The Longest Year

This past weekend, I played host. To celebrate and "break in" my new apartment (how the birthday party didn't count I am not sure, but I guess this completes the ritual), three of my closest friends came over and joined me in a game of Dungeons & Dragons (yes, really). In the midst of our rolling of dice and insistence we were half-demon warriors from an alternate reality, my phone let out its little electric buzzsaw noise that tells me I have a text message. Two seconds later, I was staring at the reminder that in one month, I would be celebrating my one-year anniversary with the girl who dumped me in February.

My second thought was "Jeez, how did I forget to delete that?"

My first thought was "That was this February?!"

Here it is, November 2009. A month and a half and the decade rolls over, which would probably be a big deal if I had not been eighteen at the turn of the millennium. But despite a shift in number sets being underwhelming, I'm still looking at the year in confusion, because I have trouble believing this year has only been a year long.

No matter how I look at it, the year feels crowded. On a macro level, my country inaugurated its first black President and took some major steps in overhauling how we live our lives and govern our people, and the Internet really started to visibly change How We Do Things; on a micro level, I entered and exited not one but two relationships that were theoretically long-term; lost touch with people I had considered best friends; made new best friends in unexpected places; moved to living on my own for the first time ever; and really started to dip a toe in this Professional Writing thing for real. The friends I talk to at work were first met no earlier than last October, but my brain insists I have known them since about 2004; I was stunned when I realized that the friends whose highly-embarrassing (for me) wedding I stood at was one year ago this past Halloween. Time has dilated this year, and I have no idea why.

Some of it, I think, is because this is the year I have most seriously started using the Internet: I am much more active on the Webbertubes this year than ones previous, and so much more aware of goings-on in the world, with the end result that it seems like more is happening. Technology is connecting us and allowing us to live in new and broader ways, such that even when we're working we're probably doing something, and it is a world I, for one, look forward to without too much trepidation (the issues of privacy, copyright, and attempts to control information are too big for the scope of one little blog post).

Some of it is because this year has been crowded: new home, new lifestyles, new and resurrected friendships. I have not had a weekend that wasn't already full up with social engagements since October 16th. I am working out more, taking more walks, watching more movies (I suspect young film buffs will grow up denying that Up, District 9, Where the Wild Thins Are, and Inglourious Basterds all came out the same year). I am trying out more new things and trying out more new people, and I think the end result is that this feels like four years because I've probably lived more in the past year than I did the last four.

But some of it, and you all had to know I was coming to this, was how much I am writing. I spend so much time at the Internet because I spend so much time working at the computer; because social networking will, I think, be key to eventual success as a writer; and because bursts of procrastination, like it or not, are part of the creative process.

While this should probably wait until December, my posts will be full of Christmas and winter by then (and if we're lucky the outcomes of Super-Sekrit Projekt Mark II), so I'm going to say it now: Writing is making my life longer. Thank you, to all my readers, of this blog and of Not Providence; thank you to the people who tell me to keep at it; thank you to the people who understand when I choose the company of a keyboard and a whiskey over anything outside the house. You'll be thanked again when real, paper-and-ink publication comes my way; but for now I want you to know you are appreciated. You have, in a small sense, helped make me immortal.

More from TED

This one goes out to my little sphere of people who always hear from me on Yahoo and Gmail; did you know we were hacking society?

Where My Mouth Is

I did some writing tonight. And then I attacked my website. And I did exactly as I said I would.

Provided all is going well and I am not currently hallucinating, you should see, atop the right sidebar, a link to my TipiT tip jar.

If you feel like tipping me, whether for the content I produce here, for content of mine you've seen elsewhere, or just because you want to feel like a patron of the arts, I would love it if you would do so. Just click on the tip jar and they will take care of the rest.

If you do not feel like tipping me, not a big deal; you are still invited to the party. I write first because I love it and second because I hope to do it professionally; if I'm getting to write I will be satisfied.

As an added incentive for those who are wavering on the tip issue: If you tip me and give me preferred contact info (via the TipiT comment field), I will tell you exactly how I will be spending the money you give me. It's like sponsoring an African child. An African child that enjoys Irish whiskey and the occasional hockey game.

Also, if you have a TipiT account, and want to feel like a part of The Future, TipiT supports tipping via Twitter (and thus via text). Just tweet @tipit @the_real_tyler followed by a number to donate that many dollars. Yes, I am also vague on the mechanics of this; the TipiT folks are a little bad at explaining how the variables in their syntax operate, so I am not sure how they handle contacting you about paying for that donation. I suspect they use a credit card you have set up with your aforementioned TipiT account—if I am wrong, somebody do comment so I can better explain how to experience the future. I just love this idea so much (the concept of being able to tweet a tip to a street busker with a tastefully displayed sign, or a speaker while they are still speaking) that I could not help but try to get in on it. Besides, this gives you a quick way to tip me for my tweets!

And yes, I know the tip jar is a little bit of a sore thumb right now; I'll be editing the template more fully soon, I swear, but life is a tad bit hectic right now. The point is, the tip jar has arrived, and the future with it; and now I am off to go watch Supernatural. Tip in good health!

The Future

I have a lot to do tonight, not the least of which is write. But first I have to make dinner. And before that, even, I have to share this link:

"why i am not afraid to take your money, by amanda fucking palmer".

Preach it, Miss Palmer. Preach it.

For those of you who agree, I'll be trying to install a tip jar on the site a little later this week. For those of you who do not agree: don't tip. Do what seems right to you. The posts and weekly updates and links and snark will all still be here for you, just as well planned out (and occasionally ill thought out) as always.

One request: Please, please do not spam me with drivel like what we found on Craigslist last week, telling us that artists do not deserve money and we out to be grateful for the pittance we receive. I'll come to your house and flog you with a Giger installation.

Serialization and Business Models

in which our author is pinned between his wallet and his dreams

The fine folks over at Pimp My Novel (I'm sorry, I have forgotten the author's name and don't know if they'd appreciate being called "Mr. Pimp") have posted an excellent entry on the return of serialization and the possibility of low-priced short stories as a valid business model.

I am intrigued by these ideas, and wish to subscribe to their newsletter.

More specifically, I am wondering if there is something here for me; if maybe I can pull off the kind of business model they are describing with some of my short works, for just $1 or $2—not the kind of prices that'd let me quit my job and buy an island, but the sort that would help me build a fanbase, or have some numbers to spit at possible agents and publishers. I'm not sure if this is worth it, but I tell myself that the worst that happens is I waste a couple hours determining that it's fiscally infeasible.

What does this mean for you? Well, it might mean you get bugged about buying stuff off Amazon in a week or two, or start seeing Amazon buttons in the sidebar off to our right. Also for now it means one or two stories are coming down from the "Selected Writings" section while I go over the old contracts for them and see if they'd be viable candidates for said small-ticket sales. They may just get popped right back up to the Interwebs, but we'll see, on all counts. Rest assured you will be kept updated, my loyal fans and constant readers.

Time to roll the dice, I guess. Let's hope for boxcars.

The Truth about Twitter

I want to make this post longer, because I treasure your hits and have goals for this site. But Paul Constant already made my point for me.

"Paul Constant Reviews Twitter" is an insightful, incisive, and cleverly-written look at Twitter's impact on the Internet and communication.

I'm not sure Twitter will fade away as Constant expects (except in a broad sense), but otherwise I agree with him: Twitter's changed things.

It's challenged writers; it's opened avenues; it's paved the road for a whole new way of doing business and living life, despite its misuse.

Even this post wouldn't be in the format it takes if it weren't for Twitter suggesting 140 characters can be used to convey important ideas.

So I salute Twitter for this noisy but bloodless revolution; and Paul Constant and @amandapalmer for writing it and linking it respectively.

(And yes, every single paragraph is 140 characters long; Constant did it first and I had to see if I could follow his lead. Thank you sir.)

Now tell me: You followed that, didn't you? So how bad can Twitter be? Give it a try; for proof of concept read the #iranelection hashtag.

For now, I have kielbasa to be cooked, laundry to be done, and writing to be wrote. If you want a Twitter primer, DM me. It's worth a try.

Putting Print on Life Support

So, I've avoided talking much about the so-called "death of print" here, mostly because I find the whole debate tiresome. However, said debate came home in the form of me actually seeing a blog post in my little personal social sphere that suggested this death would be a good thing and fully embracing the new era of Open Source information.

I completely disagree, but the discussion on the subject in said post seems to have died out, as blog discussions tend to do within about an hour. And so I blog about it myself.

The discussion stems from this Crain's article, in which the Chief Executive of Dow Jones discusses Google's role in the current dire situation newspapers face, and also confesses the ways in which newspapers allowed Google to help their demise along. I agree with Hinton, on both points: Google is doing serious damage, but the newspapers started it. Unfortunately, the newspapers started it with the best intentions: they started offering their articles online, for free.

This is fantastic. One of the best things about the Internet, as I have often babbled, is its capacity to spread data very far very fast, and to put it in the hands of people who might not have seen it offline. However, this does kind of damage the newspaper's current business model; why pay for it, right? It's right there for free. God knows I don't pay for my RSS feeds from the Times or the chronicle.

Now, newspapers helped to dig this grave. And now they're in danger, and it's possible print editions will become extinct, or at least rare (possibly Print On Demand rather than running off a million copies every morning?). And that is not something I take much issue with; save some trees, leave the paper for more permanent artifacts like textbooks. I don't care if we lose newspapers in a literal, printed-object sense. What I care about losing are two things which are far more important: newspapers as a locus for journalism, and the capacity for writers to get paid for what they do.

While Hinton's language is inflammatory, Google is part of the problem, not just for newspapers but for people getting paid for content generally. Google is one of the big names spearheading the loathsome "exposure as compensation" movement that small-time publishers are getting in on, where an artist or writer's payment for their work is the privilege of being put in a magazine or on a site where people will see it. It is behavior like this that encourages people to think they can and should get everything for free, which of course has nothing to do with the companies backing this movement getting work done for free.

But even beyond my own desire to see myself and my fellow creators getting paid to create, I am worried about the dire consequences for media if newspapers die out. Alternate methods of revenue generation based around free content make perfect sense. Dr. Horrible and FreakAngels are my favorite examples, but those are works of fiction. They are not where we go for information about what is happening in the world right now. As outmoded as print supposedly is (and I disagree that print is the problem, it's the business of print that needs to grow up), I worry that the loss of newspapers will mean the loss of journalistic rigor.

Newspapers have fact-checking, editors, various other mechanisms to (at least theoretically) ensure that the news they publish is the truth. The trouble with the storm of free content is that it's got a very bad signal-to-noise ratio. For every blogger who is a well-trained journalist who practices good rigor you have ten LiveJournal accounts full of vitriolic sensationalism that had their code scraped and slapped up into a tasteful-looking template. At least when the New York Times makes a factual error it tends to get reported on and retracted; relying on Internet sources for our information is how things happen like TMZ.com reporting Jackson died nearly an hour early, and how Australian news sources wind up reporting Jeff Goldblum is dead.

Print is dying because the model needs adjustment; publishers need to be looking at new ways of getting the money to pay themselves and their artists, artists need to be considering new profit models, and newspapers need to start thinking about how they'll get people to pay for their content. The print-on-demand idea could work, new methods of generating ad revenue that could compete with Craigslist, ideas that I'm sure it'd take people more brilliant than me to come up with. But this is not a simple case of survival-of-the-fittest; "free" does not making something more "fit". As a concept and delivery system, the newspaper and book industries need to survive in some form, or the adaptation to the new media is going to be a lot rougher than expected.

Paying for it is not inherently bad, and Open Source is not inherently good, any more than I am inherently a better person because I have a Master's degree or earn a salary that's above the poverty line. Open Source and Internet publishing have the potential to do great things, or to strangle intellectualism just as badly as the current outmoded model; the only difference is that these ideas are (relatively) new and shiny, which has us dazzled into excited complacency. So in that sense, Hinton was wrong to call Google a vampire.

It's more like an angler fish.

(Portions of this piece have been adapted from my comment on the aforementioned defunct discussion thread; my own writing, I assure you, is used with full permission by me, but if it looks familiar, that's why.)

This is important.

This happens to me a lot, and I have learned to accept it. Someone said this better than I was able, this someone being fellow writer-in-waiting, Kat Howard.

The patronage model of artistic endeavor has periodically come up for me, oh, since I first considered the idea of being paid to tell stories; I used to joke, in my most rejection-spackled, miserable moments, that I should email Bill Gates and ask him to pay me to write. And Ms. Palmer's success has me thinking maybe we're coming up on a resurgence of the patronage model, as Ms. Howard suggests: that maybe technologies like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and PayPal and PayPal-like systems will allow for fans to actually directly pay artists. Not merely on a piece-by-piece basis—not $10 for a book, $30 for an art print, $20 for a movie, but to actually create, via donations, a fiscal support network for the creators they love.

Now, the patronage model has its problems; as is often stated, controlling an artist's purse strings also meant that sometimes the artist could be turned into their patron's catspaw. I can imagine, say, my doctor being annoyed that the story he helped pay me to write says something negative about Kaiser Permanente; or the Senator who put a thousand dollars in my pocket wanting me to not deconstruct Washington politics quite so scathingly. And of course, there is the simple fact that Amanda Palmer made that nineteen grand partially because she is Amanda Palmer, and did put out that amazing, Ben Folds-produced album; without the fame she has from the album that has earned her nothing, it's likely her followers on Twitter would not be so numerous and therefore that the people watching her attempts to earn her rent would not have enough people among them who can afford to help.

Of these two issues, the former is the less immediate. The trouble with the patronage model stemmed, to my mind, from a distribution of wealth: using social media as one's personal Lorenzo di Medici, one obviates some or all of the possible political leverage those donations provide. Now at that point the donors could start arguing, against what Neil Gaiman has said, that the artists now really do owe them something; but the hope is that the money would make the artist produce more of the work they want to produce, resulting in higher quality, tighter production schedules, etc. However, possible influence, still a major flaw in the plan.

The latter issue is one I've been discussing lately, and it ties into something I really can't address in this same blog post: the fate of current media and the possible death of the publisher. As it stands, I think that Amanda Palmer (and my favorite example, Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible project) are examples of how I expect to start seeing networks, record labels, and marketing firms to be used: as springboards for one's own self-published career. The album and subsequent campaign and touring gave Amanda Palmer the fame to make money off Twitter; Mutant Enemy's network productions put Joss's name on the map boldly enough to get the DVD sales Dr. Horrible needed.

I really think we are coming up on a dismantling and/or rewiring of the current system; on an era of creator-owned content, of greater cultural cross-pollination, of a new publishing and a new journalism. I'm just trying to figure out what shape it'll take; and perhaps more importantly, how to cash in and become ultra-mega-famous, so I can laugh at all you plebeians from my throne of money.

Life as Mystery: The Light Side of Twitter

I used to rail against Twitter, for all the usual reasons. Now I am pretty active in the Twitter community, such as it is. I joined for reasons of networking, initially—no sense in falling behind on the social tools available to me, I figure—but I have found far more delight in it that as a simple tool for self-promotion.

I am lucky enough that my followers do not merely consist of some analog friends and a few bots—there are people on Twitter who I have never met in person, or met only cursorily, who nevertheless follow and respond to what I say. And in reading them, and trying to view my own tweets with fresh eyes, I am fascinated by the insular, uninformative nature of a typical tweet.

People on Twitter do not generally tell you who they are, where they are, what they are doing; tweets do not usually come with footnotes or backstory. They are slices of a person's life served up without context, references to "the trip" or "the girls" or a never-before-mentioned "Bob" that leave the reader just informed enough to know that they probably didn't understand that tweet at all.

Some of this, of course, is part of Twitter's infamously bad signal-to-noise ratio, the "babbling out loud about one's unexceptional life" that has so captivated critics. And certainly, things like my friend @ragaraja's Quotes of the Day or @hodgman's outbursts of surrealism are the highlights of my Twitter experience, along with the occasional innovative uses of the medium.

But those little slices of everyday life, when done right, they are some of the best parts of my Twitter experience. Those tweets feel like little mystery novelettes to me, tiny hints at some greater set of unifying facts. They show me that some lives are exceptional—that for every three office workers there is someone working with deaf college students, or doing freelance art; that there are people of talent finding opeace and success in this world. And beyond that, these tweets help to remind me that as unified as our lives are now, there are parts of us that are not laid bare, that are not served up for public consumption. They remind me of our individuality and the manifold twists and turns that make each life unique: universal truth found in vague nouns.

Even more than this, those tweets make me think; they make me research, and wonder, and shift my brain around trying to contextualize these people, trying to understand as much of the world as I can. They are little reminders of the Socratic definition of wisdom, served up to me fresh every day. And maybe it's overly optimistic of me; but I figure, if I can find little mysteries and hidden smiles in Twitter, the rest of life can't be that difficult.

The Real Problem with Social Networking (and also, I'm a nerd).

As of this posting, I am now on no less than four networking sites--Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Plaxo, plus the hybridized, partially-network-based LiveJournal and Google Reader--and I am running into a major issue: What do I share where?

This is a problem I first started having with Not Providence (note the subtle pimp) but which has since spread to my Internet experience in general. I give NP a by because I can't know whose feeds are going to overflow on what site and I'd rather maximize exposure, but that's a PR/self-marketing issue, not an issue of Internet etiquette. With things that are not so important as a writing career, I never know how much sharing is too much, or when I've crossed a digital boundary.

Some things are obvious, of course--News items go in Google Reader, short anecdotes of the weird go to Twitter--but where do I mention a new movie, or how I'm feeling, or something of that nature? I'm drowning in options, and what's worse, I feel like every one of my options needs regular care just to make sure it's clear I'm alive and actually a participant in this whole Internet thing. I realize there are programs to allow me to share across multiple networks, but the truth is, I really hate those things. Not only does that sometimes cause glaring mismatches with update styles (though that has lessened somewhat with the removal of Facebook's automatic "is"), but it means that people who follow me on multiple networks are that much more likely to start treating what I say as mindless noise because of its redundancy--something which is already a high risk on Twitter.

And God, if that weren't enough, I really need to update this blog more often.

So here I sit, having just updated everything that needs updating...and both dreading and loving the need to do it all again. Because at least now, once I get this figured out, everything in my slice of the Internet will have a place.

The Twitter in Repose

For those who were wondering, given the date: no, really, I am on Twitter now. You can find me under the_real_tyler (seriously, the number of people on Twitter named Tyler Hayes is really kind of absurd). A link to the feed will be forthcoming when I have the time for a site update.

Having been on Twitter just under a week, I have a few observations about the process:

• Twitter is a fascinating medium to work in—the character limitation has been analyzed to death, but I really do find that it both forces a different style of writing than the larger and more robust blog format, and also provides a forum in which to relay those events that might not be worth an entry in a normal blog. I try to think of my Twitter feed as a museum of the strange and hilarious in my life, instead of a series of dissertations on same.


• The signal-to-noise ratio really is as terrible as Internet commentators claim. Even the feeds I really enjoy have a tendency to broadcast minutiae that probably wouldn't have made it to the Internet in any other medium.


• This is not the fault of the tweeters themselves, at least not entirely; there is something about Twitter as a medium that encourages one to tweet about trivial events unworthy of a normal blog. I think an inability to post everything at once and the unconscious (and unintended) fact that those who do not tweet get their tweets buried mean that people will do whatever they can to try to fill the gap.

So, there you have it. I'm tweeting now. Will wonders never cease. Feel free to follow my feed if you like; the only thing official and writing-related to take place over there will be announcements of Not Providence updates, though, so don't feel as though you are obligated. And please listen to this, my solemn promise that I will never subject those of you who choose to avoid Twitter to LoudTwitter or its sister programs--I firmly believe that the nature of a Twitter feed means it should be entirely opt-in, and LoudTwitter circumvents that.

And again, in case you thought that was also an April Fool's joke: screw MySpace.

It's happened

My consumption into the social networking collective is complete with my acquisition of a Twitter account. If you don't want to read through my feelings on the subject, you can just jump to finding me there, as the_real_tyler.

Let me state briefly my beliefs about Twitter: I think that microblogging, at root, is a fantastic concept, and one with a lot of great applications. I also think that most people do not apply it well at all.

Microblogging's two root words suggest Twitter's real function--it's a blog for things too short or too immediate to write a full blog post about. I think that news stations have also made good use of it by having Twitter feeds for their various commentators, as per what Rick Sanchez does with his Twitter account, to create a running dialog about the news items of the day. Unfortunately, most people seem to feel that they should use it to tell everybody about everything they are doing, like a progress bar for the minutiae of their lives. The stereotype of Twitter I have seen has been, more or less, is a 15-minute span of updates consisting of four message, one of which is an in-joke aimed at a user we may not follow and three of which are about their pants.

I am opposed to this use of Twitter. Not because I think it's unacceptable generally--I won't go against my general feelings about free speech--but because I think that it colors everyone's perceptions about Twitter in a way that it shouldn't be. I think Twitter could be a lot more interesting than it is, and I want to do my part to make it so. Plus it feeds into my secret need to be on every social networking site in the world.

Except MySpace. Screw MySpace.

And of course, because I can't help myself:

Two links from outside my RSS feeds:

• World's best Halloween costume, courtesy of modern technology, and...


• Ron Jeremy's picture on first goat.se. (Please don't make me explain it.)

Critical? Critical.

I had the pleasure, during my theoretically-daily cardio program, to catch President Obama's speech about, and signing of, the stimulus bill. I am ashamed to admit that I had followed some of the basics of this bill, but did not until today realize the full extent of it (which may not have been certain until today anyway, given the ways of American politics). My interest here, however, is in two things Obama said and did during his speech.

One is his continued commitment to governmental transparency. As a bleeding-heart who desperately wants government to do what I think it's supposed to, seeing them making efforts to allow me to judge that for myself is monumental. I just wish this kind of behavior could be met with the level of work-a-day ignorance used to regard political scandals or celebrity meltdowns.

The other, and the more fascinating to me in the short term, is President Obama's comment about the stimulus package providing "critical broadband connections". President Obama is one of the first politicians, and definitely the first President of the United States, who I have ever heard refer to an Internet connection of a decent speed as "critical". Personally, I don't think he's wrong; and I also don't think I'll ever stop being grateful that we have a White House staff who finally understands the importance of the Internet.

Some link salad, because I care.

• Presenting the newest American hobby sensation: Cornhole. Yeah, I'm twelve.


• Kindle 2's functionality predicted by H.G. Wells, Robert Heinlein, Stanislaw Lem, and Philip K. Dick. In case, you know, you didn't realize that these guys were geniuses.


• Salon.com's Gary Kamiya, on the death of the news. The irony of an Op-Ed piece complaining about the decline in impartial journalism is not lost on me, but Kamiya makes some interesting--if occasionally obvious or inflammatory--points about the new style of data processing taking over the world. Almost makes me want to buy a New York Times subscription...


• The McNuggetini. I have seen the End Times...


• The world's smallest writing. And what does it say? "S.U.", for "Stanford University". Well, at least we didn't get vain or anything...

More link salad

I swear, a movie review or something else with teeth is coming soon; it's just that it's the day before Valentine's Day, and I have spent the last couple of days trying to work my normal job, write, and pound a weapons-grade cold into submission. But for today, we have a list of revolutions:

• Brazilian tecnobrega. I haven't heard any of the music yet, though I plan to go searching for it just to see if I can understand what the article is trying to describe. What fascinates me is the DIY production and distribution, and the idea of using CDs as advertising rather than as a revenue source. I can't decide if I prefer their methods or not, but given how much I babble about creator-owned content and alternative methods of distribution I'd be remiss in my duties if I didn't post this.


• Anarcho-speed-dating. That's an actual quote from the article, and it's a fairly apt description. I can't possibly do this one justice.


• Yes, you really can get dating advice from a nine-year-old boy. The jokes write themselves, I think. And most of them aren't very funny.


• Let's take that cuteness above, and introduce its more horrifying brother, shall we? 13-year-old becomes father? I am praying the Sun got their facts wrong.


• IBM has filed a patent for a "bionic body armor" that will electrocute the wearer into forcibly dodging bullets. I hear the crying of the beta-testers...


• And to end on a high note (if you're a nerd like me): Escape from City 17, a series of short films set in the Half-Life universe. Actually quite well done, I'd have to get serious pedantic to tell which parts were footage from the games and which were their own CGI work. I have not yet found a link to the rest of the series, but it'll get posted as soon as I have it.

Witty Post Title You Probably Don't Get

Link salad, get it while it's fresh.

• India considers banning Google Earth. The story itself is an uncomfortable truth about these kinds of technologies, and while I like to focus on the reaffirming quote on the nature of this double-edged sword, mostly this is here because not sharing it felt too much like me manipulating the reader experience.


• And in ironically timed news, Google debuts a new app that will let smartphone users show others where they are. Speaking of double-edged...


• Spinal Tap to record new material. Elation. I think that's what I feel. I can't help but love niche humor.


• Snarkmarket is pitching curricula for a "new liberal arts". I'm not sure if I find this interesting because it's an indicator of a cultural reformation, or interesting because it smells a little like pretension and presumption. I will, in the end, probably be buying the book.

More from the Internets

Good morning, Tubeites. Time for some links.

• A new Nightmare on Elm Street, featuring a new Freddy Krueger. The creative team behind this one is apparently well-known for its "reboot films". What sound does an empty well make?


• The government decides to shrink the U.S. Postal Service. This all at once makes me both happy and sad; this seems like part of an inevitable move toward a paper-light world, and a herald of some shifts that I can't help but consider unfortunate. It's not as though the U.S. government has a history of handling technological shifts well...


• Comcast interrupts Super Bowl with porn. This is comedy that writes itself...


• Road sign warns of zombies. Viral marketing. Hur hur hur.

Rejoice

I hate to bury my last post with month-old news, but given all my ranting on this subject it bears repeating:

All of the Dr. Horrible bills are paid.

Crew, paid off, cast paid off. As of November 29th. Purely through iTunes and DVD sales. I hear a giant middle finger extending.

I really hope that Joss has created a revolution, that creator-owned works and the cutting out of big business really are going to work. There is that part of me that fears saying it when I want to hold a real, professionally-published book of my own in my hands, but I am all for the artist getting their fair share and I think this is a huge step in the right direction.

So bravo, Joss. And bravo to everyone who helped make it happen. (I'll shake my own hand to the tune of fifteen dollars.) Now to see if we can find a way to make it work for novels...

A Single Slice of Internet Vegetation

This is a bit like a radish, I think: small, and if improperly prepared, apt to cause looks of disgust.

Fetal Twittering.

I realize that we here in my ego are apt to babble on endlessly about that thing we refuse to call Web 3.0, and the Internet feeding back into the world, and all the ways in which technology can help to create global community and global culture; but this is not a step forward for any society I want to be a part of. I can't imagine this will be anything but asinine, especially since the prototype currently puts quite a leash on the pregnant mother. We could have spent this money curing cancer, people. Or at least finding something more useful to do with Twitter.

I am your meta-MetaFilter. Call me "Filter Omega".

As usual, life and circumstance puts the lie to my posting claims. The post about obsession and Oliver Postgate (well, his work, that is) is to come later today; for now, you receive more link salad.

• Music industry shifting its anti-piracy tactics. Provided they hold true to this, it looks the RIAA is finally focusing its money and time on targeting music uploaders rather than music downloaders, and is starting to do some work on respecting the privacy of the individual. Unfortunately, they aren't abandoning their current (asinine) crop of lawsuits, so I can only gain so much respect...


• A Mr. Wendell Jamieson gives us a very different take on It's A Wonderful Life. What's better than lit crit? Cynical lit crit!


• POSTNotes. These are briefings and longer works from the UK's Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. I have not gotten a chance to read them yet; I'll edit with a review when I get a chance (and encourage you readers to let me know if this is just terrible stuff). In the meantime, I just dig this idea; it's both a quick way to get an update on current science, and a nice little way for government to make itself a bit less opaque.


• And finally, your dose of schadenfreude: Anti-kidnapping expert kidnapped. This is terrible and I hope Mr. Batista gets out of it safely, and yet at the same time there is a dark part of me that cannot help but laugh. Welcome to the downfall of my generation.

Amuse Bouche

It's not so much a link salad as an appetizer for something more interesting down the road, but a link to a blog post is like a blog post, right? Cabinet of Wonders on Coraline, the Antikythera Mechanism, and my favorite topic, digital/analog crossover.

Content-wise, this is better than the Final Rickroll (and it's a fantastic way to showcase the hard work of people who, if they are at the height of their craft, never get noticed). I hope to some day have the sort of blog that invites this kind of crossover.

Next time, I purge an obsession: Transformers

The Future is Rick Astley

So, here it is, and I realize that there is almost no way that it will stand up to not one but three posts spent stalling; but I actually want to go back to one of those little bouts of dissembling, and talk about the Ultimate Rickroll.

Please understand, I was an early-nineties adopter of the Internet, first via Prodigy then via America Online; I fell in love with the actual, more-or-less direct, browser-based Internet via an FAQ for Final Fantasy VI.

Please also understand that to me, computers are magic. I know CSS and HTML fairly well, I am at least a pretty competent user of most applications and can figure a great many out without an instruction manual; but to me the way in which computers function is almost always alien and confusing on some level, if only at the root level of machine language. So I get a thrill out of new technology and new applications of the old stuff that a power-use might not.

All this is to set the tone for what I have to say about the Ultimate Rickroll, which is that I find it so fascinating because it is such a distillation of what I love about this modern age—the ease of transfer between online and offline realities.

When I started playing with the Internet, the closest thing to grounding the Internet in the offline was email (or, if you want to get technical and more than a little jejune, printouts). While I'm sure there are power users who will tell me you could order things online at that stage, the best I ever found was scans of mail-order catalogs or the occasional roleplaying sourcebook. I remember reading some pretty execrable hypertext fiction at that point, too, and playing a passable but boring online game that purported to be linked to the movie Twelve Monkeys, as well as a few home-brewed RPGs and platformers downloaded off FTP sites. In short, barring non-visual, non-aural contact with a living person, and the occasional file download, what you found online was mostly stuck there.

Then came, at least in my experience, Amazon. A person could go to a website, select a book, pay for it with a credit card and have it delivered to their home. There is a lot to lament about this set-up—the lack of human contact, the damage to independent bookstores—but at the same time, I had to applaud it because it was another way in which online and offline were merging. As major stores started to use websites for their mail-order services, and as Amazon branched out into other things besides books, I could feel myself sliding into the future.

Wednesday night, I had the somewhat strange privilege of visiting uWink. To keep the explanation brief, it is a restaurant wherein touchscreen computers are mounted to each table, and are used to order your food, pay your bill, and play a variety of games by yourself, with your tablemates, or with other groups in the restaurant. When I say it is used to order your food, I mean that it takes the place of the menu and the first half of your encounter with your server; they bring you your food, and your drink refills (which are also ordered via the touchscreen), and they assist you with technical problems. In other words, with the obvious exception of glitches, which the waitstaff are at least nominally equipped to fix, the experience is a seamless integration of local intranet and human interaction; one facilitates the other. It definitely had the light-and-shadow play of something Hollywood trendy, and the food was only pretty good for its price, but there was something glorious about the whole experience. It really did feel like the restaurant of the future, though their future takes some of its cues from The Jetsons, and when I can afford it I'll definitely go there again. I didn't exactly know why this experience made me so giddy—it was not that much of a shift from the normal restaurant experience, except with board games added, but something about the way it was presented, and the simple fact that this was a new application of only semi-modern technology, made it breathtaking.

Then came Thursday, and the Thanksgiving parade, and what I have already termed the Final Rickroll. Go ahead and take a moment to view it, and then I'll explain what I mean.

There we go. Now, the thing about this that took my breath away is that it is one of the next steps in the bridging of the on/offline gap. My aforementioned examples—commerce and service industries—and the other major examples, like online journals or instant messaging programs, are translations of old ideas through new technology. The rickroll, and its predecessor the duckroll, are pranks, yes, but pranks which depend entirely on online technology to work. I can imagine ways in which something like a rickroll could be perpetrated in flesh and blood, totally offline, but by and large the analog rickroll seems like it would be so difficult to pull off as to not be worth the payoff. Then Cartoon Network goes, and manages to stage a real-world rickroll; but here's the kicker for me—that joke wouldn't have worked if we hadn't had the Internet to spread it. It took an online phenomenon and found a way to make it work offline, but its functionality depended on a portion of the viewership understanding what a rickroll was (note, please, that the announcer on the YouTube video I linked says the word "rickroll" but doesn't bother to explain, which I think speaks volumes). In other words, after years of us figuring out how to use the Internet to do what we did anyway, this is a small example of the Internet giving back; and that, in conclusion, is why I have such great appreciation for the Final Rickroll.

We're moving into the future. I mean, we already have a black President; now we just need a flying car.

Witty Post Title, 11/29/08

It figures that after a late-night dose of link salad and an early-morning bout of writing (and the concomitant internal chant of "don't go back and read it yet, don't go back and read it yet..."), I come across yet more links worthy, if not worthier, of inclusion in a link salad. So, prepare to distend your intellectual bellies!

• Yes, you read this video's title correctly: Wii Remote theremin. This is the intellectual equivalent of a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.


• Eliezer Yudkowsky, of Overcoming Bias, has some fascinating things to say about the creative process. You all know I'm a sucker for this subject, but I really mean it when I say that this is a fascinating way of thinking about it. I can't get enough of hearing very smart people talk about the process.


• And because it was referenced in the above article: The Mind Projection Fallacy as explained via old sci-fi movie posters. Again, two worlds collide; I think this one is more like an intellectual Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, with the Wii Theremin standing in as the bacon chocolate chip cookie.

Real post to come after I finish laundry.

My First Pimp

This was too amazing not to put this out here.

For this weekend, and this weekend only, you can see--absolutely free--Joss Whedon's latest project, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

It's a musical about a super-villain. It's by Joss Whedon. It stars Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible, along with someone else who should be seen rather than announced as his arch-nemesis. And perhaps better than that, it is Joss Whedon's attempt to start changing the way things are done in show business: Seriously, he has a Master Plan.

So please, enjoy it--act three goes up tomorrow, July 19th, and is only free until July 20th. This is Whedon at his best; I encourage you not to miss out.