Mon Oct 21 2013 14:10 What's New in RESTful Web APIs?: I was asked on Twitter what changed between 2007's RESTful Web Services and 2013's RESTful Web APIs. I've covered this in a couple old blog posts but here's my definitive explanation.

First, let me make it super clear that there is no longer any need to buy Services. It's out of date and you can legitimately get it for free on the Internet. O'Reilly is taking Services out of print, but there's going to be a transition period in which copies of the old book sit beside copies of the new book in Barnes & Noble. Don't buy the old one. The bookstore will eventually send it back and it'll get deducted from my royalties. If you do buy Services by accident, return it.

If you're not specifically interested in the difference between the old book and the new one, I'd recommend looking at RESTful Web APIs's chapter-by-chapter description to see if RESTful Web APIs is a book you want. As to the differences, though, in my mind there are three big ones:

1. The old book never explicitly tackles the issue of designing hypermedia documents that are also valid JSON. That's because JSON didn't become the dominant API document format until after the book was published. If you don't know that's going to happen, JSON looks pretty pathetic. It has no hypermedia capabilities! And yet, here we are.

   In my opinion, a book that doesn't tackle this issue is propping up the broken status quo. RESTful Web APIs starts hammering this issue in Chapter 2 and doesn't let up.

2. There are a ton of new technologies designed to get us out of the JSON trap (Collection+JSON, Siren, HAL, JSON-LD, etc.) but the old book doesn't cover those technologies, because they were invented after the book was published. RESTful Web APIs covers them.
3. New ideas in development will, I hope, keep moving the field forward even after we all get on board with hypermedia. I'm talking about profiles. Or some other idea similar to profiles, whatever. These ideas are pretty cutting edge today, and they were almost inconceivable back in 2007. RESTful Web APIs covers them as best it can.

Now, for details. Services was heavily focused on the HTTP notion of a "resource." Despite the copious client-side code, this put the focus clearly on the server side, where the resource implementations live. RESTful Web APIs focuses on representations—on the documents sent back and forth between client and server, which is where REST lives.

The introductory story from the old book is still present. Web APIs work on the same principles as the Web, here's how HTTP works, here's what the Fielding constraints do, and so on. But it's been rewritten to always focus on the interaction, on the client and server manipulating each others' state by sending representations back and forth. By the time we get to Chapter 4 there's also a pervasive focus on hypermedia, which is the best way to for the server to tell the client which HTTP requests it can make next.

This up-front focus on hypermedia forces us to deal with hypermedia-in-JSON (#1), using the tools developed since 2007 (#2). The main new concept in play is the "collection pattern". This is the CRUD-like design pioneered by the Atom Publishing Protocol, in which certain resources are "items" that respond to GET/PUT/DELETE, and other resources are "collections" which contain items and respond to POST-to-append.

We covered AtomPub in Services, but over the past six years it has become a design pattern, reinvented (I think "copied" is too strong a word) thousands of times.

RESTful Web APIs focused heavily on the collection pattern, without ever naming it as a pattern. I'm not dissing this pattern; it's very useful. I'd estimate about eighty percent of "REST" APIs can be subsumed into the collection pattern. But REST is bigger than the collection pattern. By naming and defining the collection pattern, we gain the ability to look at what lies beyond.

Attempts to encapsulate the collection pattern include two new JSON-based media types: Collection+JSON and OData. The collection pattern also shows up, more subtly, in the Siren and Hydra formats. Which brings me to the second major change.

In 2007, there were two big hypermedia formats: Atom and HTML. Now there are a ton of hypermedia formats! This is great, but it's also confusing. In "The Hypermedia Zoo", Chapter 10 of RESTful Web APIs, we give an overview of about two dozen hypermedia formats. The ones we seriously recommend for general use (HAL, Siren, HTML, JSON-LD, etc.) are covered in more detail elsewhere in the book. The quirkier, more specialized media types just get an exhibit in the zoo.

Now for the third new thing, profiles. If you go through the RESTful Web APIs narrative from Chapter 1 to Chapter 7, you'll see that we introduce a problem we're not able to solve. Hypermedia is great at solving the following problem:

How is an API client supposed to understand what HTTP requests it might want to make next?

But there's a superficially similar problem that hypermedia can't solve:

How is an API client supposed to understand what will happen in real-world terms if it makes a certain HTTP request?

How do you explain the real-world semantics of an HTTP state transition? Before chapter 8, the two solutions are to do it ahead of time in one-off human-readable documentation; or to define a domain-specific media type, a la Maze+XML. Both of these approaches have big problems. Chapter 8 introduces profiles, which lets you get some of the benefits of a new media type without doing unnecessary work.

Maybe profiles will turn out not to be the right answer, but we gotta solve this problem somehow, and the old book is not equipped to even formulate the problem.

There are also a few additions to the book I consider minor. There's a whole chapter in RESTful Web APIs on Semantic Web/Linked Data stuff; in Services there was nothing but a cursory discussion of RDF/XML as a representation format. There's a chapter in RESTful Web APIs about CoAP, which didn't exist in 2007. These are good chapters that took me a long time to write, but I don't think it's worth buying the book if you only want to read the chapter on CoAP. (Or maybe it is! There's not a lot of competition right now.)

So, what hasn't changed? HTTP hasn't changed all that much. RESTful Web APIs's information about HTTP has been brought up to date but not changed significantly. So if you were using Services solely as an API-flavored HTTP reference, you don't need the new book. You can just read up on the protocol-level additions to HTTP since 2007, like the Link header and standardized patch formats for PATCH.

Hopefully this helps! RESTful Web APIs has a lot of distinguished competition that the old book didn't have, but its competition is newer books like Designing Hypermedia APIs and REST in Practice. If you compare APIs to Services I think it's no contest.

(1) Mon Oct 14 2013 10:14 Reading After-Action Report: In preparation for my reading at Enigma Bookstore I asked people on Twitter which bit of Constellation Games I should read. I decided to read Tetsuo's review of Pôneis Brilhantes 5 from Chapter 18, both by popular Twitter demand and because Sumana had reported success reading that bit to people.

I practiced reading the review and also practiced another scene: Ariel's first conversation with Smoke from Chapter 2. No one suggested that scene, but it's one of the last scenes I wrote, so I personally haven't read it a million times and gotten tired of it. I abandoned this idea after a test reading because it's really hard to do a dramatic reading of a chat log, especially when most of the characters have insanely long names. So, Pôneis Brilhantes it was.

However, shortly before the reading I learned that Anne and I were each going to be reading two excerpts! Uh-oh. On the spur of the moment I chose to read a scene I had never practiced and that only one person (Adam) had suggested: the scene from Chapter 11 where Ariel meets Tetsuo and Ashley and they go visit the moon.

That scene has three good points: a) it introduces Tetsuo, increasing the chance that the Pôneis Brilhantes scene would land; b) it's full of the most gratuitous nerd wish-fulfillment I could write; c) it ends strongly with the call from Ariel's mother, which unlike a chat log is very easy to read because it's a Bob Newhart routine where you only hear one side of the phone call.

This was a really good idea. People loved the moon scene, even though my unpracticed reading stumbled and ran too quick. But when I read the Pôneis Brilhantes scene, it wasn't such a great hit! The room wasn't really with me. That's the scene I had practiced, and I think it's the funniest, most incisive thing in the whole book. Not a big hit! I think if I'd only read that scene I wouldn't have sold many books that night.

So, thank goodness for the moon scene, is all I can say. But what was going on? How had I misjudged my audience so badly? Sumana said she'd read Pôneis Brilhantes and gotten big laughs.

I think you have to be a very specific kind of computer geek to find Tetsuo's Pôneis Brilhantes review funny as a review of a video game, rather than as an expression of the personality you've just spent seven chapters with. That's the kind of geek that Sumana and I habitually hang out with, but it's not representative of the SF-reading population as a whole. I think that computer-geek population hosts a lot of the readers who wish that the second half of Constellation Games was more like the first half. Whereas someone who really digs the moon scene is more likely to stay with me the whole book.

I guess you could say the moon scene is just more commercial. And I guess I subconsciously knew this, because my current project gets more of its humor from the plot-driven character interaction found in the moon scene, and less from high concept Pôneis Brilhantes-style set pieces.

Tue Oct 08 2013 10:12 "Constellation Games" reading: Anne Johnson and I are doing a comedy SF reading on Wednesday at the Enigma Bookstore, a new genre bookstore in Astoria. It starts at 7 PM. The details, as you might expect, are on a Facebook page. Hope to see you there!

Mon Oct 07 2013 12:26 API Design is Stuck in 2008: I've got a guest post up at ProgrammableWeb with the provocative title of "API Design is Stuck in 2008". Often an author can blame their editor for that kind of title, but no, that's my title. The good news is that over the past few years we have developed the tire chains necessary to get ourselves unstuck.

I don't think there's anything in the article you won't find in the RESTful Web APIs introduction and my discussion of my RESTFest talk, but I wanted to let you know about it and provide a forum on NYCB for asking me questions/taking issue with my assertions.

(1) Thu Oct 03 2013 11:13 RESTful Web Services now CC-licensed: Hey, folks, I got some pretty exciting news. Now that RESTful Web APIs has come out, there's really no reason to buy 2007's RESTful Web Services. So Sam Ruby and I and O'Reilly have gotten together and started giving the old book away. You can get a PDF from the RESTful Web APIs website or from my now-ancient RESTful Web Services site. The license is BY-NC-ND.

If you've bought RESTful Web APIs (and if you haven't, you should), you may have noticed that we promise that this will happen in a footnote of the Introduction. It took a while to get the contract amended, but now it's all complete.

Here's a direct link to the PDF in case you just want to grab the book instead of hear me talk about it.

Obviously I think the new book is a lot better than the old book, but the old book is still very good. The source code is long obsolete (this is why RWA contains no source code, only messages sent over the wire), but the sections on HTTP still hold up really well. A lot of RWS Chapter 8 went into RWA Chapter 11. With a few edits and additions, RWS Appendix B and C became RWA Appendix A and B. Those are the only bits of RWS that I reused in RWA.

From my vantage point here in 2013, my main critique of RWS is that it makes HTTP do too much of the work. It focuses heavily on designing the server-side behavior of resources under a subset of the HTTP protocol. I say "a subset" because RWS rules out overloaded POST ahead of time. You don't know what an overloaded POST request does. It's a cop-out. You're sweeping something under the rug. It's better to turn that mystery operation into a standalone resource, because at least you know what a resource does: it responds to HTTP requests.

In retrospect, RWS is that way because in 2007 hypermedia data formats were highly undeveloped whereas HTTP was a very mature technology. Nowadays it doesn't matter so much whether an HTTP request uses POST or PUT, so long as a) the state transition is described with a link relation or other hypermedia cue, and b) the protocol semantics of the HTTP request are consistent with the application semantics of the state transition. That's why RWA focuses on breaking down a problem into a state diagram rather than a set of static resources.

So, RWS is very much a 2007 book, but that's the meanest thing I can say about it. A lot of it is still useful, it's historically interesting, and I'm glad to give it away. I'd also like to give my thanks once again to Sam Ruby and O'Reilly, for their work on RWS.

Wed Oct 02 2013 14:16 September Film Roundup: I missed a whole lot of museum movies in September because I was out of town for two weekends. And yet I still managed to see nine movies, plus wrap up a TV show, and write a huge blog post about it. Wonders, or at least me writing about them, will never cease.

• Rear Window (1954): Forget Vertigo. I was totally on board with the conventional wisdom of this as one of Hitchcock's greatest films. It was awesome. The work under constraints, the funny and sad minor dramas of the minor characters, the moralism aimed at you, the person sitting in your seat watching a movie, the inevitable twist in which it's revealed that Jimmy Stewart's paranoid obsession with Raymond Burr has caused him to miss an actual murder that went on right under his nose while he was watching.

  Wait, that's not going to happen, is it? The movie's almost over. Well, at least I can look forward to the ironic tragedy of an innocent man killing someone who broke into his house trying to find evidence that he'd killed someone. No, that didn't happen either. Raymond Burr was the murderer. Jimmy Stewart was right the whole time. That's all, folks!

  I'm not the only one who expected a twist here, right? I love Hitchcock's twists. (Except for the one in Vertigo.) But this movie didn't have a twist, and I also found it lacked Hitchcock's other big asset: the ability to create panic in the viewer. I would expect Jimmy Stewart flailing around, helpless, unable to convince anyone that his paranoia was justified. He got Grace Kelly and Thelma Ritter on board really quickly. In terms of suspense and paranoia, I think Shadow of a Doubt did it better.

• Fig Leaves (1926): As I implied earlier, the first reel of this movie is great. There's dinosaur puppets, there's all the corny Flintstones jokes (dinosaur pulling a vehicle, stone newspaper). There's a very sophisticated stone-age-technology sight gag which... you know what, just watch it yourself. There's also a cool creepy snake puppet, previously used by Alexander of Abonutichus.

  Tragically, before long the caveman fantasy fades to the modern day. Adam and Eve become Adam and Eve Smith, living in an apartment in the city. Adam and Eve both have their tempters. Eve is thrust into a world of high fashion and extreme emotional shallowness by Alice, her flapper neighbor across the hall. Meanwhile, Adam heads in to work at his plumbing business, where he is urged towards misogyny and outright wife-beating by his crass partner Eddie, the Mario to Adam's Luigi.

  We spend most of the rest of the movie watching Eve in the clutches (and gowns) of histrionic fashion designer André. André's fake artiste act is funny enough, but unless you really like ogling flappers and/or fancy gowns, it's slow going. Like many in 1926, this movie isn't even sure how much time has elapsed since the time of Adam and Eve. It's either eight million years or 896 million years, or possibly 897 million. That's a pretty big differential! Get it together, movie.

  I think it's interesting how silent films like Fig Leaves and Sunrise portray the changing gender roles of the 1920s. Both movies have an evil flapper-seductress character, but both movies also show a more "traditional" woman claiming some independence without becoming evil. Fig Leaves also shows a bit of the masculine side of the change, in the scene where Adam rejects Eddie's antediluvian advice in re: wife-beating.

• The Cradle Snatchers (1927): The person who wrote one of the two IMDB user reviews saw a completely different movie than I did. I'm not saying they experienced the same movie differently. I'm saying they mention a lot of things that were not in the movie I saw, including the term "cake-eaters." But the biggest mismatch was the claim that "the movie seems to be flaunting its naughtiness but it isn't really all that naughty, even by 1920s standards." Whereas the print I saw is probably the raunchiest silent film I've ever seen. And silent films are, almost by definition, pre-Code films. Is it possible that they made two different versions of this movie, one of them super-tame in case there was censorship? And then in the intervening years the two versions got mixed up? I don't know.

  For the record, I'll summarize the movie. This is a pretty funny movie about three Margaret Dumont-like society ladies whose husbands are cheating on them with Sunrise-style evil flappers. (The best title card of the movie: one of the husbands is on the phone being told to get to the flapper-infested "Club of 400", with his wife looking on. What to do? The only solution is to invent a fake business deal as an excuse to get out of the house. Title card: '"Mr. Rockebilt? Two million dollars? You interest me strangely."')

  Kitty Ladd, the aptly named and most Dumont-esque of the society ladies, discovers her husband's deception. Her title card introduces her as "A wife of ten years' standing... standing for almost anything." But she's stood all she can stands, and she can't stands no more. When Kitty's niece sees the incriminating evidence, she offers to pimp her boyfriend out to her aunt to get back at her cheating uncle.

  You might think (as some reviewers of this film do) that there's no pimping, that it's all innocent fun designed to "teach the men a lesson". But after an annoying SCENE MISSING which covers an entire reel, we rejoin the film already in progress to reveal that two of this guy's fraternity brothers have been drafted as "dates" for the other two society ladies. The triple-date is not taking place at, say, the Club of 400, the only place where showing up with frat-boy arm candy might profitably teach anyone a lesson. It's taking place in Kitty Ladd's abandoned mansion. And each of the would-be gigolos has been paid one thousand dollars, in 1927 money, for his services. You don't shell out that kind of cash and not expect some action. And... how to put this... there's action. It's not explicit, but there's one scene that leaves about as much doubt as to what happened as the conveniently timed fade-out in a James Bond movie.

  This is based on a stage play, and a lot of comedy comes through in the title cards, especially those used to introduce the characters. E.g. "Ethel Drake, whose conscience is spotless... and who has consequently led a very dull life." Or for her husband: "Howard Drake, a husband at such the cutest age. Leave him alone and he'll play for hours!" There's a racist joke in a title card near the beginning, but at least the movie depicts a 1920s fraternity that admits Jewish members. Yes, I will apply modern standards to this silent film, thank you very much. Especially since The Cradle Snatchers has a number of character names that appear to be in-jokes inserted by a time traveller: "George Martin", "Ann Hall", and "Howard Drake."

  Actually "Howard Drake" is probably a Howard Hawks self-insert.

• Dog Day Afternoon (1975): I missed this last month at the theater, but then I picked up a cheap DVD at a yard sale. And wow, what a great movie. Al Pacino shines as the guy who just wanted to rob a bank, is that so much to ask? Spot-on performances by everyone inside the bank. Everyone outside the bank is drawn kinda broadly, especially Angie and Leon, Sonny's two wives, who are pretty simplistic stereotypes. But the relationships between Sonny and his wives were believable.

  These old movies (see also Fig Leaves above) keep surprising me with the way they deal with gender and sexuality. It's a mix of human decency and wince-inducing stereotypes. There's an exchange from Taxi Driver that kind of sums it up for me. Bunch of taxi drivers are swapping stories.

  Driver 1: In California, when two fags split up, one's gotta pay the other alimony.

  Driver 2: Not bad. They're way ahead out there.

  Dog Day Afternoon also does an amazing job of maintaining tension. It uses the same trick I saw in There Will Be Blood. The characters spend the entire movie in a state of extreme danger, but there are no "action scenes" and almost no actual violence. Good stuff.

• La Jetée (1962): Well, this is embarrassing. This film was never properly explained to me, or else I wasn't paying attention. I somehow got the idea that the whole thing played out over the single static image of the airport terminal seen during the opening credits. I'd watched the first minute or so online and given up because I don't want to watch a picture of an airport for half an hour. (I'm looking at you, Andy Warhol.) But the double feature with Twelve Monkeys gave me a reason to force myself to see it, and it turns out the film is a series of static images, not just the airport terminal. And it's pretty good! My rule is not to expect hard SF from 1960s French movies, but as long as they're doing genre work, they're all right by me.
• Twelve Monkeys (1995): This movie is kind of a mess, and definitely suffers by comparison to La Jetée. Brad Pitt's performance as a crazy dude is embarrassing. The romantic subplot is both creepy and boring. Why don't you start La Jetéeing and stop La Jetéerorizing me?

  That may be a little harsh. I did have a good time watching Twelve Monkeys. The plot is nice and convoluted, Bruce Willis does a great job, and there's lots of Terry Gilliam set-dressing insanity.

  Given the combination of "a big Terry Gilliam mess" and "Leonard had a good time watching it," I find it kind of odd that Twelve Monkeys became a big hit. The museum's handout guide to the movie was an interview with Gilliam in which he mentioned that the big tent-pole movies of the season—Nixon and Casino—kind of flopped, which gave Twelve Monkeys an opportunity to move in for the kill.

  There's a scene at the very end which I saw and immediately thought "Aha! The scene that completely changes the tone of the movie, which Universal forced Gilliam to include!" But IMDB trivia says Gilliam had final cut on Twelve Monkeys. So I guess he wanted that scene. It's a funny scene, and although it invalidates the whole premise of the film, it doesn't do so unambiguously.

• Only Angels Have Wings (1939): Can't believe Hal convinced me to watch this instead of I Was A Male War Bride. War Bride has Cary Grant with (presumably) a French accent in (presumably) a goofy comedy. That sounds awesome. This movie has Cary Grant as a macho stereotype. The kind of character generally associated with John Wayne, although every John Wayne performance I've seen has more nuance than I was expecting. But Cary Grant is so emotionless in this film that in the thrilling climax, a pilot uses his stiff upper lip as an emergency runway.

  Most of the characters in this movie are based on pilots Howard Hawks encountered while doing location scouting in South America. I admire this movie's willingness to kill characters at random, and I can see how a real person in that situation would retreat into a shell of stoicism and refuse all human contact. But it's not very entertaining. Cary Grant is probably my favorite actor, but he's my favorite actor because I like the way he conveys various emotions. Don't take that away from me!

• Trent's Last Case (1929):Without a doubt the worst movie I've seen at the museum. (The benefits of having skipped Trash Humpers.) I nearly fell asleep, even though it's only 50 minutes long and silent movies don't generally make me sleepy.

  This is Howard Hawks's final silent film, not the 1952 Orson Welles film that's based on the same book. We saw the only print in existence, so I will summarize the terribleness. The movie was originally going to be a talkie. One of the lead actors had damaged vocal cords, and I guess at the dawn of the talkie period it was conceptually funny to have an actor with damaged vocal cords be in a talkie. Once they started shooting it turned out not to be funny in execution, so they turned a talkie into a silent film at the last minute. Alternate explanation I've seen online: they had the rights to make a silent adaptation of the book, but not the sound rights.

  Either way, that lack of attention to detail is typical of Trent's Last Case. As this Finnish review says, "The Howard Hawks approach is unrecognizable." It's just terrible. Here's Hawks's opinion, from IMDB trivia:

  It was presented at a Howard Hawks retrospective in the mid-'70s and when Hawks found it was on the playlist he asked out loud, "You really aren't going to play this, are you?" Midway during the showing of the film Hawks walked up to the projection room and demanded the projectionist destroy the print of the film.

  Little-known fact: this was the incident that led Crow T. Robot to form the Film Anti-Preservation Society.

  There were some scattered, halfhearted laughs at the foppish PI, but only one gag in the movie was really funny, and I'll tell you it so as to kill any interest you might have in the movie. The villain is in the process of framing his secretary for a crime. The secretary's back is turned. The villain is a classic melodrama villain with a banker's suit and a little moustache. He's really hamming it up, chortling, wringing his hands in glee, about to foreclose on the proverbial orphanage. And then the secretary looks up, into a mirror, sees the villain prancing around behind his back, and gives him a look like, "what the hell are you doing?"

  That's great. It's a joke you couldn't do in a talkie. But it doesn't justify the rest of this dumb movie.

• Scarface (1983): I missed the 1932 Scarface due to RESTFest, but returned in time to catch this monstrosity. I'm not really sure how this movie fits into the Hannah Montana continuity, but Al Pacino is always engaging, and it was really interesting to see all the stuff that Breaking Bad took from this movie (remember the famous BB elevator pitch, "From Mr. Chips to Scarface"). From obvious visuals like the pools of blue water and the scenes on the drug lord's patio, to thematic elements like "main character's attempt to provide for his family destroys his family."

  I also found it really interesting that everyone remembers the full-on, screaming, coke-snorting, grenade-launching Tony Montana from the end of this movie, like he's some kind of badass. But that guy is a failure! He's a broken man. He's like that because he's lost everything. He's got cocaine smudged on his nose and he doesn't even notice. For most of the movie he's a lot calmer, more cunning, and a more effective badass/antihero.

  The '80s abstract art and beachfront architecture in this movie is amazing! And no wonder—turns out much of the movie was filmed in the Los Angeles of my childhood. Take that, Miami, you cultural backwater!

  And finally, I've kept this hidden so far but I didn't like this movie all that much. It's nearly three hours long and its plot is very predictable. Michelle Pfeiffer is bland as the serial trophy wife. And it's got a bad case of Hamlet cliches, because before seeing this movie I experienced the most famous cultural children of Scarface: violent gangster-themed video games like Grand Theft Auto and Hotline Miami. Those games are better. They have really dumb plots, but it's not like Scarface has a great plot. It has a very well-realized protagonist, and everything else has aged poorly. I would rather play through Hotline Miami again.

  By the way, does anyone else think that Hotline Miami really needs a roguelike element? Randomly generated floor plans? That would be great.

• Breaking Bad (2008-2013): I thought I could justify putting this in the film roundup because we had a plan to SEE [the series finale] BIG at the museum, which fell through for a couple reasons, but this post remains the logical place to talk about the series as a whole.

  This is the first time Sumana and I have been fans of a show that was also hugely popular with the mainstream. It was a really weird experience. Genre shows are becoming more popular, but non-genre shows are not becoming more popular with me or Sumana. At the same time, Breaking Bad pushed my genre buttons in a way that, say, Arrested Development never did.

  This bit of Tor.com revisionism got me thinking that Breaking Bad might secretly be genre fiction, and after the finale wrapped everything up with a nice bow (too nice, one might argue), I've decided that Breaking Bad is in fact a Mundane SF twist on the classic mad scientist story.

  Every few months on Twitter I saw someone reinvent a joke about how in the Canadian adaptation of Breaking Bad, Canadian Walter White finds out he has cancer, the government pays for his chemo, and that's the end of the show. But something very similar happens during the first season of the American Breaking Bad. See, American Walter White has some rich private-sector friends. They find out about his cancer and they offer to pay for his treatments. But he refuses, because he envies and hates his rich friends. A long time ago they cheated him, denied him his scientific triumph, condemned him to a life of obscurity and humiliation. Now they mock him and they want him to beg them for charity? Pah! Never! The fools! He'll show them all!

  That's your mad scientist origin story right there, and it's also the point where Sumana and I lost all sympathy for Walt. The rest of Breaking Bad did a great job of a) creating a story we loved watching despite having no sympathy for the main character, and b) showing what it means, day-by-day, to be a mad scientist.

  Sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down. Sometimes your technical know-how saves the day, like in a Tom Swift book. Sometimes your henchmen fail you, sometimes you get cornered and forced into a bad situation. And every time you achieve what you thought you wanted, it turns out not to be what you actually wanted, because you're a freaking mad scientist and your insane desires do not reliably correspond to your real needs.

  The part of Breaking Bad that isn't about a mad scientist and his family is about the relationships between supervillains and their henchmen. So many great henchmen in this show. Sometimes a henchman makes a bid for power, more often they're comic relief or raised-eyebrow loyalty, sometimes they get in a villain's way and they just gotta die.

  The two Breaking Bad scenes that really stick in my mind are both about the weird genre-fictional state of being a henchman. The first is Ted Beneke's IRS audit, in which Skyler White, the classic henchman who's smarter than the boss, saves her clueless boss by pretending to be the clueless henchman who screwed everything up. The second is the train heist, because that's the first real Todd sequence. The whole episode I'm thinking "Oh, man, now they're dragging Todd into their web of lies." I've got Todd pegged as the easygoing, dumb-jock henchman, like Jimmy Bond from The Lone Gunmen. And then at the end of the train heist, Todd reveals himself as the most evil person in a show staffed almost entirely by bad guys. It's no surprise Todd is one of the few henchmen who makes a bid for power, and oh, man, I love these dramatic switches. Good job, Vince Gilligan.

What's up for October? More Howard Hawks, it looks like. See ya then.

Wed Oct 02 2013 09:41 Beautiful Soup 4.3.2, and all previous versions: Through long practice I'm able to write decent code while I'm sick, but I should not try to release code while I'm sick. While putting up the release of Beautiful Soup 4.3.2, I accidentally deleted the entire beautifulsoup4 project on PyPI and had to recreate it manually. I've given PyPI all the crummy.com tarball URLs for releases going back to 4.0.1, and I've installed each one via pip to verify that it works, so if your build process depends on installing a specific version of Beautiful Soup 4 via PyPI, it should still work. And indeed, random versions of BS4 have been downloaded about 200 times since I switched over. I'm sorry about this screwup. Let me know if there are any remaining problems.

4.3.2 itself is a pretty minor bugfix release. Still left unfixed is a bug I can't reproduce because the federal government is shut down. When you file a bug that happens with a specific web page, please provide the HTML of the web page, not the URL.

Mon Sep 30 2013 12:44 Smooth Unicode: For reasons of his own, Adam Parrish recently created the Unicode Ebooks Twitter bot. I offered some helpful suggestions for improving the visual appeal of the Unicode Ebooks, suggestions which Adam mocked as unworthy of his artistic vision of dumping a bunch of line noise onto Twitter every five minutes.

So I created my own Twitter bot: Smooth Unicode, the Lite FM to Adam's unending Einstürzende Neubauten concert. My bot does its best to construct aesthetically pleasing output by combining scripts that complement each other visually. The code is part of olipy and I'll be adding to it as I come up with more nice-looking ways to present gibberish.

Less talk. Less noise. More browser-visible glyphs. That's Smooth Unicode.

(2) Wed Sep 25 2013 09:56 LCODC$SSU: At RESTfest last week I put on an old Mozilla shirt and my Al Gore campaign button and gave a talk from the year 2000: "LCODC$SSU and the coming automated web". I'll link to video when it goes up on Vimeo, and I'll also point to my five-minute talk about ALPS, which not only took five minutes to deliver, it took five minutes to put together.

But right now, there's some more stuff I want to say about "LCODC$SSU", and some stuff I couldn't say in the talk due to the framing device.

When I first mentioned this talk to Mike Amundsen, he told me about Bret Victor's talk from 1974, "The Future of Programming", which Victor gave in July and which had a similar conceit. Victor is also a much better actor than I am, but I went ahead with my talk because wanted to do something different with "LCODC$SSU" than happens in "The Future of Programming". I get a strong "You maniacs! You blew it up!" vibe from Victor's talk. And there's some of that at the end of "LCODC$SSU"—I really feel like we've spent thirteen years making five years worth of progress, as you can see from my frustration at the beginning of "How to Follow Instructions"—but I also wanted to do some new things in my talk.

While writing Appendix C of RESTful Web APIs I came to appreciate the Fielding dissertation as a record of the process used to solve an enormous engineering problem. Comments from RESTFest attendees confirm that seeing it this way helps folks grasp the dissertation's gem: the definition of LCODC$SSU (a.k.a. REST). Thinking about it this way doesn't require a historical-fiction framing device (Appendix C has no such framing device), but it does require you stop treating the Fielding dissertation as a prescient guide to the 21st century and see it as a historical record of the 1990s.

And once you do that, the missing stair we've been jumping over or falling through for thirteen years becomes visible. The Web works because it has four domain requirements that reinforce each other: low entry-barrier, distributed hypermedia, extensibility, and Internet scale. But there's also a fifth implicit requirement: the presence of a slow, expensive human being operating the client and making the final call on every single state transition. In the talk I identified the inverse of this implicit requirement as an explicit requirement: "machine legibility". In RESTful Web APIs we use the term "semantic gap" to describe what happens when you remove the implicit requirement.

Making the human unnecessary on a transition-by-transition basis (the goal of "Web APIs" as a field) is a really difficult problem, and it's partly because of the phenomenon I describe in the talk and in RWA Appendix C. Getting rid of the human raises the entry-barrier dramatically. Looking around for a cheap way to lower the entry-barrier, we decide to get rid of distributed hypermedia. But distributed hypermedia is the only thing that allows Internet-scale and extensibility to coexist! We must lose one or the other. We end up with an increasingly ugly system that can never be changed, or else a fascist dystopia.

And here's the bit I couldn't put in the talk because it would break the framing device. We've seen a decade-long obsession with lowering entry-barrier at any cost, and although the cost has been enormous I can't really say the obsession is misplaced. Low entry-barrier is the main reason why the Web succeeded over all other hypermedia systems. Low entry-barrier drives adoption. You get adoption first and you deal with the other problems (which will be enormous) down the road.

Well, we're down the road. The bills are coming due. If we want this to go more smoothly next time, we need to stop chasing entry-barrier local minima and come up with a better solution. We need to make change easier so we can make progress faster.

The "machine legibility" problem will still be very difficult, and frankly I can't see a way to a complete solution. But there's cause for optimism: every step forward we've taken so far has illuminated the space a little more and made the next step visible.

It's always been this way. That's how hypermedia works. That's why I called my now-infamous 2008 QCon talk "Justice Will Take Us Millions Of Intricate Moves" (after William Stafford), and that's why I take my motto from a Johnny Cash song that's probably not on most peoples' list of inspirational Johnny Cash songs.

I built it one piece at a time.

Mon Sep 23 2013 14:28 RESTful Web APIs Monkeypatch: The RESTful Web APIs ebook came out earlier than we thought it would, and there are some important URLs in the book that don't work yet: the home page at restfulwebapis.org, and the example application at youtypeitwepostit.com. There's also one URL in the book (the book's GitHub repository) that will never work, because we wrote down the wrong URL.

I've submitted an erratum for the wrong URL, and I'm here to give you some temporary URLs that will work for the other stuff. They're temporary because Mike controls the DNS for restfulwebapis.org and youtypeitwepostit.com, and he's out of commission at the moment.

• My lousy temporary home page. (Links to the other stuff.)
• Sample application hosted on Heroku.
• The correct GitHub repository.

Tue Sep 10 2013 15:35 Awesome Dinosaurs Update:

1. On Sunday I saw the 1926 Howard Hawks film Fig Leaves. I'll publish a full review in the roundup at the end of the month, but I couldn't wait to mention the dinosaurs! This movie (briefly) features two very cool-looking puppet dinosaurs. There's Adam's pet Apatosaurus, named Dobbin:

   

   Exactly as depicted in Genesis 2.

   More amazingly, there's also a budget-busting life-sized Triceratops that pulls a bus!

   

   Awesome! Not gonna spoil the review, but the first reel of this movie used all the good Flintstones jokes, thirty-four years before The Flintstones even premiered. Except for the unfortunate bus dinosaur saying "It's a living." in a morose voice. And I'm sure that's just because the joke would be really awkward if you had to do it with title cards.

   

   (Screen image simulated.)

2. If you share my belief that dinosaurs are the most interesting part of any movie that includes dinosaurs, you'll love Kevin Maher's deleted scene from King Kong.
3. A recent Ureddit course on narrative structure in short fiction used "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs" as one of its example stories. I thought this was a) a good choice, and b) pretty funny, because I deliberately wrote "Dinosaurs" to be opaque to traditional analyses of narrative structure.

   If you'll forgive me being serious about a very silly story, here's what I mean. Nearly every plot event in "Dinosaurs" is a red herring. It's actually a New Yorker type story, in which a series of insane infernokrusher interventions leads to Entippa's epiphany that humans are exploiting dinosaurs' tendency to get involved in insane infernokrusher interventions for their own entertainment. (Those humans including, in a bit of Hitchcock-type moralizing, you for reading the story and me for writing it.)

   I wrote the first scene to have something very close to a literal Chekhov's gun. It's Tark's gun, or at least his desire for a gun. Later on, Chekhov's gun goes off: Tark gets his gun! But as soon as the literal gun goes off, Tark discovers that literal guns are loud and painful, and he throws it away. The Chekhov's gun was fake. Sort of like the keys in my old text adventure Degeneracy, which don't unlock anything—you're supposed to melt them down for the metal.

   But! In the Reddit thread dissecting "Dinosaurs" and the other example stories, the person running the class proves my intellectual superior. It turns out there was also a real Chekhov's Gun in that first scene: Tark's "killing claws", which are in fact used to kill someone later in the story, just like they would in a regular story about dinosaurs killing humans.

   I didn't even notice that. I'd assumed the human-killing scene worked because everyone knows meat-eating dinosaurs have claws. I didn't even realize I'd made a big deal about the claws in the first scene. You win this round, literary analysis!

PS: Never forget.

(2) Mon Sep 09 2013 13:39 RESTful Web APIs!: After about a year of work, my and Mike Amundsen's new book RESTful Web APIs is going to the printer. It's a replacement for RESTful Web Services, a book that's now seven years old. The replacement may be overdue, but it's only been in the past couple years that technology and attitudes have advanced to the point where I could write the book I wanted to write.

In fact, there's one subfield (profiles) where you could argue this book is premature. The way RESTful Web Services was a little premature in describing an OAuth-like system before OAuth was released. But I don't think we can wait any longer.

Back in February I discussed the differences between APIs and Services. That hasn't changed much, though we have added more stuff:

• A chapter on Linked Data, the Semantic Web approach to REST.
• A chapter on CoAP, the fabled "RESTful system that doesn't use HTTP", designed to connect embedded systems over low-power networks.
• An appendix that explicates the Fielding dissertation from an API designer's perspective.

This post is mainly my way of asking you to pre-order your copy of RESTful Web APIs through my O'Reilly affiliate link. That's a hypermedia-driven change in resource state which will get you the book in a couple weeks, and get me some extra cash. (I estimate about $1.70 extra. Don't do this if the shipping charge on a physical book is prohibitive, or whatever.)

But this post is also a back-door way for me to brag about what a great book Mike and I have written. You don't have to take my word for it. Here's the blurb we got from John Musser of ProgrammableWeb.

A terrific book! Covers a lot of new ground with lots of valuable specifics.

Here's Steve Klabnick of Designing Hypermedia APIs:

The entire time I read this book, I was cursing. I was cursing because as I read each explanation, I was worried that they were so good that it would be hard to find a better one to use in my own writing. You will not find another work that explores the topic so thoroughly yet explains the topic so clearly. Please, take these tools, build something fantastic, and share it with the rest of the world, okay?

You get the picture. I've tried to recreate the relevatory experience a lot of people got from RESTful Web Services, on a higher level, in a way that gives access to more powerful tools. Time will tell if I've succeeded, but I don't think I, or anyone, could have done much better. I'm really proud of this book, and I hope it helps you.

Tue Sep 03 2013 14:13 August Film Roundup: Not the blockbuster month as I was anticipating—I missed all of the museum's big-name Pacino/de Niro movies due to other committments—but a lot of interesting movies, and movies that were uninteresting in interesting ways, among the nine I did see.

• Baikonur (2011): Taking the logic of Star Wars to an extreme, Baikonur shows space travel in a dingy, lived-in future: the one we have now. And that part of the movie is awesome! But the plotline is creepy hurt/comfort nerd fantasy with a litle reactionary agrarianism thrown in. So I can't really recommend it. But there's no other movie that can match these spectacular visuals of Baikonur Cosmodrome, the city outside it, the Kazakhstan steppe, and actual Soyuz launches. It's your call.

  As a bonus, I would like to quote this bit of trivia from Kim Newman's review from Screen Daily:

  Wary of international cinema after Borat, the Kazakh authorities were evidently persuaded to support this effort by a strategic decision to cast the favourite grand-daughter of the President in a small, key role (which the little girl aces) in the climax.

• You're A Big Boy Now (1966): Saw this as an experimental control. How much would I enjoy a movie if the old-school New York shabbiness was the only interesting thing about the movie? And I was foiled, because of course that's not the only interesting thing about Francis Ford Coppola's first movie. It's a raunchy sex comedy that looks exactly like a Disney film of the same period; say, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. There's a hilarious triangle of relationships between the main character and his parents. But... not a great movie, overall. Thumbs up for the Freudian automat comedy though.
• Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970): This was more like it. "Con man posing as religious figure" is one of those tropes that gets me every time. It's got action, comedy, quotable lines, and of course classic location shoots.

  Now, here's the thing. Like G.O.B. Bluth, I'm white. So when I watch a comedy made by black Americans for black audiences in the 1970s, I frequently find myself deciding "all right, I assume the filmmakers know what they're doing, I'm going to laugh at this." And yet feeling kind of nervous about laughing. This happened sporadically during Emma Mae back in February, and it happened pretty much throughout Cotton Comes to Harlem.

  E.g. this movie has a white character idiotically try to disguise himself with blackface. The tactic is even less effective than when the Marx Brothers tried it in A Day at the Races. It's kinda funny even in 2013 because it's such an obviously dumb idea, not like A Day at the Races where you think Harpo's magic might allow it to actually work, but seriously movie, you're doing a blackface joke? Similarly for a lot of the humor about the cultural divide between urban and rural blacks. (Emma Mae sided with the hicks; Cotton Comes to Harlem is very pro-city, although most of its humor is at the expense of the city slickers.)

  None of this is supposed to be particularly transgressive! It's a zany '70s studio-indie film. The contemporaneous Times review mentions the most jaw-dropping moment of the movie in a casual aside. But times have changed. If you made this film today it would be disjointed: half Hollywood-friendly buddy-cop stuff and half edgy in-your-face comedy.

  The guest curator who introduced the movie said he thought director Ossie Davis shot his wad too early with the excellent car chase at the beginning of the movie. (Classic sight gag: guy in top hat and tails watches the car chase with glee, then pulls on white gloves and runs back into his storefront; turns out he runs the local funeral parlor.) And maybe so, but the movie ends with a fight scene in the Apollo Theater's prop room, and I think that's a pretty good bookend.

• Bye Bye Braverman (1968): A ton of classic New York location shots in this movie, but they're not particularly grimy. Mostly in Brooklyn. And this is a hard movie to get into. I guess I'd compare it to Seinfeld: very Jewish, unapologetically New York, and not really caring whether you get the joke or not. Like, you're supposed to understand quite a lot about the four main characters based on which Manhattan neighborhood they live in. There's a brief bit of conversation that you might or might not notice as a throwaway joke about the class differences between the Times and the Daily News. And so on.

  The stand-out bits are a young Jessica Walter in a minor role, and three show-stopping set-piece rants. The first two are by stand-up comics: Godfrey Cambridge (the funny man to Raymond St. Jacques's straight man in Cotton Goes to Harlem) as a cab driver, and Alan King as a rabbi delivering a eulogy. The third is a rambling, moving monologue by star George Segal, bringing the inhabitants of a cemetery up to date as a way of facing his own mortality. ("TV is really good... pollution is bad... we're going to the moon!... We discovered cures for some diseases that might have kept you alive a little longer; you're not really missing much.")

  If you're the sort of 1960s Jewish intellectual depicted in this movie (as director Sidney Lumet clearly was) I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy it. But it doesn't have a lot of crossover appeal, the way a Woody Allen film does. I think I got most of the jokes, and it was still a tough slog for me.

• Norman Mailer v Fun City, USA (1970) according to the Internet, this is a.k.a. "51st State" and "The Other Guys Are The Joke", and according to the program notes it's "Norman Mailer vs. Fun City", but I'm writing down exactly what I remember seeing on the title card, because there is almost no information about this film on the Internet. It has no IMDB page. It's like the VHS tape you discover at the beginning of a creepypasta. I could tell you anything about this film and you'd have to believe it. For instance:

  Remember Norman Mailer's huge futurist Lego apartment building? Well, that model is the aesthetic linchpin of this movie which doesn't seem to exist! Director Dick Fontaine uses window reflections to superimpose the huge Lego structure onto the real-life New York skyline, blocking out the real buildings as Mailer explains his frankly insane vision for an 200-story apartment block that will house fifty thousand people, some of whom ought to be "adventurous" types interested in renting an apartment on the tip of one of the structures, which might sway five feet back and forth in a high wind.

  It's a clear metaphor for Mailer's mayoral campaign and his Napoleon of Notting Hill-esque platform for making New York City the nation's 51st state, turning the neighborhoods into townships, and devolving the power of the mayor's office onto the townships. After the primary, in which Mailer gets a surprisingly high five percent of the vote, you see the Lego structure again, but this time there are no reflection tricks; perspective integrates the Lego building with the skyline behind it.

  I tend to think of writers as introverts, but Norman Mailer is definitely an extrovert. And I think of smart extroverts as being natural politicians, but Mailer is a terrible politician. And the personality feature that makes him a terrible politician is the feature I recognize in him as a fellow writer. It's what led him to build that Lego model and to imagine a guy who's excited to rent an apartment where you have to bolt the furniture to the floor to keep it from sliding back and forth.

  He hates being boring. He hates for things to be like they always have been. He thinks that he can win an election by making the election really interesting, so that the obvious next plot point is that he wins.

  And he knows this about himself. From a museum-provided contextual interview that barely mentions the nonexistent movie it's contextualizing:

  [B]eing in these kinds of things is never easy. At a certain point you go into overdrive and you feel something ugly in your ego functioning. You are selling something you don’t quite believe in. Why? To keep the movie moving and to keep it interesting so you aren’t a bore like other people you see in documentaries.

  The other reason Norman Mailer is a terrible politician is that he constantly overrides the much better political operatives he somehow got to work his campaign. In particular, he has very bad judgement about radio ads. Just thought I'd mention that; a little freelance political criticism to go with the film review.

  BTW, that interview also has this gem:

  Did you feel afterwards that Don had any kind of obligation to put the camera down and intervene?
  [Mishearing the question] I always assume God to be much too occupied. I see God as a tired general.

  No, not God. Don. D.A. Pennebaker.
  Oh! Boy, I thought we really getting into top gear fast.

• Superfly (1972): Curator Warrington Hudlin started announcing this film in a dry sort of way, but in a Shakespearean move Paul Anthony (I'm pretty sure it was him, but not 100%) of House Party fame rose up out of the audience, interrupted Hudlin's speech, and demanded that he put on a '70s trenchcoat and a funkier hat, which loosened him right up. And that kind of set the stage for Superfly, a movie that strongly prioritizes style over substance.

  It definitely has the style, capturing both the sleaze of the '70s streets and the tackiness of the middle-class '70s interior shots. But the substance... there's some good excitement at the end, and a great musical montage in which people of all races come together to buy cocaine from Priest; the sort of sardonic commentary that Breaking Bad also does really well. But most of what I remember is people driving around really slowly like they're looking for parking—a classic low-budget tell, as anyone who's watched a lot of MST3K knows.

  I know not everyone shares my preference for comedy over drama, so I understand why Superfly is considered a proto-blaxploitation classic while I'd never even heard of Cotton Comes to Harlem. But I think it's a failing of Superfly that its grittiness never made as uncomfortable as did the lighthearted comedy of Cotton Comes to Harlem.

• Little Murders (1971): I actually saw this movie when I was about fifteen! At least, I saw the first ten minutes. My mom showed me Harold and Maude and this movie, and I didn't think Harold and Maude was that interesting, but ten minutes into Little Murders I was like "Okay, Mom, this is too dark, turn it off." And then I saw it again this month and I was like "Oh, shit, it's this movie. I can't leave the theater or they'll think I'm a wuss. Well, I'm not fifteen anymore, I can take it."

  And I can indeed take it, but seriously, this is probably the darkest movie I've ever seen. It's a zombie movie where it turns out the main character was a zombie the whole time, just waiting for everyone else to become zombies. If that's your cup of tea (and you won't be disappointed when it turns out I don't mean "zombies" 100% literally and Elliot Gould doesn't go shuffling around biting people in the head), here's your comedic nihilism-fest.

  You may be wondering why my mother was showing this movie to her fifteen-year-old son. It's a good question, and the true answer will never be known, but I think there were two reasons. First, both this movie and Harold and Maude came out in 1971, when my mother was in college. I think she thought I was finally at a point where I could appreciate these movies the way she had, the way we had bonded over Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) when I was about twelve. She was wrong, but these things happen.

  Second, as I've alluded to before, as a kid I had serious emotional problems. Not something we need to talk about now, but definitely something to worry about if you're the parent of such a kid. And now that I've finally made it all the way through Little Murders, I think I see why my mom rented these particular movies. She was trying to show me that there are people with darkness within them, horrors that fifteen-year-old Leonard can't even imagine, but who are able to channel the darkness to creative ends and generally be productive members of society (screenwriter Jules Feiffer illustrated my beloved Phantom Tollbooth, for heaven's sake!), without "selling out" or closing their eyes to society's problems. So thanks for that, mom.

• The Angel Levine (1970): I admit I wasn't expecting much from a movie that's literally about a Magical Negro sent to help a white guy. But an interesting thing happens: Harry Belafonte's character turns out to have agency! He doesn't want to be a guardian angel; he wants his old life back. He doesn't want to be dead. And he fails to get what he wants, like everyone else in this depressing-ass movie, but at least he tried. Throw in some more trope psych-outs, like making you think this is the kind of movie where no one else can see the angel, but no, everyone can see him, he was just using the bathroom during one scene; and you've won me over. It's definitely below this month's median, but if you need a cinematic antidote to It's A Wonderful Life, here it is.

  On the scale of "use of classic New York grime in location shots", I would rate this movie: very poor. To quote Paul Zimmerman's Newsweek review, "[Director Ján] Kádar's unfamiliarity with New York shows. His camera views the city as if it were a tourist unwilling to wander too far from his hotel." Zero Mostel is great as always.

• The World's End (2013): Loved it. I won't go into a lot of detail because there's a reasonable chance you're planning on seeing it in the theater, but it was really fun. My biggest complaint is it maybe needed one fewer main character.

  After thinking about the Cornetto Trilogy as a whole, I went to IMDB and saw that the collective shares my opinion: all three movies are great, but Hot Fuzz is better than The World's End (7.9 vs. 7.8), and Shaun of the Dead (8.0) is better than Hot Fuzz. Honestly, at this point you know what to expect. You hear a bit of banter at the beginning of the movie, know that it precisely foreshadows the events of the movie, and it doesn't even matter. It's like knowing that Ulysses is based on the Odyssey. That's not a "spoiler"; it's the structure of the piece. We have here three great movies around two eternal themes: society as a threat to individuality, and the indestructable love between Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, regardless of who is playing the responsible one and who is playing the screwup.

  In case you haven't had enough of my idiosyncratic approach to movie quality (and you probably haven't, or why are you reading this), consider the following: if I had to pick only one movie from the Cornetto Trilogy, it would be Hot Fuzz. Not Shaun of the Dead, which is definitely a better and more influential movie. Because Hot Fuzz is the movie that caters to my specific kink: stories about people obsessed with stories, to the point where they let the stories run their lives, who get to save the day when they're suddenly thrust into a situation where the rules from the stories are the only ones that apply.

This month and next the museum is showing every film Howard Hawks ever made, so search for his name on IMDB and prepare for the Cary Grant-fest. SEE IT BIG is also returning, and I'm looking forward to seeing the Howard Hawks Scarface on the 21st and then the Brian De Palma Scarface on the 22nd.

(1) Thu Aug 01 2013 11:59 July Film Roundup: Oh man. As promised last month, July was an epic month of moviewatching, and I decided to try a little epic experiment with this roundup, inspired by the "The Balcony is Closed" game on No More Whoppers. For every movie I saw in July, I came up with a nonobvious connection between that movie and every other movie I saw in July. For instance, if I saw both Die Hard and Live Free or Die Hard, the connection between them would of course be "fresh-faced hacker".

I saw nine movies over the course of the month (well, eight and a half), and by the end this exercise became kind of ridiculous, as I strained to remember obscure aspects of earlier movies. But I knew it would become ridiculous, so when it did, I had no standing to complain. Here we go:

• Citizen Kane (1941) For years I have searched for an answer to that unanswerable question, "What is the Citizen Kane of games of movies?" What movie is held up as an unattainable example for what movies could be if only moviemakers would get their acts together and make some proper art? Then, one day, it struck me: perhaps Citizen Kane was the Citizen Kane of games of movies.

  But I hadn't seen Citizen Kane in over ten years. I'd only seen it twice. The only solution was to go to the museum and SEE IT BIG. Only then would I know whether or not cinema was a worthy art form.

  And... it's not. Because how could it be, with those kind of expectations heaped upon it? But Citizen Kane is a great movie. Just one example of its greatness: I'm pretty sure the reel changes don't sync with scene changes. You'll see a reel change coming up and it will just cut from one camera angle to another angle on the same shot.

  I became acutely aware of reel changes ever since seeing a very metatextual episode of Columbo and I can't emphasize how bizarre this is. Movies made fifty years after Citizen Kane have abrupt scene changes at reel changes, but near as I can tell Citizen Kane just says "screw that, we're telling the story at its own pace and we trust people to not misplace an entire film canister." Or whatever the normal reason is for syncing scene changes to reel changes.

  But not all of Citizen Kane's experiments hold up. The newsreel at the beginning is a really clever way to do a huge infodump and set up a framing device, but back in the day watching two newsreels in quick succession would have been super annoying, and now that newsreels are extinct, it just feels like a huge infodump.

  So, tragically, Citizen Kane cannot be said to be the Citizen Kane of games of movies. But keep trying to meet those impossible, irrelevant expectations, filmmakers!

  This seems like a good time to reveal the secret I've been keeping for years: the Citizen Kane of video games is Legend of the Bystander from Constellation Games. That's the game you get when you translate Citizen Kane's dramatic structure—someone circling around the past in flashback, unable to change or understand anything—into game form. Is it a good game? No! It's a weird, confused, frustrating game. So stop searching for it.

  • Bonus connection with last month's No: dirty-tricks election.
• Sunrise (1927): A chilling tale of the cycle of domestic violence. This film starts out with the most crushing melodrama imaginable. Then there's a goofy series of skits about barbershop misunderstandings and piglets getting drunk and flappers' shoulder straps falling off. Then, back to the crushing melodrama! It's insane, but it works. (At least, the second and third acts work.) The goofy stuff makes you think the tension has been resolved, even though the movie's only half over. But you're a fool for thinking so! The first bit of tension was a ruse, and the goofy skits are secretly building up the real tension, which when it breaks has real emotional impact.
  • Connection with Citizen Kane: Man trying to buy back his wife's love.
• Greed (1924): The Breaking Bad of its time. If you wanted to see Samwise Gamgee as a dentist who sexually assaults his patients, this is your silent film. If you wanted to see vaudeville-era German stereotypes, or the Cliff House in its heyday, or Oakland back when it was just a train station... Greed has it all. Well, it doesn't have about 5 1/2 hours of footage which was cut by the studio, but you can find most of that stuff in the book.
  • Connection with Citizen Kane: Girl meets boy because she has a toothache.
  • Connection with Sunrise: Disastrous rainstorm.
• Do the Right Thing (1989): After we watched Ace in the Hole on Criterion DVD, we saw a special feature in which Spike Lee talked about his love for that film. I didn't make much of it at the time, because the only Spike Lee film I'd seen at the time was Malcolm X. But now it's clear. Spike Lee shares Billy Wilder's interest in comedy that turns to tragedy and farce that slips into fiasco. Do the Right Thing is the same kind of slow-burn catastrophe as Ace in the Hole.

  I have a few complaints: some stretches are boring, there's some exploitative boobs. But Mookie's strong through-line lets this movie avoid the "sketch comedy" feel you sometimes get when a movie has a whole lot of characters.

  • Connection with Citizen Kane: Something highly valued gets burned.
  • Connection with Sunrise: Commotion in a restaurant.
  • Connection with Greed: Heatstroke!
• Reds (1981): I really wasn't in the mood for a 3.5-hour movie so I left during intermission. What I should have done was come in at intermission, because right before intermission the film found its focus and got super interesting and spectacular. But it wasn't enough to get me to stay. The studio really should have gotten someone to butcher the first half to about 20 minutes, a la Greed, but I'm sure those contracts were ironclad. I'm thinking you could just show the scenes with Jack Nicholson as Eugene O'Neill, and when Diane Keaton storms out of the house, show a title card saying "Such were the Reeds."

  So... I can't properly review this movie because I'm disappointed by the half I saw and I long for the half I didn't see. I will say that if for some reason you genuinely hate Ishtar, this can be your "Warren Beatty is a doofy American in over his head" movie instead.

  I gotta say, though, I never got the feeling that I was watching the 1910s. Diane Keaton looked just like she did in Annie Hall, and Warren Beatty looked just like he would in Ishtar.

  • Connection with Citizen Kane: Wandering around an abandoned palace.
  • Connection with Sunrise: Domesticated animal running all over the place.
  • Connection with Greed: A wayward dentist's wife.
  • Connection with Do the Right Thing: Directly addressing the camera.
  • Bonus Breaking Bad connection: epiphany upon seeing something inside a copy of Leaves of Grass.
• The Right Stuff (1983): The other half of my mashup, Do The Right Stuff. I've mentioned before how Tom Wolfe's book changed my perception of manned space travel. The movie isn't as good as the book, but it's very good, and it does a good job of exploring what I consider the book's primary topic: the adoption of the test pilot ethos as a model for nationalist heroism in an era where nuclear weapons have rendered traditional macho heroism irrelevant.

  What I didn't expect from this movie was that it would also show the simple, uncomplicated heroism that occurs when people stand up for each other. When the Mercury astronauts stand together against fake-Wernher von Braun and demand better treatment than the space program chimps. When John Glenn jeopardizes his career by refusing to pressure his wife to talk to LBJ, and the other astronauts have his back. And if you don't like that stuff and you wanna read the film as a celebration of Chuck Yeager stealing a plane and crashing it for no real reason, that's in there too.

  • Connection with Citizen Kane: Dive bar.
  • Connection with Sunrise: Man tempted by floozy.
  • Connection with Greed: The desert sucks.
  • Connection with Do the Right Thing: Burning photos on the wall.
  • Connection with Reds: The Russians got there first.
• Apollo 13 (1995): I loved this movie when I saw it in the theater, and I think I love it even more now. It continues The Right Stuff's exploration of heroism by showing a space mission that produced nothing else. It shows what The Right Stuff didn't: people sticking together in a genuine life-threatening situation. (In real life there was even more sticking together than in the movie, which invented Fred Haise's pissy hatred of Jack Swigert. Or at least invented it coming out over a live comm; Sumana and I read over the transcript and we think they kept it pretty professional, all things considered.)

  Best of all, Apollo 13 brings the nerds into the loop. Max Grodénchik is a big hero as FIDO Gold (SYMBOLISM), and it's not played for laughs the way it always was on DS9. I think that's why they stunt-casted Ed Harris as chief nerd Gene Kranz; it sort of gives you a bridge from The Right Stuff.

  Oh, no, wait, best of all, the sainted Billy Wilder liked this movie! From poorly-worded IMDB trivia:

  Over the course of lunch with his idol Billy Wilder, Ron Howard has said that he was thrilled to learn that Wilder deemed this movie to be Howard's best work as a director because it was about a guy who did NOT realize his dream...

  That's our Billy!

  • Connection with Citizen Kane: Cost? No man can say.
  • Connection with Sunrise: An unorthodox lifeboat.
  • Connection with Greed: I think we can all agree that Greed is also a movie about a guy who does not realize his dream.
  • Connection with Do the Right Thing: Exposition broadcast over radio.
  • Connection with Reds: Old person doesn't remember famous person's name.
  • Connection with The Right Stuff: Can't think of one, sorry.
• Howdy, y'all. Joe Hills here, recording as I always do from Nashville (1975). I'd never seen an Altman film before, and this one plays out like a whole season of Arrested Development in one movie. There's a complicated network of relationships between self-absorbed characters that plays out in a funny, horrifying way. Perhaps the cleverest move is to give the knee-jerk Hollywood-liberal approach to 1970s Nashville ("these hicks are crazy") to the British reporter Opal, a clueless, snobbish foreigner around whom all red-blooded Americans can unite in mockery. The songs are always bad in just the right way.
  • Connection with Citizen Kane: Pretending that someone who can't sing, can.
  • Connection with Sunrise: Big city musical hooplah!
  • Connection with Greed: Awkward family dinner.
  • Connection with Do the Right Thing: Exploitative use of boobs.
  • Connection with Reds: Foreign journalist has a poor grasp of what's going on.
  • Connection with The Right Stuff: Unexpected Jeff Goldblum.
  • Connection with Apollo 13: Flashy white clothing.
• There Will Be Blood (2007): I'd just like to state for the record that Kern County is exactly as depicted in this movie. Even though they filmed it in Texas.

  Uh, yeah, this was pretty good. Just your basic movie about men digging themselves into moral cesspools and foreclosing on any possibility of redemption, but better than its competitors thanks to Daniel Day-Lewis's amazing acting. I liked the passive-aggressive rivalry between his character and Paul Dano's. I'm really excited that director Paul Thomas Anderson is doing an adaptation of Inherent Vice. (Although I think that adaptation might be better if Wes Anderson did it.)

  I also want to point out what a great title this is. It's kind of cheesy. Other movie titles don't make explicit promises. And I can't imagine someone squirming on their theater seat at the two-hour mark thinking, "Well, I'd leave, but I was told there would be blood." But it works. The title sets up a tension that lasts the entire movie. There are all these moments of horrific violence and symbolic stand-ins for blood, but you never see literal blood until the very end.

  • Connection with Citizen Kane: Hey, there's oil on your property!
  • Connection with Sunrise: Wedding as act break.
  • Connection with Greed: The sordid true story of Minecraft.
  • Connection with Do the Right Thing: Brother set against brother, because one of them is an asshole.
  • Connection with Reds: Poor labor conditions.
  • Connection with The Right Stuff: Something explodes before it should.
  • Connection with Apollo 13: Something explodes that shouldn't have exploded at all.
  • Connection with Nashville: Deaf kid.

This month the museum panders to me with a festival of classic crime and grime. New York in the 1970s: a lousy place to live, a great place to make a movie about. Looking forward to seeing films like Cotton Comes to Harlem, Serpico, Superfly, The French Connection, and Across 110th Street. We'll probably also catch some Wong Kar-Wai. I will not be repeating July's movie connection experiment.

Correction: "I'd never seen an Altman film before" is one of the least accurate claims I've ever made. I've seen Gosford Park, The Company, and A Prairie Home Companion. And I've probably seen M*A*S*H, given how often they showed it on Comedy Central back when I was in high school. But I came out of all those films thinking "that was good/terrible/okay", whereas I came out of Nashville thinking "No wonder this guy's a legend!" It was like watching a whole nother director.

Mon Jul 29 2013 16:41 Loaded Dice 2013 Update: I fetched the BoardGameGeek data again, a yearly tradition, and put up another Loaded Dice update.

A few highlights:

• The number of games released each year is holding steady at about 3200.
• Rating inflation continues since last year, but it seems to be slowing down.
• Games that were highly underrated in 2011 were overrated in 2012, as BGG users overcompensated for their former low ratings. Games that were highly overrated in 2012 were still overrated in 2013--these were highly hyped games and the hype is still dying down.

If you go to the main page, you can download an amazing 17-megabyte JSON dump of BGG data I've compiled. It includes descriptions and genres for every game in the dataset, and three data samples that convey historical rating data over three years. At this point I feel like I'm adding enough on top of what the BGG API can give you (the historical rating data) that I can make the data dump available without apology.

Sat Jul 20 2013 21:55 Apo11o ll: To celebrate the anniversary of the first moon landing, I packaged up a project I came up with a while back: Apo11o ll, a generative piece that performs Queneau assembly on the Apollo 11 transcripts (from The Apollo 11 Flight Journal and The Apollo 11 Surface Journal).

Duke: Rog. [Long pause.]

Armstrong: That's one small step for (a) man; one giant leap for mankind.

McCandless: Roger, 11. I have a T13 update for you. AOS Tananarive at 37:04, Simplex Alpha. Readback. If you want to go that way, crank it up, and then you can drive it around and look where you want. Over. 11, this is Houston. And we copy the V_I.

Aldrin: Does it look to you like the [garble] the right way? Yes, they were working out - this elaborate scheme.

Collins: Unless you'd rather sleep up top, Buzz; I like - you guys ought to get a good night's sleep, going in that damn LM - How about - which would you prefer? I say the leak check is complete, and I'm proceeding with opening the hatch dump valve.

Aldrin: That enough?

McCandless: Apollo 11, this is Houston at 1 minute. Over.

First Mashteroids and now this? How am I doing all this Queneau space-magic? The answer is simple: Olipy, my library for artistic text generation (focusing on Queneau assembly, because it's the best). Check it out of Github and you'll have everything you need to create home versions of many of my works. It's like my own personal Boîte-en-valise! Want to create something new? Just grab some data and feed it to an Assembler class.

Wed Jul 17 2013 12:34 Reunion: I got a misdirected flyer in the mail inviting Leon Richardson to a high school reunion. Class of 1983. I was not yet in kindergarten in 1983, so I thought I might go and drop hints about the youth serum I'd invented.

On the other hand, the invitation is addressed to "Richardson Leon, or current resident". So I can go as myself. Anyone can show up to this high school reunion! They don't care!

In fact they're probably hoping a few current residents will show up to boost the numbers. The flyer seems acutely aware that high school reunions are increasingly an anachronism in this world of "Facebook, Twitter, and Smartphones", and is really desperate to prove the worth of in-person reunions.

It also informs me that "The bio-sheet deadline is Friday, August 30, 2013." Interestingly enough, that's also what a supervillain recently told the United Nations.

(4) Thu Jul 11 2013 10:02 Billy Collins, Stand-Up Comic (Bonus: How To Write Poetry): For reasons that need not concern us, I recently gave some advice on writing poetry. I don't know anything about poetry, but I was able to derive the most basic advice from first principles: "read a whole bunch of poetry before you try to write some." Adam Parrish knows more about poetry and offered some poetry-specific advice: "get over yourself".

I think a lot of incipient poets get caught in the idea that poetry is somehow about free self expression, and that the best poetry is that which most freely expresses the self—which, of course, isn't true. Poetry is a genre that you have to be literate in and a toolbox that you have to learn how to use.

If reading a bunch of poetry is too much work for you, you should at least take the time to reverse-engineer the findings of this paper by Michael Coleman (also via Adam), which uses machine learning to model the differences between poems written by members of the Academy of American Poets, and poems written by the general public. It gives some clues as to how the genre works and what's in the toolbox. e.g.:

The negative association with the PYMCP variable ‘Rhy’—a proxy for the extent to which words elicit other words that rhyme with the stimulus word—indicates that professional poets use words that are somewhat unusual but not necessarily complex. Professional poems have fewer words denoting affect but more words denoting number. Professional poems also refer less to the present and to time in general than amateur poems.

Run your stuff through Poetry Assessor until you start getting good scores. Now you're a poet! Well, sort of. The machine-learning algorithm can reliably tag crappy poems as crap, but it mainly looks at vocabulary and I don't think it knows about scansion at all. I ran the first paragraph of Bleak House—three ponderous Victorian sentences—through Poetry Assessor and it got a 1.8, making it a decent twentieth-century American poem. (And it's a very good paragraph, but you see the problem.)

I formulated my "read a lot of poetry" advice because that was also the techinque I used to figure out if I had any more specific advice to give. (I don't.) While reading a lot of poetry, I got really into the work of former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins. Collins has written a number of what I would call "NPR poems", poems that you could imagine him reading aloud on NPR, some of which he probably did read aloud on NPR. He's on NPR a lot. And at first glance the NPR poems have more in common with stand-up comedy than traditional or contemporary poetry.

I think it's best to think of the narrator of a Billy Collins poem as a fictional poet named "Billy Collins", a man whose bouts of incompetence and perpetual lack of inspiration are exploited by the real-world Billy Collins. Stand-up comics do the same thing. I became very interested in how Collins is able to use this persona to do serious poetic work through poems that aren't serious at all—again, something analogous to what a good stand-up comic does.

Some examples. I'm gonna start with Cheerios and Litany, two poems I don't really like. These poems are about as confrontational as Billy Collins gets, but it's not because of their subject matter: it's because they're poetry hacks.

"Cheerios" has a Poetry Assessor score of 0.8--barely professional quality. In "Cheerios" the incompetent poet "Billy Collins" keeps trying to launch a flight of poetic fancy using the overwrought abstract language associated with amateur poetry: "stooped and threadbare back", "more noble and enduring are the hills". But he can never get it off the ground because the engine keeps stalling on concrete imagery--the objective correlatives associated with professional poetry. The problem with that is the concrete imagery consists of nothing but different breakfast foods ("waited for my eggs and toast", "that dude's older than Cheerios", "illuminated my orange juice"). So it's deliberately bad amateur poetry interrupted by deliberately bad professional poetry. Just saying it's a bad poem isn't enough. It's bad in a very interesting, bathetic way.

On the other hand, "Litany" has the incredibly high Poetry Assessor score of 4.4. (The maximum score given in the Coleman paper corresponds to a PA score of 5.2.) What's his secret? Collins spends the entire poem blasting out objective correlatives at high speed. Some of them are taken directly from other poems ("the crystal goblet and the wine"), some of them are allusions ("the plums on the counter", "the burning wheel of the sun"), some are original ("the boat asleep in its boathouse"). But as he shoots those images out, he classifies them, like he's working on an assembly line, or brainstorming the poem he will eventually write. "Litany" is the opposite of "Cheerios". Collins is hacking the part of your brain that evaluates poetry, pushing all your buttons with free-floating imagery. It's a bad poem because you don't know enough about the people in the poem to understand what the imagery means.

Some other NPR poems, arranged roughly in ascending order of seriousness:

• Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House
• Child Development
• Nostalgia
• No Time
• Marginalia
• Candle Hat
• Print

Pay special attention to "Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House" and "Nostalgia", two hilarious poems that are literally highbrow stand-up comedy. "Gun" is Seinfeld-esque, employing the tricks of modern poetry to take an exasperating everyday situation and blow it up into series of escalating fantastic images. (In case you were wondering, its Poetry Assessor score is 2.2, squarely on the "professional" side.) "Nostalgia" (1.3) is more of a Steve Martin kind of comedy, presenting logically flawed arguments and the dumb things people say when they're arguing on autopilot.

"Nostalgia" escalates not to a punchline--a funny kind of absurdity--but to a reductio ad absurdum, a logical absurdity. That makes it a good transition to two Collins poems that, although they deal with ephemeral topics, are more serious and less jokey. They both deal with words, the relationship between words and reality, and the fact that we're always putting words into boxes that themselves have no relationship with reality:

• First Reader
• American Sonnet

"First Reader" (2.9) is my favorite Collins poem. I feel like "American Sonnet" is the most professionally composed of his poems, and Poetry Assessor agrees, giving it the highest score (3.2) of any of the poems I tested. (Apart from "Litany", which is a poetry hack.) I tried writing down some analysis but these two are easy poems to appreciate, so I'll spare you. I want to close with two poems that I'm not crazy about as a whole, but which do a really interesting thing in the last stanza: they anthropomorphize individual words.

• Paperwork
• Thesaurus

"Paperwork" shows fictional poet "Billy Collins" not being able to write a poem, dreaming in the end of gaining inspiration from an "ancient noun who lives alone in a forest." "Thesaurus" is all about anthropomorphizing words, but it's not until the end that the words leave "the warehouse of Roget" and take on independent lives, "wandering the world where they sometimes fall/in love with a completely different word."

Anthropomorphizing words is how Collins deals with the fact that poetry is a lonely business: writing things down all day, making sure to use exactly the right word all the time. Who else needs to be that careful about individual words? Stand-up comics, that's who. A punchline and a poem both rely on an unexpected word at exactly the right time. That word, when it comes along, is your best friend.

PS: Minor error in the Coleman paper which confused me when I was trying to convert between the paper's scores and Poetry Assessor scores.

For example, Robert Hass has two poems in the corpus, The Image and Our Lady of the Snows, which score in the high to very high range of .72 and .94, respectively.

Those numbers should be reversed. "The Image" has a score of .94 (PA: 5.2), and "Our Lady of the Snows" has .72 (PA: 1.1)

Tue Jul 09 2013 09:44 Mashteroids: As my birthday present to you, I present Mashteroids, Queneau assemblies of the IAU citations for minor planets. This showed up briefly on NYCB two years ago, but I've expanded the dataset, improved the sentence tokenization, and created a platform for future Queneaux.

A few samples:

You also got an RSS feed.

Mon Jul 01 2013 09:06 June Film Roundup: I guess the theme of June was mixing fact and fiction? I dunno why I feel the need to come up with a theme for all the random movies I watched in a month. This thing is long enough as it is. Here you go:

• Computer Chess (2013): A painstakingly forged docudrama about a computer chess tournament in the early 1980s, shot on period cameras, featuring old computers and super realistic dialogue. It's really amazing... and then... writer/director Andrew Bujalski throws it all away! He piles on fantastic elements that start out pretty good and then swerve into creepypasta territory.

  It didn't help that I sat with an audience of chess enthusiasts who'd come not to see a quirky, nearly-plotless indie movie, but rather to hear Joel Benjamin and Murray Campbell talk about their work on Deep Blue. See, the World Science Festival didn't mention the name of the movie they'd be showing, because it technically hadn't had its New York premiere yet. I knew the score: I'd heard of Computer Chess, this mystery movie was obviously Computer Chess, and I was really looking forward to seeing it. But most of the people coming in didn't know, and this movie left them... nonplussed.

  And I'm on their side, honestly. This should be a great movie, verily, the kind of movie I would make. Not the kind of movie that would make the chess fans stand up and cheer necessarily, but there's a decent through-line in there about the ethics of computer programming, and a nice conceit about two mutually unintelligible groups of people circling each other curiously when they rent the same conference center over a weekend. But it's... it's too Sundance. In fact, it's so Sundance that it's winning prizes at Sundance, so it doesn't need any help from me.

  I'm sure this has only niche appeal, but Computer Chess features an actor who looks kinda like Roy Fielding, playing a character similar to John Goodman's character in Barton Fink. That was a sweet spot for me.

  Uh, I'll talk about the panel discussion as long as I'm here. There was some interesting stuff. Murray Campbell was a veteran of many computer chess tournaments like the one shown in the movie, and confirmed that everything except the fantastic elements was extremely accurate. He also mentioned that into the 1990s, people had preconceived ideas about "how computers play chess", and when computers like Deep Blue started having a grasp of strategy (and were preprogrammed with responses to various openings), human players started freaking out, accusing IBM of Mechanical Turk hijinks, etc.

• Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989): Watched on DVD as a palate-cleanser from Star Trek Into Darkness. Man, it's a terrible movie. No two parts of the plot fit together. It's got about forty-five minutes of filler that could be avoided if the Enterprise just had working transporters. But I remembered three things about the movie that I really liked, and all three of them still stand up:
  1. I've always thought Sybok was a pretty decent Trek villain, and after rewatching I think he's actually the second-best Trek movie villain. What's his devious plan? To find enlightenment! What's his evil power? He's freakishly good at empathizing with people! You gotta admit that's pure Trek.
  2. Not pure Trek, but very welcome, was the portrayal of Nimbus III. Not the Mos Eisley part, but the "dead-end diplomatic posting" part. You rarely see environments in Trek that are not horrible or hostile, per se, just run down and a lousy place to be.
  3. The famous "What does God want with a starship?" scene is one of my favorite Trek moments, and the only good thing to come out of letting Shatner write this movie. Shatner knows Kirk: the bluffer, the smiling con man. You can't kid a kidder, and when "God" tries, Kirk not only refuses to take the bait, he trolls "God" into letting the mask slip, turning McCoy and Sybok against him. It's awesome.

  This is just another reason why I don't give ratings to the movies I see. The Final Frontier is an awful movie and Into Darkness is a mediocre movie, but there's nothing in Into Darkness to match those three things from Final Frontier.

• The Conversation (1974): A great Gene Hackman portrayal of a super-nerd, before nerds became irrevocably associated with computers. A pre-Star Wars Harrison Ford experiments with playing a heavy, and it doesn't go well. Definitely worthwhile, but the rest of the movie can't help being overwhelmed by the awesome 1970s surveillance trade show. More relevant than ever?
• The Odd Couple (1968): When I was a teenager, Jack Lemmon was the decrepit face of dull establishment Hollywood comedy. I felt the same way about Steve Martin, and was really astonished and somewhat angry when I saw a super-old SNL stand-up act and learned that the guy from Father of the Bride was secretly an alt-comedy genius! Who knew?

  Over the years I a) mellowed out about this and b) saw the wonderful movies that had put Lemmon on the gravy train to begin with--The Great Race, The Apartment, Some Like it Hot, The Fortune Cookie. I grew up a little and learned to forgive. But for some reason, in my mind The Odd Couple was the turning point, the top of the slippery slope that had Grumpier Old Men at the bottom.

  Well, now I've seen The Odd Couple, and... sort of? I'd say The Fortune Cookie is the top of this particular slippery slope: a great movie that moves Lemmon away from zany capers and exploits his abrasive chemistry with Walter Matthau for dark, cynical character-driven comedy. The Odd Couple is a little way down the slope: it's funny, it's character-driven, it's dark, but it's not cynical at all. Everybody just needs a hug. In other words, it's not a Billy Wilder film. But hey, nobody's perfect.

  PS: If you're going to put any faith in my reviews (which I don't recommend) you should know that I get extra visual enjoyment out of any movie set in New York during the 1960s and 1970s: The Odd Couple, Marathon Man, etc. So even a film like Taxi Driver which I hated, I'll go away thinking "at least there was some classic New York griminess."

• True Stories (1986): David Byrne's version of UHF. If you think parody is the truest form of humor, as I did when I was a Jack Lemmon-hating teenager, you'll like UHF a lot and think that True Stories is meandering and pointless. But if you prefer satire, as I do today, then True Stories is where it's at. John Goodman shines as Roy Fielding. (Just kidding. But there is a fun early aw-shucks Goodman role.)
• The Great Magician (2011): I get a Jimmy Stewart vibe from Tony Leung. He projects the same blend of awkward handsomeness and potentially sinister decency. He's the best thing about this movie, which mixes real and made-up history in a way I personally found very confusing. Admittedly I don't know much about early twentieth century Chinese history, but Tai Chi Zero did this without confusing me, so I know it's possible.

  More problematically, The Great Magician mixes real-looking stage magic, in-world stage magic that was clearly done with camera tricks and CGI, and real honest-to-goodness in-world magic (also done with CGI). That's even more confusing. The end result is I don't understand what happens in this movie; whether or not I should be rooting for the warlord character; or what political point, if any, the movie is making.

• Journey to Italy (1954): Museum website called it "one of the most influential movies ever made, a work that many critics now believe ushered in the modern era in filmmaking." So I guess this movie's to blame for all those other movies about women who put up with douchebag husbands. Good points: spectacular ruins porn and Italian landscapes; hilarious rambling tour guides.
• The Goonies (1985): I thought I'd seen this movie twice, but now I remember my first "viewing" was actually the James Kahn novelization, which I read in grade school. The novelization wasn't bad! I'd say it's better than the movie, but I haven't read it in twenty years, and the movie's not as good as I remember, so why not the book, too?

  Perhaps I approached this viewing with the wrong attitude. The Goonies is not supposed to depict a believable sequence of events. It's a dramatization of kids' adventure fantasies and the lies they tell each other. You gotta go in with that attitude. Maybe I did! Let's say I did. But it didn't last, because the first thirty minutes of The Goonies does its best to dispel that attitude, showing a relatively realistic setup that gets the kids to the restaurant. Once they're at the restaurant, the coming-of-age movie collides with the crime movie, and all bets are off.

  Maybe other people don't even notice this. Maybe I only notice it because I'm working on a novel that features drastic tonal shifts and misfit kids in terrible peril and people chasing other people, and am becoming very familiar with the attendant problems.

  Things where I remember the book being better than the movie: it has a much tighter POV on Mikey (I think it might even be first-person), and it's a lot more explicit about the class warfare going on between the Goonies and the country-club folk. Underappreciated thing about the movie: Ma Fratelli's string of pearls. The only bit of white on her black outfit, and the only bit of femme in a very butch role. Things where the Konami NES game Goonies II is better than book or movie: music and weaponry. (Speaking of which, the PC in that game is clearly Data, not Mikey.)

  I feel like I should add an Update that after thinking about this review for a few days I decided I was too hard on The Goonies, it's just a goofy fun kids movie, but then I thought, why should thinking more about a movie get me to lower my standards? So I dunno. It's okay. People should definitely watch it. Unlike...

• Meatballs (1979): Geez, this is the kind of movie Comedy Central used to show all the time in the 90s. You know what, all those terrible "comedies" actually had me convinced that it's nearly impossible to make a comedy movie that's funny. You know what else, I still believe that! What the hell is this? Bill Murray doing his Bugs Bunny act not to spread chaos, but to boost a depressed kid's self-esteem? Give me a break! Thank goodness there's a fat guy and a nerd in this movie, because otherwise the entire cast would look exactly the same! Are Murray's corny PA announcements supposed to make me laugh? Because... well, they did, actually. Those were good.

  Maybe this movie looks a lot better through a thick layer of nostalgia, but I never went to summer camp and it looks like an awful place to be, so screw it. I did like Murray's character's refreshing approach to the inter-camp athletic rivalry: viz., screw it.

  Two Meatballs/Goonies connections I thought were odd. 1. Both movies seem to be named after a term claimed by the slobs in a slobs-vs.-snobs movie rivalry. (I'm not sure about this for Meatballs, but otherwise I have no idea why the movie is called that.) 2. In both movies, the fat guy is also the Jewish guy. Why? Was that a big stereotype back then? Neither movie makes a big deal about this, and Fink from Meatballs is clearly not observant, but it's definitely there.

• Upstream Color (2013): Finally! We saw it on Netflix, which was probably better because we got to pause the movie occasionally and talk it over. Where Primer tests your ability to piece together a plotline from a sequence of nearly indistinguishable events, Upstream Color tests your more basic ability to turn a sequence of film shots into a sequence of events. Only the artiest shots make it into this film, the plot is advanced as tangentially as possible, and every shot ends five frames before you think it will.

  Fortunately, with the movie-watching work we've put in over the past year, we were up to the challenge. If you can read the text you'll find a nice X-Files-esque horror movie that uses arthouse techniques to mask its low budget (the other two possibilities: make the movie an in-world document so that low production values are excusable, a la Blair Witch, or just roll with it and do really cheap gore effects).

• No (2012): An incredible movie that combines heart and cynicism in a way worthy of Billy Wilder. (I keep bringing him up; I guess he's officially my favorite director.) This movie takes its place among two of my favorites—Good Bye Lenin! and University of Laughs—which also deal with the intersection of creativity and totalitarianism.

  No mixes fact and fiction to an almost unheard-of (but not confusing) extent. In Forrest Gump it's clear when footage has been modified, but in No I don't think any footage has been modified. It's just that the footage and the movie are indistinguishable. It's all filmed on period cameras, a la Computer Chess.

  During the movie you see this real TV commercial, and you also see a fictionalized recreation of the filming of that commercial. The movie builds a whole behind-the-scenes world around that commercial, creating the kind of person who would have thought it was a good way to fight against a dictatorship, and fought for their creative vision, and won.

  Naturally this leaves a bad taste in the mouths of the real people displaced by this fictional viewpoint character. While doing post-movie research I found this no-table article:

  “The film is a gross oversimplification that has nothing to do with reality,” Genaro Arriagada, director of the No campaign, said in a telephone interview from Chile. “The idea that, after 15 years of dictatorship in a politically sophisticated country with strong union and student movements, solid political parties and an active human rights movement, all of a sudden this Mexican advertising guy arrives on his skateboard and says, ‘Gentlemen, this is what you have to do,’ that is a caricature.”

  English-language reports of this inter-Chilean argument made it sound like the disputed issue is the effectiveness of the television campaign versus other things like voter registration drives. But if machine translation of this interview with Arriagada can be believed, his problem is less with the idea that the television campaign was important, and more with the idea that an "advertising guy" came up with it.

  This is a political process that has a very important dimension. For starters, the slogan is defined much earlier, in a technical committee. The pitch is determined by political and peaceful reconciliation tone, not to fear, not violence. From that meeting, also there are two elements, such as the rainbow and the slogan of "Joy is coming". That is a political decision. It was a pretty aggressive bet, but there was no major problem with the world I had to approve it. And then designate two political representatives, who were in charge of directing the band: Juan Gabriel Valdes and Patricio Silva. From them the computer is configured. Here the orientation were entitled to politicians and execution to those who know it, that is to advertisers.

  I also found what appears to be a transcript of a roundtable, "¿Por Que Gano El No?". The roundtable presented some poll results which give a lot of influence to the television campaign (again, machine translation):

  In rural areas over 90% of people said that band saw almost every day. Interviewers who were to land that rural people have, where in many homes no TV, walked from one house to another to get together at night and see this strip television, and more, serving the following question: Where did you learn the meaning of "No"? Answer: 80% for television.

  "Band" and "strip television" are "franja" and "franja televisiva" in the original: i.e. TV and radio time set aside for political campaigns, e.g. the 15-minute blocks dramatized (and shown) in No. Here's an entire block for the "No" campaign, and here's one of the sinister, even dorkier "Si" blocks.

July is gonna be a huge month at the museum, as their theme for the month is "The American Epic". Movies that might show up in next month's review include Citizen Kane, The Grapes of Wrath, Do The Right Thing, Reds, The Right Stuff, Nashville, There Will Be Blood, and The Night of the Hunter. I'm tired already!

Fri Jun 28 2013 14:55 The Interesting Parts: I've wanted to write this post for a long time, so long that the main guy I'm writing about, Iain M. Banks, announced that he had cancer and then died of the cancer. That doesn't really affect what I'm going to write, but it does give it an air of speaking ill of the dead, and it just sucks in general.

The Banks novel I read most recently was The Algebraist, and it was a mixed bag for me. The epic scope of Banks's imagination has always been a big inspiration to me as a writer, but The Algebraist is dominated by Banks's "normal human" characters, who channel that epic scope into activities I have always found really boring. I mentioned this in my commentary for "The Time Somn Died", and I assumed it was a side effect of the fact that there's just nothing to do in the Culture. But The Algebraist isn't a Culture novel. Its "normal human" characters don't sit around all day being post-scarcity. I'm just not interested in most of what they do.

Fortunately, eventually the spectacle and the aliens spin up and save the book. I speak mainly of the Dwellers, aliens who make their way onto my list of SF favorites for the way they combine Bertie Wooster joie de vivre with a complete disregard for the value of individual lives, including their own. Great stuff. I loved it. Colonel Hatherance: another awesome alien.

(The other flaw in The Algebraist is one I am perhaps too quick to notice in other writers. There's a puzzle, and a solution to the puzzle, but no explanation as to how the solution--which, by necessity, can be explained in a few paragraphs to a reader who's only been immersed in the universe for a few hours--has evaded all the in-universe people who've been desperately trying to solve the puzzle for thousands of years. That has nothing to do with this post, but I thought I'd mention it because it's a tricky problem, and if you start looking for it you'll see it a lot.)

After Iain M. Banks's The Algebraist, I naturally turned my reading eye to A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: Communication Sciences (1925-1980), by Iain Banks. No, just kidding. It's a corporate history published by Bell Labs in 1984 to keep track of all the stuff they'd invented over the years. My copy used to be in the library of the Union Presbyterian Seminary in Virginia--not sure why they had a copy in the first place.

You might think these two books have nothing in common, but one commonality was clear as soon as I cracked the latter tome: they both start out super boring.

Unlike The Algebraist, A History of Engineering and Science... is boring most of the way through. There's a lot about switched telephone networks, radio and fiber-optic cables. That's actually why I got this book; I wanted to do research for an alt-history story about phone phreaking. But the details were so dry I'm either gonna give up on the idea or just read Exploding the Phone instead. Here are the interesting parts of that book:

• Bell Labs used questionnaires and statistical models to map 25 two-person relationships along four axes: (p444-448)
  1. equality/inequality
  2. competition and conflict/cooperation and harmony
  3. intense/superficial
  4. task-oriented and formal/socio-emotional and informal

  For example, the relationship "business partners" is characterized by equality and cooperation. It's slightly on the intense side of intense/superficial, and slightly on the task-oriented side of task-oriented/socio-emotional. The relationship "siblings" fits squarely into equality/competition/intense/socio-emotional.

  Bell used this breakdown to conduct market research, such as when trying to figure out how to sell PICTUREPHONE service.

• At Bell Labs, Béla Julesz invented random-dot stereograms, (p451-453) cousin to the Magic Eye puzzles that ravaged the countryside in the 1990s. Since you can only see the stereogram if you have binocular vision, Julesz et al used stereograms to demonstrate that infants get binocular vision at 3.5 months. By reproducing common optical illusions in stereogram form, they were able to demonstrate that most optical illusions happen in a part of your brain further down the line than the part that combines the separate images from your eyes.

  I'm not 100% sure what Bell thought it was getting out of this research, but it probably also pertained to figuring out why no one wanted PICTUREPHONE.

• And of course Chapter 9, "Computer Science" was pretty interesting. It had a lot about early analog computers, and the predecessors to Unix. A few choice quotes:

  p367:

  An open shop for scientific computing, available to all comers, evolved around these machines. R. W. Hamming's epigrams, "It is better to do the right program the wrong way than to do the wrong program the right way," and "The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers," which stressed the role of computing as a servant to science, gained universal assent.

  p381:

  The low cost of film production on the Stromberg-Carlson recorder suggested using it for movies. R. M. McClure made the first computer movie at Bell Labs, a classified film of a cloud of incoming ballistic missiles and decoys.

  That would be an interesting film to see, because Bell Labs got its microfilm printer in 1961, so it probably predates 1967's Hummingbird (the first film on Wikipedia's timeline of computer animation) by quite a bit. But I can't find it online. It's probably still classified.

  p390:

  Curiously, the Bell System was sometimes required by law, as well as by engineering needs, to solve the minimum spanning tree, Steiner, and traveling salesman problems. In certain jurisdictions network rates have been based on these criteria.

Hopefully you see the problem. Nothing about those quotes, or about stereograms or classifying two-person relationships, is intrinsically more interesting than the stuff about circuit-switched telephone networks. It's all subjective. When I reached Chapter 9 of A History of Engineering and Science... I had the feeling of encountering the Dwellers in The Algebraist. "At last, this is my chapter!" But there's obviously an audience for that earlier stuff. I'm just not it. So... there must be people who really enjoy the human-centric parts of The Algebraist, right? Perhaps those people even enjoy the human-centric parts of the Culture books?

What madness is this? I knew that interestingness was subjective for nonfiction. As the author of a novel about alien video games, I am familiar with the idea that a reader might decide a novel is just not their thing. But it had escaped me that the same logic might apply within a novel. This made me re-evaluate the parts of Banks I don't like. However, I came to the same conclusion: I still don't like them, and I'm gonna try to avoid writing that sort of stuff. But it's not so strange anymore that there'd be an audience for it.

Last week I went to the Met and checked out an exhibit of prints from the Civil War. There's a Thomas Nast print from Harper's called "Christmas Eve", divided into two halves: the woman at home with the kids on Christmas Eve, praying for her husband, and the soldier in camp looking at a picture of his wife. It's a moving piece but at first glance there's not much to distinguish it from other "war sucks" pieces of the time.

But if you look in the left and right corners of the print, you'll see Santa Claus with his reindeer. On the left he's climbing down the chimney, and on the right he's driving through the camp, tossing out gifts. The cover for the same issue of Harper's shows Santa giving toys and socks to Union soldiers. These prints are the origin of the modern image of Santa Claus.

Nast first drew Santa Claus for the 1862 Christmas season Harper’s Weekly cover and center-fold illustration to memorialize the family sacrifices of the Union during the early and, for the north, darkest days of the Civil War.

Which are the interesting parts? How do you tell?

(1) Thu Jun 27 2013 10:37 Sycorax Transcends Your Puny Version Numbers: Last night I'd finally had enough with all of my Twitter bots not working due to sending POST requests to a resource that was 401 Gone. The one I really need to keep going is Frances Daily, and that one's on break right now because the planner page for June 1988 was unfortunately missing. But we're running out of June, so I fixed it.

To do that I had to fix Sycorax, the way-too-advanced piece of software that enacted an elaborate running commentary during the serialization of Constellation Games, a commentary that about eighty people saw. Since I'm pretty sure I'm the only person using Sycorax, I've decided to stop doing a tarballed release every time I change something, and just put the code up on Github.

Robot roll call!

• @FrancesDaily (Pan left.)
• @EveryBrendan (I'm not ready!)
• @DadaLimericks (What a cool guy.)
• @CrowwwwwwwwdBoardGames (I'm different! Specifically, I was rewritten to use Kicktraq's RSS feed instead of attempting to scrape every Kickstarter project page!)

The robot in the shop is @RoyPostcards, which I'll fix around the same time I get some more postcards ready to put up.

Update: @CrowdBoardGames prayed for a friend, and he came! His name is Timmy!

(2) Sat Jun 01 2013 10:06 May Film Roundup: Lots of travel in May, so not many movies this month either. But I do have heterodox opinions for you. Read on!

• Fahrenheit 451 (1966): Or, "From Truffaut to True Friend." Because I figured out why the French New Wave keeps not doing it for me. Truffaut et al. keep making films that would be much better as genre films! The lingering, visually striking shots; the stylized dialogue, the existential despair; all hallmarks of science fiction and noir. That's why I thought I would like this stuff. That's why I thought I'd like Shoot the Piano Player. But none of it worked for me, until Fahrenheit 451. From IMDB:

  François Truffaut reportedly said that he found science fiction films uninteresting and arbitrary. Because of this, a friend of his told him the story of Ray Bradbury's novel 'Fahrenheit 451'. Immediately afterward, Truffaut wanted to make a film from the novel and subsequently spent years raising the financing.

  It was a simple communication problem. "Ze science fiction films, zey are not so good." "Well, have you read this one science fiction book?" "Ze holy shit, it will be my life's work!"

  The movie's got issues. Oskar Werner hated Truffaut, and takes it out on us by Nicholas Caging his way through the lead role. Truffaut was so excited about making this movie that he finished the screenplay before becoming fluent in English. But hey, it's a dystopia whose defining feature is a lack of high culture. People are gonna act like robots and talk like poorly-translated subtitles. Fahrenheit 451 captures the school of SF in which sheer desire to tell a story compensates for the lack of literary chops. That means it's nothing like Bradbury, but it ain't bad.

• Promised Land (1975): The best thing about seeing movies at the museum, apart from the eclectic selection and the fact that it's usually free for members, is that you don't have to sit through a bunch of ads and trailers. At most, the curator will give a little speech. But the Promised Land showing brought back some of that traditional cinema non-magic, by not being free to members and by having a whole bunch of speeches beforehand, simulating the trailer experience nicely. I will admit it's not every day you get to hear from the consul-general of the Polish consulate in New York.

  OK, the movie itself. By the director of Ashes and Diamonds, and having many of the same visual trademarks as that movie, notably "light streaming through windows" and "blood-stained white cloth". There's a lot of blood in this one, actually: industrial accidents, third-degree burns, plutocrat cane-beatings, and old-fashioned fistfights and riots. The movie's engaging the whole way through, and there are a couple scenes that are amazingly clever--I loved the scene in the theater and the scene where the Bartleby-like clerk tells off his boss.

  But I was never surprised. It's an adaptation of a nineteenth-century novel, it's a movie about industrialists made in a communist country, and it goes pretty much as I thought it would. No, I was surprised, once. There's one glorious moment when entrepreneur Moryc Welt is so relieved and exhausted from having carried off a con that he breaks the fourth wall. He becomes his actor, Wojciech Pszoniak. Pszoniak looks at the camera and waves excitedly at the audience. A little flash, and then he's back to being Moryc Welt, and the movie is back to being what you thought it was.

  Good movie? Sure. Three hours worth of entertainment. Much better than Ashes and Diamonds. But not the transcendent experience I go into these movies hoping for.

• A Hard Day's Night (1964): Goofy fun. I was going to say "not much of substance", but the essay that accompanied this screening said that its cinematography was very influential. So, there's your substance.

  This movie solidified my opinion that Ringo is the most interesting Beatle. He's the only one in A Hard Day's Night who's willing to create comedy at his own expense. As long as I'm throwing Molotov cocktails: I'm kind of tired of the Beatles' music. I used to like it a lot, I still respect it, but I've been hearing this stuff for twenty years and it's time to take it off heavy rotation. Not A Hard Day's Night's fault, but the scenes where the Beatles are just playing their instruments and people are screaming didn't move me at all. They were just kinda creepy.

• Upstream Color (2013): Went to see this at IFC as a date with Sumana but the showing was CANCELLED, so we just had dinner.
• Star Trek Into Darkness (2013): I wasn't even going to see this. The buzz was so negative, with J.J. Abrams doing that thing he does, where he reveals something really dumb in a way so vague that you mentally fill in the clever thing he could be doing instead. I'd gone so far as to write off the entire franchise, the way we write off the Roman Republic once Julius Caesar comes along, even though there's still a good five hundred years of consuls and quaestors serving something called "the republic of Rome".

  But Sumana saw it, and wanted to talk about it, so I saw it with Beth. And... it exceeded my low expectations! Since you can't make a Star Trek movie these days unless it's a ripoff of The Wrath of Khan, it makes sense to literally remake The Wrath of Khan. In fact, at this point my review of the 2009 movie and my notes on Khan envy suffice to say most of what I want to say about Star Trek Into Darkness. It's pretty much the same movie as Star Trek, the difference being that I'm not going to put up with it any more. Rip off The Wrath of Khan once, shame on you. Rip off The Wrath of Khan twice, shame on me.

  And 2009-era Leonard, we gotta talk about plots not making sense. I've written a novel since then and I now see that there are different levels of making sense. On a technical level, the Genesis device is nonsense, but thematically it's perfect. Genesis has enormous creative potential, but when Khan learns about it, all he sees is a weapon. Khan thinks he should rule humanity, but he doesn't know what humanity is for.

  On the other hand, red matter, or the "red matter" deus ex machina in this movie... who the hell cares? It's a special effect. It has whatever properties are necessary to drive the plot forward. Nobody's gonna say "I sure wish they'd do something that revisits that issue."

  And that's the difference between good Star Trek and crap Star Trek. The closest this movie came to good Trek was Scotty's rejection of the militarization of Starfleet. Yes, Scotty is the film's moral center, and that's the only thing about this movie that is truly great.

  You know what? I'm changing the holy film rankings. Don't try to stop me! I'm doing this for all our sakes. The best Star Trek movie is now The Voyage Home, the one about using social engineering to clear up a big misunderstanding. The second-best Star Trek movie is now The Undiscovered Country, the one about confronting your prejudice and making peace with your enemies. The Wrath of Khan is now only the third-best Star Trek movie. Do you hear me? The third-best! AH HA HA HA H

  PS: Amitabh Bachchan for Khan.

• Arrested Development (2013): Not gonna make a habit of mentioning TV show-like things in these roundups, but c'mon, it's Arrested Development. Season 4 had the feeling of a "darker, grittier" reboot. I enjoyed watching the puzzle unfold, but was it really a comedy? It wasn't that much funnier than, say, Breaking Bad. Well, who's to say what's a "comedy"? It was really well done. Needs some editing though.

Tue May 14 2013 10:04 Beautiful Soup 4.2.0: My work on RESTful Web APIs is pretty much done, so I went through the Beautiful Soup bug tracker and fixed everything I could. The result is a new, stoner-iffic release of Beautiful Soup.

Here are the release notes. The main new features are a much more capable CSS selector engine, and a diagnostics module that should help with tech support.

Wed May 01 2013 14:55 Story Bundle: Constellation Games is featured in the current video game-themed StoryBundle. It's a pay-what-you-want, like the Humble Indie Bundle. This means that if you're the ultimate cheapskate, you can get my book and six others for the Steam-sale-level price of three bucks. Pay ten bucks, and you also get three bonus books, including Jordan Mechner's "The Making of Prince of Persia and a Ralph Baer memoir which--just guessing here--is probably enjoyably cranky.

And for people who discover Constellation Games based on this bundle, this is my occasional notification that there are tons of free extras: four bonus stories, in-character Twitter feeds, and an episode guide with commentary.

Side note: the bundle was assembled by Simon Carless, who is the reason I wrote Constellation Games in the first place.