And Since We've No Place To Go...

The post counter ticks ever closer to 200 (10 more to go after this one, we're in the home stretch!). I think I'll do something special. Maybe retrospective, maybe prospective. Maybe a little bit of both; stay tuned.

With so many posts, I often find myself searching my own archives when writing new posts. It's getting to the point where I can't remember if I've written something or not. Turns out that I've written next to nothing about snow. Snow, of all things! Weird. Good thing, I suppose, that I haven't covered EVERY topic yet. Consistently posting is hard enough as-is.

Snow is basically the best precipitation that can happen on this planet. Sure, golf ball sized hail is pretty snazzy, but are you sure you like the roofing bills (to speak nothing of insurance premiums!) that come with it? Snow is relatively benign, and what it does is provide anyone that's interested with a more or less limitless supply of sculpting material*. It's by no means the most accurate, nor the most comfortable to work with for hours on end, but it's free and it's omnipresent. The potential that snow has goes tragically unrealized year after year; snow could mean free public art wherever you go. I mean, yeah it'll be a lot of snowmen. So what? Give people time, maybe toss them a Calvin and Hobbes book...you'd see them start to push the envelope. Or, you know, make snowforts. But we should encourage that, too. Heck, I think we should have pinnies that we can wear over our coats that mean "it is OK to start a snowball fight with me/I will have your back if you're already in one and need help"! There was an article I saw a while back about how during winter, you gain the ability to see how the paths people actually take differ from the ones that are provided from them by the city. I think we need to take these lessons further. Snow is tabula rasa, and yet we spend so much time and effort plowing and scraping and salting just to fight back the tide, get back what we had before, but do we ever stop and think "Hey...we could have more!"?

*It's also good for building shelter, throwing at people, etc.

At this point I should clarify that I'm not really trying to advocate snow as an agent of anarchist policy. This is more food for thought than it is a polemic. We have a plain white canvas that descends from the sky and stays for about four months...Why DON'T we do more with it than we do? Is it one of those stupid 'maturity' rules, like it's suddenly not OK to start rolling up a snowball past the age of 25? Why DON'T you see more street artists working in the medium of snow when winter rolls around (when conditions are right, you can and will see me making mini snowpeople whilst waiting for the bus. I usually leave 'em on a bench or whatever surface is handy. They don't last long, but snow as a medium does have a certain expected ephemerality)? I implore you to imagine a city that enrobes itself in snow: ornamental arches, ice slides, forts, walls, snowmen and women - rather than one which pushes it aside and grumbles until the spring. I would have told you yesterday that my great regret about last winter was not tobogganing on Citadel Hill. Now  I can see that what I - what we - miss every winter is the chance to live in the same fantasy snow-land seen in christmas/holiday film and TV! Some cities try a little harder than others in this regard: Quebec and Ottawa get points for Carnaval and Winterlude, respectively. I think that Halifax's plentiful public spaces could play host to all manner of snowcraft. I'm sure that to some extent, they already do...but we can do better!

-Loud!

PS. ACTUALLY REALLY SERIOUS ABOUT THOSE PINNIES. WE NEED A WAY TO MAKE PUBLIC SNOWBRAWLING LEGALLY/SOCIALLY OK AND UNAMBIGUOUS!

Noble Aspirations

Alternate title: Noble Aspirations and Pet Dinosaurs. Realization: Redundant.

The Best of 2009 prompt for today yesterday  was "Conference or Workshop", so I will have to take a pass. Just as well, I suppose, that I should learn how to post on my own initiative again.

Snowfall this morning: it chills the blood in my veins, so I fight back with a shower and hot chocolate. The winds of change are blowing, and in on them sails a ship bearing the recollection of winters past: christmas trees, terry's chocolate oranges, frozen toes, Frou Frou, an extremely poorly handled relationship... Ah, wintertime. This year, perhaps not so much. This year it's a vacation, and I'm trading my two weeks of slush and wood fire for seawater and lava flows. There's a certain melancholy in this, because growing up in one of the world's coldest capital cities you tend to associate bone-chilling weather with the good cheer of the season. We've done almost exactly this once before, a family reunion somewhere warm for the holidays. Last time it was Mexico. It was great fun, but it didn't really feel like christmas. Am I gonna whine about it? Heck no. Least as long as there are bars with swings for seats where we're going. Those things are worth at LEAST three feet of snow on the ground.

So last night I took a break from updating my blog (hence the super-late post) to wander downstairs and talk to a housemate of mine. Let's make him pseudonymous, because elsewise this is going to get tiresome. He's an Extraordinarily Long-haired Individual, so we can call him ELI. Fortunately enough, the other Extraordinarily Long-Haired Individual I know already has a different pseudonym. It's late at night/early in the morning, but we're still up 'cause it's the weekend - what else are you going to do? I have always contended that the best philosophical discussions take place during the wee hours, a theory which bears itself out time and again. Doesn't bode too well for my brain meats should I get a job with normal-people hours, though. Well, this time we start with...what do we start with? I've already forgotten. Not long into the conversation, though, ELI says something that sounds obvious, should have been obvious, but on further examination isn't really. He says "I think you expect that everyone else has had the same childhood as you". In the sense that I have certain ethical and philosophical preconceptions that were influenced by my upbringing, I am already aware of this. The part that makes me pause to think is that I'm not just assuming that these things I think are true because how else COULD they be? But I also assume that people grew up like I did ie. with two well-adjusted parents and effective freedom from want. The latter is especially important, we decided. Someone who has never really had to 'make do' is missing a certain amount of perspective on the world.

This was either a tangental observation from, or a segue to a discussion about the value of "family" as a life goal as opposed to things more abstract. I made an offhand remark about dedicating my life to some rather ridiculous cause (something techno-utopian, quite likely). He responded by asking why I didn't consider "family" a life goal worthy of being framed in the same way. I said that I wasn't altogether certain, although it is certainly true that our culture has taken to having fewer children and later. Careers are given precedence, and so we talk about dedicating our lives to justice, or science, or art...and not family. I argued, however, that "family" for its own sake is sort of its own goal, but that having a family and having goals can be rather coincident. When you're talking about the way you'd like to raise your kids, I think it can be more or less taken as read that you're talking about the way you would like people to act. Furthermore, I said (although not perhaps very articulately, it being the hour it was) that I thought abstract desires could certainly be more noble than the desire for family in and of itself. I think that a person who devotes his or her life to an ideal is committed to reproduce - genetically or memetically* - the kind of person that he or she would have comprise the mass of humanity. I think that in having children, one should imagine the kind of (better) world that they ought to grow up to live in. In light of the severity and immediacy of the challenges to our survival as a species that we and our children will be facing, it is no longer enough to simply wish that the next generation will have better than we have had. We have to know in relatively concrete terms what "better" means.

*Probably this use of terminology will offend everyone who actually studies this sort of thing, but I like the idea that if you're not going to have kids and teach them virtue, you should at least get some kind of virtue-inducing mindvirus started in other people.

Now, this didn't come up, but it's occurred to me that there will be an inevitable rebellion against any kind of better world we envision for our offspring. I'm not sure that frees us from the burden of laying the groundwork, but it'll sure as hell test our patience.

We also considered for some reason the ramifications of lightspeed travel, namely that you could pretty much pull an Ender Wiggin and keep yourself alive at relativistic speeds as the universe sped through the ages outside your window. I said that even if I could take a just-shy-of-lightspeed voyage to another galaxy (if I understand how it works, I would experience next to no subjective time when my speed approached that of light, and that photons themselves are timeless) I wouldn't want to turn around and go back. Millions of years would have rendered just about anything alive that I had known in the galaxy alien and unrecognizable. Also perhaps too advanced to interact with, or worst case scenario extinct. Much better to just keep going at speed, sending off probes and microbes to smash space dust and rocks together into whole new planets and stars, to seed life on lifeless worlds (ethically questionable, sure, but cool), come back in millions of years more to see what had happened in your absence. Maybe see how many times you have to do it before you get something that looked enough like a dinosaur that you'd want to keep one as the badass pet you always wanted but didn't know how to get. I wondered, as ELI and I speculated on this, if at such a tech level we would not have discovered a better way to procure dinosaurs. We discussed whether or not one could even domesticate a dinosaur. One imagines that wolves were not likely to have been very kind to cavemen...yet we have dogs. Tens of thousands of years later, we have the weiner dog. I say I want a weiner dinosaur, and wonder what on Earth (or rather "Earth #20 000: Earth hardest!" in our lightspeed adventures playing Monolith/God) such a thing might look like. I imagine that it would be cute. I would also like to ride a stegosaurus, but I don't think I brought it up this time. Oh well. I wonder if the mammalian nature of dogs made them more amenable to like us, and if reptillian dinosaurs would even develop a rapport with people? And how many times WOULD you have to seed life onto Earthy worlds until you got dinosaur-like denizens? How many times on average, anyhow?

Do you suppose it would be worth it to leave everything you know behind if it meant that it almost no (subjective) time, you could have a pet dinosaur? How much do you suppose we would be willing to sacrifice if it meant the fulfillment of childhood dreams? I think that while the thought of watching aeons fly past as I take a one-way rocket ride to entropic oblivion (stopping, of course, to pick up my pet dinosaur along the way) is intellectually attractive, but I wouldn't have the heart to leave PEOPLE behind. I can take or leave this planet, but I'd like to think that I have at least some friends that I wouldn't even trade for a dinosaur, or even several. What about you?

-LOUD!

"I don't want to set the world on fire..."

A day or so before Fallout 3 was released, I took a gander at the copy of the game manual that STEAM provided. It was part of my vetting process, along with watching and re-watching the five gameplay videos, as I decided whether or not I would make a purchase in the end. The introduction to the manual proposes that we find the idea of a nuclear aftermath compelling because history has no analogous situation for us to reflect on. I think that while this may be so, the real reason that we find stories set in the armageddon's aftermath is easy to discern when you observe who the characters are...or rather, what they are: Human (or something like it). With the exception of something like On the Beach, the moment you see a human form wandering the irradiated wastelands you know that no matter how terrifying you find the idea of a nuclear holocaust there is, at least in this fictional universe, hope for the future of our kind. Self-evident in the term “post-apocalypse” is the concept of something after The End of all Things. It's not a perfect analogue to “afterlife” - more like “afterdeath” but we could take that to mean the same thing anyway - nevertheless the idea behind both terms is the same: they exist to comfort us with the hope that after we, and others pass on (whether one by one or en masse), there will be something, more accurately someone to carry on thereafter.

As you have probably surmised by now, I am now a proud Fallout 3 owner. I have yet to finish the game, but I decided to offer a compilation of my first, second, and third impressions (in plain terms, I've played I would guess about 10 hours of the game so far. The time counter seems to be bugged here under Linux, but I will edit this post with the exact information sometime later today EDIT: Steam's time counter is messed up in Windows as well. Fortunately the game keeps count and tells me that as of the time I was writing this my playtime was 15:14:08). I'm not a huge consumer of post-apocalyptic fiction, but I do have a bit of a soft spot for the stuff. I have not played either Fallout 1, nor Fallout 2. I think this is a valuable perspective to have when considering a game, as are those of a diehard Fallout fan, and a Mad-Max junkie as well. What I want to address is whether or not Fallout 3 is a good game on its own merits.

The narrative structure of the initial character creation phase (which begins with your birth) is very linear, but also very compelling. I don't want to give away the details, but suffice it to say Bethesda did a very clever job of integrating character creation into the setting, and into the game. From almost the get-go, you can be a sappy, golly-gee-whiz good guy, or a right prick to everyone. There are about three options for any dialogue (sound familiar, anyone?), with the moderate response representing a range from neutral-good to lawful neutral (in D&D terms). While it is nice to have a legitimate alternative to ridiculous altruism (for reference, my play style tends to be “I'll be really nice about doing stuff for you, but I'm not going to say no to payment. Energy cells for my Laser pistol don't grow on trees, dammit!), I think that the game could stand to alter your options as you establish a character to give the player a greater range of options from his or her chosen moral stance. Even while playing a very-good “Ranger of the Wastes”, I still have the option in many dialogues to say what amounts to “time to die, punk!”. While this does help if you like to play schizophrenic characters (see previous posts on gaming), I'm not sure if it helps most gamers. The way I hear it, a lot of gamers tend to play through once as the good guy (to complete the game), and then once they're sick to death of getting missions from every NPC from here to Beijing, they roll up the good 'ol Hitler-Skeletor hybrid and CRUSH THE PUNY PLEBES WHERE THEY STAND. So the utility of an evil response for a player who is being good (or vice versa) isn't really apparent. They could at least replace it with something more polite that wouldn't cost you Karma if slaying someone could be justified, ie. “I am forced to purge the wasteland of your malevolence forever!”. I think that such an approach wouldn't require rewriting much dialogue, and it would be helpful to players who want to feel very heroic when they declare that it is time for a villainous cretin to MEET HIS TIMELY END.

So, once you leave the vault (again, play the game if you want story/details), the game opens up and presents you with a substantial map, your first main quest goal, and a whole lot of autonomy. Sure you can go to the nearby town to make some inquieries, but you don't really have to. I suppose it would be a little hard for a character using primarily ranged weapons to forego the first opportunity to stock up on ammunition, but I digress. Like its sibling Oblivion, Fallout 3 has fast-travel, but with the caveat that you must first “discover” a destination by hoofing it there. I find this an ideal balance, because it makes questing quite painless without removing the need for exploration. It's also awesome when you're low on health, although this is a mixed blessing. It seems that your fast-travelling and even naps in potentially-hostile territory aren't ever interrupted by baddies along the way. While this will prevent a lot of irritating deaths for characters who are low on stimpacks and various irradiated foods, it makes the world feel less dangerous than it should, in a way. If I sleep in the ramshackle base of some bandits I just killed, I almost expect to be dragged awake by some punk or super mutant who wants to bag my carcass. It could be that this is a feature of higher difficulties (I am on the default in this game, I will report back with further information when I have it), but reserving an immersive feature from the default experience of the game I would find a questionable design choice.

If you've seen any reviews of Fallout 3 thus far, you've probably heard two constants: 1) V.A.T.S. Is the S.H.I.T., and there are some animation/AI glitches. Both are true. The Vaultec-Assisted Targeting System (V.A.T.S.) is not only the coolest, but the most excellent solution I have ever seen to the whole stats-versus-twitch accuracy problem in RPG shooters. Too much reliance on stats will make good shooter players feel like something isn't right in the engine as their perfectly-aimed shots fly wide due to behind the scenes dice rolls, and too much reliance on a player's FPS sk1llz will alienate less-dextrous folk who want to roleplay a straight-shootin' badass. Fallout 3 in its real-time mode is a little too stat-based for my tastes, I think (although it could just be that my utterly wrecked post-apocalyptic 10mm sidearm or laser pistol isn't all that precise). V.A.T.S. Does two important things: it pauses the game, and it tells you what % chance you have of hitting your intended body part/ target (you can shoot their weapon, if you like, and once you deal it enough damage it flies out of their hands!). You queue up attacks based on your Action Points (AP), which regenerate at a decent pace in real-time combat. Once you've set up all your attacks, you tap the use key, and watch as they are carried out in slow-motion from the obligatory DRAMATIC CAMERA ANGLES. While the game occasionally shows you a nonsensical view for watching what you just did (ie, missed), it's pretty awesome about letting you see just how incredibly dead you shot that guy when you score that critical hit. Squeamish? DO NOT PLAY FALLOUT 3. I must confess that I'm one of those weird dudes who takes it kind of personally when things (even AI-controlled ones) are trying to kill me in games, so it's pretty incredibly gratifying to watch in slow-mo as they are blasted asunder (often literally so) by my laser beams, bullets, or whatever. I've just taken the “Bloody Mess” perk at level 8 which increases the intensity of carnage you cause (AND grants you +5% damage with EVERYTHING), so I'll report back on just how brutal it gets. As for the AI and animation glitches, I'm hoping that Bethesda can patch these, as it tends to detract from immersion when that badass super mutant with the chaingun can't or won't turn to face you when you strafe him, allowing you to blast him repeatedly without reprisal, or when characters try to walk into walls before the game helpfully shunts them free of the obstacle. For a company that brags about having the most lifelike AI engine out there, they have a bit of 'splainin' to do.

There is a lot more that I want to say about Fallout 3, but since I really have to get some sleep or risk dozing through morning class will leave for tomorrow or a final review. If you want a recommendation, it's a qualified yes. It's a pretty fantastic experience so far, but if you've got a problem with contemporary RPGs, it won't change your mind. Despite its unique flavour and setting, there's something about the way Fallout 3 feels that makes it not so different from, say, Mass Effect. The dialogue is less cinematic, the combat moreso, and Fallout is on the whole better-executed, but pausable combat? The same “Yes-Maybe-No” dialogue options? Excruciatingly pretty graphics? A less-than-stellar inventory management system as a console-ation to those people playing with an utterly WRONG input device (although at least Fallout 3 doesn't force you to reduce surplus stock into useless omni-gel, and it organizes your items alphabetically)? It's all there! This isn't so much to say that Fallout 3 = a better Mass Effect*, so much as to impress upon people that you're still a glorified errand boy or girl (or mass murderer[ess], if that's how you roll) with some real kickass toys and a whole lot of terrain to explore. The wheel remains steadfastly un-re-invented (while this particular phrasing of the old idiom is clunky to be sure, keep the idea in mind, it will be relevant to an impending post when I tackle some non-videogame-related material. Stay tuned!)

-LOUD!

*although it's definitely true that Fallout 3 is just better than Mass Effect.

In which Loud muses about how to keep the free world rocking. And writing. And painting. And coding...

My housemate returns home tonight, and finds the remaining three of us in the midst of a heated debate. Naturally, he inquires as to what it is we are yelling about.

“We're having another copyright fight”

“Oh”

“Well, we do tend to have them every couple of days”

At this point, Etarran observes:

“We have them EVERY day!”

Which would be funnier if it weren't the honest truth. We had indeed argued about intellectual property rights the night before. It would certainly be funnier if it weren't my fault. As the token long-haired-hippie-anarcho-communist, I am something of a philosophical punching bag for the ...I guess liberal moderates? Who make up the house, and occasionally those visitors from outside the house as well. It's possible that this is for a good reason; the people who take issue with my positions tend to be more pragmatic, whereas I am an ideologue. Sadly, I think that in this sense I am an outmode, that policy and thought have to be guided by what rational observation can prove, and not by what an individual or group believes is somehow more “virtuous” than the next guy's “good life”.

When we debate intellectual property, as we do too much around here, it comes down to a fundamental difference in priorities. Etarran has observed of us that we “believe mostly the same things, only you believe them for completely the wrong reasons”. In common, I think everyone in the house is in agreement that no matter how you arrange IP rights, you need to both encourage and reward creativity. Past this, we tend to disagree entirely: I focus on the need to promote a vague “public good” - the benefit to people when they are allowed to enjoy art and participate in culture – by removing “unreasonable” restrictions on use of intellectual property. The others point out that making intellectual property less strictly controlled damages the ability of artists and publishers to make money, and therefore disincentivizes creativity. They assert that derivative use of IP under the current framework can be permitted by negotiating with the copyright holder, and purchasing it from them (or agreeing to pay royalties), and since this is at all possible the system does not need to change.

The way I see it, though, the economics of creativity are not the only thing that need be dealt with. While career artists do have to make a living from what they create, there is a whole world of non-commercial creativity that I believe is stifled when artists and corporations demand tighter restrictions on how we are allowed to use our media. For example, it makes economic sense for Apple to have iTunes dispense songs which are of a format exclusively supported by their brand of mp3 players. It makes sense for iTunes not to interface with mp3 players from other vendors. Apple has no obligation to increase the business of other companies, and it has a right to maximize its profits. Apple's policy in this matter may help Apple, but it is harmful to the public good and, I would argue, to the digital music industry. I believe that a free, open standard for music files (mp3, while ubiquitous, is not common property) and players would create a market in which users could buy music AND portable audio devices with greater confidence (I would suggest that they might buy more music, were this the case). Such a system would create market pressure for each vendor to produce the best, cheapest Open-Source Audio Codec (OSAC, not as catchy as mp3, but what can I do?) player, as well as the best digital delivery service. This intense competition would be a great boon for consumers, but perhaps costly for the technology providers. To this, I would respond “tough titty”. If each digital distribution platform used a unique key to encode songs bought through that service, consumers could be forced into being less fickle. HOWEVER, this would put quite the damper on another form of creativity, namely that exhibited by programmers of free or alternative media players. A decent compromise could be reached if users could pay a nominal fee (per song, perhaps?) for either the ability to transfer keys (encryption would be standardized, of course) to other programs, or perhaps – and this is already a reality – simply for unencrypted media files. I think that being able to pay to free your media from DRM strikes me as particularly fair. One, if it is money the companies want, then let them have money in exchange for free (as in speech, not as in beer) information, and Two, honest people who do not like DRM would be allowed to put their money where their mouths are. I think this sort of arrangement could work for all manner of digitally-distributed media. I would love for, say, Steam to be cross-compatible with other digital distribution platforms once I paid the fee. Valve might give up a certain amount of potential revenue, but as a fan of Valve's work, it's not like I'd give up lining their coffers. Sure, they might have to wage a couple of price and feature wars with other providers to get my every purchase, but they should have to do that anyway! Different companies make motherboards, BUT I do not have to buy an Asus graphics card when I use an Asus motherboard. I do not have to buy Toyota gas if I drive a Toyota. I do not have to buy a Warner Brothers' movie player to watch Warner Brothers movies. Standards are DEFINITELY beneficial to the public good, and it's high time that digital distributors cut out all the proprietary bullshit!

Picking up from thoughts of computer hardware and digital distribution of games, I would like to make the case that gamers, and gamer culture (at least on the PC) can be an example of an enlightened copyright regime. First, I want to be clear that I don't think that piracy as it exists in PC gaming is justified or enlightened. What I do think is that “piracy” of so-called “abandonware” games does have some certain merit. While in some cases the industry does produce means for gamers to play their old favourites again (ie. SNES emulators on a chip with all the old games preloaded), only recently have services like Steam and Gametap really, well, tapped into this market. Still, not every retro game will be profitable, and I foresee the utility of a small amount of file-sharing for the obscure, the overly complex, and the forgotten. Where gamer culture really shines in terms of IP is in the world of mods. When buying one game at retail allows you to access for free the creativity of many others who contributed content for the love of gaming (or in an attempt to get noticed in the industry), that can translate into additional value for the original creators and publisher. I think that if the model of mods could somehow be ported over to other forms of art (accessing derivative works is contingent upon owning the original content), we could make culture participatory AND fair to creators. “Institutionalized plagiarism”, you say? Hardly! Humans often learn through imitation/ My sister learned to talk by parroting my every sound (true story!), and while I'm pretty sure I found it annoying, you don't see me handing her a DMCA takedown notice! We retell jokes that we didn't make up ourselves, we relate stories that are not our own, we play games that we didn't make up but never paid for (remember wall-ball in grade 3 or so? Foursquare/king's court?), and sometimes we modify or embellish these things. Granted, these things are not new, but if you told me that no one's livelihood depended on them, I would laugh in your face. Imagine a world where you had to get permission to tell or modify any joke you told, or any schoolyard game you played, and tell me that YOUR livelihood would not be adversely affected (with a straight face and not dripping sarcasm). I think that if we enjoy a series of books, we shouldn't have to worry about whether or not the publisher wants to make an RPG out of it when we contemplate making a MUD on the internet based on said book. Maybe that's cutting into the potential revenues of the author, but if people are not allowed to celebrate what they love with just a little imitation (the sincerest form of flattery), something is VERY WRONG. What I cannot quite say is where the line should be drawn between what sort of derivations are fair and which are not. Maybe a MUD based on your favourite fantasy book is ok, but what about home-cooked rules for adapting, say, D&D or GURPS to be playable in that world? Such an action would be rather akin to making a mod of a computer game, based on an established franchise that you did not own. This happens all the time, and occasionally copyright owners will force the mod teams to cease and desist. While I respect the desire of, say, Lucasfilm, to make money on Star Wars: Battlefront, I think I would rather play a Battlefield mod coded by people who LOVE Battlefield and Star Wars instead of money. I think the ideal arrangement would be what happened to Garry's Mod, Team Fortress, and Desert Combat. Rather than a battle between quality and profit, the industry should embrace mod teams, and then commission them to help build, or even design on their own a bigger, better, for-profit version that the IP rights holder can sell. The amateur creation should be allowed to remain as a demo, free publicity for its better-supported official cousin. Of course, the practicality of hiring a mod team every time you want to exploit a franchise for profit is nil, but in other media the concept does exist in a sense (ie. Star Wars extended universe novels, although I'm sure they have a strict vetting/quality control policy on those). If multiple derivative works were being prepared at the same time, it only gets worse (although mod teams sometimes do coalesce on their own when this happens). The best answer I can give is that IP rights holders could always hire the pick of the modding crop when multiple projects were involved, and that franchise-based gaming could move away from being assigned to particular studios, and to contract work by modders? Still impractical, I suppose, so if anyone has a better idea I'd love to hear it.

I think that's all for now. Apparently posting about actual goings-on in Halifax was a lie. Maybe it will happen next time.

-LOUD!

o/ lord I was born a ramblin' writer/speaker/thinker o/

BOOBtubeS!

I think it's more than safe to say that of all media, television is the most maligned. Forget Shakespeare's lowbrow roots, forget about the harlequin romance, the incessant repetition of this year's "hits" on 9/10 radio stations, Meet the Spartans...the pollution brought by these wretched works doesn't seem to contaminate their respective art forms the way we have allowed bad television to colour everything we see and hear on the good ol' boob tube (even though most network TV is too tame to show anything remotely resembling the actual female breast...). Videogaming is I think a close second, despite the best efforts of self-appointed moral crusaders. At least games are known to improve co-ordination and problem-solving skills. Television gets pretty much zero good press as a medium.

Which is why it's so awful that I am a sucker for good TV.

If I'm tired enough, I'm a sucker for just about any TV, but that's neither here nor there. No, I'm talking about Farscape, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica (remake), Cowboy BeBop, jPod...intelligent TV. I might as well toss in Mythbusters, Magic School Bus, Robot Chicken, Popular, Buffy, Heroes, and Dead Like Me, while I'm in a listing mood. These shows are all different, but they can be collected into groups, sometimes overlapping. You've straight-up solid writing, acting, and wit; you've got pertinent social commentary; educational value; comedy, romance, psychosis: you have art.

When you think about it, TV is the perfect mirror for society: sure, a lot of it is made with very little thought input, or a great deal of thought is put in to ensure that very little comes out, but either way, a lot of it is the bland homogeneity and routine - filler - required as if by law to stop the masses from discovering existentialism (gotta keep your power sources safely plugged in, after all). But there's always that small, rogue band of people who keep thought alive, with such alien concepts as "plot", "character", and "cinematography". I may be overly melodramatic in casting TV as some kind of socio-political battlefield, but maybe there's something to it. Television has, like Religion, been called "the opiate of the masses", after all. It would certainly explain why intelligent TV tends to get cancelled with alarming regularity: get too subversive, and the Capitalist Oppressor takes you off the airwaves. I think Heroes, Galactica and Farscape managed to hang on (although the latter was cancelled after 4 seasons) by having a strong emphasis on family, which the conservatives must like enough to make up for their boldness elsewhere. Looking deeper, I guess Heroes and Galactica both feature powerful elites making decisions that affect the fate of humanity, and they generally tend to make the right choices. The powerful elites must like that vindication.

So, with new TV comes a new cast of shows to be examined, the ones I've seen at all would be jPod (already in the list of intelligent TV, and duly cancelled), the Sarah Connor Chronicles (which I think survives on overtones of family and religion, as per my theory), and finally Eli Stone, which I'm still evaluating. On the one hand, they did do an episode where a vaccine maker was trying to hide the fact that it's products could cause Autism (dumb, 'cause that myth does not need more support: note how the vast majority of people are non-autistic and immunized? Yeah, I thought you might enjoy your health). This week, though, was much better: they totally took the US government to task for only funding the LIES of Abstinence-only "sex education"! On TV, in front of (hopefully) millions of viewers. I like their style this week, although I wonder if they mean to educate, or just to provoke a different group every week by subverting their usual message somehow? Also, the whole "Eli-as-prophet" storyline has the potential to get really, really annoying and preachy if done wrong.

I guess the bottom line is that Eli Stone has Natasha Henstridge, which should keep at least the male viewers, even in the event of severe shark-jumping.

More on this as my artistic appraisal continues. I think I may just go and watch some more Battlestar Galactica Season 3 (which you should buy or rent or borrow and watch and no they are not paying me, unless you count the part where they're making more for me to watch)

LOUD!

"Come with me if you want to live!"

Simple Arithmetic

Lena Headey + Summer Glau + the Terminator mythos - Ahnold = why YOU should be watching The Sarah Connor Chronicles. It's a good show on the Fox network, which does mean invariable cancellation, but before it is -and this must be said - terminated, give it a whirl. Summer Glau is a lucid, mechanical badass this time around, stealing scenes like the unholily-talented acting bandit she is. Lena Headey steps boldly into the be-all and end-all of "yo mama wears army boots" jokes as the titular Sarah Connor, and she's a worthy successor to Linda Hamilton, I'd say. John Connor is present, and a major focus of the series, but as a 15-year-old, he's basically there to be angsty, provide motivation for his mom, as well as tender, heartfelt family moments for the viewers (and doubtless for the Fox people, neo-con bastards that they are).

While the acting is quality stuff, the show as an experience is so far operating like the Terminator movies: there's a good-guy robot, a host of bad-guy robots, and there are the police looking for an armed-and-dangerous nutjob mother (or so they think). This isn't a complaint as of yet, because I and the writers both know that something has to happen besides car chases and teary mother-son hugfests, but the pilot episodes have to be just that in order to sell. That's fine, that's what you do to sell TV... I mean, look at Drive: you try to do car chases AND intelligent storytelling AND character development ALL AT THE SAME TIME? That's madness! How is the average Fox-watching Yokel supposed to wrap his poor little noodle around all that com-plex-uh-teeee and new-aunce? Given time, I'm sure that all of these will make due appearances in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, so seriously, watch it so the writers have a chance to a) get a fair deal and write more episodes, and b) tell a part of the story with some kind of actual resolution, before Fox puts their mechanical, humanity-crushing boots to it!

Critical Thinking

It's just occurred to me how incredibly apt "Critical Thinking" is as a term. I wonder if there are words for phrases like that? I'll put forward "pseudo-autological", and leave it at that for now. It just so happens that I am taking a course on critical thinking at university now, and I realized in class today that I'm going to need some new words if I'm going to be able to express myself adequately. For example, one student raised a point in class, that defining "morally right actions" as "actions which maximize pleasure for those affected" (which was NOT the debate) was a functional (I think that was it) definition, in that it did not address what "morality" is itself, only what would constitute morality. I wanted to say that his objection was only valid if one acknowledged some kind of special meaning for "moral". For someone who does not believe in any special, independent existence of a moral code, couldn't a functional definition also be a definition of the word "moral" itself, in the absence of some greater significance? I don't think I had a word to indicate that I meant the phrase itself would define the very concept of what moral is in the non-presence of an absolute, but I think it would have greatly helped the clarity of my response. I also want words for "existence-that-isn't-actually-existence", as in "something that isn't NOT, but cannot be said to exist as you or I perceive reality and the universe to be present" (an entirely hypothetical conjecture that I used when hypothesizing about how God is the ultimate expression of the "freedom to..." philosophy. While I'm on that, I generally need words that define whatever...stuff...is beyond our mortal ken. Real stuff is easy, science has been name-tagging matter and energy and their myriad dances for centuries, the physical is (naturally) well-documented...but how to define hypothetical conjectures? So, consider this a sort of "wanted words" request. Submissions via email, MSN, or the comments here, if you have a good word for any of these...(non?)things. Winners get my supreme appreciation, maybe some chocolate or $5 from my pocket, and I'll try to use the word in class or conversation, see if I can't get it to stick. I reserve the right to post and popularize my own submissions, but the $5 or chocolate (or equivalent something) is going to someone else because I said so, even if I think I win.

And, lest you think I forgot, it is 2008. Still no flying cars, so it's not that big a deal.

In personal news, I have all but abandoned the quest for the bare-bones notebook. I find it appalling that in a market that must consist entirely of picky, tech-savvy people, it's actually harder to get what you want! Defeated, I look to a heavy upgrade for my desktop, and perhaps a Smartphone purchase. One day, I will have my hardcore custom gaming laptop, but that day isn't coming with any great alacrity.