Rocket Bomber - Links and Thoughts

Tyrone Brunson – The Smurf

Good Morning.

Urban Studies:
We need small houses : BetterCities.net

I can see how some people in some neighborhoods might be opposed; “not in character” with the other houses, “lowering” perceived property values (I say perceived, because there are never numbers in these arguments) — but what we need is affordable housing for first-time home buyers and more often than not: the houses just don’t exist anymore. Who in the hell would buy a 400 square foot home? is the question — I would, for one. It would be all I need, and while I love some of the conveniences of apartment living, I would also like the opportunity to pay a mortgage rather than rent, and 400 square feet would suit me just fine, thank you.

When the time comes, I’ll likely have to build my own

see also: Tokyo Takes New York: Astounding Housing Facts : Next City

Mobile:
“The amazing cheap-o handset is the new iPhone.”
Don’t Diss Cheap Smartphones. They’re About to Change Everything : Wired Gadget Lab

“One of the key questions for both the carriers and, in particular, for device makers is whether the shift away from subsidies and two-year contracts will shorten or lengthen the average time between consumer upgrades.”
No-Subsidy Mobile Phone Plans Gaining Steam, With T-Mobile Leading the Way

“Unlike the high-end phone market where things progress at a steady clip, the low-end phone market has made bigger leaps with each generation as smartphones continue to overtake the global phone market.”
The evolution of the $150 cellphone

When we talk about Advances in Computing, usually the biggest revolution we ignore is The Computer In Your Pocket. Combined with ‘fast-enough’ data and web access, yes, your phone (or it’s close kin, the 7” tablet) is often a replacement for your computer, doing the things you used to have to sit down at a desk to accomplish (we don’t ignore but often forget that the laptop largely replaced the desktop 6 years ago). Phones are only getting more capable, so much so that tablets (the new hotness) are built using the phone operating systems. And while the $699 iPad may be the benchmark some like to use, I think the $150 phones are more exciting, and hold more promise.

If we get to the point where new phone apps can be programmed using nothing more than the phones themselves — at that point we’ve really democratized the platform. We’re not there yet, but getting smart phones into more and more hands is the first step.

Tech: …speaking of democratizing the platform -
“Everybody and their mothers (especially FCC commissioner Mignon Clyburn’s mother, apparently) are up in arms about this net neutrality thing. Why now? Net neutrality has been an idea, and occasionally a set of somewhat spotty regulations, kicking around the Internet for years, and the public hasn’t ever much seemed to care.
“Even a week ago, if you’d ask people for their thoughts on ‘common carrier’ regulation or ‘Title II’ or ‘paid prioritization,’ you’ll probably get a lot of blank stares. … But American citizens are sure paying attention now. I mean, who really goes to a FCC open meeting to shout down the commissioners?”
Why Net Neutrality Became A Thing For The Internet Generation

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Today’s Book Recommendation is The Master Switch by Tim Wu. From the publisher -
“It is easy to forget that every development in the history of the American information industry—from the telephone to radio to film—once existed in an open and chaotic marketplace inhabited by entrepreneurs and utopians, just as the Internet does today. Each of these, however, grew to be dominated by a monopolist or cartel. In this pathbreaking book, Tim Wu asks: will the Internet follow the same fate? Could the Web—the entire flow of American information—come to be ruled by a corporate leviathan in possession of ‘the master switch’?”

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Diary entry for 17 May:

Tim Wu’s book came out in November of 2010 — which means he was writing it well before that. The issues now coming to a head are 4 to 5 (or even 40) years old, so in a way — it’s nothing new.

There are three reasons we’re talking about Net Neutrality now, and why it’s become a “big deal”

1st: This hits people at home. You (generally) don’t give a rats ass about internet so long as it is “fast enough“ for whatever it is you do, but when Netflix slows down from what you’re used to all of a sudden it becomes an issue. If Netflix had always sucked on your connection, that’d be one thing, but if things were good but now they aren’t, you notice. You go online, you type things like “Is netflix down” or “why is netflix so slow” into a search box, and it pulls up news articles and forum posts. You educate yourself; and if there is one thing corporations hate, it is educated consumers.

2nd: “We already paid for that”:
When we pay for a burger, we get a burger. When we pay for cable, we get cable TV. When we pay for a gym membership, we get to use the gym — many of us don’t actually use the gym fully, we don’t go every day, we go but for only a half hour, or we stop going… but we have the membership.

Internet companies have been selling us gym memberships: advertising the Whole Glorious Facility that We Can Use Whenever and However We Want — but also pretty sure that no one is going to actually use all of it. But then came peer-to-peer sharing, streaming online video, massively-multiplayer online games, skype and other easy-to-use two-way video chat, and the current catalyst: Netflix.

It’s not that Netflix was invented online video, but Netflix brought all their subscribers with them — and the current Netflix crowd loved movies and TV (that’s kind of the whole point of paying for the original Netflix DVD rentals).

Add up Netflix, Skype, World of Warcraft, bittorrent, 10 million or so xboxes and playstations, and families moving from the single desktop plugged into the internet, to the desktop plus laptops, tablets, and phones all on home wifi — and suddenly everybody was using the Internet Gym and using it All The Time. But that should also be fine, because that’s what we were promised, and that’s what we paid for. We’ve been overcharged for internet for a decade now.

That’s not how your cable company sees it. Obscene profit is (from their perspective) their god-given right, and customers using their internet connections to connect to the internet is (again, from their perspective) a betrayal, and an ‘abuse’ of the system.

And instead of upgrading the pipes, they squat on existing infrastructure, suppress any potential competition, start spending money on lobbyists and campaign contributions, and prepare to squeeze their customers for more money.

The Thing About the Internet is it’s not a water pipe, or electrical transmission wire, or a coaxial cable — once some fiber is laid down, the internet literally moves at the speed of light, and the ‘guts’ of the system aren’t pumps and transformers — the ‘guts’ of the internet are in fact just more computers.

I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but computing power gets both more powerful and cheaper every year. Unlike every other utility, basic internet infrastructure gets cheaper to expand and operate as time goes on. Sure, the user base is growing too, and the data throughput each one of us requires is also growing, but any industry run by professionals deals with growth as a very ordinary part of doing business — and in nearly any other business, growth would be a *fantastic* problem to have. This leads us to —

3rd: The ISPs are just getting greedy.

The ISPs see a rise in demand, and their response (instead of building more infrastructure to meet demand and customer expectations) is to artificially throttle the internet ‘supply’ and force prices even higher. Customers are already being charged at both ends — I pay for internet at home, and I also pay a webhosting company that serves you this website. You pay for internet, and Netflix also pays a carrier to access the internet from their side. [this is also very, very different from how electricity and water are delivered, which is why I hate those analogies]

Now, in addition to charging at both ends, Comcast and Verizon want to introduce a 3rd charge in the middle. In effect, their customers are a new commodity, and the ISPs want to charge companies to access them — to get to You. Taking it to extremes, the ISPs would also subdivide the internet you can access and charge you extra to access chunks of it — want Netflix? That’s five bucks. Or, allow me to sell you this bundle — all the internet ‘channels’ you know and love, and all it costs is an easy $80 monthly surcharge…

That’s how the cable companies work; we know that. We hate the cable companies. Cable sees internet as a great deal — currently, to get cable TV, your provider has to pay the networks for content, which they sell to you at a markup. In this brave new world that is forming, the ISP would charge Netflix for content, which they then get to sell to you at a markup. It’s not about getting paid twice, by customers at both ends of the internet pipes, but getting paid four times — charging for access to the pipes, then charging Web companies for access to customers, and also charging customers more for using too much data (by whatever definitions of ‘too much’ your ISP cares to define).

To solve this problem and return the internet to What We We’re Promised It Would Be, we need regulation to keep the ISPs from getting too greedy, and real competition among providers to give customers choices and let the market work to drive down prices. Baring real competition, we need even more regulation (past just Net Neutrality) because at that point we’re permitting de facto monopolies that need to be treated like other utility companies.

And it all comes down to Netflix. Before your Netflix started to suck, not enough people cared, and Internet Service would have slowly transformed into just-another-cable-TV bill without anyone noticing. Now, the issue has come to a head, and I only hope the notoriously-short-attention-span internet will stick with this issue until we get to see real change.

I’m not holding my breath, though. —M.

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The Knife – Heartbeats

Good Morning.

What?:
https://www.google.com/search?q=giant+amazon+locker

A giant, mysterious Amazon locker has appeared right in the middle of downtown San Francisco : The Verge
Amazon leaves mysterious giant orange locker in downtown SF : c|net
Mysterious giant Amazon locker appears in San Francisco for Friday event : GeekWire

My guess would be that it’s an Amazon Delivery Van (minivan) inside; amazon will announce their own, branded delivery service. (alongside an extended roll out of their locker program?) but Business Insider says it’s just another promotion with Amazon and Nissan.

Web:
“Pinterest has a vision of solving discovery and helping everyone find things they’ll love. This new investment gives us additional resources to realize our vision.”
Pinterest Raises A $200 Million Warchest To Do Battle With Google : ReadWrite

Indeed, the only way to beat Google is not to copy them (they do what they do too well) but to revolutionize and leave Google copying you (…a pursuit where Google has an abysmal track record). I don’t know if Pinterest has what it takes, though — maybe in a niche, like online shopping, but then you run into Amazon… we’ll just have to see.

Science:
“Wildfires are sweeping through drought-addled Southern California, a massive ice sheet that holds 10 feet worth of sea level rise is resigned to thaw in Antarctica, and top military officials are warning that rising temperatures are leading to global conflict. What else do you need? If climate change were a disease, it’d be thick in the bloodstream, and the symptoms of our carbon-stuffed atmosphere are being felt by Americans every day.
“Just last week, the White House unveiled a deeply researched scientific work that outlined the many ways that global warming is already impacting the nation. This week, we lived them.”
The Week Climate Changed Everything : Motherboard

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Riffing off that first link, and Amazon’s mystery box, Today’s Book Recommendation is The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon and just to show I have a sense of irony: here’s the link to the Amazon Kindle edition. There Is No Escaping Amazon.

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Diary entry for 16 May:

I could write yet another diatribe on Amazon, but I feel I’m done with that. I’ve already written too much, perhaps, as a quick google search handily illustrates. It’s not that I’m opposed to writing more, or that my opinion of Amazon has substantially changed, but I just can’t keep fighting it. Personally, the stakes have changed as well.

If I had to pick one article to take the place of today’s essay, it’d be the most recent, The Book Utility Co.

That’s it for today; I think I’ll start working on tomorrow’s. —M.

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REO Speedwagon – Roll With The Changes

Good Morning. (yes, I know what time it is)

Comics: What Would Make Manga More Appealing to Comics Fans? + 24 Manga for New Readers : MangaComicsManga

“How manga is shelved in bookstores and comics shops can definitely make discovery of new titles difficult for readers who want to get into manga. Having all manga titles shelved alphabetically by title and not by genre is kind of like going to a record store and finding all the jazz, rock, electronic dance music and classical records organized alphabetically by title. Yo Yo Ma, next to Yo La Tengo, next to Yngwie Malmsteen. I know that’s how things are, but it’s not helping new readers get introduced to manga, that’s for sure.”

…once you’re a fan, though, having everything mixed together enables serendipitous discover of new books easier.

Movies:
“But is that what we really want? When I was interviewed back in 2009 for The People vs George Lucas, I said that what I really wanted Lucas to do was take all that money and social capital and infrastructure and build a new universe with new characters and tell us a new story. Not because I’m sure it would be awesome, but because I want something new.”
No, Michael Bay Has Not Destroyed Your Childhood

‘Destroy’ is such a strong word. I think it would be more accurate to say Michael Bay has carved nostalgia-laden properties into chops, steaks, and roasts and is selling them back to us retail.

Media:
“At the annual City University Journalism School dinner, on Monday, Dean Baquet, the managing editor of the New York Times, was seated with Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the paper’s publisher. At the time, I did not give a moment’s thought to why Jill Abramson, the paper’s executive editor, was not at their table. Then, at 2:36 P.M. on Wednesday, an announcement from the Times hit my e-mail, saying that Baquet would replace Abramson, less than three years after she was appointed the first woman in the top job. Baquet will be the first African-American to lead the Times.”
Why Jill Abramson Was Fired : The New Yorker

It came down to issues of fairness, and pay equity, and respect, I think — you can read all about it at the link.

Writing: Agreed. Want to Write Great Science Fiction? Read Classic Literature : io9

Design: Tip #1 should have been: don’t do these tall, scroll-scroll-scroll web infographics. Just Don’t. The information would have been better presented as a text outline, and the execution of the post neatly contradicts the intended message – Infographic: Tips For Designing Effective Visual Communication : Design Taxi

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Building on that first link, let’s go back and look at manga —Though perhaps doomed to be out-of-date even in the year it was published, Today’s Book Recommendation is Manga: The Complete Guide by Jason Thompson — it dates to 2007, so we’re missing anything from that year on — but like yesterday’s recommendation, the value of the Manga Guide as a historic reference is incalculable.

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Diary entry for 15 May:
Obviously I got a late start this morning, and while I am operating on something-of-a-buffer, I still prefer the links to be timely (so I’m working—at most—three days ahead) and even with that: The section of each “links and thoughts” installment that gets finished last is the ‘thought’ part.

It is not impossible to keep a daily diary, or even to think of something to write, but I can’t guarantee deep thoughts, annotated with images or video and with helpful links scattered throughout. I just can’t. I promise that links will always be presented with appropriate snark commentary, as merited, but the end of each post — be it confessional, lecture, revelation, insight, or total crap — can’t always be 12 paragraphs and won’t always follow a topic to conclusion. That’s nice and all, but I’m stretching things pretty far (and relying on your patience) already by doing this without proper editorial oversight, and may have to fall back on old conventions (“here’s a blog post mentioning that the other blog post is late”). Not every day is going to have an exciting, thoughtful, heartfelt essay attached.

Indeed, some diary entries will have to be short, if only because I want to get the product out the door before 2:30 in the afternoon. —M.

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Bronski Beat – Smalltown Boy

Good Morning.

No: the daily music embed usually has nothing to do with the rest of the post — but thanks for asking.

Media: Physical media, not the other type –
“The week-long course aimed to provide students with an introduction to identification, handling and preservation of a range of audiovisual formats, with students receiving hands-on experience with motion picture film, magnetic media, audio technologies and video. In the pictures above, students are seen exploring the insides of VHS, U-matic casettes, magnetic tape and more. The workshop included training on basic conservation treatments, such as splicing and tear repair of motion picture film, preservation winding of films, and cleaning of material.”
http://ebookporn.tumblr.com/post/85568173337/studentconservators-blog-ever-considered-the

Food: The surprisingly complex story (drug cartels! climate change! citrus viruses!) behind $1 limes -
The Soaring Price of Limes Means Trouble : AlterNet

Music: “The vocals are Jackson, but the production is not, and it shows.”
Michael Jackson’s New Album And Why We Can’t Say Goodbye To Dead Musicians

Jackson comes with… baggage. But the songs were good, dammit. I don’t think we give MJ enough credit as an arranger and producer — sure, he was self-taught and relied on recording himself singing a cappella riffs, horns, and drum parts into an audio tape recorder — but if you have to teach yourself pop music composition, there are worse ways to do it than hanging around Motown studios in the 70s.

I still don’t understand the persistent, rabid (and worldwide) fan base he inspires, but I guess I wasn’t part of the target audience in the 80s.

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Today’s Book Recommendation is The Rolling Stone Album Guide — from 1992. Do not be fooled into thinking the 2004 update made the guide any better — and besides, you can get the 1992 edition for like $3 (plus shipping). A book (physical book) like this isn’t about the latest music anyway. When you can listen to free samples online of just about any track off any album anyway, one hardly needs an independent arbiter of taste to tell you what’s good. These days we also have wikipedia, of course, and any artist’s discography is no more than 5 seconds and a google search away. The reason to pick up the Album Guide then, is its importance as a historical document — for $3 — and a handy music education that you can leave on top of the toilet tank and flip through at your leisure for the next decade.

That, and you (pop and rock fan) need this thing for the Jazz and Blues album reviews.

##

Diary entry for 14 May:
Music is an important part of my life. Though obviously, we would all say that.

(If you don’t, you are a sad, sad person and I pity the life you must be suffering through.)

According to reputable sources [soundcheck, nytimes, cracked] your musical tastes are formed in your early teens and for many of us, they get stuck there — that’s not to say you won’t discover new bands later in life, but the new bands will often sound like the old ones.

I’m not sure where my own taste comes from, to tell you the truth, because I like stuff that came out the year I was born, and years and decades before that. It also doesn’t explain how new music revolutions get started — If we key in on the music when we were, say, 14, then where did your&my favorite artists catch the bug when they were 14? Shouldn’t that sound and my favs’ sound, well, sound the same? There’s also the phenomenon of the garage band: kids grabbing instruments and practicing with friends, you know, in high school. They start out copying their favorite artists (and thus many a bad cover band is born) but the acts that make it—a few years later in their early 20s—are obviously bringing something else to the table, not just the style they imprinted on at 14.

It’s a really interesting idea — and may explain the periodic revivals of things like funk, ska, and punk, or the pendulum swing between pared-back guitar-bass-drums ‘rock’ and lusher arrangements with strings and choirs and shit. One trend inevitably leads to a reaction by the other, and each time we bring back the “old” sound, critics inevitably gush about how this is the “real” sound.

Me? Eh. I like it all — but if you can add a horn line and a slap bass to it, you’ll make me happier.

My eclectic tastes can be traced back to elementary and middle school music education programs: I was in the band. 14 is when I started playing in Jazz Band, in fact, after playing instruments for 7 years at that point, and sax for 4. So while my peers were listening Bon Jovi, Huey Lewis, Whitney Houston, and yes, Michael Jackson — as well as watching MTV, which for you kids out there, was a music-thing back in the 80s kind of like YouTube, unrelated to whatever currently calls itself ‘MTV’ — *I* was getting some grounding in the jazz music and standards of the 30s, 40s, and 50s on top of all that pop, plus my dad’s vinyl collection (folk from the 70s, mostly; not that I would play ‘em but he would, on weekends) — and ice that whole cake with the emerging radio format “classic rock”, which was also a new thing once:

“Classic rock is a radio format which developed from the album-oriented rock (AOR) format in the early 1980s. In the United States, the classic rock format features music ranging generally from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, primarily focusing on commercially-successful hard rock, blues rock, and arena rock popularized in the 1970s.” — wikipedia

Pile on even more: I grew up in the American south and so had to listen to some country music (unless I never left the house) — plus exposure to this one cover band, out of New York and even more 60s music that ended up on a lot of 80s movie soundtracks and…

well, yeah: I heard it all. I ended up liking a lot of music, and a lot of different types of music, even some that would seem mutually incompatible.

I didn’t discover funk until college. Junior year, I think, by way of James Brown and his backing band, the JBs, and I found my way to James Brown through the samples used by Hip Hop — when you read an article citing James Brown as the most sampled artist, you think to yourself, “hm, I need to listen to some early James Brown”.

So from 1930s Jazz through ‘standards’ and early rock and roll and both the rock and folk sides of the 60s and into everything-but-disco in the 70s (but disco too, because I lived through the 70s) and on to the “new” music of the late 80s — which included the 2nd wave of heavy metal and the ‘golden age’ of hip hop (MTV and most of the media were still calling it ‘rap’ back then, as I recall) — and right up until Nirvana (which is a bright dividing line in music to me, at least, from ‘what was’ to ‘what is’, maybe because I was 17 or so at the time) I was exceptionally well versed in music, including weird stuff my friends had never heard of. My favorite band was Morphine. I collected choral music, with a decided preference for settings of the requiem mass. I played pop music in the stands at GT football games, and weirder stuff in music classes. I legitimately like Rush and own all their studio albums (I’m not as particular about collecting the live albums, though).

I think the only reason I didn’t become a music critic (aside from my love of Rush, which in most people’s eyes automatically disqualifies me) is because I can find it hard to say anything *bad* about music – there’s almost always something good to listen to, even if it’s only the ‘hit single’ off the album . And if it’s bad, truly bad, why would I want to listen to it to begin with?

[Morphine – “You speak my language” & “Honey white”]

To top it all off, folks tell me I have a “radio voice”. Maybe that’s my calling: not that we need radio DJs anymore — even back in the 80s when I was listening to ‘classic rock’ the role of the DJ was being replaced by market-tested corporate playlists. These days, your “local” radio is supplied via satellite from Clear Channel corporate out of NORAD or somewhere before being rebroadcast — and the only place you still listen to radio, maybe, is in your car. The rest of the time you have an iPod or your phone or the internet, streaming music…

…or you trawl YouTube for hours each week looking for great songs to share on social media – A DJ for an audience of maybe a dozen (who knows how many people actually click to open the links) and a radio show that plays out in slow motion, 4 minutes at a time, every day. Good Morning. —M.

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Wild Cherry – Electrified Funk

Good Morning.

Music Business:
“Since incorporating sales figures from SoundScan and adding the activity of streaming services like Spotify and YouTube (also a streaming service, whether or not it brands itself as one), Billboard likely has the most accurate data it’s ever had. That doesn’t make the task of breaking out self-identifying fans and their favorite songs any easier. “
Fixing the Charts : The New Yorker

TV Business:
“Of the 47 new series introduced this past TV season by the major US broadcast networks (NBC, CBS, FOX, ABC and The CW), only 13 have been renewed for next year”
…
“Grappling with season-to-season ratings declines (only NBC showed growth this year), the networks are trying a new tactic: approaching their lineups as if they are summer movie schedules.”
Television is taking a cue from summer movie blockbusters : Quartz

I suppose this is only fair, after Hollywood went to the trouble of turning every nostalgia-laden TV show in to a movie back in the 1990s.
see also: Peak TV?

All Up In Your Business: ‘Frontline’ Doc Explores How Sept. 11 Created Today’s NSA : Fresh Air/NPR -audio at link

What?: Kenny G has become China’s goodbye music and no one knows why

Gaming: Following up on the Nintendo news links I shared on Friday –

How we’d save Nintendo : Ars Technica

“All of this feels eerily similar to the SEGA Dreamcast. An old, honorable company tried to do something special in the gaming space and failed. That company clung to first-party titles in the hopes things would turn around until they didn’t.”
The Wii U is Dead : SlashGear

Invoking the ghost of the Dreamcast… that takes me back…

The Birth of the $60 Billion Videogame Industry: Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Mario Bros., and Sega’s war on Nintendo : Medium

The video game console wars have a surprising ongoing life in Japanese media, with not one but two ongoing fictionalizations:

• Hyperdimension Neptunia – see also: 1 – 2 – 3
• World War Blue – see also: 1 – 2

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Today’s Book Recommendation is Think Like a Freak by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (middle initials are important) – which I obviously haven’t read yet (it just came out) but I feel fairly confident in the recommendation considering this pair’s previous two books, and after hearing them talk about it in their most recent podcast. [here’s a transcript if you don’t have your ears on] [Levitt & Dubner use the word ‘bacon’ 34 times in the podcast, you know it has to be good]
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Diary entry for 13 May:
One thing I’ve been doing recently, knowing that I have a daily ‘deadline’ to write something interesting (for whatever assumed values I have for ‘interesting’), is going back to my notes.

I haven’t dug out the dusty Moleskines (yet). But there are a lot of started-and-abandoned drafts in txt documents on my harddrive, to say nothing of the random notes — files named Scratch, Whiteboard, Topics, Found, and Notes; folders with names like Sync, Misc, Queue, Arc, Notes (again), and the overloaded Temp folder; and assorted harddrive backups which no doubt have files I’ve since merged or deleted (or in rare cases, published).

What do I do with the list of headlines that were obviously meant to remind me of (one hopes at least) a short essay topic, but without any additional material? What to make of “Two Islands”? It’s on a list between “Business as Hobby” and “Wallpaper” — I actually remember what Wallpaper was supposed to be about*, and business-as-a-hobby seems obvious as well (likely a dressing-down of owners who go into business without thinking of the money, and making a plan; I’m sure I was watching Kitchen Nightmares at the time) — but “Two Islands”?

I can’t follow that anymore. And yet, I haven’t deleted it. (Who knows? Maybe I’ll remember, or come up with a new topic to go with it.)

Some of my drafts are pretty well along, but stalled — occasionally because I haven’t yet found all the sources to illustrate my points, sometimes because I can’t be arsed to properly edit it down from a drunken ramble, in at least one case because breaking news ‘stole my thunder’, but usually because I need one or two more really good ideas to make a proper post out of it. I don’t properly format these things anyway (topic, point a, point b, point c, conclusion) and maybe some high-school-taught outlining would be good for me — but that’s not how I think, or how I write.

Actually, my process is more like “Read All The Things!” — I mean, all the things, even stuff that seems off-topic — and then let my subconscious work on it until I’ve synthesized an original thought, something really interesting, a frickin’ revolution that I then can’t quite express properly in words, and I spend too much time looking for the words, and I get frustrated, or I post my literal best attempt at changing the whole world for the better and it gets ignored, or trashed.

…So probably just like everyone else’s writing process.

The backward-rifling through my notes hasn’t produced any diary entries yet (unless you count this one) but I haven’t despaired of finding some good ideas there. —M.

[image source: Randall Monroe, xkcd]

* and who knows, maybe I’ll actually write the “wallpaper” essay

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Super bass Punjabi style Dhol remix

Good Morning.

It’s a Monday. (I don’t know if I’ll do something special on Mondays with these posts, but I thought I’d float that as an idea and see how I like it in a week or two)

Tech: “All programming teams are constructed by and of crazy people”
Programming Sucks : stilldrinking.org

Media Diet: update your rss feeds as needed -
“That’s what this blog is going to be about. I’ll share some of what I learned for the book—with some stuff that I didn’t include. And unlike the book, I’ll be giving some of my impressions of drinks and bars, and maybe even a little bit of my own life in the kitchen, standing in front of homemade ginger beer or a shaker full of ice, wondering what to pour in next.”
Thinking on the Top Shelf: Welcome to Proof – a new Wired Science blog

Education:
“Charter schools benefit from a massive double standard, taking public money without being subject to the regulations or oversight applied to traditional public schools. That lack of regulation and oversight has a cost, in students’ educational experiences and in dollars. More than $100 million, as a new report from the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education shows.”
…
“While some of the most egregious cases are found out, leading in some cases to prison sentences …we have no way of knowing how many similar situations haven’t yet come to light.”
Weak charter school oversight leads to fraud and mismanagement

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Today’s Book Recommendation is The Noble Hustle, “Pulitzer finalist Colson Whitehead’s hilarious memoir of his search for meaning at high stakes poker tables, which the author describes as ‘Eat, Pray, Love for depressed shut-ins.’” – Whitehead has been making the rounds of NPR shows, which is where I first heard about his book – perhaps obviously I personally haven’t read it yet, but damn: that premise.

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Diary entry for 12 May:
Yesterday I heard an amazing conversation on the radio (On Being, an APM production often heard on NPR affiliates) about fairy tales and modern storytelling:

Maria Tatar — The Great Cauldron of Story: Why Fairy Tales are for Adults Again

Lucky for you, the full audio is at the link.

“Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, where she also chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythology. Her books include Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood and The Annotated Brothers Grimm.”

One could take the new TV shows Grimm and Once Upon a Time as just more (yet more) examples of originality-bankrupt Hollywood running out of ideas and resorting to recycling, and autolysis. Another interpretation: The TV networks were looking to riff off (or rip off) Willingham’s Fables without actually paying anything for it.

Myth and legend—and yes, fairy tales—have been grist for the media mill for a while, though — not just Diz ripping off Grimm in 1939 (and ever since) but also the Brothers Grimm: Jacob and Wilhelm didn’t write new stories in 1812, they traveled the countryside and wrote stuff down. Old stuff. I’m not sure if Los Dos Bros Grimm even knew (at first) just how deep the rabbit hole went [ha, heh]. They tapped into a deep vein of collective unconscious that both Freud and Jung went all, well, Freudian and Jungian on a century later. The tales themselves had been handed around for quite a few centuries prior. I’m not going to write a dissertation comparing Ovid’s Metamorphoses (itself 1st century AD compilation of older myths) with Grimms’ Fairy Tales, but I could see value in the analysis [and for you grad students out there: hey, free dissertation topic].

If we add on Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey (the “monomyth”) and Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion — hell, now you’re writing with fire.

My own process involves a whole lot of reading — not just the theory and monomyth and metamyth (which might be the best way to describe the links in the diary entry up to this point) but also as much genre fiction I can cram into the limited reading time I have — after all, if all you read are books on how to write – the only ideas you’re going to get are how to write books on how to write books and you’ll be dragged downward into a recursive whirlpool between massive writer’s blocks [ref. Scylla & Charybdis] [too far, too smug, too cute?].

Watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer is going to do more for your craft than reading Man and His Symbols, or Moses and Monotheism (no, really) — so don’t feel guilty about your ‘guilty pleasures’. Especially if you’re marathoning all of it. (while you’re at it, binge-watch Full Metal Alchemist).

A grounding in ‘theory’ is certainly worth pursuing — But be careful: if you think too much about storytelling, myth, psychology, craft, form, and art — you just might find the time spent learning gets in the way of time spent writing. —M.

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Elvis Presley – I’m Movin On

Good Morning.

Music: More Elvis in my usual Sunday music round-up — but it’s not all Elvis. The topic is actually American Music Studios and their house band, The Memphis Boys.

Books: The Night Library -
“Noticing that Shibuya lacked an accessible library that stayed open late enough for people who work full-time to be able to enjoy, book-loving Mori resolved to build his dream library it as close to the sprawling station as possible and invite like-minded souls to share it. With a unit already purchased and currently being fitting out with shelves, counters, and the facilities required to provide drinks to customers, Mori realised that he’d need a little extra help if he was to fill his shelves with enough titles to make it worth visiting.”
Books meet beer – Man achieves dream of opening ‘night library’ with help from crowdfunding site : Rocketnews24

Business: Books are always cheaper online – but it’s not about the books.
“This means book markdowns are extremely visible. Sellers can tout their low prices compared to what’s on the back of book covers, the price publishers want to sell it for. And that can be a convenient psychological device — especially if you’re a big retailer with lots of other stuff to sell. ‘When the customer sees a book at 40, 50 percent off,’ Teicher says, ‘the presumption is that everything else that that retailer is selling is also equally inexpensive.’ And books bring in some pretty attractive consumers. ‘Book buyers are good customers,’ Teicher adds. ‘They tend to be slightly more affluent, they tend to be consumers who shop and therefore are always in the marketplace for other products.’”
Why books always seem to have a discounted price : Marketplace [audio at link]

Tech: The deal is still just a rumor, though, right?
“Bona fide Beats are sold at a huge mark-up, making them immensely profitable but also irresistible to counterfeiters. The headphones—beloved by image-conscious teenagers but scorned by audiophiles—are easy to copy because the headphones’ appeal is largely based on brand rather than function.”
Why millions of counterfeit Beats won’t bother Apple : Quartz

The number-one factor that determines how earbuds sound is the fit — so even Sennheisers that run a couple hundred bucks are going to sound bad if the fit is too tight, or falling-out-loose, or just ‘off’ somehow—for you. It’s a very personal and subjective thing (which makes reviews of earbuds worthless, in my opinion). For over-the-ear cans, the actual driver (the speaker part) is more important than with earbuds, but build quality matters at least as much (I’d argue more) — padding with that thin, fake-leather crap that flakes away gets itchyscratchy fast, and foam that is too airy or too thin to matter means your cans are leaking sound (or letting the outside sounds leak in).

I live in my headphones (not, as some Beats owners do it, wearing them around my neck — but 14 hours a day and then all night while I’m sleeping ) so yes, I am picky about what I buy, but I don’t think I’ve spent more than $30 on a pair of headphones ever.

My current faves cost about $22 bucks and when I found out the style was going to be discontinued I bought 5 spare pairs and also used some heat-shrink tubing to reinforce the cord at the mini-jack (a stress point and most common point of failure in my experience) — I really like this model of earbud and as noted above, they’re so comfortable (in my ear, anyway) that I can even wear them while I sleep. Don’t even bother to ask me which brand they are though; there are still a few out there (even after being discontinued) and you never know, I might want to buy what’s left. (maybe I’ll buy myself another 5 spares for my birthday)

So anyway, short lecture aside, I never saw Beats as anything more than marketing (savvy marketing, but still snake oil) and given the many other options out there, I’d never shell out for a pair. However, Beats comes with a built-in, mostly young fan base (and that super-savvy marketing team) and maybe that is worth $3.2 billion to Apple.

See also:
What Apple is really buying with Beats : The Verge
Beat By Dre: The Exclusive Inside Story of How Monster Lost the World : Gizmodo

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I’m throwing today’s Book Recommendation into the diary entry — keep reading.

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Diary entry for 11 May:
The earbud-thing above is, I think, indicative of being a curmudgeon. By ‘earbud-thing’, I mean both my pickiness and my overuse/over-reliance on the unspoken social cue that’s communicated by wearing them in public. And by ‘being a curmudgeon’, I mean of course *me* being a curmudgeon. I’m getting older, and starting to sound like it: “New Things? Why should I try the new thing, I like my old thing… nothing wrong with something just because it’s old. You damn kids. Get off my lawn.”

Actually I’ve been a curmudgeon since I was seventeen. Or maybe sixteen. Or maybe ten. I’ve always been grumpy/standoffish — at first because I was shy, and throwing up a thorny exterior was (ironically) how I coped — and then later even after developing some social skills, because I found my own company preferable to needy, stupid people.

Over time, preferences become habit, and feedback structures develop that slowly turn a lonely life into an isolated one. I bring my laptop with me to the pub so I don’t even have to interact with other people in a social space. I wear earbuds in the coffee shop, while walking the neighborhood, even while shopping for groceries, because the earbuds are a visual cue to others that I want to be left alone (if not an actual deterrent) and also help me build my isolated personal space.

Working retail made the situation superficially better — but also much, much worse. Yes, as a bookseller I was out there, every day: dozens of interactions with the shopping public, and actual conversations — about books! Fantastic, right? No. Oh gods no. The shopping public (even in a bookstore) is an unremitting parade of stupid. The two or three moments of connection, the small rush you get when you have actually helped a fellow human being, quickly get subsumed and overwhelmed by all the other retail crap and one bad customer ruins not just your whole day, but often also the past week.

It’s not that I’ve become afraid to go out (enochlophobia would be a more accurate term than agoraphobia, but is also incorrect) — it’s that I now find I actively dislike people. All of you.

Oh sure, you are fine and in the proper context and a stress free environment – you will find I’m a pleasant conversationalist with a dry wit wrapped around an occasionally biting sense of humor and a near-encyclopedic trove of trivia. I can even be charming. But all those other people, the strangers, the masses? I hate people. I hate your kids even more. Damn kids.

I started out as an introvert. *Not that introversion is a problem or something that needs to be fixed.* Introverts get shit done. But now instead of merely being unsure and uncomfortable in social situations, I’m sure. I’m very sure. I’m sure I don’t want to be there and I don’t want to talk, and no I don’t want to talk about it, and no, just ‘opening up a little’ and being more ‘active’ isn’t going to help anything. I’m active: I’m actively introverted, almost violently so.

And one could argue that my choices — my grumpy, thorny outside and self-imposed isolation — are still just a coping mechanism and inside I’m still that same scared, nervous 12-year-old. Sure. But there’s internet access in here and I can suffer fools long enough to buy the occasional six-pack and when everything is said and done: I like it in here.

I’ll skip the Susan Cain recommendation; sure, Quiet is a fine book and a bestseller and all that, but is geared more toward making society as a whole more comfortable with the introverts among us. Today’s Book Recommendation is an older book, one written ten years ago, and a book not about introverts-in-the-world but rather about introverts feeling comfortable in their own skin : Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto by Anneli Rufus

And now, as it’s shaping up to a beautiful Sunday afternoon, I think I’ll pop down to the pub for a late brunch and a Guinness or five — alone, with my laptop, at the bar. ‘Cause that’s how I roll. —M.

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Grand Funk Railroad – I’m Your Captain

Good Morning.

Business: (I’m tagging this one ‘business’ because I wasn’t sure how else to pitch it: OS? Platform? Computing?)

“Mainstream Chromebooks.” You never thought we’d be discussing Mainstream ChromeOS Anything, now did you?
The world’s largest PC maker now wants to sell you a Chromebook: Lenovo’s first mainstream Chromebooks start at just $279 : The Verge

ChromeOS doesn’t have the user-base of Android, and Chrome “apps” and extensions still need a lot of work — something about the form-factor and ‘vocabulary’ (for lack of a better word) of smart phones makes apps work on that platform in a way that doesn’t translate to bigger screens and web browsers — which to me is very odd, since even confined to a browser the laptop/desktop environment has a lot more potential and broader (dare I say it) application that can’t be matched by a 4” or even 7” screen.

ChromeOS (and its physical manifestation, the Chromebook) is an admission, or a realization, that very few of us need to run Photoshop or even Office on a daily basis and that from email to Facebook to Netflix, most computer users are spending 98% of their time in a web browser anyway. Without the need for compu-horsepower to run Call of Duty or Autodesk applications, you can get away with cheaper, underpowered chips — and when you combine that with plasticky cases and keyboards, and best-of-2010 (or maybe 2009) LCDs, you can push out a stand-alone web browser for under $200. (this widespread cheap-in-a-bad-way perception of Chromebooks is why Google put out the Pixel, of course. Not that anyone could afford one.)

With Samsung, HP, and now Lenovo on board, though, a Chromebook is starting to look viable. And as time goes on, the capability of Chrome apps and extensions will only grow. (finding the good stuff in the Chrome Web Store is another matter entirely, though. *Ugh*. That place is a swamp of bad implementations, spammy-and-spammish-seeming crapware, four year old early-adopters that are now sadly out-of-date and nigh-unusable, and other kruft that needs some serious curating. You listening, Google?)

Additionally: I still think Google should have pushed chromeOS for tablets, rather than android — especially on a 10” screen — but whatever. they make more money than I do.
A Chrome OS tablet? Don’t hold your breath : SlashGear

Gaming:
“We all knew it was coming, but Nintendo unleashed the bad-news bonanza late last night: It won’t make the 55 billion yen (about $520 million) profit it initially forecasted for this fiscal year, but instead it will lose about 25 billion yen ($240 million) due to weaker than expected sales of pretty much all of its products. It lowered this year’s sales forecast for the Wii U console from 9 million units to 2.8 million.”
Nintendo Loses Heaps of Money, Slashes Forecasts. So, What Now? : Chris Kohler, 17 January 2014, Wired

Nintendo is bleeding cash (it still has $10 BILLION or so in the bank, so this isn’t all gloom-and-doom) but with console generations now stretching into 7 or 8 years, losing out on a platform evolution (like, say, the Wii U is getting it’s rear-end whooped by PS4 and Xbox One) means losing out on a decade’s worth of profits and, more importantly, mindshare. When the gamers stop caring, you might find yourself shipwrecked on the shoals next to Dreamcast, Neo Geo, and 3DO.

As stated, though, Nintendo has a mound of cash — and a convenient ATM:

“Nintendo’s surprise reveal of Pokemon Alpha Sapphire and Pokemon Omega Ruby was a bit vague to say the least. The company described the 3DS games as a ‘fresh take’ on Game Boy Advance entries Pokemon Ruby and Pokemon Sapphire, while a brief press release mentioned things like a ‘new adventure’ and a ‘spectacular new world.’ So, just what are these games? Step in Satoru Iwata to clear things up, or at least a little bit. In today’s financial briefing, the Nintendo president described the games as ‘full remakes,’ which at least removes some of the confusion if not a lot of it.”
Joystiq

##

Today’s Book Recommendation is Naked Statistics by Charles Wheelan — Nathan Yau recently revisited this book over at flowingdata.com and I thought I’d do the same (especially with the paperback available, as opposed to the $27 hardcover). Speaking of Dr. Yau, he’s written two books himself — if you like the nifty maps and graphs folks link to and gush over all over the internet, you should check out Visualize This and Data Points to see how the datamages put ‘em together.

##

Diary entry for 9 May:
I’ve been examining my media diet recently, as well as my writing process. The two tie into each other, actually — especially when blogging.

— aside: and by blogging I’m also referring to the act of using twitter, tumblr, and (to a much lesser extent) google+ – ‘microblogging’ in the parlance.

Even using folders to organize them, I find there is very little use to a browser bookmark. Bookmarks are obviously a necessity (unless you like typing in urls for the sites you visit every day) but for making notes and citing references in longer posts, it’s messy and still too easy to lose something. Worse, I occasionally find a month-old (or even a week-old) link and I have to stop and ask myself: well why did I bookmark that?

There is, of course, an app for that – several in fact. I’m looking at Google Keep (because google; despite my snark above I’m invested into chrome/android/and most-things-google) but leaning more towards OneNote or Evernote. I’m researching the issue — actively researching, as of yesterday, as opposed to the back-of-the-mind-itch that it has been for the last six months.

Oddly enough, I do my writing in a text editor these days — completely giving up on LibreOffice Writer, LibreOffice having replaced OpenOffice which in turn replaced MS years ago. I think the last time I used MS Office was on my last desktop system (which I built myself); I’ve never installed it on any laptop that I’ve owned. So, um, twelve years ago I switched to open-source office? [edit: I made the switch with the first release of OpenOffice, 1.0, back in 2002 .] I still use Calc, as spreadsheets are a thing that are quite handy (to me) though for some of my projects I really should switch over to SQL or some other database implementation. (The now-neglected manga database has 10,000+ titles in it, just as an example)

I switched to a text editor, um, six years ago? …some of my oldest novel notes are in a .odt format (and spreadsheets; I’m that kind of author *chuckle*) so I know I used to write in Writer at least up to 2006 (when the OpenDocument standard was introduced) but I also have a very solid memory of writing for both ComicSnob [defunct] and Rocket Bomber exclusively in a text editor. My other notes and writing slowly but naturally followed suit.

Over time, it also became natural to write using mark-up language [em, strong, links, et al.] from the first draft — which further ossified and codified my process, now solidly entrenched in a text editor. [neither a recommendation nor a paid endorsement, I use Notepad++ – which has some features that really only apply to coders — but I do some of that, too]

Anyway, back to what I was saying about bookmarks:

I can either manually extract pull-quotes and build links in-real-time, as I browse, and file those in appropriate drafts or notes .txt documents — which is of course the better, more conscious method that I should always default to — or I can click the little star in the omnibar up top in Chrome, and maybe remember to select the correct bookmark folder while I’m at it.

You can guess which I do more often. Sometimes the first step in a draft is just going back through my bookmarks and figuring out what I was thinking. A regular reader (all dozen of you; and thank you) might have noticed that my analysis posts are link-and-quote heavy, going back a year or so.

I don’t know if switching to (for example) OneNote would help the process, though Microsoft would certainly want me to think so. I also found some glowing testimonials/tutorials online espousing the use of Evernote + Scrivener.

Like I said: I’m looking into it. I have to wonder, though, after years of working in a text editor, will I be able to make a switch? In an odd way, Notepad++ has become my Smith-Corona – a fetishistic part of my process. Different laptops and keyboard layouts come and go, but Courier Monospaced black in a plain white window remains constant.

This ended up being much more about my process, and not so much the media diet; something for the next entry, I guess. —M.

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Casiopea vs T-Square – Japanese Soul Brothers ~ Fightman

Good Morning.

Local: Attention Atlanta Radio listeners: Album 88 (88.5, Georgia State’s student-run station) will be switching it’s daytime format from music to news, in a deal with Georgia Public Broadcasting — so instead of college/indy music, there will be some mix of NPR/PRI/APM content. I, for one, will miss the music but I also like the idea of having NPR talk as an option during those crucial hours between Morning Edition and All Things Considered.
WRAS Album 88 switching to daytime news format with GPB
[link via @MaraDavis on twitter, who other Atlantians should possibly be following.]

Comics:
“Meltdown Comics and Collectibles opened in 1993 on Sunset Boulevard, in Los Angeles, less than two miles from the intersection of Sunset and Vine, right in the heart of Hollywood. More than 20 years later, the store is one of the largest in the country and has diversified its inventory from simply comic books and graphic novels into comedy, podcasting and pop culture. ‘Digital media is killing us, just like records stores,’ says co-owner Gaston Dominguez-Letelier. ‘People started downloading music, now they are downloading books and comics. … It’s not the same as it used to be.’”
audio at link: A comic book pioneer adjusts to the digital age, Marketplace (APM radio), 7 May 2014

Business: Some companies would rather just get rid of interns, than pay them
Quartz

Business: Activision is spending $500 million to make ‘Destiny’ the next ‘Halo’
The Verge

Gov’t: Why America’s about to run out of money for roads (again)
Vox

##

Today’s Book Recommendation is Brian McClellan’s Promise of Blood, and if you need a review, I like the one Howard Tayler wrote. I’m giving Promise of Blood the nod because the second book in the trilogy The Crimson Campaign, was released in hardcover on Tuesday.

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diary entry for 8 May:
If I can find a topic, I’ll be doing a podcast — and by podcast I mean YouTube video because a solo podcast is a lonely thing, but for whatever reason people really connect with one-person and a camera video. There is even a word for it, “vlog”, which I hate at least as much as I hated the word “blog” eight years ago. (It took a while for the term, and the appellation blogger, to sound right to my ear. I’ve since embraced it.)

The thing about a video series and/or podcast is that people expect you to have a topic. I don’t want to cover publishing/bookselling, though I certainly have enough material on that one…

I’d be tempted to do music reviews, very much in the vein of what I’ve been posting recently but the embedded-video-with-commentary blog posts works exceptionally well for that (in my opinion) and adding my voice to it doesn’t seem like an improvement.

I may end up splitting the difference between bookselling and music reviews and do book reviews, though that is very hard to do on a weekly basis if you haven’t a process and workflow already. I also have a few doubts about my abilities there; I’ve never really felt comfortable as a reviewer. I feel some of my reviews are more like book reports (middle-school level) when I try to write more than three paragraphs on anything. In fact, my preference would be the ‘shelftalker’ — a few sentences at most recommending the book (selling it to you, as it were) — but that wouldn’t make for a very long podcast, would it?

I suppose I could string together several such (or perhaps, do something called “The Book Minute”. heh.) but again, I’d be worried about running out of content. As you might have noted, I can’t even manage daily blog posts.

So: still spitballing ideas for a podcast, and thinking about its ‘sustainability’ over a long haul. —M.

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