Planet Rodin

February 08, 2010

Mole

Pond.

[From the same writing exercise night as the previous post ('Philbert'). The prompt was to write a passage involving three objects: a ladybug (dead), a minnow (living), and hand creme (neither). I find this sort of thing stupid and annoying until I'm doing it, at which point it's so obviously a good useful idea that I have to invent new words to describe how annoying I find myself.]

* * *

She wants to ruminate, or inquire, or peer deeply - or to 'philosophize' or cogitate. Or even just to know what 'cogitate' means, or have a clearer idea what it would feel like, whether a poet's afternoon seems longer than a stock clerk's, and does it break cleanly across 4:30pm like hers, into 'working' and 'alone.'

But she just stares. The duck pond is supposed to be beautiful and serene, but serene feels disappointingly like 'boring,' and it looks like beautiful means basically 'expensive.' The clouds are not castles or infants' faces, but they're not clouds either, or not the 'fact' of clouds. They don't hang or float lazily, don't even move, they're just...noise. Visual noise, like bunched fabric. Spots where the wallpaper has peeled back.

The pond isn't exactly a carnival either. There are minnows happening about. They look like accidents of light instead of fish. She rubs hand creme on her burn and the smell of it seems like an imposition, no less than the heat. There is movement but no objects, or colours but no movement. The fish are there, pointless, then the image changes and they're a few inches on, or gone.

This is even worse than him leaving. Arriving at a rerun of a better day, known how it ends.

The upturned shell of a ladybug spins across the water without direction or destination. The lady has vacated the premises, it seems. Probably looking like all the other bugs now, beneath an unfinished sky in rerun. Some drama would be nice, she thinks. Some something. Not this...'beauty.'

February 08, 2010 08:32 PM

Philbert.

[Wrote this as an exercise at a writing-group meeting last month. Assignment: write around the sentence beginning 'In the armchair there sits...']

* * *

Philbert! Do not tarry, boy. Witches make their coven here. Witches! What are witches? Lucky lad, to have lived a baker's dozen years and - excuse me, eight years - and not met a witch. Wizards, my boy, wizards who menstruate no less, and - well I'll explain when you're - if your parents haven't told you it isn't my place to - well -

Witches! Eye of news, Philbert, and ear of...newt...or salamander. Ears and other parts taken before their time from defenseless amphibians who knew nought but peace before the devil-women did their...oh, you do? A frog? Philbert, I - well don't cry, lad. What's your frog's name? Philb - you named him after yourself? No, that's a perfectly fine frog name, I -

Philbert! WITCHES, damn you! Hell-slatterns, foul warlock-spawn - it means 'sluts,' boy. Ask your father. He's known a few in his time, heh - ask him when your mother's not around, though.

Where was I?

LOOK there, boy! Philbert! Close your eyes and imagine - well, look with your eyes closed. Just...do it, OK? Picture it, lad. Close them. Good.

A full moon, Philbert. Demon dogs howl on the tor, demon cats - indistinguishable from normal cats - rub against Satanic calves and ankles. MAGIC. Vile ichors drip from the ceiling about a bubbling cauldron. The light is sickly purple, indigo, puce...viola...rembley...other colours unknown to man. An uncanny sounds seems to thrum in the fetid bowels of the earth. You - no, 'bowels.' Your pipes, boy. The pipes in the back. LISTEN! PHILBERT! The sky splits. The smell of candy-coated death dipped in chocolate BILE fills the cottage. Yes, we'll get lunch after this, I'm actually peckish myself, WITCHES, and blood fills the sink in place of soapy water, spoiling the dishes that the witches would never do anyway because they're WITCHES. And in the chair, curled like a question mark...in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh - a woman about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. She's gone to seed, Philbert, at Satan's command. SATAN.

Don't get married, Philbert. Trust Grandpa on this one thing.

February 08, 2010 08:16 PM

Oh.

When you clasp your hands in prayer you are making contact, skin to skin, hand in hand, with someone who needs your help.

February 08, 2010 06:25 PM

Mrhe

Miracle machine provides clean water in Haiti earthquake relief effort

The Emergency Water Station, developed by Aqua Sciences, has provided thousands of gallons of water for earthquake victims in Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital, since it arrived in the country on . . . more

February 08, 2010 05:39 PM

Mole

Schemata.

Diagrammatic maps, class hierarchies, multiplication tables, vector fields, interpretive schemes, occult taxonomies, historical timelines, the Order of Battle, the Ladder of Creation, the Phish setlist file, the rules of Nomic, a summary of Gödel Escher Bach, the fearful symmetry of LISP code: the appearance of complexity and reassurance of its digestibility are drugs to me. I've lived wholly in abstraction for so long, and am narcotized by infographics and categorization schemes. (Multiplication tables and equation sheets give me tingles.) Hence the blush of Pynchon/Joyce love, Coltrane, Discordia, self-taught calculus as dream-cartography...schemata keep life orderly - i.e. not life. I'm learning.

February 08, 2010 01:05 PM

The Super Bowl ads are making me ashamed of my country, my sex, my race, every goddamn thing.

What a parade of craven despicable assholes marches across the TV screen between plays: terrified of women, homosexuals, art, foreigners, everything! What a bunch of cowards we look like. Jesus.

Good game though.

February 08, 2010 02:42 AM

February 07, 2010

Mrhe

Subway Life Lessons: On the Red Line

Random people tend to talk to me on the subway. I'm not sure what it is - Do I look friendly? Am I perceived to be a good audience for unsolicited commentary? A helpful resource? Do I just stand too close to the loonies while waiting for the T?

Last night was no exception, as an imposing, bald, goatee-sporting gent, thoroughly soused - looked like a biker (his words) - sought my help to attack the insurmountable problem of locating the proper train (the Braintree line, being one of two possible options) and befriended me for the trip home.

After at first fearing for my life, in 20 minutes conversing with this chap I learned:

To his credit he was friendly, made the long ride back interesting, and was responsible enough to call for a ride and not drive home drunk when he got to his station.

February 07, 2010 02:33 PM

February 06, 2010

Scott

a prairie home companion live cinecast

A Prairie Home Companion
Live HD Cinecast
4 February 2010

I blame Rhode for this one. I am not a regular Prairie Home Companion listener. Nor, having just lost $15 and three hours of my life seeing Avatar the night before, was I delighted by the idea of shelling out $20 to watch a private television broadcast at my neighborhood movie theatre. But with a little persuasion, I decided I could afford another chance to get in touch with the culture of my Minnesota heritage—the great pillars of which are snow, fishing, Lutheran churches, funny vowel sounds, and Garrison Keillor.

We arrived early and were treated to an amusing pre-recorded video tour of St. Paul. Keillor, whose unmistakable baritone lends a certain gravitas to his off-handed comedy, walked around the city rambling about life (winter is “nature trying to kill us”), architecture (accusing a new government building of having the grandeur of a “filing cabinet”), the life-size statue of F. Scott Fitzgerald on the sidewalk (“we didn’t put him on a pedestal”), and just who The Tornadoes are (the Anoka Tornadoes). And so on.

The show was fabulous. The writing is first-rate. The musicianship is superb. Watching it on screen for the first time, it becomes evident that the PHC crew runs a tight ship: performers appear and disappear without delay, microphones silently come and go as needed, and musicians perform dozens of numbers right on cue. The production is star-studded but laid back and unpretentious. The musical guests were excellent. It was a treat to see Heather Masse on stage—I remember her from her Pickin’ Tuesday days. The highlight of the show was probably Keillor’s monologue, The News from Lake Wobegon. I had naively assumed from its meandering but focused narrative and unhalting pace that this segment was carefully scripted. It is not. Keillor’s prowess as a storyteller is unmatched by anyone.

For the Regal Fenway 13 theater, the technical requirements of hosting this broadcast were evidently too challenging. The entire pre-show program was presented with badly unsynchronized sound, which they remedied by completely shutting down the projection halfway through the opening number of the program. The audio was glitchy throughout. Needless to say, I will not be seeing future cinecasts at this venue.

Will I see A Prairie Home Companion live again, if I get the chance? Absolutely.

February 06, 2010 08:21 PM

February 04, 2010

Mrhe

Demand Question Time: sign the petition for more open government

Obama's Q&A session with the House GOP was a unique and curiously hopeful political event:



About 50 bloggers, pundits, and media members from across the political spectrum (including Nate Silver of fiverthirtyeight.com) have organized the Demand Question Time petition, in the interest of making this type of event a regular occurrence. If done properly this could be an excellent opportunity to make the Executive and Legislative branches more open and accessible, both to each other and - more importantly - to the People. Silver has a great post on how the details of Question Time might work.

If you support this idea, please consider signing the petition.

February 04, 2010 10:30 PM

February 03, 2010

Mrhe

The Ghost of Fed Chairmen Past









Via TBP:

When challenging the former Fed Chair about the Volcker Rule, Sen. Mike Johanns (R., Neb.) learned why Tall Paul is not a man to be trifled with.

The Senator accused Volcker and the White House of trying to add onto an already confusing proposal. Volcker’s response was utterly classic:

>

“I tell you sure as I am sitting here, that if banking institutions are protected by the taxpayer and they are given free reign to speculate, I may not live long enough to see the crisis, but my soul is going to come back and haunt you.”

February 03, 2010 03:23 PM

Let 'em filibuster



Listening to a segment on On Point about Congress, Partisanship, and Paralysis. One caller suggested that the Dems let the GOP put their money where their mouths are, so to speak, and actually follow through with old-school filibusters. Drag out the legislative process in a very visible way.

This is an intriguing idea, and not just for the theatrics of it all. Would this further rally public opposition to the Dems? Would this visible delay of progress, tied directly to individual senators, create resentment within independents for the stonewalling GOP?

What say ye?

February 03, 2010 11:04 AM

February 02, 2010

Mole

Films.

Assorted, unordered, provisional: Gilliam, especially Munchausen. Magnolia. Blade Runner. Fight Club. Serenity. Spirited Away, unnervedly. Southland Tales, not David Lynch. Last Crusade, unembarrassedly, and Temple of Doom's opening scene. (Spielberg almost always.) Empire with a soft spot for Jedi. Donnie Darko. Gambon. Yes Rushmore, no Tennenbaums as I recall. Children of Men. Crouching Tiger. Passionately, Eternal Sunshine; any Kaufman actually. Without a Clue. Ghostbusters. Not Repo Man. Burton's Batmen. Christian Bale nearly always. Hedwig, always. Punch-Drunk Love. A Mighty Wind. Big Trouble in Little China plus DVD commentary. With all my heart, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Monsoon Wedding.

February 02, 2010 05:37 AM

Evolution.

Knowing and accepting are different. No gorilla 'rose up' to become human; homo sapiens isn't the 'end product' of anything. Many people 'know' humans evolved from lower primates, but what does that really mean? Undirected, nontelic, ongoing process; essential interspecies commonality; pure existential contingency. You're an accident, not even a 'you,' and your species doesn't 'deserve' to consume every imaginable natural resource. If natural selection produces only local optimizations and human consciousness is a biological phenomenon, then our relentless anthropocentrism is sinful, if anything is. Evolution should scare you a little. It undercuts exceptionalism, not dignity. That's no small thing.

February 02, 2010 05:17 AM

Code.

MIT disabused me of my 'I'm a programmer!' notion, among others. I like code, not coding; syntax mastery feels good but I've neither patience nor taste for it. Still, its schematicism and order are appealing; I like the cleanliness of code, the promise of power. Ruby's speechlike idioms agree with me, and Perl's nutball arcana; of course LISP is perfect-of-its-kind. But I need spoken English's assumptions to be comfortable. Code's hermeticism gets a bit much, hyperspecification doesn't comfort me. I've got the wrong spectrum disorders for the hacker lifestyle. I did get a B+ in 6.001 though. Not without help.

February 02, 2010 05:12 AM

We've all had days and nights like this.

February 02, 2010 01:26 AM

February 01, 2010

Mole

Fallows on the impossibility of bipartisanship.

If you read only one Atlantic Monthly blogger it should probably be James Fallows, who's got a lot of years on Coates and a lot of sense on Sullivan. (Surely you don't think I can in good conscience recommend the laughable Megan McArdle...)

Fallows's latest is vital, but he wrote almost none of it. No matter! Still vital!

Bipartisanship in the American sense means compromising on legislation so that a sufficient number of members of Congress from BOTH parties will support it, even if (as is typically the case) a few majority party members defect and most minority party members don't join. Bipartisanship consists of getting ENOUGH members of the minority party to join the (incomplete) majority in voting for major legislation. It can't happen if the minority party members vote as a block against major legislation. And that can happen only if the minority party has the ability to discipline its ranks so that none join the majority, which is the unprecedented situation we've got in Congress today.

"The way parliamentary parties maintain their discipline is straightforward. No candidate can run for office using the party label unless the party bestows that label upon him or her. And usually, the party itself and not the candidate raises and controls all the campaign funds. As every political scientist knows, the fact that in the U.S. any candidate can pick his or her own party label without needing anyone else's approval, and can also raise his or her own campaign funds, is why there cannot be and never really has been any sustained party discipline before -- even though it is a feature of parliamentary systems.

"The GOP now maintains party discipline by the equivalent of a parliamentary party's tools: The GOP can effectively deny a candidate the party label (by running a more conservative GOP candidate against him or her), and the GOP can also provide the needed funds to the candidate of the party's choice. And every GOP member of Congress knows it. (Snowe and Collins may be immune, but that's about it.)

Etc., etc., etc. Give it a read.

February 01, 2010 09:08 PM

Devastatingly elegant: this is how you change minds.

Slacktivist addresses the Tea Partiers. (Read the comments too.)

February 01, 2010 07:16 PM

Review: No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides by James Raggi.

[Attention conservation notice: 4,300 words on a low-fantasy roleplaying game module, which boil down to 'Nice try,' and which could have been (more) profitably spent discussing, say, the excellent books I'm reading (Brasyl, Mindfulness in Plain English) or the movie we rewatched last night (The Spanish Prisoner, 2/3 of which is perfect). Ho hum. The intended audience of this article is the module's author, though it's not directly addressed to him. This is not a fine work of criticism. It's just one guy commenting on another guy's stuff, hoping for better stuff down the line.]

[On further reflection: In case it's not clear, I liked the module in question, and look forward to reading some of Raggi's other stuff. But this article focuses on the module's shortcomings for a variety of reasons.]

I've just read (not played) No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides, a ~40-page 'old school' RPG (i.e. D&D 0e, AD&D 1e) adventure by metalhead gadfly James Raggi. I'll say this up front: Raggi has strong idiosyncratic opinions about his main hobby (which he's bravely/foolishly made his part-time job), and he's willing to put his money where his mouth is. I admire his tenacity, focus, and bluntness, and I wish him all the best in his future creative pursuits.

Three Brides is a noble and interesting failure, or else a very small success; its specific weaknesses are worth studying; it's surely a fine resource with several neat ideas on offer, and worth buying despite its shortcomings.

[Spoilers abound.]

My Biases

I don't find 'old school' modules like, say, Tomb of Horrors terribly interesting, nor do I care for classic RPG settings like Greyhawk, Toril, Krynn, etc. At age 14 I would have been the first guy in line to buy such things - and yes, I've read thousands of pages of absolutely dreadful Dragonlance novels, though I never played D&D before grad school and never joined a campaign 'til age 29 - but I'm a couple weeks shy of 31 now, and it's impossible for me to get amped up about unmotivated puzzle-solving, shabby worldbuilding, and endlessly overwritten genre-by-numbers pastiche. I think the AD&D 1e Dungeon Masters Guide is one of the worst-written, worst-organized, most overwrought pieces of rubbish I've ever paid six dollars for, but still way more interesting and inspiring than the 1e Players Handbook; I have no problem with a preference for 'old school' gaming, as distinct from modern RPGs, but I don't believe there's even a single aspect of 0e and 1e D&D that hasn't been superseded, in elegance and effectiveness of design and presentation, by subsequent game designs. That said, these are founding documents of an important hobby - sequels to the original DMG include World of Warcraft and The Matrix - and Gygax's work is worthy of study.

To my eye, Ken Hite's The Day After Ragnarok, S. John Ross's Uresia: Grave of Heaven, Dale and Thomas's GURPS Goblins, Luke Crane's Mouse Guard, and Jonathan Tweet's Over the Edge are masterpieces of RPG/setting writing and design: evocative, generative, and elegant. I believe Gary Gygax's importance to the hobby is incalculable, his presence largely beneficent, his generosity admirable, his creative and literary catholicism a worthy example for young writers, and his vision of roleplaying games myopic, juvenile, and ultimately a drag on the creative development of RPGs.

Of greatest importance to this particular review: I think that fealty to 'Gygaxian' design principles is misguided, except insofar as it will make roleplaying games more accessible to children and new players. But I don't think the module in question is particularly 'Gygaxian,' beyond the basic tropes of the 'old school' dungeon crawl and an ancestral relation to Gygax's Hommlet, though Raggi would perhaps disagree and I remain open to disputation on the subject, which (in any case) has little to do with what follows.

Mere Objects

The PDF of Three Brides is full of text in a single wide column, its typography undistinguished (which is to say 'unhelpful,' but also 'unobtrusive'). The maps will do. The artwork by Laura Jahlo is similarly undistinguished, though a couple of pieces are quite well-done and all are certainly mood-appropriate. It's clear that the art and writing have little in common with modern D&D material, but - crucially - they don't have much in common with TSR material of the 70's and 80's either. This is a good thing! Better to put out idiosyncratic stuff than ape the cartoon aesthetics of your father's generation.

But the presentation isn't terribly important. This is a low-cost self-published module, a labour of love, and I don't care that it looks unprofessional. It's readable and Raggi doesn't hide behind flash. That's admirable.

The Writing

The plot of each of the module's three sections is relatively straightforward: in 'Small Town Murder,' a bride is killed on her wedding night, gypsies are (obviously) falsely accused, and the PCs can choose (or not) to find out the truth. In 'The Great Games,' a pagan ceremony takes place, a bride is to be sacrificed to spirits (or a dragon), and the PCs can choose (or not) to save her life. In 'A Lonely House on a Lonely Hill,' there's a haunted cottage to be explored, with a couple of monsters to fight or avoid. The strength of the module, all its readers agree, is its weird flavour: bloody footprints, wailing banshees, pagan rituals, an isolated village full of madmen. So the writing of Three Brides bears the heavy weight of expectations: this is to be a hard left turn away from the baroque adolescent fantasy of Gygax and his endless litany of imitators (in both pulp and epic fantasy/sci-fi modes).

The key problem with The Three Brides is that its writing is as middling as everything else about the module. Not 'middling' because it's like everything else in the RPG hobby - it's not! - but because it's inconsistent and flat, not precise enough to be really creepy, not wild enough to bring off its attempts at humour and human liveliness.

This modules deserves praise, and receives it at the end of this review. But we've got a long way to go before that.

I started worrying when I reached the third paragraph of the introduction:

Just a note about the gypsies in this adventure. When I first moved to Finland, I noted the local “gypsy” population was not well thought-of by the public at large. Not having ever seen these people in the States, and thinking that Europe was supposed to be far more enlightened, I was fascinated by the whole thing. I decided to make the victims in an adventure gypsies, just to see what my Finnish players would do with that setup. But I don’t know anything about the real-life culture, and the adventure is in no way social commentary or trying to teach a moral lesson about racism. I intentionally made the gypsies as “Hollywood” as possible, with any resemblance to any real-life ethnicity superficial, to keep that distance between real life and the fictional idea of gypsies. The 1941 version of The Wolf Man and the Ultima computer games were what influenced some of the characteristics of the gypsies in this adventure, combined with the kind of antics that traveling entertainers indulge in. I know this caricature depiction of gypsies has been ill-received in other games, and I thought a word of explanation about their appearance here would be in order.

This is a bad and somewhat evasive explanation for the thinness of the 'gypsy' characters, but I'd have been willing to let that thinness go by without explanation anyhow. Yes, they're a cliché - so what? It's D&D for god's sake, nearly everything about it has been a cliché for decades. The tackiness of their depiction in the adventure is not unexpected.

Yet Raggi says nothing about the hamfisted inconsistency of all the other characters in the first part of the module ('Small Town Murder'). He describes the setting of Pembrooktonshire (yes, the name is an authorial joke, though not a particularly coherent or style-appropriate one) as a 'medieval' village with a population of 2,000. The citizens are without exception simpleminded parochial idiots...with a 'high-grade manufacturing economy.' They have rich trade with the nearby towns, apparently, yet they're all afraid to venture in the mountains around the village. They...well, just read:

Approximately 2000 people live in Pembrooktonshire, and it has a high-grade manufacturing economy. Their craftsmen are highly skilled and fetch high prices amongst the wealthy throughout the realm, and the people here have quite a progressive stance on social welfare, so the standard of living is quite comfortable, even for the hardest working laborer. They are far off enough off the beaten track to never be involved in wars, and somehow even with all their riches, bandits and other organized criminals have never been a problem in Pembrooktonshire. However, while the populace is well educated in civic and mercantile matters, they are not so prepared to face trouble.

What exactly is Raggi basing this description on? I grew up in an aggressively parochial rural village that nonetheless had a thriving high-end mercantile character (it was a ski town). But Raggi's offhand details - 'quite a progressive stance on social welfare,' comfortable standard of living, unprepared for any harsh dealings with anyone else - are incoherent. The lack of banditry is nicely explained in 'Small Town Murder' - for a long time a dragon kept the village safe, now it's watched over by a clan of dwarves - but as the module develops, the town gets less coherent, not moreso.

A 'Knight of Science' comes to town to make trouble. Very well - terrible name but a nice idea. He's zealous, self-righteous, lordly, and a showoffy pompous ass - and yet his devotion to his religious cause is in no way compromised or complicated by his worldly limitations. The character of the Knight is almost compelling, but falls apart after a moment's consideration: a materialist who luxuriates in earthly things, an authoritarian religious zealot, a murderous asshole, and yet...

...where there is actual evil, there are no allies more trustworthy, and fewer more effective, than a Knight of Science. They are incorruptible and uncompromising in their drive to eradicate extraplanar evil. Local rulers and clergy defer to the authority of the Knights not simply out of fear, but because at their core the Knights are nothing less than pure champions for the common, mortal man.

If Raggi had given in and written 'The Knight is Azrael from the Batman comics' I'd have accepted the silliness of the fiction. But all these efforts at characterization have little effect. The module offers plenty of suggestions on how to play him line-to-line, but there isn't actually a character there. Just a thinly-connected behaviour set.

Burn it into your brain, would-be RPG scribes: character creation is dramatic writing.

Well, no big deal. The Knight is just one of a fistful of characters in the tripartite module. His Squire is a bigger problem. Here's Raggi's complete description of the Squire:

Faustius is the Knight’s squire. He will act even more snobbish than the Knight himself, warning that anyone helping the gypsies would be seen to be in league with evil and that isn’t such a good idea. He will dismiss the PCs as “unread beggars” and always be “finding time to broaden my mind with great literature” and hanging out in the book binderies when not toadying up to the Knight and going out of his way to be a slave and errand boy. He has a complete collection of Bumblebee Bandit novels in his trunk (The Bumblebee Bandit (signed by the author!), The Bumblebee Bandit Battles the Bourgeoisie, The Bumblebee Bandit and the Dragon That Ate Ten Towns of Some Size, The Bumblebee Bandit and a Monkey Named Fred, The Inconvenience of the Bumblebee Bandit, The Death of the Bumblebee Bandit, The Return of the Bumblebee Bandit, Son of the Bumblebee Bandit, The Bumblebee Bandit Meets The Creature From Bog Dell Swamp, The Bumblebee Bandit: Critical Review Edition with Bonus Chapter!, The Many Loves of the Bumblebee Bandit, The Bumblebee Bandit Rides Again, The Legend of the Bumblebee Bandit, The Son of the Bumblebee Bandit Meets the Many Loves of the Bumblebee Bandit, The Unauthorized Biography of the Bumblebee Bandit, The Bumblebee Bandit and the Writing Ghosts, Earnest Wilde Exposed: The Wild True Story Behind the Bumblebee Bandit (with never before seen Bumblebee Bandit short yarns!), and The Strange Case of Dr. Bumble and Mr. Bee Bandit) but has told the others that it is his collection of prayer books. Faustius wears shined plate mail and wields a two-handed sword. His light warhorse is stabled in town. He is a first level fighter.

Umberto Eco might have good things to say about this use of resources but I'm afraid I can't. Y'know, several of those titles are actually funny - particularly the last one and The Son of the Bumblebee Bandit Meets the Many Loves of the Bumblebee Bandit. But again, it's incoherent - subtly undisciplined. Is Raggi spoofing the titles of, say, boys' adventure novels? Sherlock Holmes stories? Comic books? I'm all for juggling tones and styles if you can make it work, but this list is a mess. (Read Pynchon's Against the Day to see this specific joke done right!) Couldn't Raggi have just given us four entries that established a style, and actually fleshed out the character of the Squire instead? Particularly since -

- get ready -

- the Squire is the goddamn murderer?!

An Unsuccessful Mystery Story

Though the first movement of Three Brides is framed as a small-town murder mystery, there's no real mystery to it. The Squire did it, as a very brief investigation will reveal. But that would do for a short one-off adventure, if Raggi didn't piss on his own work as follows, in a passage describing what the players can learn by questioning the dead bride herself:

Can the party speak with the dead? The Squire committed the murder, that handsome, dashing man who would be a Knight... and dressed up and acted like her favorite storybook hero! She couldn’t leave her family and village (oh yeah, and that nerd husband of hers) for a squire though, so he killed her when he realized she’d reconsidered after he’d already risked his position as the Knight’s squire.

Yet it might be too obvious to make the one guy the players will want to most see dead the real killer. The actual culprit can be almost anyone. Just come up with a motive and stick the Bumblebee Bandit suit in their closet, and there you go. Maybe one of the others gypsies did it as sort of a lover’s spat or jealousy thing trying to keep Anthoni away from her. Maybe it was Ursula, thinking Jessica was going to run off with the gypsy and bring shame on the family. Maybe it was Franz, who got blamed for a missing copy of the book (which spawned the leaked page) and taking his revenge on the real culprit, who due to nepotism wasn’t going to be punished anyway. As long as it makes sense and the players aren’t going to throw dice at you once the killer is revealed, it should be OK.

The only specific people that it would be unwise to set as the murderer would be the Knight (they will lose all mystique if they are actual villains instead of icons of supreme in/justice) or Anthoni (how much of a let-down would it be if you set up this big murder mystery, and the accused is actually guilty?). If you decide to make the killer someone not otherwise noted in this adventure, it would be best to write some sort of part for them, because it’s supremely unsatisfying (and unfair!) to find out the killer was some guy you never heard of until the moment he’s implicated. However, the important thing is that it must be possible to successfully investigate the truth and as a result free the prisoners. If Anthoni is the killer, then the rest of the gypsy family is still doomed and anything the players decided to do was for naught. That is dreadful refereeing. Failing to save the gypsies is certainly a valid outcome; not being able to even if successfully learning the truth and doing every single thing correctly is just crap. Choose the killer wisely so that success is possible if the players care to try.

That's good advice as far as it goes, but I kept hoping there was some truly weird twist coming - the Squire having conjured up the living spirit of the Bumblebee Bandit, say, which escaped from the comic books in the form of a feral man-bee, ravaged the bride on behalf of his Reader, murdered her in the thrall of animal passion, etc. That'd make the roles of the Squire and Knight a good deal more complicated - and give the players a different sort of climactic encounter to look forward to, in addition to the written climax (stop the execution of the wrongly-accused gypsies). And written/played well, it'd suit the module's atmosphere of eldritch weirdness.

Well, here's the problem with the adventure as written. Raggi says outright that he's chosen the wrong answer to the central mystery. In other words, he recognizes a failure of craft, but does not fix it. Why, in heaven's name?! If the ending of the story as written is thin, clunky, obvious, then rewrite it! Asking the referee to provide a fix for the module doesn't 'grant agency,' it just pawns off part of the work on the buyer. If you set up a mystery, deliver a mystery - or make its anticlimactic or weird shape a feature.

As written, the module might end with the PCs interceding on the gypsies' behalf, stopping their execution at swordpoint. That's a great setup for a scene, particularly if it falls to the PCs to convince the Knight that his Squire is a killer. Bravo, James! But Raggi's plot-agnostic attitude leads him to repeatedly emphasize that it doesn't matter whether that event occurs; it doesn't matter how the story ends. I'll grant that this is a full-blown philosophical stance, one which fell out of favour in the RPG industry 25 years ago. And though it's fine in other contexts, it hampers 'Small Town Murder,' which is a plot-centric module despite Raggi's apparent interest in writing an atmospheric interlude and leaving plotty bits to the referee.

A murder has taken place. The PCs have no involvement in any events in the town other than investigating the murder. And the investigation builds to...nothing much.

Even 'old school' adventure writers benefit from building suspense and plotting the 'intensity curve' of their modules.

The Other Two Parts

'A Lonely House on a Lonely Hill' is a nicely atmospheric adventure locale, a Zork-like 'dungeon crawl' in disguise, which stands out from other such sites in its compactness and spooky austerity. There's not much to do, but the fun is presumably being there, and it can be dropped into nearly any existing rural campaign, under most any RPG rules system, with no trouble. Raggi wastes few words here.

The middle section of Three Brides is entitled 'The Great Games,' and it's an interesting bit of writing: macabre background events and a script describing what happens if the PCs mouth any objections to the goings-on. Six young grooms compete for the dubious 'honour' of martyrdom, which will placate the spirits watching over the town; the bride of the 'winner' is taken up to the mountains and never seen again. If the PCs mention to anyone else in town that they find this odd - i.e. if the party plays out an encounter in which nothing happens but a discussion of the background events - then a group of townspeople in robes tell the PCs there are no spirits, just a dragon, and by the way they have a potion that controls dragons, and could they go and get the young lady from the mountains without telling anyone what they've done?

But - the final twist - the dragon's dead; a band of dwarves does its town-watching job, and they don't particularly care about the girl, and (as written) simply allow each decennial sacrifice to die of dehydration.

Raggi provides a few suggestions to the referee in case the PCs discover what's going on and run off with the girl. His main suggestion: if they tell anyone what's up, a war happens, and the region turns into 'just another hell on earth.' This is a neat bit of telescoping action - a stupid little village ritual sets off a race war in the mountains, leaving chaos in its wake - but I find nothing satisfying or interesting in it, and the language in this climactic section is poor.

Raggi delights in his own 'edginess' and bluntness, as his blog, zine, and LotFP products make clear (cf. the embarrassing original cover to his remarkable, iconoclastic Random Esoteric Creature Generator), but for all the self-conscious Wicker Man weirdness of 'The Great Games,' the module leaves me cold. The story isn't terribly compelling in itself - does it matter whether there's a dragon or a clan of dwarves there, if the PCs and their players never meet either? - and Raggi has provided no shape, no movement, just an odd circumstance and a surprisingly (intentionally?) insignificant role for the PCs to play. (James Maliszewski had the same criticism - and we rarely agree on such matters, so that's, um, something.)

Praise and Summing Up

Of the three sections of Three Brides, the first is promising and substantial but awkward, the second evocative but anticlimactic, and the third wonderfully spooky but ultimately weightless. The feel of the thing is powerful and unique; Raggi is going for an otherworldly spookiness that reminds me of Riddley Walker, a 'Miss Marple Meets Cthulhu' vibe unlike anything in the fantasy RPG/D&D mainstream, and for several long stretches of this work he succeeds. He's going for delicacy and in places attains it; this is Neil Gaiman's bailiwick, if that makes sense. Yet the writing is marred by tonal inconsistency of a young-writer sort: the juxtaposition of the Bumblebee Bandit (and that booklist!) with the surreal oddity of 'The Great Games,' or (say) this character description:

Nataliya Lezarovich
This is Zindelo’s wife and Josef’s aunt. She doesn’t understand why everyone was so upset with Anthoni at the wedding. A simple “no” should have sufficed if they didn’t want to include him on their wedding night. She herself had an extra admirer on her wedding night, what’s the big deal? She is sad that her family has been accused but does not blame the Knight since “his kind knows only simple truths” and “looks only for easy solutions.” Thinks highly of the priest (Cantrovius) who came to visit them overnight but hates the Squire who laughed “in a most disgusting manner” at their accusing until the men-at-arms hushed him up.

'Simple truths' is a clunker, as is Nataliya's half-written blithe/ignorant voice and the obligatory subversive-by-numbers priestly visit. Not to mention the phrase 'What's the big deal,' which is thuddingly misplaced. If you're going to provide a strong ethnic coding for a group of gypsies - and indeed call them 'gypsies'(!) - then it behooves you to spend some time enriching their voices rather than falling back on paper-thin cliché. (It's not even worth talking about the gender dynamics of the module: the women are dimwits, sluts, fortune tellers, or dead brides. Standard D&D fare, alas.)

Yet it all works, more or less, for some value of the word 'works.' Reading through Three Brides, I kept thinking, 'Our campaign could use more of this.' Not the anachronisms and sloppiness, but the Weird Tales vibe, the prickling Lovecraftian sense of horror creeping up out of the past. The three mini-modules don't sum to much, but when Raggi is able to keep a close rein on his writing, the result is unusually evocative. Is anything in Three Brides on the level of Uresia, GURPS Cabal, Deadlands, even Ravenloft? No, no, maybe, maybe. And it's not easy to generalize from this module to the rest of Pembrooktonshire; the flavour of Three Brides doesn't seem likely to scale to a campaign world or even Pembrooktonshire itself. (Raggi has released another supplement, dealing exclusively with the denizens of his little village, which some reviewers have called too much of a muchness.) Yet that's not the point - Three Brides is a one-off (or three-off) item, a quick look at a quiet lonely village hidden from human eyes and free to get a little weird over the years. It's enough in itself, as itself.

Should you buy No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides? Well, if you're the sort who buys RPG stuff, has $6.00 to spare, and is interested in supporting independent artists/designers in an era of expensive glossy corporate products, then absolutely you should. Not much has come out of the so-called 'old school renaissance' that's of any interest beyond nostalgia, but Raggi's work qualifies; he has it in him to become an elegant miniaturist, his imagination is fertile and well-tended, and his various geeky parochialisms are well within parameters for the RPG business, should he choose to pursue a full-time living making storygames. His aesthetics are very definitely not mine, but I appreciate the work he did on Three Brides (which to my mind is a far better title than 'No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides' - oh come on, James...).

I'm not 100% convinced you should play it. But I'd love to know how that goes.

The surprising and salutary effect of reading Three Brides seems to be this: I find myself rooting for James Raggi. I'm glad of it, and glad for him, and so this turns out to have been time well spent.

February 01, 2010 01:45 PM

Mrhe

The 111th Congress: maligned yet productive in 2009











Norman Ornstein has a nice piece over at The Washington Post discussing Congress's accomplishments over this past year (yes, accomplishments). It's easy to discredit the quantity and quality of legislation passed in the current awful political climate. However, Ornstein notes:


I would add that Congress has done an effective, if inefficient, job of supporting unemployment programs with federal cash

Now, certainly people can take issue with the quality of this legislation, but the Congress has been active and impressive, especially given its ponderous nature in general and its functioning as the most partisan Congress ever. It's unfortunate that these accomplishments get lost in the hyperbolic discourse of political "debate" in this country, but it doesn't make the accomplishments any less impressive.

The Obama administration and the Dems have failed to sell their successes, both in the general and specific. This is a critical failure with regard to the public - both in its interest and their own.

February 01, 2010 01:08 PM

Rock-N-Roll Rhode

Things I didn't blog about this month

I will attempt to make up for more than month of blogging by trying to summarize things I would have blogged about had I remembered to.

Now, without further ado, "The Internet" presents The Godfather starring Harrison Bralower as Marlon Brando, directed by me (as you can hear at various points):



* It's the no-checking rule.

February 01, 2010 04:43 AM

January 31, 2010

Mole

Do the Dems actually want to pass health care reform?

This is dark news though it shouldn't be:

Sen. Tom Harkin, the chairman of the Senate Health Committee, said negotiators from the White House, Senate and House reached a final deal on healthcare reform days before Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts.

....Harkin said “we had an agreement, with the House, the White House and the Senate. We sent it to [the Congressional Budget Office] to get scored and then Tuesday happened and we didn’t get it back.” He said negotiators had an agreement in hand on Friday, Jan. 15. Harkin made clear that negotiators had reached a final deal on the entire bill, not just the excise plans, which had been reported the previous day, Jan. 14.

Kevin Drum (second link) says he's confused about why the compromise, already agreed upon, hasn't simply been executed since then. I can't tell whether he's serious. His first commenter provides a simple answer: 'Lots of Democrats didn't really want to pass HCR but didn't want to be blamed for killing it. Hence the stalling until an excuse arrived to give up.' The second commenter goes even simpler: 'It really seems to be a mystery only to you Drum. Democrats don't actually want to pass health care reform.' Fourth commenter: 'If they wanted to pass it, they would have already.'

That's probably the simplest explanation, on the face of things, but I'm uneasy about it. You can assume that (1) most politicians live to get reelected, (2) it's hard for the Dems to tell whether the HCR bill will be a short-term electoral win, and (3) Reid really is the craven hack the news makes him out (unwittingly) to be; makes sense (alas) that the Dems aren't invested in improving health care policy so much as appearing to do 'the right thing' for the voters. 'Caution' has historically been a good strategy for Democratic congressmen, while the GOP's 'starve the beast' strategy certainly pays off in the short term with its small-government supporters. So everyone's falling back on favoured tactics instead of exploring the possibilities of the moment itself. In which case no monolithic desire (to pass or scuttle the bill) enters the equation. People could just be myopic cowards and we'd get the same effect.

Joy!

January 31, 2010 04:03 PM

Important use of Adobe Flash: pornography.

Of course one of the problems with 'No Flash on the iPhone/iPad' is that it restricts access to pornography. Does anyone who's ever looked at online porn, even once, not understand that? And there are many, many, many porn viewers. It's good to see that this Flash evangelist at Adobe understands it as well, and can be frank, even at the expense of hundreds of people pointing out that he's a shill and possibly a chump. (The missing screenshot was from a smut site.) The comments thread is hilarious: overrun with fanboys and tech types spanking the original poster for doing his job, i.e. pimping a proprietary technology whose functionality is slowly being duplicated by other means.

John Gruber handled the topic in his usual exhausting exhaustive style the other day. Fact is, Flash for OSX is slow, buggy, and crash-prone (my machine and browser are far more stable since I installed the invaluable ClickToFlash). I don't miss it on the Mac or on the iPhone. The porn bit is incidental.

[Update: Turns out the evangelist in question is a dissembling ass!]

January 31, 2010 04:29 AM

Thinking different: What the iPhone really means, for Apple and everyone else. [REPOST!]

[Originally here, right after the iPhone was announced. Still not wrong! And newly readable, I hope, given yesterday's somewhat weird iPad debut and the fact that Jon Gruber's latest big post says basically the same things I wrote here. Haha!!]

The big news at this year's MacWorld Expo wasn't the long-awaited iPhone, though that product announcement has generated the most buzz, and has cost shareholders at RIM, makers of Blackberry handheld devices, a good deal of money already. Yes the iPhone is a spectacular gadget, and sure to do a good turn for Cingular starting this summer (Apple and Cingular have struck an exclusive deal to pair Cingular's voice/data service with the iPhone). But the big news, the signal that a sea change occurred yesterday of which the iPhone is only a part, was the sort of thing that only an Apple fanboy/girl would pick up on immediately.

Apple Computer is no more. Say hello to Apple, Inc. - a cosmetic change, it would seem, a function of different manufacturing and marketing priorities perhaps. Companies change their names all the time, to fool Wall Street into thinking management is moving boldly, or to resuscitate a brand name grown stale. Apple shook long-time Mac lovers last year by naming its new laptops 'MacBooks', putting an end to the venerable PowerBook product line, and the iWhatever prefix was another recent savvy brand-name maneuver from Jobs and Co. Names change, it's no big deal.

So what does this one mean?

It means the era of the personal computer is coming to an end.

A phone is a dumb computer

The iPhone is probably the most misleadingly-named Apple product ever (unless, duped by the 'Macintosh' brand name, you once tried to bake a pie using four pounds of Apple computers - in which case please, please seek help). Its main draw would seem, on the surface, to be its telephony features - it's a full-featured GSM cell phone with integrated camera and a gorgeous button-free interface, and though you probably wouldn't pay $500 for that, it ain't bad. It's also basically a click-wheel-free iPod; if the iPhone were just an iPod phone, as many pundits predicted (and not a few consumers clamored for), it'd be a great product, but nothing fundamentally new. Maybe such an item would make a splash as a consumer product, but such things already exist - I got a crappy little Napster-music/camera/phone device from Samsung for $50 with my Cingular contract the other day.

But the iPhone is something else entirely, something that consumers haven't exactly been asking for, the first tangible articulation of the philosophy behind Apple's name change.

The iPhone is an OSX handheld computer with telephone and iPod functionality built in. (If you're an Apple buff: the iPhone is the Newton done right.)

Think about that for a second. Mac OSX - now in its fifth major version, with a sixth version, Leopard, due for release later this year - is the most elegant, and in terms of one-click access to programming tools and extensions the most powerful, consumer operating system ever made. OSX rests on a rock-solid UNIX core (BSD, ancient and bulletproof), meaning it's configurable and easily scriptable by power users, but it makes use of the loveliest and most expandable Apple user interface thus far, which brings in the styleheads and welcomes new users; it's virus-free (one up, or one hundred up, on Windows) and supplemented by an array of ingenious free and cheap third-party applications from programmers who actually care about average end-user experience (one up on Linux for home users, that OS's indispensability to sysadmins and other assorted tech types notwithstanding). In short: it's better and more secure than Windows and easier than Linux in every way, and until now there's been no hint that it would get onto a handheld.

But Apple's engineers are promising a version of OSX that fits in your hand, tailored to the buttonless interface of the iPhone, which will integrate existing Internet messaging and organization/information apps (iCal, email, Safari, etc.) with top-of-the-line phone functionality (visual voicemail! And it's about time, frankly). There was no talk from Jobs about developer tools, but you can rest assured that third-party development for the iPhone will start up in short order, likely using toolkits simplifications or subsets of existing developer resources. That is the killer app for the iPhone - its secret identity as an extensible Mac computer. And that's why Apple dropped the word 'computer' from its name - because a few years from now you'll take 'computing' power for granted in your electronics. Or your kids will.

A computer is not a place

In AOL's instant messaging program there's an 'away' mode - meaning you're not 'in' the program at that moment, either doing something else with your machine or physically away from the computer. SMS messaging blurs that line - messages aren't precisely synchronous (real-time) or asynchronous (received when they're checked), and the etiquette surrounding texting can seem archaic to those accustomed to older politeness-metrics. Before the rise of ubiquitous cable/DSL modems you were either 'online' ('Mom you can't make a phone call, I'm on the Internet!') or off; now we think of an Internet connection as an aspect of the machine, as a resource the PC needs to do its work. The notion of being 'on the computer' is shifting out of the vocabularies of tech-savvy Americans; if you're doing work or playing games or watching TV, you're quite likely in front of one screen or another, so the language of computer tasks has gotten more specific, and the centrality of the screen itself is becoming downplayed.

The upshot of this linguistic shift, and the attendant conceptual shifts, is that we're moving away from thinking of the computer as a place; more and more it's simply a tool. You're editing a video - oh, desktop or laptop? You're listening to your mp3 collection - while jogging? You're updating your blog from your cell phone, or you're ordering from Amazon while riding the subway, and so forth. And somewhere in all those activities a computer is involved, a programmable box for manipulating data, but it's almost invisible; the iPod is more like a CD player than a PC in most people's minds, even though technologically that outlook is daft.

But this shift isn't complete. Meaning there's still a chance to change the world a little. Well, that's where Steve Jobs lives.

A computer is a component

Dropping 'Computer' from Apple's name is Jobs's way of ratifying this shift in consciousness, and stating unequivocally what products like iLife and the AppleTV and the iPod and the (unheralded but dazzling) plug-and-play Airport Express router have been hinting at for years: the computer as all-inclusive monolithic artifact is going away, and computer companies need to realize they're increasingly component manufacturers. The iPod instrumentalizes its operating system and internal version of iTunes, subsumes them in a broader design that seems to connect each button-push to a piece of music stored somewhere in the box. You press 'play' and you probably don't think of a hard drive spinning up, you think of a jukebox, or a Walkman. The iPod is a tiny computer but to the typical consumer it's just a music box. Yet the PC is inescapably itself: the big beige box on or under the desk, with a monitor attached. It is an end in itself - a destination. You still sit 'at the computer' and do tasks, and when it crashes, chances are you lose access to some information (because chances are you didn't back up your data recently, or sync it, or keep a redundant external hard drive, or…). The data is 'in there' somehow.

But between the AppleTV and the iPhone, we can see the outlines of a coherent vision for what comes after the personal computer, which isn't a new vision but which is a long leap closer to reality because of Steve Jobs and company: extensible modular devices, omnipresent networking, home data storage distributed invisibly among multiple machines. The box attached to your TV with the Apple logo; the phone in your hand; the Luxo Lamp-looking PC on your desk where you do your homework and make posters for parties; the device that senses when you wake up and plays music from your docked iPod; the control box for the lighting in your garage, with a broadband connection and a Web frontend - all these things are computers, one like the other, in different form factors and with different levels of complexity and extensibility. That's not new. What's new is that it's here and it's being aimed at Joe Consumer.

Is the iPhone too expensive? Sure it is, if you're on the market for a cell phone. And it's a little pricey if you want a box for listening to music. But imagine browsing the Web on a half-pound Macintosh computer while sitting in the park, and getting full-service phone features, plus a touchscreen iPod thrown in for free. The tasks are the main thing, are the value - the box is just a tool for accomplishing them. Steve Jobs doesn't want to sell you an expensive phone; he's selling a new way of thinking about computers that turns 'telephone' into a feature of your handheld instead of the other way around. It looks like a super-iPod and sounds like a super-phone, but the iPhone is really a Mac Nano.

And that raises a few more questions, exciting ones: how do you talk about Apple's 'PC market share' when your phone is a stripped-down PC? If Apple sells 10 million iPhones by 2008 (Jobs's goal, 1% cell phone market share), won't it really have sold 10 million handheld Apple computers? If you're calling your schoolmates in OSX, does that make you a Mac user?

Are you seeing the picture here? A computer is a component. Apple isn't in the component business. You buy a 'smartphone' - but you're basically being sold a Mac.

The end of the PC era (don't worry - it's not here yet)

Apple is never going to own 50% of the PC market share, or even 20%; if PC-shopping were a meritocracy the Macintosh and OSX would have the market sewn up (consider Microsoft's catastrophic development and release of the Vista operating system), but that's not the way the world works - ask the automakers, or the President, or whoever's responsible for the asinine college football ranking system. The change from 'Apple Computer, Inc.' to 'Apple, Inc.' (paging the Beatles!) doesn't mean Apple's turning into a gadget company, cranking out iPods and cell phones and forgetting the rabid userbase that relies on OSX, the Porsche of operating systems. It means Apple is betting the farm that, as time passes, there won't be any difference between a high-end gadget company and a computer company. The key traits of their products would be the same: extensibility, interoperability, transparent multimodal communications (if your instant messaging client handles AIM and Jabber and Google Talk and VoIP calls and Skype messages the same way, you're already there - now put those functions in a device the size of your wallet), ubiquitous network connectivity, and so forth. If you want a full-size keyboard, you buy one machine; wanna make phone calls from the same box that handles your email, buy another.

Look, this essay isn't particularly new in its limited prognostications; the fact is, this kind of rhetoric has been employed for literally decades. But with the announcement of the iPhone, we're now looking at hard business facts: Apple has just declared its intention to open up a new consumer market for low-end handheld computers. The iPod penetrated consumer consciousness to a staggering extent; now even the mp3 players that predated Apple's device are 'iPod competitors,' and the 'iPod killer' narrative was attached to Microsoft's Zune long before consumers had a chance to realize how unimpressive it is. (They've realized.) Now that awareness will go to work for Apple's computers in a new way: Apple can convince you to buy its new Junior Mac on the basis of its telephone functionality and iPod subsystem. The iPhone is the most impressive physical embodiment yet of Henry Jenkins's vision of 'convergence culture,' and it's not a proof of concept, it's a corporate product, set to release in June. The Bluetooth headset might not be street-ready yet (word is Jobs was showing a dummy at the keynote), and the iPhone team might spend the next six months making all kinds of changes to that adorable little gadget, but we've just seen a handheld computer, aimed at consumers, with a beautiful and elegant interface, a solid and familiar operating system, iPod's lauded music playback/storage/sync capabilities, and a major national phone service provider backing its telephony features.

The message is simple and clear: iPhone does some of what a personal computer does, and its successor machines will do even more, but it's not a PC. It's something else, not unprecedented but a good distance past anything that might be compared to it in form and function. From the perspective of the consumers who bought millions and millions of Apple's iPods, the iPhone is a box that checks email, browses the Web, plays music, and squawks like a cell phone. To call it a 'computer' is, increasingly, to make a category mistake. The thing that sits on your desk is a 'computer' because we don't have a better word for it. Call it a PC. It'll long have a place in your home, doing tasks too computation-intensive for your phone, too variable for your TV, too textual for your stereo, too non-food-related for your 21st century automated microwave oven. But as a class of object - the artifact we call a computer - its days are numbered. What's now your PC will someday soon be part of a suite of networked devices in your home; it'll be powerful, moreso than today's PC's, but it'll be different, and some of its features will be gone entirely, except among retro-minded users. (Start with the traditional QWERTY keyboard, a weird technological artifact of the typewriter era.) And its functions will be dispersed among a half-dozen or more devices around the house and office and subway station and public plaza. The PC is just one tool for interacting with certain kinds of data - some of which are better suited to other hardware interfaces entirely. Apple isn't the first company to recognize this, but it's putting out the message to its corporate kin and the enormous undifferentiated mass of American consumers in a big way.

In other words, as a friend pointed out this morning, the iPhone doesn't just fire a shot across the bow of RIM and other smartphone makers, along with Microsoft and Dell and HP and other companies involved in making handheld computers. The iPhone takes aim at another big company in another (related) field: Sony. Apple has already gone one up on the Walkman and devices like it; now it wants Sony's name, its reputation for consumer-electronics leadership, its position as semi-official symbol of an entire class of product, and semi-official ambassador to an entire class of shopper. Can't capture the market share? No problem. Make a new market. [I maintain that Obama's strategy for dealing with independents, disaffected centrists, and moderate Christians in 2008 was just like Apple's 'fuck you, let's invent a new category' strategy. --wb.]

Think different - for real this time

For decades other companies have happily copied Apple's innovations; that's not news. In a few months or years someone will come out with a device that inelegantly copies much of the phone/music functionality of the iPhone for half the price; that's not news. The iPhone is only a product. Apple's shift from self-identification as a computer company to the public acknowledgement that it is and indeed has been something else, on the other hand, is a much bigger deal. It's the corporate face of a shift in consciousness about electronics. (Did you know the CEO of Nokia doesn't allow his employees to refer to Nokia as a phone company? That's writing a conceptual check their products can't cash, of course, but his head is in the right place. He was laughed at for this habit when it reached the press; he can laugh today - while his engineers pull out their hair trying to catch up to the iPhone.)

Am I sorry to see the name change? In a way I am. My first computer was an Apple IIgs, back in the mid-80's, and I'll always associate the company with its early central role in the personal computing revolution (the outcome of which - Microsoft hegemony in office suites and operating systems - neatly tops the list of anti-meritocratic evidence above). I fervently hope that Apple sticks with OSX development and continues to support Mac users for a long time to come. But ultimately this nostalgia has little to do with any product, with an assemblage of parts. It's about the passage of a way of thinking.

When the improvisatory rock band Phish broke up in 2004, guitarist Trey Anastasio pointed out in interviews that fans who demanded at every concert that the band try something new, that the musicians follow their musical or organizational impulses no matter how seemingly counterintuitive (trusting that the audience would be right there with them), were being somewhat hypocritical or myopic in criticizing the group's decision to call it quits. After all, he reasoned, the seeds of the decision were to be found in the band's radically democratic organization and empathetic practice/performance ethic. The (friendly, mutual) breakup was, in other words, the natural endpoint of the free-spirited ideology that had drawn fans in the first place.

Apple's famous marketing catchphrase, 'Think Different,' isn't just a slogan; it's a key to understanding the way it sees itself in relation to other companies and customers. Macintosh: different from the PC. OSX: different from the old MacOS, and from Windows. iPod: different from any other mp3 player (at first). iPod Shuffle: different from the way you listened to music before. iTunes Store: different from the way you buy music. And now Apple, Inc.: different from other computer companies. It's time to take Steve Jobs at his word. That means recognizing what a big deal this year's MacWorld keynote really was: not just because Apple announced one 'insanely great' product, but because - in a small way, maybe, but decisively - on January 9, 2007, the world of consumer electronics, which is say the world in which we live a little more every day, changed.

Starting with a name, not a phone.

January 31, 2010 04:23 AM

January 30, 2010

Mole

Atheism.

I believe, maybe, in ESP; or rather some everpresent unnameable, whatever is to feeling as air is to sight. Limbic blahblahblah. MIT cured/robbed me of theism, retrofitted my Catholicism as shared ritual. Back to its (and my) roots I guess. I still pray nightly in English and Spanish, broadcasting silently, without wife hearing. Shame? Or are powerful transformations predicated on aloneness? Gods seem silly, like literature, and through/as literature I'm coming to respect them. Even Him. My Catholicism lapsed noisily along with other forms of trust. Now to divorce those fictions, remoralize stepwise. I miss choir, reverence, but not worship.

January 30, 2010 06:30 AM

Gamma World! Finally - an inspired decision from Wizards of the Coast.

This October WotC will be putting out a single-serving Gamma World RPG box set with rules based on D&D 4e. Do you care? No. Do I? Hell yes. That's the smartest decision I've heard from WotC since 4e itself. Their 2010 products are a huge step forward in terms of outreach beyond the usual suspects. And the fast, fun, flexible rules are...

Well, they're...

Oh.

All being well - fingers crossed - I should be a dad at that point.

Um.

Maybe I'll do without. :) (????) (YES THATS A SMILEY)

January 30, 2010 03:00 AM

January 29, 2010

Mole

Now, that there is some serious business!

Obama's discussion with the House Republicans was...extraordinary. The GOP made a huge tactical error allowing this to be televised (on C-SPAN) - or would've, if anyone actually watched C-SPAN. The Republicans in the audience brought up a succession of half-arguments and outright lies and Obama - without prompting! - just demolished them. More importantly, he turned sound observations and earnest talk from the audience into collaboration - he sounded like he was eager to work with colleagues. Bluff-calling, sure, but weirdly hopeful too.

Give it a read, or watch some video if you can. When he says 'I'm having fun!' I believe him, and am happy for the people he works for, i.e. us.

January 29, 2010 09:32 PM

Scott

nouvelle vague at the somerville theatre

Nouvelle Vague
Somerville Theatre
24 January 2010

The premise: a French band reinterprets New Wave and punk rock songs as laid-back bossa nova tunes. Imagine lush, [sometimes] quiet remakes of classic Talking Heads, Violent Femmes, Dead Kennedys, and Joy Division material. Yes, it’s weird, but it works. It works even better live.

As the concept is not entirely unique, Nouvelle Vague owes a large part of its success to solid musicianship. The breathy, seductive vocals, stunning outfits, and sometimes over-the-top stage presence of vocalists Helena Noguerra and Karina Zeviani were the carefully-crafted centerpieces of the performance. The guitar, keyboards, and bass were right on, but in some ways drummer Spencer Cohen stealthily stole the show, charging precisely through very complex rhythms with a relaxed bearing and goofy grin that effused understated simplicity.

Opening act Clare and The Reasons was a delightful discovery. Her voice is great. Her husband plays guitar, violin, pennywhistle, kazoo, and the saw. Their song about Pluto was funny. They closed their part of the show on a high note by summoning a guest tuba player to supply the bouncy bass line for their hilarious cover (with violin and clarinet) of Genesis’ “That’s All.”

Verdict: awesome!

January 29, 2010 04:07 PM

Mole

Archaeology.

I just realized that David Foster Wallace's 'How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart' changed my life. Direct line: that essay to A General Theory of Love to Zen and the Brain to M. John Harrison's Light to The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind to Mindfulness in Plain English, and that's 80% of my idle thought lately. Or something.

January 29, 2010 02:23 PM

Caregiver.

January 29, 2010 01:04 AM

January 28, 2010

May

Weddings are Expensive.

Alternate title: Weddings - The Most Inefficient Transfer of Wealth From One Generation to the Next.

I wonder if my teenage rebellion against authority has morphed into a rebellion against tradition, or generalized into a rebellion against all industry. I didn't want a diamond because I don't want to support a controlled market that I see as an inefficient waste of lives and resources. I hate diamond commercials and ads, thus my view that anything bought from the Shane Company should get flushed down the toilet. And I tried to avoid supporting the ridiculous market that is the wedding industry. But maybe I'm just cheap.

Part of me still thinks about skipping the whole wedding thing and eloping. I mean, conflicting emotions and expectations abound, I get anxious planning a dinner party for 8, and add to that 30k of cost to my parents? No wonder this stuff drives people crazy. And did I mention the constant focus on what the bride wants? There's nothing like having 5 different vendors ask you what your color palette is to make you suddenly decide that you Need a color palette. Beyond that point is a slippery slope to a nervous breakdown about ribbon and throwing someone headfirst into a foam cake display. But everyone keeps deferring to me with lines about "this is YOUR day" and "whatever you envision, we'll make happen". Um...don't people know that absolute power corrupts absolutely? I'd like things to be pretty and not cost too much. I probably should hire a wedding planner who could make that happen, but that, to me, seems like an overwhelming task and plus, it costs more money. And, full disclosure, there is a part of me that is enjoying exercising control, and a part that sees this as a Challenge. And so far, it's been something new and different to do, and fun at times. Especially cake tasting.

Here's the low-down: my dad has planned more for this day than I have. I want a big party with all of my friends and family, and I want there to be lots of dancing. The specifics seemed unnecessary at first. But how do you make a decision on any of this stuff while trying to remember that the details are unimportant? And what's the line to walk when you're lucky enough to have a father that wants more than anything to make you happy and yet has very strong opinions and expectations on how things should go, especially when you've spent most of your life just being contrary to him? Let's have a Baptist minister officiate! (Yeah, that one was a fun conversation. I might as well bring up how Bill O'Reilly is a bastard son of satan while we're at it. God, if you're there, I swear I'll try to believe in you if Bill O'Reilly gets caught fornicating with a goat. See the issue with the Baptist minister yet?)

Also, I'm sorry if I'm not inviting you. I'm sure there are going to be some awkward conversations in our future, and it's probably more a logistics decision than a personal one, but boy feeling obligated to invite people sucks balls, as does not being able invite others to for headcount reasons.

So, in summary, my life is not very tough. I'm super lucky that I get to throw a big party for the people I love, and I really don't want to elope. It will be completely awesome to see everyone, like a reunion, and I can't wait to see all my friends together again. But I have been thinking about this stuff a lot, and wow it feels good to get this crap off my chest. Me, C, our siblings and parents, on a beach somewhere warm, with a respectable old dude telling us how to love...sometimes that sounds really damn good.


January 28, 2010 11:14 PM