It’s never too late to Celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
Indignant Desert Birds
Class Warfare and Video Games
So: when I was about 14 years old, my mom and I went to a science museum, where they had scales set for various planets. So if you weigh 100lbs on earth, you’d weigh 37lbs on Mars, etc. It was the first time I’d been on a scale in years. I stepped on the Earth scale and was 180lbs. I was a bit worried because that was more than I’d ever weighed before. I’d previously thought of myself as “skinny”, but had to start re-evaluating my self image. Sadly, from that point, I continued to gain weight, shooting past “fat” and into “obese”. I was rapidly approaching “morbidly obese” when a good friend decided she needed to lose some weight also. So we started changing our behaviors, hitting the gym, walking, stopped eating entire large bags of M&Ms, etc.
Today I weigh 189lbs…
A bit of progress
I’ve still got some work to do. I want to get down to “height/weight proportionate before I turn 32 (5 March, if you want to buy me anything), and to do that, I need to lose 2 pounds a week for the next 7 weeks.
But for now, I’m going to hit the gym…
All your bigotry are belong to us
There is a certain category of people who will claim not to be racists while doing racist things. For instance, This all-white basketball league. Here’s what they have to say for themselves:
Don “Moose” Lewis, the commissioner of the AABA, said the reasoning behind the league’s roster restrictions is not racism.
“There’s nothing hatred about what we’re doing,” he said. “I don’t hate anyone of color. But people of white, American-born citizens are in the minority now. Here’s a league for white players to play fundamental basketball, which they like.”
Racism is implicitly about creating an “us” to contrast with “them”. In academic terms “otherization”. “We” have “these qualities” (usually positive), and “the other” have “these other qualities” (usually negative). “We” have the “protestant worth ethic”, while “they” are “puritanical”. “We” are “civilized” while “they” are not.
Lewis said he wants to emphasize fundamental basketball instead of “street-ball” played by “people of color.” He pointed out recent incidents in the NBA, including Gilbert Arenas’ indefinite suspension after bringing guns into the Washington Wizards locker room, as examples of fans’ dissatisfaction with the way current professional sports are run.
Alright, let’s ignore that bit about “people of color”. Truth be told, I kinda like that phrase, and wish it weren’t taboo.* What Lewis is doing here is contrasting “fundamental basketball” (whatever that is) with “street-ball” (again, whatever that might be). In general, I can say that Americans tend to like “fundamental” and hate “street”.
Oh wait. I missed the other bit. Lewis is also contrasting players of “fundamental basketball” with players “of color” who “bring[...] guns into the [...] locker room”. This is pretty explicit: people who aren’t us are violent.
So there we have it: this league was founded on an “us vs them” mentality that otherizes their fellow human beings as being violent and lesser. Add it all up and we can say with certainty: supporters of the All-American Basketball Alliance are bigots.
Just for fun, I’d love to see one of their teams play an NBA team for charity…
*But it is. And as a white guy, I’m poorly placed to fix that. So I won’t try.
One of the freedoms I think we Americans notice least is the right to have juries sit in judgments of our trials. Always, when we discus juries, its from the perspective of what a hassle it is to sit on a jury, how much we’d prefer not to be on one, strategies on how to get out of one. Nonetheless, I would contend that juries serve as an important check against tyranny.
Looking at the structure of a courtroom, the prosecutor is in the employ of, and is representing “the State” either literally (ie: “The people of the state of California”), or more technically (ie: “the people of the United States”). Next there is the judge, who is an employee of the government doing the prosecuting. As is, very often, the lawyer for the defendant. Most criminal cases have police officers as witnesses– people who’s job is to protect the interests of the State, and are empowered to use violence towards that end. Weighed against this is the ideal of presumption of innocence… And one other thing.
When a person is brought before a jury, the jury is asked to make a determination of fact. Did these acts happen? The jury is, ideally, to have no institutional stake in the outcome of the case, merely a desire to see justice done. We amateurs are ripped from our own lives and placed in judgment of one of our own, in hopes that in a case of over-reach by the State, we citizens will be able to head off a grave injustice.
I’ve got jury duty today. I’m looking forward to it.
Don't post without these.
Owing to their losing market share, Microsoft today announced that they would begin cutting prices on all future operating systems down to $175, but would be discontinuing it’s policy of free service packs. Instead, they’ll be charging upwards of $25 for security and functionality improvements. These paid-for service packs will only work on a limited set of hardware. Supported hardware will only be announced once the service pack is released.
Perhaps this will help spur adoption of Chrome…
(Edit!)
Sometimes you miss. In case it’s not clear, I’m saying that this is Apple’s current strategy, and that it’s kind of awful.
(Edit Edit!)
It turns out that this is only potentially funny if you follow the links. And people aren’t doing that. Shame on you 
It's a big mack. Get it?
One of the things I haven’t talked about on this blog is that I’m trying to lose weight. Technically, I’m on a diet; what I’m really trying to do is change the way I eat. It’s harder than it seems. Part of this means that when I’m out with friends and they want to go to McDonalds, I need to find something on that menu…
So: last night I ordered a hamburger, medium fries and a medium drink (Total calories: ~680). The woman then suggested I could get a McDouble Meal for less money (total Calories: 770). I said that no, I’d prefer just the regular burger. Oh! Perhaps I mean the 2 cheeseburger? (Total Calories: ~1000).
The weirdest part of the experience is this: the woman taking my order was trying her hardest to give me a positive experience. What I wanted to do was more costly— and less filling– than what she wanted me to do.
This is the result of a bizarre food scheme we have where consumers are looking to maximize not their health, but rather their total caloric intake– for the least amount of money. The net result is that we get fatter. Not only that: because its the poorest of us who are unable to afford healthier food, fat becomes a class issue. Fun times all around.
You will be assimilated-- in a sexy dance number
From the first moment I saw 1776, I have been in love with musicals. It was as if reality could involve people spontaneously break out into choreographed song and dance routines. As if our world were too big to be as mundane as we live it. Naturally, I had to see a film adaptation of Nine. And naturally I began to compare it to the stage version.
It was irksome to discover favorite songs truncated or left out entirely. It was bizarre to find only eight women, and I believe it was mentioned* that the child was eight and a half.** With all this in mind, I think it’s obvious: this movie is not an adaptation of the stage performance at all. Rather, it’s the best film adaptation yet of the book Tristram Shandy.
To start with, they’re both gratuitously about sex while straight-facedly claiming to be about anything else.*** Shandy claims that the story is about his own life, but can’t seem to advance the plot all the way to the moment of his birth. Nine is supposed to be about a Great Artist’s struggles to make a movie, but instead gets stuck talking about his childhood. The life and struggles for both protagonists are set when they are too young to exert much– if any– influence over that path.
Those are pretty surface level events, however. Structurally, they both do things with the format that are simply not done. For Shandy, this means creating space within the book to jump between time periods– often these jumps happen within a page. The phrase “winding the clock” came to be very dirty over the decade in which it Shandy was published. The book itself, however, wound revolved around a certain set of events, which didn’t quite climax with the birth of the author. See how I said that again, but slightly dirtier? That’s how the book goes. Rather than being a book about a subject, in many ways it’s a book about the act of… being a book.
Nine plays with the structure of film. Remember what I said yesterday about film not being capable of showing the interior life of a subject? Well, that was a thumping lie. What Nine does brilliantly is use music to illustrate the thoughts of the subjects. Contini is not literally sitting with his mother, he is imagining what that conversation might be like. His thoughts are not life-like, but rather larger than life. Musical.
Contini states that it is his ambition to get ideas out of his head and onto the screen with as little “talking about it” as possible. This is a musical based on a play based on a movie about making a musical. It is about the very structure of ideas itself. In that, it is a very worth adaptation of Stern’s masterwork.
*I could be wrong about this, my date noted it and I did not.
**This would, of course, be a reference to the original film 8 1/2 on which the stage production of Nine is based.
*** Wait a minute, you’re asking, is Nine any good? I’ll cover that in a footnote****
****Nine was a musical involving half-naked ladies singing how much they want to get laid. That’s going to be enjoyable pretty much no matter what.
Tom Chick tells us about the upcoming Dragon Age comics. In case selling us on-disk content wasn’t a clear enough signal that EA will monetize anything they can get their hands on, this should be. But just to drive the point home, they’re getting Orson Scott Card to write the cash cows.
Mr. Chick points out the irony that Dragon Age features a very strongly LGBT friendly story, while Mr. Card is an amateur anti-gay bigot. This brings up the specter of yet another boycott of yet another Card-associated game product.
I make a habit of judging art on the worth of the art itself, rather than the worthiness of the creator. Scott Card has written a couple of Excellent books, some mediocre ones, and at least one that was truly awful. Since that seems to be his career arc, it makes this buying decision an easy one: I’ll be skipping his comic book…
From what I can tell, there are 3 forms of what I’ll call “narrative entertainments”– Books, TV/Movies (film), and Video games.* Each type of narrative makes a different type of shadow on Plato’s cave, attempting to capture a different aspect of reality.
Books are fantastic at creating rich worlds, and showing how people live and think while within them. Books by their nature take place within the mind of the reader. They are, in this sense, an almost pure form of imagination, unconstrained by a need to produce actual artifacts. Books, then, are great at showing the microcosm how an individual mind works, and also very good at simply stating the rules by which a society operates. And yet, the fact that they take place within a reader’s mind has it’s own inherent drawbacks– A poorly described commonplace item, can lead readers to have a wildly different idea of what’s going on than the author intended. This isn’t always the author’s fault– try this exercise:
Take the sentence “Tom sat atop the elephant”, and rework it for someone who has never seen or heard of an elephant. Make it interesting, concise, and fit the tone of the story. 10 different people will come away having drawn 10 different pictures.
The other end of this is film. Film cannot exist without showing the viewer “things”, “artifacts”, “pictures”, “etc”**. Its language is that of camera work and forced angles. Narrative “voice” is controlled not simply by the words used by actors, but also by how the camera responds to various actions. The biggest strength of film (other than it’s communal nature) is that it can take the great writer’s axiom literally: “show don’t say”.
What film doesn’t do very well is show us the interiority of a person’s experience. All actions must exist as shown, with none of the self-justifications and denial that real people experience regularly. Evil is nearly always presented as “other”, and morality is very often shallow.
Games are a very new art form, and are still seeking a universal expressive language***. For now, this certainly counts as a major weaknesses. The strengths of gaming lay in it’s ability to place a player in the middle of an experience, forcing them to make decisions. Granted: players are making decisions at a remove from how actual persons might do them. Still, players aren’t reading someone’s thoughts about balancing a budget, and they’re not seeing someone balance a budget, if they’re playing SimCity or Dawn of Discovery, they’re having to make the choice between guns and butter. Most of us don’t want to slaughter civilians in real life… but it can be interesting to explore the life of someone who has to make the choice of kill or be killed.
All of this is prelude to tomorrow’s post about the movie version of Nine. Stay tuned…
*I feel that I should say something here about audio entertainment. But Alas! I just don’t know it well enough to make intelligent comments. For our purposes, we can think of books and audio as being much the same, though I know there’s a lot of room to call BS on that..
**Yes, yes, I did that on purpose
***Speaking of not having a universal expressive language! English sucks: by all the rules of grammar, that should have been “an universal”, but it sounds funky.
As you probably heard, a terrorist tried to blow up an airplane last foggy Christmas eve. Inevitably in this polarized country, the Right and the Left have been pushing different narratives.
The right is saying that it’s a terrorist dry run, or at least a major attack that should leave us all worried.
The left is saying that Al Qaeda is sending people out to blow up their own balls while wearing woman’s underwear. One of these is a narrative that helps Al-Q recruit people. One of these is a narrative that helps America….