Starbucks & Starbucks

We are Living in the Future 5/21/2010

Here are two headlines I saw yesterday:
Human beings have managed to produce functioning synthetic DNA. Link

The 'Raisin' is a little device (recently approved by the FDA) that sticks to your skin and will help you track the rdif enabled drugs that pass through your system. Link

I think William Gibson has the right idea, writing 'science fiction' set in the very recent past.  

Grooveshark

... is a new service that I am enjoying quite a bit.  Grooveshark's legality amazes me, but it makes sense.  I can find pretty much any song on youtube provided it hasn't been DMCAed, and the same goes for Grooveshark.  I prefer the latter though in that the music selection is better, the audio quality is more consistent, the labeling is a higher quality and it's playlist and reccomendation systems are vastly superior to youtube's.

You can check out my grooveshark here.  I am building two playlists, one of mellowish music to play in the background as I work and another called simply 'the best.'  If you have any songs you would like to reccomend, please do so.

'The Best'  'Work'

They totally had it coming...

source

'Control F' as a Final Draft Tool

Io9 had an excellent piece in their free advice for writers series about '4 Danger Signs to Search for, Before Sending Novel off.'  The article is all about those bits of lazy writing that are so easy to overlook time and time again.  I have decided to run a quick search for these items before I send off a piece, and I feel it has improved my writing.  Here is the list (and explanation) of the things I search for before submissions:


only and just (As far as I know, this is an idiosyncratic weakness of mine.  I seem to over rely on these words to add 'tension' or a sense of immediacy.  They just get redundant really quickly.  But I only want to make my writing more exciting!)
and then (I am not too bad with this one, though I will find it here and there.)
were being and was being (I don't tend to get any hits for these two)
grimly (Such a hackneyed word, especially in speculative fiction.)
there was and there were (Oh how I am guilty of these two.)
It as a sentence opener (Winnowing 'It" out leads to a lot more exciting, stronger sentences.)
ly (the way I search for adverbs... though I should design something a little more elegant.)

In addition to that list, I am trying to be more considerate with my use of: was, so and that.  'That' is a bit a crutch for my writing, and I can usually figure out a more interesting verb choice then talking about how everything 'was' this or that.

Semi-Fictional Obsessions: Augmented Reality

I am fascinated by Augmented Reality.  As a story device, I constantly battle to keep it out of everything I write.  Basically, AR (in the way that I understand and am interested in) is the use of some sort of technology to function as an intermediary between the world and your senses.  I am delighted by stories like 'Rainbows End,' (where the humans gain mental powers akin to demigods based on their contact lens computers and the information/communication that is always present to guide them through life) and so I have a habit of fixating on the science fictional (Ignoring the Overlay) and ignore what is presently available.  But, as usual, the science of today is just as intriguing and inspiring as the purely fictional.

Tech as ancient as maps or as recent as your sleek two thousand dollar laptop with its always on evdo internet are great and (arguably) produce a form of Augmented Reality for their users.  And yet, this is not what I am interested in.  Instead, I feel that what is actually, potentially new and is definitely most inspiring is AR applications that have little to no 'stop what you're doing and look at this thing' aspect.  The goal and the excitement for me is not for times when you have to look down and fiddle with a guidebook (no matter how incredible and futuristic that guidebook).  Rather, I am interested in experiences where you can squint just right and the guidebook becomes another layer of what you're seeing. 

Though it wasn't always apparent to me, Automotive GPS devices are the most successful, and most overlooked, examples of this kind of discretely overlayed Augmented Reality.  Despite the emphasis on AR being flashy cool visuals to distract you away from the view I wonder if we will ever master screen technology to the point where it could be housed in a non-horrendous pair of sunglasses.  Instead, AR might go the direction of a soft AI voice whispering in your ear; always there with a wikipedia excerpt, probability charts, advice or directions depending on what gesture you make with your hands.  (While displays might not be small enough to create anything short of a Stephenson gargoyle, I believe that cameras and speakers are small enough to be worn discretely on the body... if someone could just develop the algorithms to parse the mind numbingly complicated material world).   Another potential technological breakthrough is haptic feedback (feel) which was a cool conceit in Cory Doctorow's story "The Things that Make me Weird and Strange get Engineered Away."  Imagine device that constantly taps messages into the small of your back, maybe leading to a renaissance of interest in Morse code so people can make sense of the incessant rhythm of communication being tap tap tapped.

Augmented Reality inspires a ton of thought, and we're already using very unobtrusive tech to extend our senses beyond our 'natural' limits.  I know not all these developments will be good (the demand to be forever 'on' or connected -which I do not like- will only grow stronger with the successful implementation of this technology as the best of the bad effects) but when push really comes to shove I do not and will not believe that giving people the option to receive and work with more information would be a bad thing.  Whether we are clever enough to effectively use our new and improved 'senses' is a query that is forever being reasked: with contradictory results.

Boingboing AR Linksplosion!

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/17/ted-augmented-realit.html

http://boingboing.net/2010/02/01/augmented-reality-id.html

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/03/03/augmented-reality.html

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/08/04/its-the-end-of-the-n.html

Athens Riot Dog

Apparently, there is a dog that keeps appearing whenever people in Athens riot.  I wonder if he is a communist, or an anarchist or what...

Long Form Journalism

Even though I have from time to time railed and flung metaphorical poo against 'dinosaur media' like newspapers, I must confess that I adore finely crafted long form journalism.  It is tragic that newspapers and news based magazines are two of the only media that support longer articles.  I don't believe this art will ever disappear entirely, just like I don't believe any art form has ever really been lost to humankind.  I do believe that long form journalism will shrink and dwindle as the the profits evaporate and hence the most creative and intelligent people are drawn to new modes of communication (I think perhaps remix friendly, video inundated documentary web sites will fill most of the niche expose and essay once served).  Long form journalism will probably go the way of opera, or even poetry; it will transform into a small craft industry more or less driven by hobbyists and obsessive devotees entirely outside the dominant economic streams.  (I think short fiction is going to the same place).

Despite (or more exactly probably because) of this perceived trend I am ecstatic to have discovered www.longform.org .  The site is dedicated to long form journalism, and goes out of its way (in partnership with http://www.instapaper.com/) to locate, popularize and parse amazing long form journalism through whatever device you're using to view the web.  So far, my favorite piece has been 'Mother Earth, Mother Board' which you should read the very instant you have a couple hours to spare, it's that good.

Talking bout my generation...

The Pew Research Center recently released a report on 'millennials;' i.e. people 18-29 i.e. my generation.  There weren't many surprises, except maybe the focus on family (which mapped to my personal experience with my friends, but I have always worried that was due to a sampling bias because I have awesome friends).  Also, the stats about tattoos are telling... both in how many people have them but also how many people are diligent in keeping them hidden.  I wonder if that will change when we become the dominant demographic group...   

Link

While you're at the Pew site, you should really check out some of the other data.  It was incredibly fun to play with and was very useful for sharpening own conceits and concepts about our society.

Things to (and not to) Say During Sex - Hillarious

Click the picture for full size, and here is the source. http://www.myspace.com/37080660

Hayek and Keynes Gangsta Rap

Man this video is awesome.  The two dominant economic ideologies in our country explained via gangsta rap!  I lean towards Hayek on this one, but I get why people believe Keynes.  But whatever your economics, we can all agree that this is the best possible format for debating economics...

First Person Shooter Disease

The bit about the stroke is my favorite...

Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism

My wife and I have been thoroughly enjoying Netflix streaming, especially the documentaries.  The best I've seen so far are 'Walmart: The High Price of the Low Cost' (though the "look at these poor midwestern shop owners" brand of emotional manipulation did nothing for me) and 'This Film is not yet Rated.'  Some of the other ones we've tried seem... rather shoddily constructed ('Islam: What the West Needs to Know' springs to mind) i.e. the kind of thing a honors high school student could make with access to a couple university professors and 'final cut pro.'  'Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism' stands somewhere in the middle.

(Has anyone else noticed how documentaries seem to be uniquely affectionate of subtitles?)

The shoddiness is mostly at the beginning when they have a little barely animate picture of Rupert Murdoch telling you 'what I own.'  It's not a dealbreaker, but because it is near the absolute beginning of the film it makes you hyper aware of any corners cut or money saved throughout the rest of the movie.

After the primer on the Newscorp media empire Outfoxed quickly transitions to fixate exclusively on the evil that is 'Fox News.'  The documentary does a fairly good job of outlining the biases of the organization.  This argument is well designed, but it felt like 'old news' (though, in all fairness 'Outfoxed' is from 2004 so perhaps this is akin to stating 'Romeo and Juliet is so cliche').  What still worked well, for me at any rate, was the rehashing of the O'Reily melt down around Jeremy Glick, which was heartbreaking to watch.  Likewise, the stat shots concerning the percentage of Fox News watchers who believe patent falsehoods (that we found WMDs in Iraq, that the World Public Opinion favors going to war ect) were a bit mind boggling.  (However, in defense of something I detest you have a chicken or the egg problem when it comes to the errorenous beliefs of Fox News viewers: do people who have stupid ideas watch Fox News or does watching Fox News promote certain stupid ideas?)

Reading some of the reviews of the movie, I am amused by people claiming how 'unbalanced' the film itself was.  Again, the title is 'Outfoxed: Rupert Mordoch's War on Journalism.'  This movie is going to tell you a story, like it says right on the cover, and it will do its best to convince you of its point.  This argument makes me think of people complaining of the carcinogens in cigarettes when the warning label is right there on the pack.

That being said, I take issue with some of the philosophical underpinnings of 'Outfoxed'.  The film's obsession with television seems to me like squabbling over dinosaur bones (but again, this is perhaps due to how much has changed in the last six years).  I pity anyone who gets their 'news' from a 24 hour station (Fox or otherwise) but it is, at least for my cohort, an increasingly moot point.  (We don't get our news from anywhere *rim shot*.)

Moreover, the vaunted notion of 'fairness' the film expouses is a gross misrepresentation of what would be fair.  The platonic ideal of 'Outfoxed's fairness (which Fox News is failing to live up to) is only about balancing between red and blue, the binary of liberal and conservative.  This dialogue is potent because of the way our political process is designed (one winner per election means we have two political parties) and the fact that 'Democrat vs Republican' makes for a good, and easy to tell, story.  Powers that be in TV land do not want to muddy the waters of narrative trying to present the paralyzing complexity of what is closer to actuality: that people have a variety of idiosyncratic ideas about politics and are more often then not are only begrudingly lumped under one banner or another (to say nothing of third parties).  As such, poltics (as presented by the 24 hour 'news' networks and their pet crazy people) is not about values, politcal philosophy and the comprimise and jerry rigging of adults trying to cobble together some strange hybrid that we can tolerate (or at least that the lobbyist and big time donors will tolerate); but rather 'politics' is a media event, a soccer match between two long time rivals with all the associated yahoos, hooligans and stat crunchers on either side.  Who can blame them though?  Football gets much better ratings then C-Span.


Finally, my biggest problem arrives when the movie reaches the 'call to action' ending.   The only viable option presented by 'Outfoxed' is to petition the institutional giants in our life to be a just a teeny tiny bit nicer.  For example, the actions we can take actions are things like 'letter writing campaigns' or 'protesting outside a station building.'  There's an anectdote about some people founding their own low power fm station but the film doesn't bother to go into why this is difficult (hint, it is not because of any technical issues).  In my opinion, media consolidation is a problem of corporatism.  That is to say, government corporate partnership wherein the laws are designed in such away as to create artificial barriers of entry which neccesite tha dominance of one or, at best, a few corporate oligarchs in charge of a market.  Despite the antitrust laws on the books the law works to produce effective and insular collusion of media kingdoms.  In my opinion, if you want to fight the imbalance inherent in 'news' coverage (Fox or otherwise) don't beg for scraps from the king's table but start your own reporting.  Fairness means that everyone could start their own station, and in fact many of my generations are busily producing our own content (banal and insipid as most of that may be).  We'll make our networks on youtube or if we're feeling particularly indie and anticorporate we can post our ogg format videos on our home servers. 

Not to belabor the point but we as private citizens have more or less been legally prohibited from making up our own tv or radio stations (Clear Channel's dominance of the radio market is not a function of its ruthless and overwhelming prowess in business but rather the deference paid to it in the am/fm permit process).  At one point, one of the interviewees complains about talk radio being full of right wing nuts.  Well, it is full of right wing nuts because they are the ones that make money for Clear Channel.  So instead of asking 'why is talk radio full of right wing nuts' or 'why is Fox News so unbalanced' we should instead ask 'why are the only voices we hear over our commonly owned radio frequencies those that make money for corporate 'persons'?  Why do we have only the internet with which to hear people?'  Outfoxed never gets to this far more interesting -and telling- question.  And the film never gets there because it operates from an ideological basis that corporate dominance of the media is as natural as the Rockies (which are now a registered trademark of Coors, or so I've been told).  Though, the movie was independently funded, promoted and distributed so it's nice that they are at least practicing what they're not preaching.

Despite these esoteric complaints I still think that 'Outfoxed' was an effective documentary and would reccomend it to anyone who likes documentaries.

Nightmare fuel

Glen-Palin

'A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?'

The Second Coming - Yeats

Source

If Mario Brothers were designed in 2010...

Sigh.  It's funny cause it's true.  Of course, you could only upgrade to the mega-mushroom if you convinced twenty friends to stomp goombas with you...

source

by way of  kottle

Self Tracking

I've tried to do a weekly log where I write about my writing 'the week in writing' (and I get triple points if I write variations of writing a few more times in this sentence so: writing writes written writing writing).  I still might idly journal that way from time to time, but since it wasn't producing the results I was looking for I've decided to try something simpler and more data driven.  I.E. something far, far more anal.  I present you 'The Quantified Writer' a shared Google spreadsheet where I will track my writing, time spent revising and otherwise working at being a writer (writing writing writing).  I hope that this honesty inducing nanny doc will get me writing.  At the very least, I imagine this may induce me to churn out more blog posts in a feeble attempt to up my total word count for the day.

(If you are interested in the awesome possibilities and pitfalls associated with self tracking you should check out the blog 'Quantified Self.'  I was particularly moved by 'Why I Stopped Tracking' the advice and insight of which I am wholly ignoring in this mad scheme of mine...)