(1) Thu Nov 20 2008 20:38: I think that went pretty well. When I finished everyone had kind of a stunned look on their faces, but they recovered. There will be video eventually, which will surely be embarassing and show that it actually went poorly.

Thu Nov 20 2008 16:10 Lanyard Disappointment: I thought this branded lanyard said "TRIFORCE". It says "TRIFORK".

(1) Tue Nov 18 2008 09:36 Bento: I'm done with my QCon talk, though it's almost certainly too long. I decided to put a picture of a bento box on the first slide and did my usual Flickr-search. I found two pictures that are cooler than the one I used, but too complex to go on a slide that will only be seen for a few seconds. I thought I'd share them with you.

First is the pictured Star Wars-themed bento, which uses the dark side of the rice to great effect. I couldn't use this because it takes a few moments to recognizable it as food. Second is the meta-bento, which contains a smaller bento box made of food, with utensils made of food. That one was just too complicated to use: if you only see it for a little bit it looks like a normal bento box with normal utensils.

(3) Mon Nov 17 2008 12:46 Hey, England: I don't generally go to other countries and tell them how to run things, but you might want to look into tape dispensers. They make it easy to shear off the edge of the tape, and they hold the tape in place for next time so you don't have to pick at it. Admittedly there's a small amount of waste in selling a little piece of plastic and metal with every roll of tape, since in theory they can be reused, but now that you've become hardasses about reusing grocery bags, go ahead and treat yourselves.

Thu Nov 13 2008 20:41: Man, I gotta finish this talk.

(2) Wed Nov 12 2008 22:43 One Bad Mother: I've completed Mother 3 (see previous entry). On the "offensive" note, I forgot to mention that fairly early in the game you get covered in soot from a fire, and everyone talks about how wacky it is that you look all black. I don't want to be the blackface police, but I guess I kind of am.

In non-offensive news, there's an dream sequence that's not as weird as the Magicant sequence in Earthbound, but is creepy and horrifying and would probably scar you emotionally if you were a kid playing it. Except what kid would play it? You'd have to have played Earthbound to get an interest, which at this point means you'd be into retro gaming, an odd hobby for a kid and one that probably indicates you could handle a super creepy dream sequence. The sequence does go over the top into ridiculousness in one place, which if you've played it you know exactly what I'm talking about. But all in all, well done with the creepiness.

Around the point I wrote the previous entry in this series of weblog entries, the game stopped being focused around changes to one place and became much more Earthbound-like, shuttling you off from locale to locale like a Bond movie. That was a bit disappointing. The secret of the game, revealed about two hours before the end in a huge infodump, is decent and exactly the kind of poignancy I was hoping for, though if your multi-part infodump involves a special recording device that lets the player refer to the infodump later, your infodump is too big.

There are some connections to Earthbound and although I'm a huge EB fan I think the connections made Mother 3 a lesser game. I'm thinking especially of the main villain. If you've played Earthbound the villain's identity will not be a secret for long, and if you have a functioning brainstem the identity of the villain's henchling will never be a secret at all. I'm going to just accept this in the name of dramatic closure and move on.

There's a tendentious video-game logic that says that bad things are caused by people who are evil, and that the evil people do the bidding of a boss, and that if you kill the boss you've solved the problem. This causes big problems when applied to real life, but it's hard for me to get worked up about it in a video game. And yet, if there's one video game that could take a more realistic approach, it would be a Mother game. Especially Mother 3, whose plot, for all its ridiculous rock video television-enslavement, teaches the realistic lesson that bad things happen because people sacrifice their long-term interests for short-term satisfaction. But no, the boss is behind everything, and you defeat the boss. And then something else happens that is difficult to describe and that I'm still thinking about. Suffice to say it's cool but not as cool as the end of Earthbound, which I'm still thinking about after a longer time.

In conclusion, huge thanks to the translation team, without which I'd never have been able to appreciate the game. Because as much as I'd love to, the odds of me learning Japanese from scratch now that I'm pushing thirty are pretty slim. And, seriously, thanks for not hiding or (I assume) toning down the offensive bits, because it's better to have this kind of thing out in the open where it can be called out.

PS: Check out this stop-motion Mega Man video, which is certainly better than this weblog entry.

Wed Nov 12 2008 21:44 Clean and Sober: No painkillers today, for the first time since my injury.

Mon Nov 10 2008 21:49: This link has now passed my "just link to it and close the tab rather than thinking about something long to write about it" threshold. Netflix released a web service that actually serves hypermedia documents! Wooooooo!

(2) Sun Nov 09 2008 23:43 Mother 3: Oh yeah. The fan translation came out when I was in London. This weekend I loaded it onto my DS and played it. Except playing it on my DS didn't work too well, despite me having bought a doohickey specifically so I could play the Mother 3 translation on the DS. So I'm playing it through Mednafen. (Note: Mednafen may cause drowsiness. Use only as directed.) I'd say I'm halfway done; below my spoilerish thoughts.

There are many reasons why there will never be an official translation of this game, but upon playing it the main one that jumps out is that it's pretty offensive by Western standards. In Earthbound, the Japanese technique of jumbling together random stereotypes about America resulted in the charming Colbertian nation-state of Eagleland. In Mother 3 it results in a "generic minority" character who embodies different racial stereotypes simultaneously. There's also a central-casting "greedy Arab" character. And the, uh, fairies, who make Tingle look like Cary Grant. I appreciate that Japan is a different country where the mere fact that homosexuals exist is considered hilarious, but the past is also another country, and that doesn't excuse the past. So: grow up, Japan.

If you can get past that, there's a great game here. It's basically a text adventure with sprite graphics: a linear plot with lots of places to explore and people to talk to. The writing and game design is as good as Earthbound. There's less all-out wackiness but the places fit together better and there are lots of great changes to the environment over time, and variations on themes. Example: your game is saved by talking to frogs, which is a) awesome, and b) implemented by scattering thematically appropriate frogs throughout the game: ghost frogs, frogs in tiny cars, old frogs in wheelchairs, floating frogs dangling from balloons, etc. It's cute and funny.

The plot is interesting--this is the only Mother game to actually be about someone's mother. As with the game design, the plot fits together a lot better than Earthbound's plot. But there's something wrong. It's not that an RPG with cute sprites can't tell a dark story--that's bathos, and it's delicious. It's that the Mother 3 story mixes different kinds of darkness.

There's the darkness of the death of a loved one and of being compelled to work on an evil project and of having your home town invaded by aliens. And there's this goofy rock-video darkness where people are being enslaved by their television sets and corrupted not by the love of money but the existence of money. They don't fit together. You could tell one story or the other with cute RPG sprites but it's asking a little bit much for cute RPG sprites to glue them together. (And for good measure there's also the pro forma high-fantasy darkness of Prophecy Fulfilled and Are You Pure Of Heart which is just an excuse for Collect A Bunch Of Similar Things, which I find very tiresome but Earthbound had the same thing.) The old text adventure "The Legend Lives!" has a lot of these same problems, but its television scene does a better job, I think.

So, Mother 3 makes visible in retrospect some problems with Earthbound. Earthbound's huge sprawling map alienated you from what was going on in the game world. Mother 3 takes you through a series of persistent changes to the world, which forces you to invest emotionally in what's happening. Except for the thing at the very end, which loses its punch if described rather than played, Earthbound has the emotional depth of a sitcom episode. Mother 3 starts off by breaking your heart, and manages to break your heart two or three more times before it gets really goofy and rock-video-ey.

The best thing about Earthbound was the feeling of subjunctive nostalgia you got wandering around Eagleland, a replica of an American/Japanese culture that never existed. Mother 3 yields this poignancy, which I also find in the Miyazaki films with European-looking settings. I almost said Mother 3 "nails" this poignancy, but there's all that offensive stuff that won't play in real America, so I deny Mother 3 the prestigious verb "to nail".

If my opinion about any of this changes by the time I finish the game I'll post a follow-up. All in all, a great game made available through an amazing translation effort.

Update: see follow-up entry.

(6) Fri Nov 07 2008 09:48 The Battle Hymn of the Republic of Letters:

(1) Thu Nov 06 2008 17:24: Kevan gave me a book of Groucho Marx-related letters, called appropriately enough The Groucho Letters. I'd flipped through the book at Jake Berendes's house but now I'm reading it through, and I was intrigued by his 1957 description of a Mystery Science Theater-esque show he was writing and co-starring in:

The format is a simple one. Jane and I sit in front of a television set at home watching a television show. The show we watch is usually a sports reel, a travelogue, or a whatnot, and we make up funny jokes to say while looking at it...

It will be a new kind of writing for me. We have to write jokes to fit the footage of the film shots. Like I need a forty-foot joke to describe what the man is doing when he examines the sheep's wool in Australia, so I say to Jane: "See, they examine the wool to determine if it's ready for shearing." And she takes the rest of the 40 feet to tell the joke. Which in this case turns out to be: "Oh yeh--they want to make sure it's a hundred percent wool."

Hilarious, isn't it? And after writing 40-foot jokes, 75-foot jokes, and even 108-foot jokes, we have a nine and a half inch [Nielsen] rating, and all is well.

IMDB doesn't know about this television program and it's not clear who "Jane" is, though picking up context throughout the book indicates that it's Jane Ace, Goodman Ace's wife.

Thu Nov 06 2008 06:09 The Hard Sell: Yesterday two guys dressed like hipper Mormon missionaries somehow got into my apartment building (not that it's terribly difficult). They worked for Direct Energy and were wandering door-to-door pulling a low-grade social engineering scam where they let you think they worked for the electric company and they wanted to "adjust" your electric rate by signing you up with Direct Energy. Dealing with them was an unpleasant experience but it did make me realize that advertising in general is a kind of social engineering.

The day before Sumana got a telemarketing call. On her cell phone that's on the Do Not Call list. It was a Choose Your Own Adventure pitch from the Internet company (a preexisting business relationship trumps cell phones and DNC list) wanting to sell us a phone line. As in a phone you can't take out of your house. I believe to sweeten the deal they offered an original iMac and some commemorative Pogs. When Sumana said she wasn't interested, the Choose Your Own Adventure (which was being read by some poor human) became incredulous that we could live full lives if there wasn't a land line in our place of residence. After assuring the CYOA that our lives were fairly full, Sumana eventually reached one of those unsatisfying endings where she lived in a state of uncertainty as to what might have been, and hung up.

In both cases this was not the first time we'd been pitched but an escalation in tactics. We got a very weird spam-card from Direct Energy a while back, which was why I remembered the name on missionary #1's badge. And the Internet company sends us a paper bill every month mostly so they can bundle in pitches for a phone line (I pay the bill online, through the very Internet I pay for).

I wonder if this increased aggressiveness is an effect of the economic crunch, or, as I believe they used to say, "recession". Did this happen last time? Since coming back from London I've also noticed a little of a more common form of creeping advertising: advertising on surfaces that previously had none.

(6) Tue Nov 04 2008 07:23 Leonard Gets Out The Vote: Vote, dammit.

Caution: gallery contains Mega Man 9 spoilers.

(1) Mon Nov 03 2008 20:02: I'm back in New York! Check out this awesome painting I saw in the National Gallery. I'm not sure why that painting isn't in the Tower of London next to the crown jewels, but I sure am glad it's not because then I'd never have seen it.

PS: Forgot this hilarious joke. "I just flew back from London, and boy are my arms tired! Because I FELL ON THEM AND BRUISED THEM QUITE BADLY."

(1) Fri Oct 31 2008 18:09 EmptyCrowd: Unless I'm wrong--and honestly, when is the last time that happened?--Halloween is the only holiday that your place of employment can shanghai you into celebrating with your co-workers in a corporate environment. It's a secular holiday, you don't get it off from work, and it's not generally of interest to adults. So long story short, I went to the Canonical office in Millbank for a Halloween party.

There were costumes. I have a special technique for Halloween costumes: I don't wear them. But when the wiki that says to wear a costume is the same wiki that lists you as someone who draws a paycheck, there's a little bit of pressure. So I employed my other technique: I did no planning and let an idea percolate which I would execute cheaply at the last minute.

Sometime last week I decided that my costume would be Launchpad itself. On Thursday we would get Launchpad T-shirts, which I planned to annotate with a huge number of Post-It Notes, a la the Office Space poster, containing the names of Launchpad classes. Unfortunately Post-It Notes don't stick terribly well to fabric. But by today, Rachel was back in town, and she came to the rescue with stickers. So now I've got a sticker-covered shirt that says things like "IHasBug" and "BlobTooLarge". It's no acid blob costume (or even AcidBlobTooLarge), but it's not bad.

(5) Wed Oct 29 2008 17:21 The Vish-Meister: I've been keeping this a SECRET INTERNET FIND because Sumana and I like to show it to people when they or we come over. But why keep it a secret? It's delicious. KleistGeistZeit is a collective that makes hyperliterate videos in the "misheard lyrics" genre, using a cheap copy-and-paste aesthetic that resembles my constrained comics. Truly this is the best use of obscure general knowledge now that the Internet has made trivia games obsolete.

The best video by far is Wishmaster Misheard Odysseus' Idealist Alchemical Revolution, but Point of Know Return is also great, and depending on how you like those two you might be interested in the really long repetitive one.

I kind of want Andy Baio to exert the skill he has of tracking down the creators of bizarre Internet videos and interviewing them. For a while I've been thinking about emailing him, but I can't actually think of any interview questions! Apart from "have you considered using your powers to enslave humanity?" and "What's that Greek word in the Odysseus video? I can't read the Greek alphabet!" So I'll let referer logs do the work of alerting Andy, and maybe you can think of some real questions.

PS: I'm not sure who introduced us to these videos, though it may have been Moss and Julia, or Dara Weinberg. Sumana probably knows. [Update: Sumana says she found it while working on Miro.] Actually, maybe Dara Weinberg is KleistGeistZeit.

PPS: I realized too late that I should have titled yesterday's entry "News: You Can Bruise". Also that man is a feeling creature, and because of it the greatest in the universe.

Tue Oct 28 2008 17:46 Some Things: My arms are getting better. Bruises have shown up (thus the news).

In retrospect, I'm really glad I didn't get that job as a corporate trainer.

(2) Mon Oct 27 2008 06:12 Oi! Shaver!: I wasn't able to charge my DS because unlike with your laptops, DS chargers don't have built-in voltage adapters. Then a coworker in a similar situation (he had a voltage adapter, but when I tried it out I blew a fuse in the hotel room) discovered that in the hotel bathroom was a plug that accepts an ungrounded US-style plug and delivers approximately 120 volts. The plug was labelled "SHAVERS ONLY", so I hadn't paid it any mind. Sure, I shave occasionally, but it's not like a lifestyle or anything.

Keeping in mind that I MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE ACTED ON THIS POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS KNOWLEDGE, the most reliable source imaginable says that "the sockets for [BS 4573 plugs] can often take unearthed CEE 7/16, US and/or Australian plugs as well."

Sun Oct 26 2008 05:00 Richie Yan: I meant to post this earlier. About two weeks ago I had a long chat with Richie Yan, Beautiful Soup documentation translator, and got some information about him to share with the English-speaking world. He's got a weblog, which I recognized because it's shown up in my referrer logs. He works at jobmet, the Chinese equivalent of monster.com, and for jobmet he's written a web crawler that uses Beautiful Soup. Sounds a little slow to me, but he claims it's fast and easy.

(2) Sat Oct 25 2008 16:03 Mind The Arbitrarily Placed Gap: I tripped over a curb that shouldn't have been there and landed hard on my hands--nothing's broken, or even sprained, but my arms sure do hurt. Really cut into my Tate Modern time what with the PAIN. So I'm spending the weekend in a hotel room wearing tube-sock bondage gear on my arms. After some confusion regarding the British names for drugs I've now got Panadol, aka paracetamol, aka acetaminophen, aka Tylenol.

Since I just rattled off a bunch of drug names, and because these bondage socks make it look like I'm wearing long underwear under my shirt, let's talk a little more about Kurt Cobain. I've been thinking about what I wrote in the previous entry, about imagining Cobain as "still alive, sober, and washed-up". When I was in high school, after Cobain's suicide, there were a whole lot of poorly-written tribute poems and songs. In fact one of my better songs[0] started out as one of these awful songs, and I wasn't the only one in my school who tried his hand.

The songs are awful because what do you say? Cobain, like David Foster Wallace, was a bright guy whose very brightness and success fed into his personal demons, and in the end he wasn't strong enough to fight them off. No matter how good an idea you think you have of this dynamic, if you're around to write a song about it you've probably got only a fuzzy idea. So maybe the key is to write what you do know: life with its disappointments and ARM PAIN.

[0] The song is Vertigo (here's an MP3). The story is that an artist named Sandow Birk did an oil painting called "The Death of Kurt Cobain", which you can find if you search for it but I gotta warn you it's a gruesome painting. Also I remember the perspective being different, more of a 3/4 view from above, but the Internet proves me wrong, and also tells me that Sandow Birk did "In Smog and Thunder". Anyway, I saw this painting in an art book when I was seventeen and the detail I couldn't get out of my head was that Cobain's teeth are scattered all over the floor. Or something that looks like teeth--I never look too closely, because like I said, gruesome.

That detail made it into a song, but even then I knew that tribute songs/paintings were cheesy and in bad taste, so I made up a fictional character and told a story about her. I've been coy about "Vertigo" on this site before, but this is the real dope. Brought to you by ARM PAIN.

(3) Sat Oct 25 2008 04:01 Don't Go To London, It's A Social Construction: I haven't been writing NYCB entries in real life because I'm at a Canonical training session in London and I've got time to do approximately one non-work thing a day. I usually choose dinner. But I was sublimating some urge because last night I wrote two NYCB entries in my sleep. Here's the one I remember.

Sat Oct 25 2008 [Dreamtime] It Can't Be!: Kurt Cobain looks so young!

Yeah, dream-self, I checked, and he does. I'm older than Cobain was when he died, and I've barely revitalized rock 'n' roll at all. On the plus side, I managed not to kill myself. If only Cobain were still alive, sober, and washed-up, my age cohort would have less complicated self-esteem issues right about now.

The second weblog entry was about a very interesting family I met in-dream, but since they don't really exist it's better for everyone that I don't remember it.

(1) Wed Oct 22 2008 06:32 Dumb Question: This is for the QCon talk I'm working on. In The Jetsons, George Jetson works in the widget factory and it's apparently canon that his job consists of pushing a button. I remembered this even though I never saw The Jetsons. But I can't find any pictures or video online of George pushing the magic button. I thought it was at the end of the show's intro, but it's not: George just kicks back at his desk and the button's not visible. That makes me think the button plot only shows up in one episode.

So which episode? If someone can find a screenshot of George in the same shot as the magic button, or tell me which episode it happens in, I'd be grateful, or at least more grateful to you than I am to the average NYCB reader. Otherwise I'll just use a screenshot of him kicking back.

Instant update: The button thing shows up in the 1990 Jetsons movie. Is that it? The only thing I like about The Jetsons is the 1960s aesthetic, so if that's it I'll just use the old screenshot. Because I'm a snob even about things I don't care about.

Tue Oct 21 2008 10:03 Scrabble: My manager is wearing a shirt that says

SONI
CYOU
TH

It would be cooler if the lines broke like this:

SON
ICY
OUT
H

(1) Sun Oct 19 2008 11:31 Age-Old Rant: How come the people who design fancy hotel rooms never test them by spending a night in them?

Thu Oct 16 2008 20:40: Sumana used to have this book of alt-history stories about if presidential elections had happened differently (occasionally very unrealistically; I think there was one where Victoria Chaflin Woodhull won in 1872). The stories were generally okay but what really stood out in my mind was the awesome cover (see enclosed). It's rare these days that you get a hardcore Thomas Dewey reference. Cover photo from the website of one of the authors anthologized.

In semirelated news, I'm having fun looking through the NYT archives for previous election years and comparing their campaign news to this year's. Around this time in 1996, I was in my first quarter of college and Bob Dole was campaigning in California after "a new Field Poll showing Mr. Clinton only 10 percentage points ahead." It's a genius plan, Bill Bradley doesn't say:

''Dole is confronted with pretty bad choices across the country, whether Ohio, Indiana or Florida or here,'' Mr. Bradley said. ''He won't win California, but a rip-roaring campaign in the last two weeks could save a half-dozen House seats and help the Republicans keep the Assembly, where they're in trouble.''

Also, this Clinton-seeking zinger from Bush in 1992: "I do think that you can't turn the White House into the Waffle House." It's funny because Waffle House is a terrible restaurant!

PS: fun Thomas Dewey fact: he was the Eliot Spitzer of his time, except without the prostitution scandals.