting business instructing companies on how to attract and keep young workers. Her advice is counter-intuitive and controversial. For instance, she advised that new grads should involve their parents in their salary negotiations. After reading the site for a while it occurred to me that the blog wasn’t so much about her career as it was a pulpit for the drama in her personal life. I learned about her autistic son, her divorce and about how she stabbed herself in the head while she was undergoing post-partum depression. She writes less about her personal life these days, but you can bet she does so only under strict orders from her divorce lawyer. Penelope Trunk gained a lot of readers by revealing intimate details of her life. The only problem with that is I remember almost nothing about the advice she gives, and almost everything about the sordid details of her family life. It’s disconcerting, and it’s the reason I don’t read her blog anymore.

Am I alone in feeling a little sleazy when I hear intimate details of a person I don’t even know? Why can’t I get to know people on the basis of a well-crafted first impression? It’s not about decency. That term is so loaded and it is often hijacked by the stupid. I’m not against people having skeletons in their closet, but how would you feel if someone you introduced yourself to at a cocktail party started telling you about how they have inner-child issues?

Some people might say it’s a sign of the times. With all this technology to record our every move, why not put something up there worth watching? In an age of millions of competing voices, we have to do anything we can to maintain people’s attention. It’s Days of Our Lives, only it’s starring me, me, MEEEE! When we start airing our dirty laundry over the internet, we’re not only putting our shame on public display. We are essentially saying to the world, “there is nothing interesting about me besides the personal tragedy beneath this thin veneer of blandness.” Aren’t we better than this?

Now, I am under the belief that all of us have something to offer by blogging. We all have specific experiences that can benefit others. Keeping records of how we live is important in any society. We should, however, have things that we just keep away from the public eye. Our secrets make us unique, and revealing them is an important symbol of trust in friendship. If we do make them public, it’s so that people can learn from the mistakes of our past, not so we can temporarily soothe the emotional wounds of the present.

Now, it’s been years since I’ve been anywhere near the video games industry, but I still like to keep up with it in an armchair capacity. One of my favorite sites by which to do this is a blog called gamesetwatch, a collection of essays and links to articles by many industry leaders. One article they had recently was a retrospective on “Time Gal”, one of those old laser disc arcade games that had animated cutscenes that you control via pressing the correct button or moving the joystick in the right way. The author, Todd Ciolek, (who also writes X-button, a fine column at the Anime News Network) pointed out that Time Gal was the first game to have a non-licensed character that players could recognize as human. He goes on to praise the game for having a heroine that was so cute and chirpy, but then there was one line that just made my head spin.

“Misogyny creeps in, of course: Time Gal’s already skimpy clothes get ripped away by T-Rexes and Fist of the North Star mutants alike, and she’ll scream about being struck on the chest or getting bitten on her partially exposed rear. Pioneers are not always proud.”

It wasn’t just what he said, it’s how he said it. Misogyny. You know, creeping in like that. Here you are, pushing through the glass ceiling, but let one of those things on your chest slip out and BOOM! There’s misogyny. The word here is written with such complacency, such blasé, that it’s almost as if the author was describing the sky as blue. To use such a powerful word as misogyny in that way tells me that he doesn’t even believe in what he says. And why should he have to? He’s only preaching the gospel truth. You can see it repeated all over the ‘net. To show women as sexual in any capacity is misogynist. That’s it. Finito. End of discussion.

When there’s an idea that becomes sacrosanct and, dare I say, unexamined, it bothers me. Untested truth is what keeps us from moving forward, making connections and seeing the greater scheme of things. This is part of a pattern I keep seeing again and again in video game criticism. Why is a scantily clad girl in a video game defined as misogyny? “How is that not misogyny!?” is not a valid answer.

Despite being male, I think I can put my liberal arts hat back on and take a crack at this one. Misogyny is the hatred of women. If a woman getting her clothes torn suggestively in a fight is misogyny, then there are a couple of assumptions at work here. The first is that this is sexual objectification, where a woman is judged by her physical attributes independent of her personality and intelligence. This is demeaning to women, and that makes it misogyny.

I have a problem with this. This also assumes that the way a woman looks and how she presents herself has nothing to do with her personal taste, her habits or the culture she comes from. It would seem that this imagery is only defined by how I see it. Big, white male me. Now this tells me that if I look at something and get a rise out of it, it immediately becomes misogynist. I am indirectly dictating what can and cannot be depicted in regards to women. It doesn’t matter if anyone else finds the game cute or funny. Is that feminist? Hell, is that even humanist?

So now that we’ve found out what misogyny is, what’s feminism? What images do game companies produce if they want to be forward-thinking and catch that ever-elusive female audience? Many would point to a game called Portal. It’s about a battle between a sarcastic computer and Chell, a barely seen female protagonist in a formless jumpsuit with no dialog, no expression, and no personality. She is seen as the perfect feminist archetype, as opposed to blond-haired traitors like Super Mario’s Princess Peach. Of course, this can’t explain why Peach herself has female fans all over the world and why her own game, Super Princess Peach, has sold over a million copies.

That, my friends, is why we can’t have compelling video game characters. This is why we live in a video game world populated by bald space marines and sullen amazonian axe-murderers. When we intentionally wall off a part of human nature, we blind ourselves to potential avenues of creativity. A specific, easily recognizable character can make the difference between millions of dollars in revenue and billions.

For the first few months of our marriage, my wife Sara would ask me how I could possibly spend so much time surfing on the internet. Recently I found out this wasn’t a complaint, but an actual question about how to find good stuff to read on the web. I told her that I frequent sites like Digg.com and Fark.com to receive the latest news about technology, video games and STAR WARS! In other words, sites that would not interest Sara in the slightest.

The state of affairs continued until I found an article on Digg called “Top Five Reasons Why I Want Digg for Girls”. It basically outlined what I had thought when I had tried to introduce Sara to news aggregate sites. Most of them are sausage parties, populated by nerds who try to break the site for no other than a surplus of time on their hands. You’re unlikely to find articles about non-geeky arts and crafts, parenting or anything else relevant to women. Considering how much of the publishing sector is created by and for women, having web software like Digg and making it completely male oriented is like building a Saturn V Rocket and using it as a Christmas tree. It seemed like the author had pointed out ripe territory for revolution, but many commentors pointed out that the revolution had already happened at www.kirtsy.com.

Intrigued I headed down there and was taken by surprise by how nice the interface is. It’s just 9 self-explanatory categories, and you don’t even have to join to give a “kirtsy” since the site measures the click-through count, not just votes from registered users. What’s more, the users don’t seem to use misleading headlines like “Bike Seat Cuts Off the Nose to Save the Penis!” in order to garner votes.

Now, I’m still going to use sites like Digg and Fark for most of my link hunting needs, but it’s really nice to know that a site like this exists. For one thing, it proves that lines of code and a server don’t make a software package any more than a truckload of hamburger meat and a suitcase full of money makes a McDonald’s. It’s amazing that you can create a news aggregate site that functions like Digg and have it come off as being completely different. It’s a tribute to the human element in software design. And what does Sara think of Kirtsy? Let’s just say she curses my name now that she knows how to waste time on the internet!

Sara and I got a membership to the Vancouver Art Gallery as a wedding present so last Friday we opted to go see an exhibition called “KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art”. The isn’t the first anime/comic themed exhibit at the art gallery. In 2002 there was “The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture” which took a lot of Astroboy, Iron Man, and Ghost in the Shell comics and called it cyborg culture. The link between all of the works was a little tenuous. I found this exhibit to be much more interesting.

On display were the last three Krazy Kat drawings ever made, lots of (very good) independent comic artists like Seth and Daniel Clowes, as well as some Manga Artists that aren’t as well known in the west, like Junko Mizuno and Mamoru Nagano. The animation exhibit displayed clips from Macross, Patlabor, and Satoshi Kon’s Paprika. There was also a display on the history of animation, from Gertie the Dinosaur to Toy Story. The video game exhibit was compiled by Will Wright, creator of The Sims and Spore. It traced the progress of video games throughout the years, starting with Pac-man, going through Super Mario and leading up to Grand Theft Auto and Quake. This was followed by a pop art exhibit containing modern art about comics, animation and video games.

Now, I’ve blogged about the art gallery before, and I wasn’t too happy about how free expression had completely overthrown the idea that you need the talent and craft necessary to communicate the ideas. It’s kind of impossible to do anything in animation or video games without some level of craft but I still had this nagging thought that the exhibitors at the art gallery viewed the abandonment of rules as progress. Works that made less and less sense were being touted as the future of their respective media. Even in the video games, the procedural generation of random worlds was held up as being superior to scripted stories and artistic control. As I walked through the pop art exhibit, I came across a series of works called “No Ghost Just A Shell”, and I had realized that I stepped into the dimension of arrogant intellectuals who had completely missed the point.

“No Ghost, Just a Shell” is the work of two “artists” named Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe. They bought the rights to a character they called “Annlee” from a Japanese character development studio. She was kind of a sad girl with elf ears who probably wouldn’t be able to carry on her own series. They decided to create an exhibit around her. Now, this would have been a good thing if she was in the care of people who could communicate like human beings. Instead she was at the mercy of cold, logical modern artists whose penchant for ambiguity is only outpaced by their arrogance. In kinder life Annlee would’ve been given a backstory, a few doujinshi, maybe someone would even cosplay as her. She would be, you know, loved. Here, in a perversion of the Velveteen Rabbit story, she gets dissected and deconstructed by bunch of euro-trash hipsters who put her in looping video installations speaking gibberish and repetitive pop art posters. The so-called triumph of the work was that the artists got a legally binding agreement that all rights to make works based on Annlee revert back to Annlee herself. However, since no one else can draw her now, she is effectively dead because some self-aggrandizing academic wanted to explore the “idea” of copyright.

The whole thing reminded me of Gulliver’s journey to Balnibarbi, where he found scientists who were so obsessed with analyzing the natural order of things that the land had turned barren from all their absurd experiments. These artists are doing the same thing with the realm of ideas. Slavish devotion to the new and the unique has created a culture where art is irrelevant. The modern art movement was started because the world of art was so detached from people’s lives, but the resulting trend ended up making art today more detached than ever. Soon they will have even lost the ability to shock.

Sara and I left the Annlee installation feeling confused and a little sad for the elf-girl that had gotten mixed up in all this. We passed another video installation called “Cosplayers” by someone named Cao Fei. It was a video of young chinese men and women exploring, fighting, and running through the streets of Guangzhou, China in anime costumes. The plaque near the installation said that the youths in the video were fighting against a society that had disdain for the imaginary, and threatened them with stifling homogeneity. It was a little obtuse, but unlike the Annlee it was actually trying to express something. The costumes were well done, and the contrast to the oppressive buildings in the background was quite neat. It reminded me of how seeing cosplayers at conventions kind of took you out of the mindset of the real world. The work was relatable and I could experience it, instead of just staring at it and trying to fashion Emperor’s clothes for it in my head. If there are more artists out there like Cao Fei, perhaps all is not lost.

It’s hard to have common culture with anyone these days. I am told there was a time when people of all walks of life could meet up at the “water cooler” to discuss shows named “Seinfeld”. Now, even if a show is popular enough for everyone to watch, they’re most likely story arc shows like 24 and Lost. Any attempt to discuss said shows are met with screams of “NO SPOILERS!” followed by a dive behind the nearest desk. This is why I enjoy internet shows. They’re short, contain no interconnecting plot lines, and they usually have a comments section where you can discuss the show with other fans. However, I don’t want to discuss these shows with people on the internet. As much time as I spend on the computer, I’d rather find out what people I actually know personally (and I think that would you out there, reading this) think about these shows. So without further ado, I’d like to introduce one of my favorite internet shows, Wayne Gladstone’s Hate By Numbers.

Hate By Numbers is actually kind of a strong word for what Gladstone does on his show. He has a very calm and cool demeanor as he takes video clips from various sources and lists what bothers him about them. Here he describes how juxtaposing breast shots with video of animals being neutered might turn a news fluff piece into an odd form of aversion therapy. You may recognize this form of commentary from the Daily Show. This may be no coincidence, as Gladstone also writes for The Daily Show’s Indecision 2008 Blog. However, where the Daily Show focuses on the foibles of world leaders, Gladstone looks outside the news spotlight to find out just how bizarre television has gotten. Armies of production crews are assembled, millions of dollars are spent and this is what we, as a people, have come up with. With our civilization in this state, I am glad we have Hate By Numbers to remind us that “No, you aren’t going insane. Kid Rock really is a boil on the face of popular music.”

Working in computers almost requiresyou to be paranoid for a living. We spend so much time trying to get at all kinds data that we know for a fact that someone out there is drooling at the prospect of being able to rifle through our iTunes folders. Whenever the idea of any large entity having access to our “data” whether it’s facebook, comcast, or the City of Seattle. We go on multi-minute tirades on the right to privacy and the dangers of identity theft all the while thumping a copy of “1984″ like some kind of nerd war drum.

It’s always interesting to me how we’re quick to discuss the cons of living in a post-privacy society while ignoring all of the pros. Not that I’d really want a post-privacy society. I’ve read my share of dystopian cyber-punk stories. While they were awesome, living in one would be a complete pain in the ass. The reason we should be discussing the pros of living in a world without privacy is that the advantages are what make such bad ideas reach into reality.

Take slavery, for example. It treats people like animals, sure, but free labor kept it going for so many years. Pollution is merely a side effect of accessing the energy necessary to make modern society possible. Speaking of post-privacy societies, Facism and Communism got their run because the effect they had on crime and class warfare.

The erosion of privacy in western society may be something different from the totalitarian governments of the past. Sure, anyone can see your information, but what if you could see everyone else’s? If your movements could be all tracked, they could become the perfect alibi if you are accused of a crime. If everyone just starts producing all this data, wouldn’t it hamper government efforts to spy on people by producing a lot of dummy data to sift through? You wouldn’t have to lock your doors or your car anymore, those things just won’t open or start for people who don’t have rightful access.

These advantages are what would make a “Big Brother” society possible in the 21st century. What sort of advantages can you think of?

While we’re on the subject of clichés, let’s talk about Stuff White People Like. You might have heard of it. It’s a blog dedicated to listing the likes of a curious race of people that are worried about the problems of the world, yet not actually worried enough to do anything about it. They will scramble to any type of product that will alleviate this long-standing guilt for whatever they’ve done in the past.

A recurring theme in the blog is a constant struggle to be unique from one another without actually doing the work of being unique. This is done by going to movies that may not actually be funny, plays that aren’t actually interesting, and listening to music that isn’t exactly played well. Being unique actually surpasses the need to be entertained, well-fed and most importantly having the money to be both those things.

White people certainly don’t have a monopoly on all of the foibles brought up in the “Stuff”. This is what happens when human beings put the problem of food and shelter so far behind them that we are absolutely stumped over what to do next.

Why do we have this soul-aching need to be unique? It wasn’t enough we were all given our very own genetic code to play with and it’s not enough that we get brought up in the richest and most advanced society in History. This probably has something to do with the knowledge that not too far in the past terms like “2,000 dead from starvation” wasn’t an atrocious statistic in our society and in some societies it is still par for the course. We need to be unique to calm our fears that we won’t be the next statistic in a plague, famine, or ethnic cleansing that happens by. We want to know that we’ll be missed, and that the world will be poorer from our passing. The fact that homogeneous manufacturing processes have created all this largesse doesn’t help.

The only remedy for this frantic search for the unique is that sometimes you can be unique for doing something well. Years of art criticism and University theses have gone into establishing the “revolutionary” idea that simply doing something well is bland, banal, and a threat to the future of the arts as we know them. This love of the esoteric bleeds into other creative disciplines turning out many jacks-of-all-trades but unfortunately no masters. However what is and isn’t esoteric changes from year to year, as is the rule with all fashion. In time, your turn will come up, and you too will be famous, if only for 15 minutes.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that more writing is going on today than at any point in human history. All it takes is 8 1’s and 0’s to make a byte, my 8GB flash drive contains well over 8 billion of those, multiply that by the billions of computers all over the world and combine that with fully industrialized printing processes, and you get the idea. Now with all this talking in stasis going on and if the Infinite Monkeys Typing Theorem is to be believed, we are going to be repeating ourselves a bit. I came across a few lists of internet writing clichés that I should try to avoid in the future.

For the Love of Blog Cheese from Lindsayism.com – A lot fun cliches but some of them are things the author can do nothing about, like having sycophantic commentators. Highlights include Calling Tivo/DVR “My new boyfriend.”, Participating in any blogging “meme” (“Write down the first three venereal diseases that pop into your head.”) and using the word “meme.”

Bad Lingo: Blog-Media Clichs from Gawker.com – I know, they spelled Cliché wrong, but it is full of well-worn idioms from the internet age. It is frightening and shameful that I know which Simpsons episode [adjective]-y goodness came from.

Thirteen Blog Clichés from Codinghorror.com – It’s not so much a critique of internet writing as it is critique of blog design in general.

The 100 Lamest Game-Industry Clichés from GamesRadar.com – There is no greater temptation to use a Cliché when it’s 3:00 am, you’re out of coffeee, out of time, and most importantly out of money. While it mostly rails against games reviewers, I see this kind of language pop up on blogs and makes me start to lose my faith in humanity.