Mile Zero
feel-good hit of the summer
Mile Zero is the personal website of Thomas Wilburn. All statements and opinions here are my own, and do not represent the views or policies of my employers at Congressional Quarterly, Ars Technica, or other publications.
Little Brother is Atlas Shrugged for teenage crypto-freaks. It's too long, too preachy, and too self-aware to function as a decent piece of fiction, and it's too frothing to convincingly act as rhetoric. It will probably be a huge hit online.
I'm unhappy that I feel this way, because I really did enjoy Cory Doctorow's previous book, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. Although it too had its moments of "Look! A tech issue that Cory Doctorow thinks is cool!", the writing elsewhere more than made up for the awkward shoe-horning of Boing Boing material into the story, and there were decent narrative excuses for that material's presence.
Not so with Little Brother, which is explicitly attempting to be a primer on data privacy issues for 15-year-olds. Like most young adult fiction with a message, it fails on several levels: its hero is gratingly eager and overcompetent, the voice is an embarrassing imitation of "youth", and the villains are cardboard cutouts. I think the last point is the most annoying, because to me it's insulting to the reader. By ignoring many of the deeper political implications of the issues it raises, and reducing them instead to "bad people want to spy on us," Little Brother actually does a disservice to its readers.
Shrill. Shrill is the word I'm looking for. Little Brother has a kind of desparation to it, clearly informed by Doctorow's own feelings on data privacy issues. And while there are some readers who may respond to that, who may get a kick out of the step-by-step instructions for fighting The Man, I thought I would never be able to struggle through the last hundred pages of it. It's hard to say whether I would have felt the same way as a teenager--I used to read Piers Anthony, after all. I don't even know what I would recommend instead, but there's got to be something better than this. Maybe Doctorow can even write that book, now that he's gotten this one out of his system.
14:34 x Thomas x /fiction/reviews/doctorow_c x link x 1 comment
My office in-jokes, let me show you them.
True story: during a game of Taboo at a party the other week, I actually got Belle to correctly guess a word using "My blanks, let me show you them." We are dorks.
13:10 x Thomas x /random/comedy_and_tragedy x link x 0 comments
My problems with the Newseum are personal, I think. When I visited it with Belle and my parents last week, they had a good time. As did I, for the most part. But there are still a few things that bug me about it a little.
First of all, in a town stuffed to the gills with great free museums, it's hard to believe that they want $20 a head. I understand that it's a brand new building with state-of-the-art equipment, but I can't imagine many families choosing to visit it over the Air and Space, American History, or Natural History museums, which are also filled with some pretty neat--and probably more kid-friendly--materials. I'm not even sure I'd choose it over those museums, and I work in the news industry.
Second, several of the exhibits rub me the wrong way. Like the room on reporting history, sponsored by News Corp, which seems to spend a disproportionate amount of time discussing journalistic errors, partisanship, or malevolence (and who benefits from that perception, I wonder?). More pervasively, there's a tone of self-congratulation to some of the rooms, like the section of the Berlin Wall that stands in the basement. Yes, journalism covered many groundbreaking events. But there's a fine line, for me, between acknowledging the role of journalism in spreading the truth, and crediting it with a crucial role in those milestones. The important story about the Berlin Wall wasn't the reporting of its fall, it was the activism that brought it down.
There's little modesty on display, is I guess my point, if that makes any sense. And part of the problem with modern journalism, in my opinion, is that it thinks it's a lot more important than it really is.
But for me the central irony of the Newseum--a last gasp by an industry rapidly being overtaken by the Internet--is that it probably would have worked just as well, or better, as a web site. Snarky, I know, and you can say the same about many museums. But take the Pulitzer photography exhibit: a few photos are blown up and hung with explanations on the wall, and that's genuinely interesting. But the majority of the exhibit is every prize-winning photo, printed at 5x8 scale and mounted in a mass around a central column with no particular organization or order. It's a bottleneck for foot traffic, and really a poor way to display what are supposed to be the best news photographs taken each year.
A Newseum Online wouldn't have to replace the current museum--there are always exhibits that work better in person, like the collection of newspaper front pages going back to the start of the United States. But there are many things, like the Pulitzer exhibit or the interactive features, that it could do with more depth and greater diversity. And as such, it'd serve the purpose of advocating for journalism far more widely than a $20 glass shrine behind the National Gallery of Art.
Bonus picture: While we're on the topic of the website, this is some fantastically poor subhead writing.
12:28 x Thomas x /journalism/industry x link x 0 comments
"I'm going to watch a three hour Russian film classic," I told anyone who asked last weekend, and a few people who didn't. Luckily, Stalker is one of those long films that justifies its own length--and watching it in two sessions didn't hurt. If the running time intimidates you, I'd highly recommend breaking it up into smaller chunks in order to watch it--it's conveniently broken into Parts 1 and 2 for just such an approach.
Like the game of the same title, Stalker is very loosely based on a science fiction story named "Roadside Picnic." It's set in and around the Zone, a dangerous, trap-filled area created through mysterious means. Three men--the Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor--enter the Zone in search of a room that supposedly grants wishes. The Stalker is their guide through this territory, and requires them to step through an elaborate series of pathes and tests on the way.
Although it's a high-concept sci-fi film, there are basically no special effects or technological machines in Stalker. It's shot in fields, abandoned buildings, and underground tunnels, and through dialog and character actions these locations are transformed into something unsettling and claustrophobic (although it should be noted that the production involved a chemical plant that probably led to fatal cancer for several cast members). The Zone is used as a hook for the character to expound on their philosophies, their plans, and what they hope to get out of the room at the end of their journey.
This makes the film very "Russian" to my mind, but it's well-written. And the cinematography is exquisite. Director Andrei Tarkovsky, who also directed the original adaptation of Solaris, indulges in slow zooms and long takes that would be excruciating if the images themselves--either in vibrant color or shimmering, gold-tinted black and white--were not so beautiful. I am not an analog film fanatic, but if I were so inclined, this would possibly be the film to convert me.
11:48 x Thomas x /movies/reviews/foreign x link x 4 comments
I downloaded four or five Linux CDs and/or VM images this weekend, since I needed to use RealPlayer without installing it on my Thinkpad. Turns out that Real's software is also terrible on *nix. I know, I was surprised too.
Every time that I download a Linux installer for my old laptop, it's a herculean task to get it working right. Some of this may be due to the age of the laptop that gets used for these kinds of disposable projects--it's almost ten years old now, and I'm sure it has issues. But it's not like I've ever had any problems getting it to read a Windows install CD during those ten years, despite reinstalling the OS three or four times for various reasons. Advocates sometimes ask what Linux would have to do to impress me--"create a reliable boot disk" does not seem to be too much to ask.
What always cracks me up about this process is the information that the community does provide for reliability--the MD5 checksum, which validates the download file itself. Now, perhaps I simply live in a sheltered world of unmangled connections, but I honestly cannot remember the last time that the file I downloaded was corrupted or different from what I expected to get--this was, I was under the impression, the entire point of the HTTP protocol. Sure enough, when I bothered to check, the disks that didn't work were burned from an ISO with a valid checksum--and moreover, they eventually did work, sometimes with the same CD that had failed not an hour before.
Look, don't get me wrong--Ubuntu's come a long way even just since the last time I tried it, and clearly these things are working for someone. But the MD5 thing is still pretty funny. It's like someone shipping you a package and then insisting that what's inside will work because they've got a receipt from UPS.
Me, I've given up on the whole live CD/spare laptop thing, and I'm going to go with virtual machines instead. It's a lot tidier, a lot less frustrating, and with machines as powerful as they are nowadays, actually faster than trying to load even the most frugal modern OS onto my spare laptop.
11:18 x Thomas x /random/tech x link x 0 comments
There's a new NIN album out--online only for now, and it's completely free. Reznor's been prolific lately, what with the Ghosts halo just late last year. As a friend said when he forwarded the announcement email, "Is there a new NIN album every month now?"
Maybe. Because--and I don't know the man, and he doesn't know me, so this is just conjecture--I suspect that Trent Reznor is really enjoying this. It seems to me like he's enjoying the feedback, and he likes being able to put out material direct to his fans, and perhaps most importantly, he's getting a real kick out of frustrating his label's plans to monetize his output.
I mean, this is a musician who has had a long, long history of label fights. There was the lawsuit and public struggle with TVT, followed by a lawsuit against the guy who helped him found Nothing Records, and then most recently his disparaging remarks about pricing in Australia and UMG in general. This is a musician who used to release something once every five years, and now it's more like every five months. It sounds like he's energized to me.
Which I'm not complaining about. But it is a real change from the guy who used to literally write songs based on his notebooks of goth poetry. Even if the music's not as good, I'm kind of happy for him.
Update: The music's not bad at all, actually. And Reznor's done a very cool thing with the MP3s: they've got huge, high-res, individual pieces of artwork as the "album" art for each, by longtime collaborator Rob Sheridan. It strikes me as a very cool update of the LP album art, which was thought lost after CDs created packaging that's so much smaller. Now the music's shrunk to insubstantial dimensions, but it's reacquired that visual, almost tactile element. Between his earlier commercial experiments and this small touch, it's obvious that Reznor has put a tremendous amount of thought into this whole online music thing.
16:39 x Thomas x /music/artists/nin x link x 0 comments
| System Codes | Individual games |
Wii System code
|
Mario Kart DS 1 4 6 0 8 8 3 6 3 7 8 5
Tony Hawk:
Animal Crossing
Metroid Prime: Hunters
Tetris DS
|
13:50 x Thomas x /gaming/hardware/networking x link x 7 comments
Just an idea I had last week.
Possibly useful information: the physics are not terribly complicated--returning the ball with the edge of the paddle does not change its trajectory. But it will sometimes put a little spin on the response, if you take my meaning.
20:54 x Thomas x /gaming/design/art x link x 6 comments
Should have put this up a long time ago: The Song Chart Meme.
By flickr user xianjessen.
11:41 x Thomas x /random/personal/memes x link x 0 comments
Hey journalism: this is the Internet. Let's act like it.
Dumping video straight online is a flawed idea, I'm convinced. Not that it doesn't work, in the crudest sense of the phrase. But it's like using the Internet to sell rotary telephones. You're doing it wrong.
Whether we like it or not, the Web trains us to interact with content in new, non-linear ways. Take hyperlinking (please!): during the average blog post or news article at a relatively hip outlet, there will be lots of links inside the article, any of which basically derails the flow of the narrative onto a new, temporary track. That is a drastic change from the way journalists have thought about writing for years--so much so that I'm constantly being sent articles on "how to link" by coworkers who are trying to adjust.
Once you've spent enough time online, of course, this becomes second nature (making the forwarded articles more than a little tedious). In fact, it becomes addictive and even desirable--if nothing else, it lets you back up your assertions immediately, and synthesize it with other works. But the hyperlink does require you to understand that the medium is no longer a broadcast proposition, even for documents: you can't simply assume that people will read your piece start to finish. Instead, they're going to interact with it, drift away and come back as they follow their own path through the hyperlinked text.
Web video takes a step back from this. Sure, it's got a pause button, and when contained in a content-management system like YouTube it can be shared/linked/commented. But it's primarily a one-way street, especially as implemented by the majority of news organizations. I think this is part of the reason that media types are often particularly eager to leap onto the streaming video bandwagon: it feels familiar and controlled.
Here's my take: to do this right, we need to get past the broadcast mentality with web video, and move to something like smart videos, which incorporate some of the same non-linearity of web text. For example: while watching a video, you should be able to click for more information--the equivalent of an inline link. While someone explains something, you should be able to slide open a pane and explore the data behind their statements. When the video's over, you should be able to link to recent media on the same topic via an RSS feed. You should also be able to "skim" longer videos--jump through them by using an outline or overarching structure (B-SPAN had a primitive version of this, and the TED conference has a very nice interface for it).
This accomplishes a number of important goals. First, it appeals to viewers who, after years of surfing the Internet, really do have the attention span of a frightened mayfly. I've mentioned before that I doubt these people actually exist, but if they do, here's a way to keep them interested for a few more precious advertising-sellable seconds. Second, it turns the video into a dialog, and one that interacts with the rest of the site, where previously it was isolated from that content. Finally, it extends the lifespan of videos by making it possible for them to remain valuable as teaching and package resources even beyond when their intended topicality has passed.
The really good news is that this isn't hard to do. We've been working with BrightCove at work, and they provide a decent API for embedding their streaming video component into a custom Flash app that provides these services. Building it without BrightCove would be more frustrating from a service and bandwidth point of view, but isn't necessarily any more technically difficult. A few lines of code, a carefully thought-out index file written in XML, some attention to design, and you're all set.
There's really not an excuse any more, except that you don't have the time to do it. And that is, to some degree an acceptable excuse--we're all busy people, I know I am--but I don't think it will be acceptable for long.
11:14 x Thomas x /journalism/new_media/video x link x 0 comments
