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Posts Tagged ‘internet’

Adam Carolla of the “Man Show” Fame now has his own podcast after a “Complex business decision” cancelled his morning radio show. As the large media concerns run out of money, we’re going to start seeing more and more experienced performers moving to where there’s less overhead, less creative interference and less calcified power structures. The show has been running for about two months now, and it’s easily the best podcast out on the net. Unlike most podcasters out there, Adam has had years to hone the art of talking into the mike. His shows rarely last more than an hour, there aren’t any uncomfortable silences or peals of laughter long enough to drag the conversation down. Adam himself has a fairly blue-collar down-to-earth outlook on life, but he also respects intelligent people when he finds them. So far he’s had people like Seth McFarlane, George Takei, and even Jack from Jack-in-the-box (or the actor who plays him. I’m not sure. The episode is so reality-bending it just has to be heard to be believed). All the while, Adam has given himself 10 months to figure out how to make a profit with his new podcast. He can’t accept any kind of money while he is working on this new sitcom pilot for CBS. In fact, the podcast is costing him almost $5,000 a month in broadband fees.

That whole conundrum gives the podcast an overall story arc if you will, and the plot reminds me a little bit of Buck Rogers. Adam has emerged from the terrestrial radio time capsule into a world he doesn’t exactly understand. For the first few episodes he was hanging on to some of the old tropes of radio, like “resetting”, where they would re-introduce the guest they had on  for listeners just tuning in. However, Adam is determined to make it in this strange new world using his old-fashioned know-how and determination. With 5 shows a week, the podcast has a professional dependability you just don’t see in other podcasts that miss shows, run too long, or just don’t have Adam’s comedic experience.

With daily downloads in the hundreds of thousands, there’s no doubt the Adam Carolla podcast will turn a profit once it’s allowed to. Adam still dreams of making his show subscription-based to keep the advertisers from meddling with his show, but I don’t think he realizes how much the game has changed. With the universe of content options available out there, bloggers, web-comic artists and podcasters cannot make any compromises on their credibility. A motivated, trusting audience is irreplacable. If some ad rep tried to walk up to the Penny Arcades and the Cracked.coms of the world and say “Oh, I don’t know, do you think you could be a little more edgy and youth oriented?”, they’d get an intern to grab a bat tell them to get the hell out of the store.

The Internet has a ways to go before it’s the center of all media, but it’s so close you can smell it. When that happens you are going to see a new era of art and literature where no one gets to be a hit simply because they’re on the big three networks or the Clear Channel. The people who focus on making their shows better than everyone else’s will succeed. That’s why I want the Adam Carolla podcast to succeed. Every medium needs it’s juggernauts to motivate the smaller operations to create an entertainment universe with something for everyone, entertainers, audiences, and even sleazy ad reps.

Here are some links I found in my travels this week:

Yamato toys is set to unveil a new line of products for the Macross event in Akihabara, including a 1/1 scale Fighter Pilot helmet. I’d be all over that thing if only I could fit my big giant head inside it. Via www.collectiondx.com

Ghostlightning over at “We Remember Love!” contemplates fan service outside the realm of pretty girls viewed at compromising angles.

We all know that the best Batman game was the one released on the NES after the movie came out 1989. An intrepid animator has created an intro for an 8-bit game based on the latest movie, “The Dark Knight”. This one will have you screaming “JUST PRESS START ALREADY!” Found via the Loony Blog.

Here’s an internet classic. The Smurfs are commies!

Some wicked mecha concept art found via espvisuals.

Someone has decided to transform a Japanese WWII Zero fighter into a Battloid.

It’s the Serenity crew in Lego form!

Fool’s Errant muses on the tropes and trends of Space Opera.

Call it the Credit Crunch, Depression 2.0, or whatever. The fact is, due to a set of cascading financial circumstances, businesses all over the world are now dealing with the problem of no money. It’s not that labour and capital are too expensive, there is just no money to pay for it all. Since I belong to a relatively high turn-over industry, I’ve been watching out for the stimulus packages that are being passed to get the world’s industries humming again.

The Canadian government’s plans did not produce much in the way of debate. The Liberals and Conservatives simply agreed to disagree and Jack Layton was left alone with a torch and pitchfork in his hands and a stunned expression on his face. Granted, with the regulatory environment our banks have, there seems to be much less at stake in Canada. In America, the numbers are bigger, the stakes are higher, and the tempers shorter.

I understand the debate as the gross generalization that I am about do describe. We have one side in favor of the stimulus package. They want the 800 billion to go into projects that will pay workers who will in turn spend that money again in the general economy. This way of thinking subscribes to the Keynesian school of economics. The other side is against government spending of any kind, and states that such a package will bankrupt the country and they’ll all be cleaning trillion dollar bills out of the gutter by the year’s end. The people saying this proudly say they hail from the Austrian school of economics.

I find the Austrian Solution for the problem very interesting because it seems to consist of the following:

Stage 1: Let Companies Fail.

Stage 2: ???

Stage 3: Profit.

Of course, that’s not the whole plan, but out on the internet I heard a lot about of the doom-saying about runaway inflation and not much in the way of an alternative plan. It turns out that many followers of the Austrian School of economics are supporters of Republican Congressman Ron Paul, who has come up with what I suppose is the vision for their philosophy. This includes abolishing of many government institutions, including the Federal Reserve. Military bases would be closed all over the world, and the US would pull out of the UN and NATO. Drug regulation would be turned over to the states, who could legalize and criminalize as they pleased.

While that leaves out the interesting question of the power vacuum that would be left behind if the US Military were to take its ball and go home, I can see this strategy’s appeal. It certainly is different, and it challenges many assumptions of value in the US structure of power. However, it completely enshrines the idea that government never does anything right, spends taxpayer’s money on hookers and blow, and kicks puppies for good measure. As a product of a government-run medical system, I have a problem reconciling that with the successes of government institutions around the world. It would be destruction for its own sake if the stimulus packages aren’t passed and unemployment is just allowed to increase. Furthermore, these packages include projects like roads and bridges that the market depends on, but can’t reasonably benefit from in the short run. Radical ideas are attractive because they encourage debate and lead up to things that are truly creative. However, we have to be aware that we sometimes cling to these ideas simply because they allow us to believe that we are right and everyone else is wrong.

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 was in the library the other day, checking out the comics section, when I noticed a book with an O’Reilly logo on the cover. This would be nothing new if it was “Linux in a Nutshell” or “PHP Cookbook”, but this was a rather Manga-looking book with “Hackerteen Volume 1: Internet Blackout” emblazoned on the cover. It appeared that O’Reilly was looking to raise the next generation of IT Security Professionals. Intrigued, I checked it out and brought it home.

The comic follows the story of an 11 year-old shut-in named Yago. His parents become suspicious about all the time he spends on the computer, so they enroll him in Hackerteen, a school where kids of all ages can use their interest in computers constructively to become “El33t Hacker3z”. 6 years later, Yago is now a real hacker…teen, and he has the orange goggles, racing gloves and spikey mullet to prove it. Unfortunately, word of his prowess has reached the criminal element, and they constantly hound him for his services. He manages to rebuff them until he finds out his father’s bakery is in financial need. He takes a job to install a program to trace some rich fellow’s wife’s computer. However, the real purpose of the program is to hijack the rich fellow’s daughter’s webcam (which was placed conveniently in her bedroom) and use pictures of her undressing to blackmail her for thousands of dollars. Yago has to use his technical expertise to help the poor girl out before she becomes an unintentional internet camwhore.

I must say that the writers of Hackerteen certainly know their stuff. They know that hacking is not just the province of breaking into the pentagon and other sexy stuff. It’s mainly about abusing the trust of humans and their machines to get what you want out of them. The book has more than a few web addresses leading to web pages that go into detail about the issues that the characters face.

Unfortunately, that’s where this book’s good qualities end for me. First of all, it’s very hard to get past the art style in reading this book. The characters look like crude copies out of a Christopher Hart “How to Draw Manga” book. Facial features float all over the place, and rules of perspective are often treated more like guidelines. The story also hard to follow. Subplot after subplot is just being sandwiched in there, involving so many characters that it’s hard to keep track of them all. Yago has about 5 people on his team, and I don’t even think their names are mention. The characters themselves are pretty one dimensional, borrowing from anime stereotypes conjured up in Yu-gi-oh! or Pokemon.

Now it may seem unfair that I’m picking on an educational comic like this. The good people who wrote Hackerteen are simply trying to shed light on the complex issues that drive our world. But if computer security is so important, should we have to put up with sub-par art and lazy story-telling to learn about it?

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.

The world felt a little poorer yesterday when Ziff Davis announced the cancellation of Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine. It’s been years since I bought an issue, but I still vividly remember it as one of the joys promised by my weekly allowance in the early 90′s. The issues back then were monstrous, chock full of reviews, previews and curious looking ads. Large sections of the magazine were dedicated to Japanese games. They were primitive by today’s standards, but by 1993′s standards, they were all but magical. Some of them even offered a glimpse of this advanced form of cartoons known as “anime”, which at the time was mostly found on Nth generation VHS tapes in the back rooms of specialty comic book stores.

The passing of EGM makes sense. Over the internet I can get printed columns, talk radio, and even entire television shows dedicated to video games. Why bother with a magazine that’s going to be stuffing a closet within a month? Still, no one likes to see a piece of their youth dry up and blow away. Now that we have this recession on our hands, we can expect more of this sort of thing.

Everyone has a little corner of happiness that just isn’t economically viable anymore. It might be a favourite shop that’s closed down, a cancelled television show, or sports team that’s folded. We rationalize by telling ourselves that we’ve grown out of the things that we like, but when you’re fighting through the daily commute, getting yelled at at work, and paying your taxes, what’s so grown up about dealing with all that and gradually abandoning your happiness options?

In 2001, I attended Sakuracon, my first anime convention. It was a reward I gave myself after a university co-op, but it was really an excuse just to leave town for a while. It was apparent that I wasn’t going to graduate that year, and my social life was going nowhere. Thinking anime was still a rapidly shrinking niche genre, I was expecting a few card tables of merchandise in the dealers room and maybe a video room. I could not have been more wrong. There were at least a half dozen video rooms, a full dealers room, cosplayers, and riveting panel seminars. I also made friends that are still with me today.

What I’m trying to say is, don’t let go of those things you cherish, even if they seem silly. Following your passion can lead you to good places, even if that place is in an easy chair listening to a favorite album or reading a favorite book. It doesn’t matter that what you like isn’t economically viable at the time. Anime was on the rise when I went to that convention, but now most of the companies that translate and sell it in the west are scaling back like most companies these days. There’s a cycle to these things. Even as trends ebb and flow, we can always find new ways to experience what we like.

In case you didn’t know it was the 21st century, America has just elected Barack Obama, the first African-American President. Personally, I think this turn of events benefits everyone, even Non-Americans like me. It isn’t going to matter exactly what kind of President he is, the fact that Obama got elected the way he did is enough to rewrite the playbook on political campaigns. A vivid and compelling vision of your city, province or country is a requirement for any run for office. Now that we have the internet, that vision can be as vivid and compelling as you want. You can have as much information out there as you want, and the candidate with the most information wins. This increases voter confidence and energizes your core base. Early statistics place US voter turnout at 70-80 percent. Forget that there is a black US president, that number is an even greater achievement!

However, since Canada’s relationship with the US still resembles that of a humpback whale and a cluster of barnacles, a change in regime should always be a concern. The US Ambassador warned the Fraser institute that Canada will miss Bush if Obama wins the election. I’m sure we will miss Bush just as much as that lovely 30% duty he decided to put on our softwood lumber exports.

Obama’s site says that he will work with the leaders of Canada and Mexico to change NAFTA in such a way that benefits America’s workers. The campaign promise is vague in a way that’s unsettling. Is he appealing to his democrat base, or is this a vision of things to come? Of course, there are also elements within Canada that believe we got the raw deal on NAFTA. Perhaps if all parties meet on the basis of a shared distrust of the agreement, some common ground can be found and a better NAFTA will result.

No matter what Obama’s actions as president we’ll be, it’s a sure bet that he will think of his own people first. We should ask nothing less of our own parliament. However, we should take solace in the fact that he got to where he is right now by listening to the people around him, rather than just hiding behind his talking points. Where his opponents demanded obedience, he demanded inventiveness and passion. If he invites Canada to join in his plans for the future, he will do it by trying to inspire that same inventiveness and passion. Even if he turns out to be an adversary to Canada’s interests, the only way we’ll do right by Canada is if we respond with a strong vision of Canada and our place in the world. Either way, we come out with the Canada we wish for.

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!