News You Can Bruise

We spent a fair amount of time discussing the ethical issues surrounding bot construction, but there was quite a bit of conflation of what's "ethical" with what's allowed by the Twitter platform in particular, and website Terms of Service in general. I agree you shouldn't needlessly antagonize your data sources or your platform, but what's "ethical" and what's "allowed" can be very different things. However, I do have one big piece of ethical guidance that I had to learn gradually and through osmosis. Since bots are many hackers' first foray into the creative arts, it might help if I spell it out explicitly.

Here's an illustrative example, a tale of two bots. Bot #1 is @CancelThatCard. It finds people who have posted pictures of their credit or debit card to Twitter, and lets them know that they really ought to cancel the card and get a new one.

Bot #2 is @NeedADebitCard. It finds the same tweets as @CancelThatCard, but it retweets the pictures, collecting them in one place for all to see.

Now, technically speaking, @CancelThatCard is a spammer. It does nothing but find people who mentioned a certain phrase on Twitter and sends them a boilerplate message saying "Hey, look at my website!" For this reason, @CancelThatCard is constantly getting in trouble with Twitter.

As far as the Twitter TOS are concerned, @NeedADebitCard is the Gallant to @CancelThatCard's Goofus. It's retweeting things! Spreading the love! Extending the reach of your personal brand! But in real life, @CancelThatCard is providing a public service, and @NeedADebitCard is inviting you to steal money from teenagers. (Or, if you believe its bio instead of its name, @NeedADebitCard is a pathetic attempt to approximate what @CancelThatCard does without violating the Twitter TOS.)

At the bot summit I compared the author of a bot to a ventriloquist. Society allows a ventriloquist a certain amount of license to say things via the dummy that they wouldn't say as themselves. I know ventriloquism isn't exactly a thriving art, but the same goes for puppets, which are a little more popular. If you're an MST3K fan, imagine Kevin Murphy saying Tom Servo's lines without Tom Servo. It's pretty creepy.

We give a similar license to comedians and artists. Comedians insult audience members, and we laugh. Artists do strange things like exhibit a urinal as sculpture, and we at least try to take them seriously and figure out what they're saying.

But you can't say absolutely anything and expect "That wasn't me, it was the dummy!" to get you out of trouble. There is a general rule for comedy and art: always punch up, never punch down. We let comedians and artists and miscellaneous jesters do outrageous things as long as they obey this rule. You can poke fun at yourself (Stephen Colbert famously said "There's no status I would not surrender for a joke"), you can make a joke at the expense of someone with higher social status than you, but if you mock someone with lower status, it's not cool.

If you make a joke, and people get really offended, it's almost certainly because you violated this rule. People don't get offended randomly. Explaining that "it was just a joke" doesn't help; everyone knows what a joke is. The problem is that you used a joke as a means of being an asshole. Hiding behind a dummy or a stage persona or a bot won't help you.

@NeedADebitCard feels icky because it's punching down. It's saying "hey, these idiots posted pictures of their debit cards, go take advantage of them." Is there a joke there? Sure. Is it ethical to tell that joke? Not when you can make exactly the same point without punching down, as @CancelThatCard does.

The rules are looser when you're in the company of other craftspeople. If you know about the "Aristocrats" joke, you'll know that comedians tell each other jokes they'd never tell on the stage. All the rules go out the window and the only thing that matters is triggering the primal laughter response. But also note that the must-have guaranteed punchline of the "Aristocrats" joke ensures that it always ends by punching upwards.

You're already looking for loopholes in this rule. That's okay. Hackers and comedians and artists are always attracted to the grey areas. But your bot is an extension of your will, and if you're a white guy like me, most of the grey areas are not grey in your favor.

This is why I went through thousands of movie review blurbs for @RealHumanPraise in an attempt to get rid of the really sexist ones. It's an unfortunate fact that Michelle Malkin has more influence over world affairs than I will ever have. So I have no problem mocking her via bot. But it's really easy to make an incredibly sexist joke about Michelle Malkin as a way of trying to put her below me, and that breaks the rule.

There was a lot of talk at the bot summit about what we can do to avoid accidentally offending people, and I think the key word is 'accidentally.' The bots we've created so far aren't terribly political. Hell, Ed Henry, chief White House correspondent for FOX News, follows @RealHumanPraise on Twitter. If he enjoys it, it's not the most savage indictment.

In comedy terms, we botmakers are on the nightclub stage in the 1950s. We're creating a lot of safe nerdy Steve Allen comedy and we're terrified that our bot is going to accidentally go off and become Andrew Dice Clay for a second. There's nothing wrong with Steve Allen comedy, but I'd also like to see some George Carlin type bots; bots that will, by design, offend some people. (Darius's @AmIRiteBot is the only example I know of.)

Artists are, socially if not legally, given a certain amount of license to do things like infringe on copyright and violate Terms of Service agreements. If you get in trouble, the public will be on your side, unless you betrayed their trust by breaking the fundamental ethical rule of comedy. So do it right. Design bots that punch up.

For the first time ever, I now present A Time Machine as it was originally intended to be seen: on the Internet. I wrote these poems sometime between the ages of 6 and 8, and I'm much happier showing them to you than the poems I wrote when I was a teenager. I think you will see that certain themes have been constants in my writing my entire life.

A note on the text: The poems were originally formatted as free verse, but they're clearly not free verse, so I reformatted them. I've corrected the spelling throughout except in one case where it was ambiguous. Strangely, there is no poem called "A Time Machine".

A Time Machine and Other Poems

Written and illustrated by Leonard Richardson

A time poem
There's no such thing as a time machine.
Even so you may sometimes wonder
If you could hear ancient thunder
If you could see an ancient beam.
If you could swim in an ancient stream.
So build a pretend time machine if you please.
And go and feel an ancient breeze.

The dinosaurs have died
The dinosaurs have died you see.
Even in the great big sea.
So when you're swimming in the sea,
Beware of dinosaurs, you and me.

Tyrannosauruses are red
Tyrannosauruses are red
Allosauruses are blue.
When you're near them,
Run away to. [sic]

How did the dinosaurs die out?
How did the dinosaurs die out?
Was it a whale with its spout?
No one knows for sure I know
But in a time machine I will go.

Other books in this series

• Better Homes and Gardens
• All About Dinosaurs
• What Can You Do?
• I Saw a Dragon (and I mean it!)

Oh man. That "whale with its spout" line gets me every time. And the first poem's ABBAACC rhyme scheme is pretty nice.

I'm sure I wrote the "Other books in this series", but the only one I still have is Better Homes and Gardens ("WITH QUESTIONERES AND CHECKLISTS!!!). It's nowhere near as good as A Time Machine—like most magazines, it's full of padding—but it does include the immortal line: "Now buy the stuff you don't have." Better Homes and Gardens has its own "Other books" list, which promises a fifth book, Computer Games—also lost to history.

It all went downhill once Sumana suggested casting Dulé Hill as Geordi La Forge. I think Dulé Hill would make a better Data, but this never came up because somehow we got the incorrect idea that Dulé Hill is two years younger than Levar Burton was when he started doing TNG, and started coming up with strategies to compensate for the age difference:

"Well, we could wait a couple years to do our imaginary remake of Nextgen."

"Or, we could clone Dulé Hill, and since memory is genetic, we can age the clone at an accelerated rate while maintaining his acting ability."

"He could contract the aging virus that Dr. Pulaski got, and get cured after five minutes."

"He could breach the singularity of a Romulan warbird and spend some time in one of the areas where time runs faster."

"We could cast the rest of the show, then they could spend two years in a transporter pattern buffer, the way Scotty did in 'Relics'."

"Or they could live through the three-day time loop from 'Cause and Effect' over and over again."

"We could do a controlled version of what happened to Crewman Daniels when he became unstuck in time and his body was aging at different rates."

"He could move to the planet from 'Children of Time', and we could cast one of his descendants."

"He could wait two years and come back to the present day through the Guardian of Forever."

"Or use the slingshot effect."

"We could create a holographic representation of what Dulé Hill will look like in two years, then hire it when it inevitably achieves sentience."

"We could cause a quantum fissure like in "Parallels" and mine alternate realities for one in which Dulé Hill was born two years earlier."

"If we need him to be more mature as an actor, not necessarily older, he could spend two subjective years in his own head, like those aliens did to O'Brien in 'Hard Time'."

"Or he could run into that probe from 'The Inner Light' and gain a whole lifetime of experience."

"He could acquire a Trill symbiont that's two years old."

"He could use temporary cosmetic surgery to make him look like a human, when he's actually a slightly younger human."

"We could use a telepathic trick or an addictive video game to trick the whole world into thinking Dulé Hill is two years older than he really is."

"We could do a new animated series and just have him do the voice."

"The Traveller could do something."

"If Q were around he could do it by changing the gravitational constant."

"Isn't there something we can do with relativity?"

"There's no relativity in Star Trek."

Unfortunately, I ruined the whole thing by checking IMDB:

"Wow, Dulé Hill was born in 1975! He's thirty-five!"

"How old was Levar Burton in 1987?"

"Only thirty! It's a temporal paradox!"

"So Dulé Hill needs to become younger."

"There can be only one answer: reproduce the transporter accident from 'Rascals'."

Then Susanna had a daughter, and I had an idea. Recently Maggie turned three, and I gave my niece the birthday card Susanna had sent me eight years earlier. "Whee! You're 3 22 3!" The payoff was worth it. "I laughed for like 5 minutes," said Susanna.

Recently I was doing a video chat with Susanna and I mentioned:

L: So I'm jogging for an hour every day, and I realized I wasn't doing enough reading, so I decided I also needed to read for half an hour every day. And I also want to devote half an hour to games, though that's not as much of a problem. And I think I should also allocate at least half an hour for writing. But if I keep dividing up my free time like this then my whole life will be...

S: Organized?

Hmm.

I made this connection on Sunday when I spent twenty minutes standing in the twelve-item checkout line.

• Quick jokes: The secret of manzai, Ultimate Generic Joke, Schooljailhouse Rock.
• Justice Will Take Us Millions of Intricate Moves, the transcript w/slides of my 2008 QCon talk in which I tell the story of the Internet and introduce a heuristic for web service maturity. The transcript went up in 2009, so it counts.
• The epic six-part series How Game Titles Work.

  As I write this I'm discovering I could go on and on, but think about "Citizen Kane". Not the movie, the title. Kind of a sarcastic title. In fact, it works much the same way as "Leisure Suit Larry." It wouldn't make a good game title, and "Leisure Suit Larry" wouldn't make a very good movie title. But there's some subtle work in fixing on that one of all possible titles for the movie--a title with some sarcasm and some sympathy--and that's the same kind of work you need to do to come up with a good game title.

• Thoughtcrime Experiments! Analysis of the Thoughtcrime Experiments slush pile, and writing tips to get your fiction noticed.
• My critically-acclaimed rewrite of the Battlestar Galactica ending.
• Dada Chess. See also commenter "b"'s lucid explanation of why Black might have an advantage in Dada Chess. (Black's lead over White has diminished in the past 6 months but is still there.)
• Roy's Postcards, which will keep going on for another couple years. (And I should probably process another 100 or so postcards to top up the backlog).
• The tale of the lintsagna.
• "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs", incisive analysis of same, and an audio dramatization.
• The two-part Nostalgiaudit.

(I was planning to post the big "Best of Multimedia" entry tonight, but I don't have time to finish it, so hopefully that will come tomorrow.)

When Voyager was on the air, my problem with it was I didn't like the writing. As I watched it later I discovered another problem: the supporting cast is redundant. Most Trek supporting casts have an air of blandness (this is, in a nutshell, why DS9 is the best Trek series: pretty much the entire recurring cast is well-developed), but in VOY a lot of characters are just unnecessary.

Specifically, you don't need Chakotay, Tom Paris, or Harry Kim. You just need Tuvok. Whenever one of those three characters has a scene, it would be a better show if that were Tuvok's scene. You're probably thinking: "What about the episode where Paris learned a valuable lesson about blah? That wouldn't make sense with Tuvok!" Here's the thing: that episode was lousy. Pretty much every episode where these three characters act on their own initiative (as opposed to following orders) is lousy. But once those characters existed and the actors had contracts, the writers had to use them, and it watered down the plomeek soup.

Once we started talking about this, Sumana and I started trying to compress the casts of other Trek shows. The point is not to eliminate characters that we don't like--we love almost all these characters--but to try to get a similar cast with fewer characters, so that every character can be essential to almost every episode. This is a ruthless exercise in minimalism.

What's the point? Well, all these characters looked good in the series bible, but some of them didn't pan out. Some of them consistently bombed, some were underused. The thing is, you don't know ahead of time. A series bible is like a meta-screenplay. It can be implemented well or badly, and the final verdict doesn't come in until the end of the series.

This exercise is the flip side of tie-in novels and fan fiction. Instead of fleshing out the underused characters and exploring the ignored relationships, it lets us see which parts of the show were absolutely necessary to get the stories we liked. If you totally disagree with what Sumana and I like about Trek shows, you can probably express that disagreement in terms of your minimal cast.

Now on with the show. When I think Star Trek and "ruthless exercise in minimalism", I think of the original series. You can tell almost every TOS story with just Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. Everybody knows that. But you gotta have some other characters to spread the dialogue out, so let's dig deeper.

Do you need both Chekov and Sulu? Nope! TOS got along for a full season without Chekov. Do you need both Scotty and Spock? Not really! Let Spock fix the engines himself instead of telling Scotty to fix them.

Sumana took this opportunity to complain about the fact that Uhura, a chronically overlooked main character, is the only woman in TOS's main cast. I suggested making McCoy a woman. Sumana pointed out that they did exactly that in TNG, and nobody liked Dr. Pulaski. This had me stumped for a while, but now I have the solution: have Nichelle Nichols play McCoy instead of Uhura. Who would complain? Well, DeForest Kelley fans would complain, but look, now DeForest Kelley can play Khan. (Second-best solution: combine Scotty with Uhura instead of with Spock.)

Now that you see how the game works, back to VOY. As above, Tuvok subsumes Chakotay, Paris, and Kim. Apart from that, my suggestions are pretty minor. Seven of Nine can replace Kes--in fact, she did. With their powers combined, Seven and the Doctor can replace Neelix. Seven can also replace Torres, or Torres and the Doctor combined can replace Seven. But honestly I'd be perfectly happy with the Tuvok thing. You can tell most good VOY stories with Janeway, Tuvok, and Seven, but it's a stretch.

DS9 did an amazing job of developing a huge cast, so objectively speaking it doesn't need this exercise, but that's what makes it such a ruthless exercise. No one is spared! The TNG imports are out: Kira can do O'Brien's job, and Odo can do Worf's. Dax and Bashir can be combined. You still need Quark, but he can be a recurring character, like Rom, instead of a marquee character.

Sumana and I had a lot of fun messing with TNG, because it's the Trek we both grew up with. And TNG shows that major characters can just leave a show. The show didn't drastically change when Tasha Yar died, when Beverly Crusher left (or when she came back), or when Wesley Crusher left.

It's not much of an exaggeration to say you can tell all the interesting TNG stories with just Picard and Data. But you can't run the day-to-day business of Star Trek with just two characters, so let's add some more.

I think we have to leave Worf in place, especially since we got rid of him on DS9. The big question here is what to do with Riker, Troi, and Crusher, TNG's equivalents of Chakotay, Paris, and Kim. The situation's better than VOY because there's about 1.5 interesting characters between the three of them--but how to arrange them? The obvious thing to do is combine the two medical types, but the resulting character isn't any more interesting than Troi alone.

That's why we prefer to merge Troi with Riker and create a real XO character, someone responsible for mediating between the captain and crew. Either Marina Sirtis or Jonathan Frakes could play this character well. With this character you can play up Picard's reserve, make him a little less of a nice guy. If Picard is the captain everybody admires but nobody positively likes, this Troi-Riker character becomes the most interesting character on the show! Picard's more interesting, too. Combining characters doesn't just tighten up the show, it creates new possibilities.

You don't need Geordi LaForge when you have Data. If you really want to keep him (I do, he's my favorite TNG character), have him replace Crusher, but I don't think TNG needs a main-character doctor at all. Crusher was incredibly underused; have recurring guest stars do the sickbay scenes.

OK, one more. I haven't been messing with the commanders, because if you change the commander character you change the whole tone of the show.[1] But on ENT, Captain Archer isn't the strongest character: Tucker is. You can tell almost every good ENT story with Tucker, T'Pol, and Phlox[2]. You'll need an Archer+Reed+Mayweather+Sato character to spread out the dialogue, but with those four you're good to go. A Trek show where half the command staff are aliens would be really interesting, and quite appropriate for the ENT era.

[0] "Demon" and "Course: Oblivion" are among my favorite hours of Trek. For Sumana-like skeptics, some more excellent VOY off the top of my head: the "Equinox" two-parter (which shows what would have happened if VOY had been the Battlestar Galactica reboot), "Body and Soul", "Message in a Bottle". VOY also had some excellent stories about storytelling (eg. "Muse" and "Living Witness"), something that TNG tried occasionally but it never worked. DS9 fans especially should watch "Message in a Bottle" for its view into the Dominion War.

[1] Here's the kind of thing I come up with when I mess with the commanders. The DS9 pilot focuses on the great Federation diplomat Curzon Dax (Terry Farrell), who's been posted to the Bajoran system following the discovery of a strategically significant wormhole. Halfway through the pilot, Curzon is assassinated by Bajoran extremists trying to disrupt an ancient prophecy. The Dax symbiont must be saved at any cost, but the only Trill within range is Ezri Tigan (Avery Brooks), the troubled first officer of a nearby Federation starship. Yes, I said it. Avery Brooks plays Ezri Dax as the main character of DS9.

[2] Yeah, Phlox. He did kill a whole species that one time, but take him away and you no longer have ENT. Phlox's strength as a character comes from the fact that, by human standards, he's insaaaaane. IMO one of the most realistic depictions of a "human-like" alien in Trek. (Sumana asked me to add this disclaimer: "We cannot be sure how realistic this depiction is, because hypotheses about the behavior of imaginary aliens cannot be tested.")

There was no laundry in my tiny apartment building, but I had a special "laundry key" which opened the front door of a totally different house. In the foyer of this house was a washer and dryer, and if you lived there you'd have a different key that opened up the house proper. It was an odd system.

The first time I hauled my laundry over to this house someone else was using the washer, so I had to come back the next night. The second time I made it. After drying my clothes, I tugged on the lint trap to clean it out. The trap practically exploded out of its receptacle as the hundreds of loads worth of lint it contained expanded to fill the space outside.

I peeled the lint off the lint trap. It was two inches thick, a lasagna of lint, striated in colors like the geologic column. There was no trash can in the laundry room, so no one had ever emptied the lint trap.

I didn't want the house to burn down, so I took the lintsagna with me and threw it in my building's dumpster. Sometimes I can still hear it calling me. It says, "I'm a pile of compressed lint and incapable of speech, but nonetheless youuuu are responsible for my deaaaaath!" I generally ignore it.

Here's what I mean. By normal standards, Khan is a really bad Star Trek villain. Star Trek villains generally have some self-justifying line of BS that makes them the hero. The Borg want to unify all life forms and cultures, the Cardassians are imperialists spreading civilization, the Xindi think they're acting in self-defense. Admiral Leyton is trying to stop the Federation from becoming soft. Harry Mudd is a Willy Loman type who's just trying to shift product. Etc. Their actions make sense given their worldview. Even TOS-era Khan assumes what he does is right by virtue of his innate superiority.

But Khan in Khan is Captain Ahab, a character defined by his obsession and his need for revenge. He no longer cares whether he's doing the right thing. With Khan it made sense, because he's the superman who's been humiliated by Kirk, a normal person. But the people who make Star Trek movies keep making the villain into Captain Ahab as if that'll make the movie good.

Check out the lousy Trek movie villians. Soran: obsessed with the Nexus. Ru'afo: wants revenge on the Son'a. (Yeah, I had to look those names up.) Shinzon: wants revenge on Picard, which doesn't even make sense. Nero: wants revenge on Spock (also makes no sense). Obsession. Revenge. They're all trying to be Khan.

Some of the Trek films don't have villains at all, which I always enjoy, but look at the good villains. General Chang: afraid of change. Borg Queen: is a freaking Borg. Even Sybok (religious fanatic) is a decent villain. I don't think you can get a big-budget SF movie made these days with no villain, but maybe if Khan hadn't been such a good movie the other Trek movies would have been better.

PS: Anyone complaining about red matter, rewatch Khan and try to explain how Genesis works.

But as Joel Hodgson once said, you don't have to take the ending they give you. You know I haven't been boring you by posting about BSG every week, and I wouldn't post about the finale if all I had to say was "I'm disappointed". But ever since the DS9 days I've considered Ron Moore a role model for SF storytelling with long dramatic arcs, and I need to write this alternate ending so I don't remember the BSG arc as fundamentally flawed.

Obviously this discussion is full of spoilers, so if you're Nandini or someone else who's waiting for the finale to show up on Hulu, don't read this yet.

It looks like the finale was as sloppy as it was because Ron Moore had a few major obsessions that drove the story to a place nobody but Ron Moore wanted it to go. A place the story itself didn't want to go, such that an entire pantheon of B-movie dei ex machina had to be deployed to push it there. I'm gonna take one of the obsessions as revealed in the final episode, and ditch the rest.

For me the wheels came off the story right after Galen killed Tory. That made sense by itself, but not much afterward made sense. I'm gonna back up the story to just before that, get rid of the memory-sharing tech that gave Galen his motive, and start from there.

The five uber-Cylons put their minds together and decrypt the secret to resurrection technology. An uneasy truce is formed between the humans and all models of Cylon. Galactica docks at the Cylon colony and the Five begin work on a new resurrection hub.

What I'm about to write doesn't really have any conflict in it, which is usually a problem, but it has more conflict (read: shouting) than the final hour of the actual finale. There wasn't any conflict in the second hour of "What You Leave Behind", and that was fine. And if you want more conflict you can just add back in Galen finding out about what Tory did.

During their work on the hub the Five make a discovery: there's no reason why resurrection technology can't work on humans. It may have been a human invention in the first place. The inability of Cylons to reproduce sexually is some kind of DRM that can be broken if you understand resurrection tech. There is no longer any fundamental difference between humans and Cylons.[0] The cycle is broken. The human race and the Cylon race merge. Laura Roslin's death is especially poignant because she'll be one of the last people ever to die.

The show ends with a flash-forward to twenty years in the future. Some people we knew as humans now exist in multiple copies. There are some new hybrid characters.

The occasion is the commissioning of a new ship, a colony ship the size of a base star, built with human and Cylon technology. The people who were born human have been living in space for far too long. They've built this ship and are leaving to continue their search for a habitable planet. Of course they call this new ship Galactica and there's bookending and all that good stuff.

That's my basic storyline. There are many possible variations: if you want the cycle to restart in the end, I think you can see a couple ways of doing that. There are problems you'd have to finesse but by and large the real show finessed the same problems. Watch this video of Edward James Olmos at the UN and tell me this ending isn't more in the spirit of BSG.

One last thing. Let's talk about Starbuck. Pretty much the only thing I liked about the final hour of BSG was the revelation of what Head Six, Head Baltar, and Starbuck were. I'd like to keep that, but Starbuck's arc needs some changing now that there's no "real" Earth for the humans to find.

So. Sometime in the final hour Starbuck disappears from human sight, as per the actual episode. But instead of Lee's "that's strange, the woman I love suddenly disappeared, oh well" shot, we go to her POV. She sees Head Six and Head Baltar. They tell her that she is a construct created by God for the fulfilment of the plot prophecy. Prophecy is a very tricky thing and when the instrument of prophecy dies at an inconvenient time, extreme measures must be taken. She was brought back to lead the fleet to Earth. Earth sucked so much that the humans became desperate enough to make an alliance with the Cylons, a move that has now led the human race to its end. Now the plot prophecy is over and it's time for Starbuck to come with them.

Needless to say Starbuck does not take kindly to this revelation. Here you get your shouting. You can resolve this in a number of different ways, most of which are more interesting than what happened in canon.

[0] That was my prediction that came true in a really unsatisfying way, ie. by killing off the humans and the Cylons and making us all descendants of the hybrid.

My secret project stalled recently, and today I figured out why. I don't really understand how the names of video games work. For "Mallory" I made up a bunch of fake arcade game names, and they're pretty OK, but it took a long time to come up with them, and some of them (mainly "Mutant's Revenge") don't quite ring true to me.

Looking on the Internet, repository of all video game related-knowledge, I discovered that no one has really looked in-depth at the names of games. There are lists of best and worst[0] game names, but no one has tried to figure out a set of genres and rules for game names. Which is odd because when I started thinking about it I came up with a lot of patterns and even a rule of historical development. Which I now present in part 1 of an epic series.

A couple bits of logistics, as they say in college. First, when I mention a game, eg. Pong, I'm generally talking about the name of the game and not the actual game. Second, these are not ironclad rules because we're talking about the fruits of creativity here. I'm trying to ferret out the underlying rules of game names so that I can tweak them and apply them to my own purposes. Also, I'm not really clear on where to draw the line between synecdoche and metonymy.

Electronic games started out as representations of real-world activities, and they started out being named after those activities: Noughts and Crosses, Tennis for Two, Football, Pong, Tank, Gunfight, Watergate Caper. The most abstract names from this era are Gran Trak 10 (a racing game) and Simon, where the name has only a metaphorical relationship to the game. (Simon is a rare case of a game's name referencing a different game!)

The big exception is Spacewar!, which was way ahead of its time both in terms of gameplay and naming. Even if you consider Spacewar! a representation of a real-world activity that's not possible yet, that exclamation mark makes it clear the designers considered the name of a game to be the same kind of thing as the name of a movie or book. There are some more games for computer nerds in this category, like Hunt the Wumpus and Adventure. (Later I'll talk about "Computer Space", an attempt to market Spacewar! to non-nerds.)

Why this pattern? I can think of a couple reasons. People had to become acclimated to the idea that you could inhabit the virtual space of an electronic device and play a game there. It made sense to create games that simulated or could be tied to real-world activities. Also, because graphics were so primitive, the name of the game had to do a lot of the heavy lifting. All the 2600 sports games are basically Pong. If Spacewar! had had 2600-quality graphics, it would have been Combat.

Over time the graphics got better, and two things happened. First, you started seeing games that were not based on familiar everyday activities. Sometimes they had generic names anyway: Asteroids. Sometimes the names were more abstract: Space Invaders, Battlezone, Breakout, Defender, Pac-Man.

Second, games that were based on familiar everyday activities started using synecdoche. You can't have more than one game called "Sprint" so you got "Night Driver", which was a little more abstract, and then "Speed Freaks", "Turbo", and "Pole Position." A single aspect of racing is used as shorthand to inform you that this is a racing game.

At this point technological progress acts as a reset switch for the synecdoche. On a home system, the graphics suck compared to the arcade. Home systems go right back to games that are named directly after the real-world activities they replicate.

Here are some titles for the Magnavox Odyssey: Baseball, Basketball, Dogfight, Football, Handball, Hockey, Roulette, Shooting Gallery, Shootout, Ski, Soccer, Tennis, Volleyball. But there are some more abstract titles: Analogic, Cat and Mouse, Interplanetary Voyage, Percepts, Prehistoric Safari, Win (?). And even some synecdoche, with "Wipeout".

Here are some Channel F titles: Tennis/Hockey, Baseball, Slot Machine, Bowling, Backgammon. Some more abstract titles: Casino Royale (an early media tie-in?), Alien Invasion, Pac-Man, Cat and Mouse, Dodge'It, Pinball Challenge, Space War. A little synecdoche here too, with "Drag Strip" and "Torpedo Alley".

One more. Here are some Atari 2600 titles from the year the system launched: Air-Sea Battle, Basic Math, Blackjack, Combat, Flag Capture, Race. Some more abstract names from the same year: Canyon Bomber, Brain Games, Maze Craze: A Game of Cops and Robbers. Now there's significant synecdoche and metonomy with "Home Run", "Outer Space". "Indy 500", and "Video Olympics".

Here are some games from Nintendo's sports series for the NES: Golf, Ice Hockey, Tennis, Baseball, Volleyball, Pro Wrestling, Slalom, Soccer. Other notable early NES titles reproducing real-world activities: Pinball, Duck Hunt. But by this time, people are comfortable enough with video games that you can call a game based on a real-world activity Excitebike (alliteration, nonsense compound word), 10 Yard Fight (synecdoche), Mach Rider, Urban Champion, or Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! (synecdoche, celebrity tie-in, gratuitous exclamation marks). Even if there wasn't previously a game called "Football" or "Boxing" on the system.

History progresses from this point and we start seeing franchises. We get RBI Baseball 1, 2, and 3 (synecdoche), Tecmo Bowl and Tecmo Super Bowl (synecdoche, corporate self-insertion, sequel naming by word association), up to today's tie-in-laden Madden, NBA Live, FIFA Soccer, MLB 2K, Tiger Woods PGA Tour, etc. etc. These are "canonical" game series based closely on the comings and goings of the real-world sports franchises.

Today these franchises have pretty much taken over the market for sports games. Their names are very predictable. On the other hand, games that don't simulate real-world activities have had their names get more and more unpredictable since the days of Breakout and Battlezone.

But when a new technology or console is introduced you get some generic-sounding names. A generic name or franchise name gets the name of the new technology stuck onto it: Sonic CD. Super Mario 64 or Advance. Virtual League Baseball. Wii Sports. There was a published game called "Golf" as late as the Virtual Boy.

Sometimes you get a game name that sounds like a tech demo: Super Glove Ball. Virtua Fighter. Computer Space is kind of in this category; the technology being pitched is the very act of playing a game on a computer.

It looks like the same pattern occured earlier, in the world of electromechanical games. Games based on sports were the first to show up in arcades in the 1930s. The first baseball-style pinball games (in 1932) were called "All-Star Baseball" and "All-American Baseball Game". Then you got the synecdotal "World Series 1934", "All Stars", "Box Score", and so on. Sega put out a submarine game called "Periscope" (synecdoche) in 1968, and then Midway ripped them off with the even more abstract Sea Raider, Sea Devil, and Sea Wolf.

I find it even more interesting that this did not happen for pinball in general. Pinball games have always had abstract names: the first four names I could find are "Bagatelle Table", "Baffle Ball", "Whiffle Board", and "Ballyhoo". Pinball games are usually skinned to remind the player of some non-pinball field of endeavor, but when that happens the games tend to have abstract or synecdochal names. 1972, the year Pong was released, also saw the release of pinball games with names like "Fireball", "Sky Kings", "Magic Carpet" and "Grand Slam". (In 1973, Williams released a Skylab-themed pinball game!) You could think of pinball as being less like a video game and more like a sport: the kind of real-world activity being simulated by video games up to the present day.

[0] Of course such lists are highly subjective. One of my favorite game names of all time is "No One Can Stop Mr. Domino!", which makes #11 in that "worst names" list.

By now it's a cliche to observe that allegedly "RESTful" web services like Amazon's SimpleDB and the Flickr web service and the del.icio.us web service aren't really RESTful. But there's something about them that makes their creators distinguish them from SOAP-based web services (by calling them "RESTful"), and there's something about those services that users love despite the possibility of, eg. deleting data by accident.

Rather than say one service is more or less "RESTful" than another, attempting to quantify an easy-to-misuse term that wasn't even intended to be used in relation to web services, I've found it useful to judge web services based on how many of the web technologies they adopt. Think of the World Wide Web as having a technology stack that looks like this:

Hypermedia (ie. HTML)

HTTP

URI

In every case I know about, people build web services from the bottom of the stack. They pick some point on the stack and take the technologies below that point seriously. The technologies above that point are not considered important. They're ignored, or used to the minimum extent you can get away with and still technically be a "web service".

XML-RPC and SOAP services are at level zero. They don't take any of the web technologies seriously. They use one URI, one HTTP method, none of the interesting features of HTTP, and they have no notion of hypermedia.

URI

The web services I mentioned at the beginning of this entry are at level one. They take URIs seriously and assign a URI to every aspect of the system. But they only use one HTTP method (GET) and don't use any of the interesting features of HTTP. Nonetheless, people love these web services, because people love URIs.

HTTP

URI

Amazon S3 is at level two. It has problems (or so I've heard) with its use of HTTP, but it takes HTTP seriously. It uses URIs to designate objects in the system that can be operated on with different HTTP methods. It takes advantage of HTTP's features like conditional requests. But there's no hypermedia. All the information about how to manipulate the resources, and how to detect the connections between them, is in English documentation that you have to read when writing your custom S3 client.

Hypermedia

HTTP

URI

Most of my current thinking is hypermedia-related. Useful here is the formal definition of hypermedia, from 4.1.3 of the Fielding dissertation: "Hypermedia is defined by the presence of application control information embedded within, or as a layer above, the presentation of information."

Services like the Web, AtomPub, the Netflix web service, and the Launchpad web service are at level three. They serve documents with embedded "application control information": links and forms that give a more or less generic client hints about how to manipulate this particular web service.

There are degrees of quality within these levels. For instance, big parts of the Web use URIs to name operations, rather than the objects those operations can act on. I think that's bad design, but that's a problem on level one. It doesn't negate the value of HTTP or hypermedia. Similarly, when we have the well-worn argument about which HTTP methods a web service should expose, we're having an argument on level two, not an argument about who's more RESTful. In fact, almost all the currently raging arguments are level one or level two arguments, which is unfortunate as there are some really great flamewars to be had on level three.

I don't intend to defend this classification technique in detail. It's a set of heuristics. In theory you could take URI and HTML seriously but not HTTP; or HTML and HTTP but not URI. But the heuristics are useful in that they 1) encapsulate a fact about how people tend to design web services, 2) make it easy to classify an argument or problem, 3) let you make a snap judgement of how much Web knowledge went into a web service, 4) make it easy to think about RESTfulness (an abstract meta-architectural concept) in terms of specific technologies you should know about already, technologies that are probably the reason you care about REST in the first place.

"Rrawk! I'm a parrot! Parrots are awesome!"

"Hmm."

"Rrawk! The neutrality of this parrot has been disputed! Rrawk!"

Oh, you want to know what was in the commercial. Let's suppose there was a health-and-safety video where a kid named Joe hates Fruit by the Foot. But he lives in a universe where Fruit by the Foot is everywhere! Everyone's constantly chowing down on the stuff. It's disgusting. Joe summons a Coily-type spirit and demands that said spirit delete Fruit by the Foot from his universe.

But Coily is very lazy, and rather than carrying out this task in detail, he finds an alternate universe where there is no Fruit by the Foot, and swaps Joe with the corresponding Joe-prime. The health-and-safety video has Joe in his new universe, coming to terms with the disastrous consequences of his Fruit by the Foot-deleting bloodlust. The commercial, however, is about Joe-prime.

Joe-prime's story is the exact opposite of those health-and-safety-videos: he is thrust unprepared into a universe where everything depends on Fruit by the Foot (or, as they called it in olden days, Fruit by the Foote). "Never heard of it," he admits. "Am I the only one?" Yes, Joe-prime. Yes you are.

The lad is understandably confused. After some initial mishap (which I don't remember but which must be there because of the rule of threes), he hails a cab to take him away from the scene. "Doesn't this cab go by the mile?" he asks. "No!" cries the cabbie enthusiastically, pulling out an infinitely long stripe of the maybe-you-can-convince-your-parents-it's-not-candy device. "I go by Fruit by the Foot!" I envision the cabbie as a jovial Topol-type fellow who knows not what torment his words inflict.

Panicking, Joe-prime flees to the safety of the classroom. But in class, everyone's swilling down Fruit by the Foot like it's going out of style. What fresh hell is this? There is no learning here, no order; there is only Fruit by the Foot. Rending his garments, Joe-prime cries out: "Doesn't this class go by the rule?" I think you can guess the punchline. Yes, I just told you a shaggy dog story and omitted the punchline. Don't say I didn't learn anything from my father.

I do know the source of these remarks: they stem from the eternal conflict between two philosophes in my mind. These are the hippy-dippy Carl Sagan atheist who says "You don't need God to have a good time, man; look at all the wonder in the natural universe!", and the cranky Richard Dawkins atheist who says "The wonder is all in your brain, you pothead! Not distributed throughout the universe!"

The Carl Sagan philosophe was formed in a transcendental experience I had when I was six years old. You know those charts that go on the walls in elementary school classrooms? Instead of putting a few of them on the walls, my kindergarten teacher, Jim Murchison, bought an enormous number of them. He punched holes in them and turned them into a huge flip chart. Every day or two he would flip over a sheet and reveal the new topic of discussion. One day he flipped over a sheet and I saw the solar system.

I'd surely been to the Griffith Observatory before then, but somehow I hadn't seen any pictures of the planets before this reveal. Jupiter, in particular, blew me away. Seeing drawings of the planets triggered my first and biggest transcendental experience. Since I always ruin Sumana's transcendental experiences it's only fair that I should ruin my own. Jupiter isn't transcendental; it just looks really creepy. It's a planet, a gasball.

What's more, the universe does not contain a magical kind of thing called a "planet". Planetness is a social construct. The solar system is not the sun and nine planets, as depicted on the flip chart of my youth. It's a fusing gasball, four non-fusing gasballs, a few million rockballs, a few billion snowballs, and a big dust cloud.

Recently, the International Astronomical Union decided to make a proper scientific definition out of the social construct "planet". This used to seem easy and even superfluous, but in recent years it's become clear that to judge every object in the solar system by a uniform standard of planetness, you must make a hard decision. Either Pluto is not a planet, or there are lots of Kuiper Belt objects which are planets on the same criteria as Pluto. These planets are very distant, mostly undiscovered, and not very interesting once discovered. There might be hundreds of these tiny boring planets. So the IAU created a definition that excludes these objects, including Pluto.

It's not nice to fool Mother Nature, but it's even less nice to naturalize Mother Social Construct. People are used to the planets being the non-fusing gasballs, four of the biggest rockballs, and Pluto. A lot of people got mad at what they viewed as a bunch of eggheads usurping their social construct. And now the eggheads are arguing amongst themselves about the definition. It's a huge mess.

The real problem with this definition is that, to get the "right" result, the IAU restricted the definition to apply only to our solar system. It's the Bush v. Gore of scientific definitions! They had to do this because extrasolar systems perform instant reductio on any attempt to turn "planet" into an objective concept. There are too many weird things in the universe. It would have been simpler if they'd just enumerated by fiat the eight things in our solar system that are "real" planets.

Astronomers have found things like two non-fusing gasballs orbiting each other in interstellar space. Are they planets? Only if we decide to call them "planets". What they are is big non-fusing gasballs that orbit each other. A gasball can have natural starness, but it cannot have natural planetness, any more than (as Michael Shermer says) it can have natural meaningness. This is what social constructs are for.

I personally don't care if Pluto is called a planet or not. My money is still on "alien disco ball". But if we must have a definition of planetness, it should recognize the inevitable subjectivity. If you don't do this, you need an artificial ban on discussing what might make an extrasolar object a "planet". Because sooner or later the smart-aleck universe will toss you a planet that doesn't meets the technical criteria, or (less likely) a non-planet that does. Then you have to tweak the definition and it's like adding epicycles to the Ptolemaic model of the solar system.

Sumana: I dreamed I was having dinner with the president, and I was cracking all these jokes, but nobody was laughing.
Leonard: You dreamed you were Stephen Colbert?

Sumana

We see love between others thousands of times but only participate in it a few times. Can we hope to find a new kind of love? How would we know it if we did? The best we can do is to explore the deeps of one great love, always finding new aspects of it.

Five years ago I stumbled upon a vast love which my lamp and map have still not charted. This is where I want to live, Sumana, among the crystals, the faraway noise of an underground city, the glimmering lights in the ceiling, with you. Marry me, Sumana.

Around the time when Cold War started, Bertrand Russell was giving a lecture on politics in England. Being a leftist in a conservative women's club, he was not received well at all: the ladies came up to him and started attacking him with whatever they could get their hands on. The guard, being an English gentleman, did not want to be rough to the ladies and yet needed to save Russell from them. He said, "But he is a great mathematician!" The ladies ignored him. The guard said again, "But he is a great philosopher!" The ladies ignore him again. In desperation, finally, he said, "But his brother is an earl!" Bert was saved.

Bertrand Russell's autobiography is presumably the original source for this anecdote. Here's the event as described in the autobiography (fake paragraphing inserted for clarity). According to the biography, it actually happened some time prior to 1918.

It was decided at Leeds to attempt to form organizations in the various districts of England and Scotland with a view to promoting workers' and soldiers' councils on the Russian model. In London a meeting for this purpose was held at the Brotherhood Church in Southgate Road. Patriotic newspapers distributed leavelts in all the neighbouring public houses (the district is a very poor one) saying that we were in communication with the Germans and signalled to their aeroplanes as to where to drop bombs. This made us somewhat unpopular in the neighbouthood, and a mob presently besieged the church. ...

The mob burst in led by a few officers; all except the officers were more or less drunk. The fiercest were viragos who used wooden boards full of rusty nails. An attempt was made by the officers to induce the women among us to retire first so that they might deal as they thought fit with the pacifist men, whom they supposed to be cowards. ...

Two of the drunken viragos began to attack me with their boards full of nails. While I was wondering how one defended oneself against this type of attack, one of the ladies among us went up to the police and suggested that they should defend me. The police, however, merely shrugged their shoulders. "But he is an eminent philosopher," said the lady, and the police still shrugged. "But he is famous all over the world as a man of learning," she continued. The police remained unmoved. "But he is the brother of an earl," she finally cried. At this the police rushed to my assistance. They were, however, too late to be of any service, and I owe my life to a young woman whom I did not know, who interposed herself between me and the viragos long enough for me to make my escape.

All the elements are in the original: the chivalry, the attacks with random objects, the comical deference to hierarchy. But the anecdote has undergone some well-placed mutations:

• The mob and the women are merged. This means fewer characters to remember and simpler interactions between them. It also changes the tone of the story from sinister (mob of toughs with nail-boards, police won't do anything) to somewhat comical (mob of elderly garden club ladies pummeling Bertrand Russell with their handbags, police try to politely stop them).
• The roles of the policemen and the women are switched. This also changes the tone: the rough chivalry of the mob ("Ladies, please leave so we can beat up the menfolk!") is replaced by the more gallant chivalry of the policemen. The only loss is the final bit of the anecdote, where a woman exploits the mob's chivalry to help Russell escape.

Altogether, I must say the later version is more memetically fit. Therefore, that's what actually happened. Another blow for the old primary sources, Jack. How long can they continue to be given their current respect when mutated versions are so much better?

First, the apple test. Bang! As you can see, I have fulfilled mankind's eons-long dream of accelerating apples to escape velocity. With luck, that apple will land on a foreign planet and take root there. This device makes me the Johnny Appleseed of the cosmos!

Now, the plum. The cannon is now aimed directly at Mars. The Martian terraforming process begins now, with this plum! Bang!

What is it now? It seems my overzealous assistant, Behemoth Radix, has loaded the panspermia cannon with marshmallows. You fool! Marshmallows are not the seed of interplanetary life! Except perhaps in the ammonia clouds of certain gas giants... yes, yes. Behemoth, your progress astounds me. Let the cosmos be filled with gaseous marshmallow balloon-creatures! Bang!

What? Who dares disturb my demonstration export of picturesque Earth life to the universe? Ah, General, your question please. Yes, I suppose it could be used as a weapon, if the enemy lived on other planets, and if more than anything they hated having fresh fruit delivered through space to their door. I find your obsession with militarizing each of my inventions disturbing, to be honest. First it was my "fun bomb", which you thought could be modified to deploy munitions other than fun. Then, your ludicrous plan for my top-secret stealth glider. Frankly, your naivete astounds me. But keep those checks coming!

     EXT. ILLINOIS COUNTRYSIDE - AFTERNOON 

			   GENERAL MCBOMBEM

             I just got off the phone with Washington. The
             Gravlax is headed towards Chicago. You'd better
             pray this device of yours works, doctor.

                           PROF. TOUCHFEELY

             I can't shake the feeling we're making a huge
             mistake. We haven't been able to establish
             communication with the Gravlax yet. For all
             we know its intentions are peaceful.

                           GENERAL MCBOMBEM

             By golly, I won't see the Earth destroyed
             just to test out your pet theories! Sergeant, 
             activate the atom ray!

                            SERGEANT JONES

             Sir, yes sir!

      CUT TO: 

      There is a huge EXPLOSION (STOCK).

      EXT. ILLINOIS COUNTRYSIDE - CONTINUING

      The area is covered with a fine paste of GRAVLAX.

                           GENERAL MCBOMBEM
                      (scraping GRAVLAX off his hat
                       with one finger)

             What _is_ this stuff?

                           PROF. TOUCHFEELY
                       (tasting GRAVLAX from his 
                        tie)

             It's cured salmon, General. Perfectly harmless.

                       (wiping GRAVLAX off his suit)

             As I suspected, the Gravlax came to this planet
             to lend its salty taste to little sandwiches
             and other light appetizers. But we were not
             ready for it. In our arrogance and blindness we
             assumed that because it had a name like
             "Gravlax" it had to be some sort of hideous
             B-movie monster. Perhaps one day mankind will 
             learn.

                           GENERAL MCBOMBEM

             It's delicious.

      Enter PETE, frantic.

                                 PETE

             Doctor, General. I just heard from the lab
             in Peoria. That signal the Gravlax sent from
             its ship -- it was aimed directly at its
             original point of origin.

                           GENERAL MCBOMBEM

             That could only mean...

                           PROF. TOUCHFEELY

             More of them are on the way.

      CLOSE ON MCBOMBEM

                           GENERAL MCBOMBEM

             We'll be ready for them.

                               THE END
                                 ...
                                  ?

Sometimes they get married and everything's fine. Sometimes they get married but then eaten by a fish or a heron or a cat. Sometimes they get eaten in the sixth verse for no real reason. It's like a probability distribution of all the different ways the lives of the frog and mouse could end up. They probably got eaten, but I prefer the versions where they don't. Cause having them get eaten just seems like

I'm tired of singing this song to you, mm-hmm
I'm tired of singing this song to you, mm-hmm
I'm tired of singing this song to you
They all got eaten by a bird, and away it flew
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, the end

Especially when it happens in the sixth verse.

Compsognathus sing this song, doo-dah, doo-dah
Compsognathus five miles long, oh the doo-dah day

It may seem silly, and the myth of Sisyphus does have the gravitas, but only because of its great age. The myth has a big buildup about Sisyphus snubbing gods no one cares about anymore and inhabiting an underworld that's long been replaced in our namespace by the Christian hell, then leaving the underworld and being dragged back and blah and blah. All of it is to provide a flimsy justification why Sisyphus should have to push his rock all the time. What's missing is any real motive. Why should he push his rock all the time? He just has to. It must be stipulated.

On the other hand it's not hard to understand why Charlie Brown should, eventually against his own better judgement, try over and over again to kick Lucy's football. Kicking footballs is the kind of thing humans want to do. When the sport of football is forgotten everything will still be explained in the dialogue: "I'll hold the football, and you kick it". Charlie Brown's own desire, vanity, and hope compel him to go after the football time and time again. There is no need for the gods to curse him because he has cursed himself.

Camus would say (and did):

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?

The lack of hope is only a prerequisite for Sisyphus' compelled labor. Hope is what tempts Charlie Brown to choose his fate for another year. His "torture", as it were, is delayed until the moment Lucy betrays him, when it is repaid with interest. Camus' Sisyphus has his reprieve while the rock rolls back down his hill, but during Charlie Brown's reprieve, the brief lifetime of his hope, he is building up the momentum that will inevitably be turned against him. I think that's more tragic.

Anyway, according to that history site, starting in 1986 Charlie Brown had actually given up his hope, and those strips are less compelling. The same thing that makes them less compelling also makes them more like the Sisyphean myth. Q.E.D.

I always pictured opposition research as kind of an amoral game. You scour all available documents for scraps of your opponent's impropriety (actual or seeming). When you find something, you put on your Concerned Citizen face and release it to the media or make "Shouldn't this be investigated?" inquiries to the appropriate authorities. The goal is to get the media to bite, to get them to Discover An Issue and then try to finesse it into a snowball effect.

It's sad and depressing work, but all campaigns do it. Everyone's hoping for a Whitewater-scale jackpot, something where their opponent will look up in surprise and say "You sank my battleship!" and drop out on the spot. But the more common result is a constant stream of fake scandals and fiascoes that nobody remembers three days later, to match the equally forgettable stream of positive political theater coming out of your own camp.

I'm not talking about negative ads. This stuff is an order of magnitude too flimsy to use in a campaign ad. You'd get an ad like "Senator Bedfellow says he's for American jobs. But this one time, he ate a Toblerone! What's next, Senator--the killing of adorable kittens?"

You can't retroactively change what your candidate said twelve years ago in Rat's Ass, Missouri (though that's a good idea for a time travel story). On the other hand, it's easy to avoid this one particular type of embarrassment by simply treating patriotism as a sort of brand loyalty. But why put so much effort into avoiding such a flimsy fake outrage?

Well, this tiny subgenre of opposition research has a well-defined beginning, according to the campaign worker lore I am now intermittently versed in. It dates back to the 1992 presidential primaries, when Pat Buchanan suffered a fiasco because his campaign car was a Mercedes. A Mercedes! The champion of protectionism using a foreign car, ripping the bread right out of little Johnny Crankshaft's mouth and sending it overseas to the dour offspring of some unsmiling Hun! Fetch the smelling salts! Fiasco!

You can see (assuming this apocryphal tale is where it began) that it didn't start because some random politician had a Nokia watch. It was Pat Buchanan, and it was a car, the very symbol of the decline of American manufacturing. But now everyone is paranoid about it, because it's something they have control over.

Apparently this fiasco--a fake fiasco identical to the fake fiascoes that beseige every campaign every day, one remembered now only by campaign workers--was like the 9/11 of political campaigning, the moment everyone woke up and said "Holy crap! We must henceforth engage in ELABORATE, SUPERFICIAL RITUALS so that this will NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN!" Except since the fiascoes are themselves caused by the elaborate, superficial ritual of opposition research (and not by eg. a real enemy who wants to actually kill you), the counter-ritual is actually effective. As far as I know (which is not far at all) there have been no foreign-product-use-based attacks since the Buchanan fiasco. But if you ask me, the real reason is that other candidates are not Pat Buchanan, and these attacks would be less effective on them.

Here are the examples of this Brand America type thinking on the Clark campaign that I can remember. Because I was not privy to purchasing decisions (or indeed any other kind of decision) I'm guessing there were many more decisions made on this scale. I do have two that were kind of weird though.

• All the computers we bought were HPs or Macs. Not a big deal.
• We got Blackberries for all the brass to carry around and message each other with, except they weren't Blackberries. We couldn't use Blackberries because Blackberry is a Canadian company or something. They were these things called Goods (Geed?). But everyone called them Blackberries, because that's what they were.
• When I was looking for a weblog/news software package to run the Clark Community Network, one of the criteria I used was whether or not the software had been written by Americans. It didn't really matter, because Scoop (coming out of Maine, IIRC) was the best choice for what I wanted to do, but it was weird. And not even neccessary--the Dean campaign used Drupal, which was written by a guy in Belgium, and nobody got on their case.

I'm not sure how we justified using Linux for everything. Maybe because everyone else was also using it, and because creating a fiasco around it would require explaining what an operating system was. I think it just doesn't apply to software; only to things that can have incriminating pictures taken of them.

Anyway, the first and less viable of the two politics-related business opportunities I'm going to tell you about is the one where you buy cheap the sort of equipment a campaign needs, change the logos, and resell it as genuine American Brand Tech. Yeah, it's a pathetic sham, but having to explain why it's a pathetic sham makes the issue too complicated for your opponent to use it against you. Complexity: make it work for you in politics!

I know what you're thinking: "Great, another hacker trying to use the hammer of technology to hit the non-nail of law. Also, he has poor personal hygiene!" Well, hear me out before you judge, hoo-mon. My personal hygiene is actually quite good, and look at this hypothetical complaint constructed by the EFF to demonstrate how awful and exploitable is Orrin Hatch's INDUCE (now IICA) bill[0]. I'm sure my prattling to Seth had nothing to do with this, but it is the perfect example of what I was talking about.

Note that in a twist rarely seen in the technical realm, sometimes the people writing the law are actually using the law as cover to enable some new attack. In that case it's even more important for outside reviewers to find and expose the backdoor in the law. Also, all laws should be written in my Leibnitzian Python wonder-language that contains no ambiguity.

[0] Leonard's Analogue to Leonard's Analog[sic] to Brooks' Law: "Renaming a bad law makes it worse."

There was an old VR game (that was what we called these games before we called them "first-person shooters") that ran on Amiga hardware, called Dactyl Nightmare. It had a sequel called (surprisingly) Dactyl Nightmare 2. The ad copy promises you will be "plunged into an ultrareal setting trying to avoid the menacing intentions of giant swooping pterodactyls in this game of unprecedented realism" and "You won't sleep through this nightmare."

Hey, wake up! Nightmare! C'mon! You're missing it!

OK, good. Here's a contemporaneous review of Dactyl Nightmare from an Amiga separatist site. The other thing I wanted to show you is this screenshot from Dactyl Nightmare 2, in which the pterodactyl has had big posters of herself printed up and hung in her nest. An egg theft countermeasure?

Man, what a great name. The trademark has been cancelled; does that mean I could write a completely different game with the same name and get away with it?

Sorry, no spectacular thing to show you today. I've got only one of the three things working that I wanted to have, and (sad to say) it's not the one that hits people in the gut and makes them think This Is Important, insofar as any of them do that.

This is an HTML document.

->

["This is an", [TAG name='a' attrs={href: 'http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/', title: "Brought to you by HTMLCorp"} child=[TAG name='b' child=["HTML"]], "document"], "."]

Update, much later: I wrote Beautiful Soup because I wasn't happy with any existing parser.

One day, robot asked the head monk how to find kitten.

"The kitten that can be found is not the true kitten," said the head monk.

"Then why do we search for kitten?" asked robot.

"Why did you drop kitten?" asked the head monk.

At that moment, robot found kitten.

Maybe you can secure the notebook by hiding it in a book safe, except the title of the book is "Book Safes And How To Make Them".

What if Santa left a real star under the tree?

Yeah, let's try to watch out for that contigency. Geez, don't we trust Santa not to be incredibly stupid? What if Santa distributed Class III narcotics to little kids? What if Santa bypassed safety inspections before the sleigh launch and died in a harness accident 10,000 feet above Canada? Santa knows his stuff; he's not going to destroy the earth by twisting Mu Cassiopeiae into a black hole so's it'll fit into a gift box.

Anyway, that's the software side of things, and on the hardware side there's the collection of old scanned computer manuals, truly a labor of love. A random skim through the manuals reveals, eg. the Hayes Stack Chronograph, which is an external system clock. I thought external CD-ROM drives were old school, but it turns out that that school was built on the ruins of an even older school.

[Wait, under what circumstances did you swear revenge on Ned Batchelder's weblog? -Ed. Such questions are not productive in these times of transition, as we seek to reopen friendly relations with Ned Batchelder's weblog. How come I never heard about this? Is this one of those delusional things you make up as you type to make an entry more interesting? -Ed. You're a spy for Ned Batchelder's weblog, aren't you? Fie! This means war!]

My chef, who is also me, cried out, "You're mad! Mad, I tell you! You've never even had poached pears and you have only the vaguest idea of what a poached pear is! Also, what theme restaurant?"

"I call it 'Foods You Can Bruise: The Interactive Restaurant Experience'," I told the chef. You know, I think of him as the son I almost had. "It will serve never-before-seen fusion cuisine, made with only the freshest ingredients, except where we can get away with it."

"Maybe you should call it something like 'The Lowdown,'" said the chef.

"Silence, chef-self! The longer the name, the longer the line out the door! The First Rule of Restauranteering never fails... to fail! Now, while I write the description for the menu, find a poached pear recipe on the Internet that can be turned into an ice cream!"

Ingredients

• 2 pears, peeled, cored, sliced in half
• 1/4 cup brown sugar plus a little more
• 1 cup cream
• 1 cup milk
• Orange or tangerine juice
• Maple syrup
• Honey
• Cinnamon
• Salt
• Vanilla (optional)
• Lemon oil or juice (optional)

Preparation

Put a tiny bit of brown sugar in the pear seed cavities and put them cavity-down into a dish. Put a tiny bit of salt on each pear half, then spoon some maple syrup on top and put a little more brown sugar on top of that. Cover with plastic wrap and microwave for 8 minutes or until soft. (You could probably add cloves or something to the mix, but do I look like a clove-haver?)

Your pears are now microwave-poached. While you were waiting for them to be poached you put the cream and the milk into a saucepan and heated it to almost boiling. Now chop up the pears, put them in a bowl, and pour the milk/cream mixture over it. Add the sugar and the cinnamon. Stir. Add a little tangerine or orange juice and stir some more. If it doesn't taste sweet enough, add some more maple syrup or be ready to add more honey. If you want, add a tiny bit of vanilla and/or lemon oil. Then cool it, daddy-o.

Now it's ready to go in the ice cream machine. At some point during the ice cream making process, add some honey to the mixture. You now have poached pear ice cream!

Notes

I made this last night and it's delicious, but I made it way too sweet, which overpowers the taste of pear; indeed, overpowers your very sense of taste. I don't know why I kept putting sugar into it when it already had so much of so many kinds of sugar. The delta between the published recipe and what I actually made was 1/4 cup of white sugar and maybe 1/8 cup of brown. The recipe as published should be sweet but not too sweet. Let me know if I actually removed too much sugar. Oh, also the stuff I made had no cinnamon because I forgot to get cinnamon.

This is the metadessert recipe for which I asked Alton Brown's advice. For the record, he said that both honey and cinnamon would work well, but to be careful with the honey because it can affect the way the ice cream sets.

News You Can Bruise: Hello.

Coffinfish: Hello.

NYCB: Is it true that you can walk on the ocean floor using your fins?

CF: You'd better believe it.

NYCB: Where do you usually walk?

CF: Just around.

NYCB: But like where? Like to the store?

CF: There are no stores in the depths of the ocean!

NYCB: Well, have you ever thought about opening a store?

CF: Why?

NYCB: Because it's never been done before. The market is completely open. I think it would be a good business for you if you opened up a convenience store off the coast of Australia. You could sell to the other deep sea fish and to the squids and crabs and whatnot.

CF: Look, do you know what fish use for money?

NYCB: No, what?

CF: Nothing! 'Cause we're fish! We have no economy! Our relationships with other fish are predator/prey relationships or mating relationships or rival relationships! So stop with the store idea!

NYCB: Do you think that the ocean as a whole would be more productive if you had an economy?

CF: No.

NYCB: Why not? Humans have an economy.

CF: Yeah, and what do you get out of it? You have to work all day to get your "money"!

NYCB: But you have to work all day as well. All day you lure smaller fish to their doom with the glowing bait atop your head.

CF: That's not work! I just sit back and the fish fall into my gaping maw! It's fun!

NYCB: And then you have to evade predators.

CF: To evade predators, I simply swallow an enormous amount of water! I bet that doesn't work for you!

NYCB: No, but if a predator did get you, how would your family survive without you to provide for them?

CF: That is a moot point because I don't provide for them now.

NYCB: I'm saying that maybe it would be a good idea if you took out an insurance policy or something.

CF: I have an insurance policy!

NYCB: Really?

CF: I am insured against theft, and damage from earthquake!

NYCB: That's pretty useless.

CF: We fish trade only in things that have no value! If we have something valuable, we keep it for ourselves.

NYCB: But what about symbiosis?

CF: Symbiosis is for sea anenomes!

NYCB: You're a very unpredictable interview.

CF: You are a very unpredictable interviewer. Why do you ask me about economic activity all the time? Why don't you ask me some more stupid human questions about how I walk, just like you do? Huh? How about anthropomorphizing me some more? Blaaah! I'm a coffinfish! Blaaah!

NYCB: So, uh, when you walk, are you all walkin' down the street like this, or are you all walkin' down the street like this?

CF: The first one.

NYCB: 'Cause that one's cooler?

CF: Yeah, whatever.

NYCB: Look, you wanted more questions about the walking thing.

CF: Why don't you ask me about my new book?

NYCB: You have a book?

CF: Yes, it's called "Passion and Power: The Political Houses of the Great Barrier Reef 1951-1956".

NYCB: What's it about?

CF: It's got it all: politics, food, sex, budding, intrigue, all set against the stunning backdrop of the postwar Great Barrier Reef.

NYCB: So is it a history?

CF: It's more of a fictionalized memoir. It takes place from the perspective of a young polyp who grows unobserved in the chambers of the ruling class of corals.

NYCB: I'm intrigued.

CF: It also has my favorite recipe for fish. I call it "Fish a la Fish".

NYCB: Would you like to share the recipe?

CF: Yes. First, you stay very still with your mouth open. Then, you eat the fish.

NYCB: So, it's more a means of acquiring fish than a recipe.

CF: It's both. The second part is the recipe.

NYCB: Your book sounds very interesting. Do you have a publisher?

CF: I was planning on disseminating it through oral tradition.

NYCB: You should get a publisher.

CF: Is that another economy thing?

NYCB: Sort of. I think a lot of humans would pay good money for a book written by a coffinfish.

CF: And what would I do with this "money"?

NYCB: You could buy a bunch of really tacky knicknacks and scatter them over the ocean floor, and then show them to other fish.

CF: Your human ways have corrupted me! Now I too must have these tacky knick-knacks!

NYCB: Sorry.

CF: Tell me where are the knick-knacks!

NYCB: Like what do you want?

CF: A little castle! I must have a little castle that gets algae in it! And a treasure chest that opens to reveal fake treasure!

NYCB: That sounds like classic aquarium store material.

CF: All right, I will try your aquarium "store".

NYCB: Thanks for inaugurating this series, coffinfish.

CF: Blaaah! [swims off]

The bad news is that at that roadside stand in Gilroy or wherever that has a whole shelf of hot sauces, there are probably only a couple, if any, which will survive this decision procedure. The good news is that you won't waste your money on that shelf of hot sauce.

To run this decision procedure, you must ignore the funny graphic on the front of the bottle and the "This is the hottest damn thing you've ever tasted in your life! Not for sissies! This will blister your tongue and the tongues of your ancestors!" bravado on the back of the bottle. Those things are a constant on every bottle of hot sauce, no matter how un-hot or foul-tasting it actually is. Instead you must look at the ingredient list on the side of the bottle, where by federal law an honest reckoning of the contents will be found, and answer the following questions:

1. Is the first ingredient habanero peppers? The first ingredient should be habanero peppers, or be somehow based on habanero peppers. If it's some other kind of peppers but all other conditions are met, then it might still be good (if you like that kind of pepper), but it probably won't be as hot.
2. Is the second ingredient some kind of vegetable matter? The second ingredient should be a non-pepper member of the vegetable kingdom, such as carrots, or mangoes. This is the 'base' of the sauce, a nonreactive substance which prevents it from being merely a habanero relish. Note that the base must be something you like: if you don't like mangoes, you won't like a mango-based sauce.

   "Why do you have this rule?", you might ask. "What non-member of the vegetable kingdom could possibly be the second ingredient of a hot sauce? Venison? Drywall? The set of all natural numbers?". No, I refer to that scourge of this decision procedure: vinegar. If the second ingredient of your hot sauce is vinegar, this means you have what we in the business call "a vinegar-based hot sauce", which is no good. Most hot sauces I've seen are vinegar-based, for some reason I cannot comprehend, so you need to be careful about this.

   Now, some of you may like vinegar-based hot sauces, and at this point you are probably seething with vinegary rage. "You'll get my vinegar-based hot sauce when you pry it from my cold dead hands!", you might be saying. Well, THAT'S JUST FINE, because NOBODY WANTS your lousy vinegar-based hot sauce, and if we did we could just BUY SOME FROM THE STORE, so stop being so touchy.

   It is okay for vinegar to show up later in the ingredient list. All hot sauces I've seen contain some vinegar. If you like incredibly hot sauces there might be no hope for you but to go with a vinegar-based sauce.

   NOTE: Sometimes the non-pepper member of the vegetable kingdom comes first in the ingredient list, and the pepper comes second. In my experience, this is fine. It just means that there's more base by weight than there are peppers. If there are a bunch of vegetables in the ingredient list, and then the pepper, then what you probably have is a salsa rather than a hot sauce, which is fine. In fact salsa is generally better than hot sauce because the vegetables are fresher.

3. Does it contain the bonus ingredients? The bonus ingredients are garlic, lime juice, and onion. They are not neccessary for a good hot sauce, but they make it taste better.
4. Does it not contain the malus ingredients? The malus ingredients are things like sugar, corn syrup, cornstarch, and drywall. Most of these are put into a vinegar-based sauce in the misguided hope of thickening it. This is misguided because 1) they should have given it a vegetable base in the first place, and 2) it just makes the sauce taste worse. If you have these ingredients you probably also have a vinegar-based sauce. If nothing else, try to find a vinegar-based sauce that doesn't have this junk in it.

The following sauces are known to pass the decision procedure, and meet with the approval of Kevin and myself:

• Sontava! brand hot sauce. This is a very flavorful, fairly hot habanero sauce, and I use it as the gold standard for other hot sauces, because it was the first one Kevin and I found that was really good. There is a hotter version which we haven't tried yet.
• Mo Hotta Mo Betta puts out at least one good sauce, the mango-based Red Savina sauce. It's hotter than Sontava!, and it has a sweet flavor to it due to the mango.
• "Voodoo Queen" hot sauce. This is an alarming macaroni-and-cheese orange color, but it tastes good, and slightly hotter than Sontava!. Kevin and I call it "Zombie Queen" for some unknown reason.
• The 85% Pain and Batch #37 sauces are put out by the same company and are basically identical except that Batch #37 has more garlic. Both are good, but Batch #37 is better because of the bonus ingredient rule. Both are a little hotter than Sontava!.
• Melinda's brand hot sauce. I was actually going to give this as an example of a vinegar-based sauce that tastes okay, but when I looked at the ingredient label it turns out that it's actually a vegetable-based sauce with vinegar in it. So the decision procedure works better than my own memory, and there are no vinegar-based sauces I recommend.

News You Can Bruise: Is there any artifact of our youth for which you wouldn't write a treatment?

Tom DeSanto: Well, there was already a He-Man movie, so that's out.

NYCB: But the He-Man movie sucked.

TDS: That's because it was made too early. It was made in the 80s, when only ten-year-old dorks would see it, so it was a dorky movie. Now those dorks are 25 and have disposable income, but the market's tapped out. He-Man is a joke.

NYCB: So, would you write, say, a Gobots treatment?

TDS: No, because the Gobots were a pathetic ripoff of the Transformers. Let me give you an example. You know how the boss of the good Gobots was a fighter jet named "Leader 1"? Well, one of the merchandising tie-ins for the Gobots was this Gobots activity book for kids. One of the activities in the activity book was a word search where you had to find the names of the Gobots. In the first place you have an activity book which is destined to show up at the Pic 'N' Save in six months. Second, that activity book contained a word search, which is simply busy work to gets kids to be quiet for a while. Finally, you'd look at this word search and there'd be all these random letters and right in one of the corners there was a numeral 1. And that's where Leader 1's name was.

NYCB: Wow.

TDS: Totally amateurish!

NYCB: So, in a live-action context how do you plan to deal with the fact that there are effectively no humans in the Transformers universe?

TDS: Well, there are humans, but nobody cares about them. They just fix things and get into trouble. So I'm going to introduce a new human character, Humie the Human. He's someone the audience can relate to.

NYCB: Does he transform?

TDS: Yes, he transforms into a tugboat. No, he doesn't transform. Ha!

NYCB: Ha! What are the difficulties in doing a live-action treatment of something as essentially cartoonish as the Transformers?

TDS: I don't understand the question.

NYCB: Well, like so many cartoons of the 80s, the Transformers cartoon existed only to sell toys. The cartoons were basically renditions of what you might see in your imagination playing with the toys, and that's why you suspended disbelief. But if you see it as a live-action thing you're not going to see them as toys, and you're going to wonder why the Transformers were built in the first place.

TDS: Uh-huh.

NYCB: Like with X-Men you could suspend your disbelief because mutants don't have control over what abilities they have. There's not some Rawlsian preexistence where you decide what sort of mutations are good and then everyone is born and gets one of the ones you decided on. You take whatever your genes give you. But Transformers are constructed beings, and you gotta wonder why anyone would decide to build this combination bulldozer/battle robot, unless they were just making a toy. The X-Men had this super plane, but it was based on the SR-71 Blackbird. It didn't turn into a robot.

TDS: Uh-huh.

NYCB: So how do you plan to resolve this problem, of suspension of disbelief?

TDS: Well, there are tricks of screenwriting you can use to induce the suspension of disbelief. For instance, for the first twenty minutes you can have it be a perfectly normal movie about a normal modern person's life, and then the first plot point happens and kablooie! It all goes to pot.

NYCB: Wow! Has nobody ever told you how boring that is?

TDS: Well, keep in mind that during the first twenty minutes of the movie a lot of people are still coming into the theater, or they go out to get popcorn, and if something weird is happening when they arrive you get a lot of talking in the theater, which nobody likes. But sometimes test audiences react negatively to this extended normalcy sequence, so the standard procedure is to put a flash-forward scene at the beginning and then treat most of the movie as a flashback.

NYCB: But that's just a sop thrown to the audience to get them to sit through twenty minutes of boredom! You should start right in the middle of the action and not let up!

TDS: Okay, but the other problem with that, and I probably shouldn't say this, is the musicians' union. You know how every movie has this wishy-washy opening music that's all heavy on the woodwinds? That's because there is otherwise no place for the flute and the piccolo in modern moviemaking, and the flautists and piccoleers become angry. That wishy-washy music requires a mundane introductory sequence over which to lay the credits.

NYCB: There's a conflict I've felt goes to the very heart of the Transformers mythos, and that is Grimlock. Grimlock is a T-Rex, which is awesome, but he's also a Transformer that looks like a dinosaur, which is even stupider than one that looks like a bulldozer. So my question for you, is, do you want to improve on the rather simplistic notion of good and evil presented in the original Transformers series?

TDS: Wow, you got me.

NYCB: Yeah, you thought it was gonna be some lame fanboy question about Grimlock.

TDS: Usually interviewers don't get so involved in the creative process.

NYCB: I do because I care about the movies.

TDS: Well, I don't think the Transformers have a simplistic morality at all. You have good Transformers, and you have bad Transformers.

NYCB: Yeah, but take Magneto for example. He wasn't evil the way Megatron is evil. He did things that were evil, but they served towards a goal; he wasn't doing them just to be evil.

TDS: But every single movie has that sort of villain nowadays. So if you have someone like Megatron who just wants to wreak havoc for no real reason, it's a refreshing twist. Because you have no idea as to his motivation, you never know what's coming next.

NYCB: Bizarrely, you have a point.

TDS: When reviewers say that a character is "mysterious" it just means that they liked the movie but this character had no motivation. It's completely independent of whether or not the movie is good. People who say that characters should have motivations are just exposing their inability to tolerate the mysterious.

NYCB: What's the one thing you want moviegoers to take home from their live-action Transformers movie experience?

TDS: I want people to leave the theater totally mystified and overwhelmed by Godzilla's invincibility.

TDS: Wait a minute, I never said that. That was Shogo Tomiyama, producer of Godzilla 2000! Don't you do basic fact checking?

NYCB: You never said any of the other stuff in this interview either.

TDS: Fair enough.

NYCB: It's been a pleasure, Tom.

TDS: Well, I'm not sure what the ontological status of this conversation is, but if it had actually involved me the pleasure would have been all mine.

Let me give you an example: the old Space sets were great. They had enough gadgetry that you could build any kind of futuristic-looking instrument, but not so much of so many different kinds that it was difficult to mantain a consistent design aesthetic. The humans were differentiable by their different colored spacesuits, which allowed you to assign them to jobs like in Star Trek, or make them representatives of rival space organizations, which for some reason all used the same logo: the symbol of the Galactic Empire from Foundation.

Now the Space sets have been discontinued (?) and replaced by Star Wars sets. Now, I like Star Wars as much as the next fellow, but if I want Star Wars I'll see a movie. If I want to re-enact scenes from Star Wars I'll buy Star Wars action figures and move them around jerkily while speaking in deep or high-pitched voices. To my mind, there's no need to pollute the Lego piecespace with Star Wars stuff. Yet there it is. I can't get a spaceman anymore and give him or her a motivation; I can only get predefined characters from Star Wars.

In retrospect, Lego started going downhill when they started making different types of Lego person heads. This was with the introduction of the Pirate line of Lego sets. I admit that that huge pirate ship was really cool, but it was also the gateway drug into a never-ending spiral of bizarre custom Lego pieces and pre-imagined scenarios. It was a slippery slope from custom heads to a product line whose bread and butter is specific custom heads that tie in to movies.

So, the Space sets have been replaced by Star Wars sets. I never really figured out how to do interesting things with the Castle sets (though it would be cool to render the castle from Degeneracy in Lego), but at any rate those have been replaced by Harry Potter sets. The workaday Town sets have been replaced, I suppose, by various 'adventure' sets which are more extreme; I say that because they have the same design aesthetic as the old Town sets. Those aren't as bad as the others. The Bucket O' Bricks 'sets' are still around in about the same proportion as they used to be (which is to say, not much). (There are also sets with gears and things, but I never paid as much attention to those as I should have.)

This brings me to the actual thing I wanted to talk about here. There is a series of sets called "Lego Studios", which consists of a Lego set plus a Lego man with a Lego camera who's there to film the goings-on. What the hell, man! How is acting out the filming of a movie about a vampire more interesting than acting out an actual vampire scenario? Let me put this in tabular form so that you can understand my confusion.

	"Vampire" scenario	"Filming of vampire movie" scenario
Vampire?	Yes	Not really

There's a Spider-Man tie-in. Now, Spider-Man is all CGI, but the "Lego Studios" set for Spider-Man isn't a room with a Beowulf cluster and some workstations; it's some fake buildings and a Spider-Man guy and a guy with a camera and a guy with a megaphone. It makes it look like the actor playing Spider-Man actually has spider-powers--that he is, effectively, Spider-Man. Why not just make it a damn Spider-Man set? Kids who get this set for Christmas will probably not actually use the cameraman or director, which is heartening, but why are they in there at all? You're supposed to be the one telling Spidey what to do!

My prediction: the Lego Studios line will grow to swallow the Harry Potter and Star Wars lines. After all, those are movies as well, and all you have to do is add a few pieces for a film crew and you've completely ruined the dramatic tension!

def probablyPrime(n):
    if n > 1 and n <= 7:
        return 1
    else:
        return 0

"Bah! I was having a dream about a friendly tortoise! What do you want?"

It was Bob, my idea man. Always looking for the quick buck and the flashy sound bite. His Crummy.com Gasoline-Soaked Dollar Bill Giveaway had cost me millions in legal fees alone, and his plan to put advertising messages in my Java variable names had yet to recoup the cost of the banner ads. But he was working for me under a highly illegal indentured servitude scheme, which meant I couldn't fire him or he'd go to the feds.

"This is going to be huge, so you'd better sit down. Oh, you're lying down. That's even better. Now, picture this. This is huge! You know the Jake Berendes West Covina franchise?"

"Yeah."

"What if it were a board game?"

A board game?

"Yeah! 'Out of maple syrup candy, go back two spaces.' You could play with Berendes Bucks instead of Monopoly money. Or even better, it could be one of those games that's exactly like Monopoly except for the names of the properties. That way we wouldn't have to come up with new rules!"

"Bob, nobody plays board games anymore. Too much crap to get lost in the rug. It's all collectible card games now."

"How about a collectible card game?"

"There aren't enough distinct words in Jake Berendes West Covina to make a collectible card game. You'd have to get into implicit stuff like 'the cheap 35-millimeter camera the kid at the McDonalds bought with his money'.

"You could write the next episode."

The truth comes out. Bob was always trying to get me to write more Jake Berendes West Covina. It was the only thing of mine he knew how to sell. Perhaps waking me up at three in the morning was his way of catching me off my guard.

"You know there is no next episode, Bob."

"Okay, so how about this. You know that Weezer song American Gigolo?"

"Yeah?"

"What if instead of 'my love walks right to your door', it went 'my love walks right through your door'? It would be about some Herman Munster-like guy who went crashing through doors."

"Now you're talking!"

Observe this subplot among Episode II's subplots: the Republic, which has never had an army, nonetheless needs some way to coerce a separatist faction into not being so durn separatist anymore. Milquetoast condemnations have failed. Sanctions have failed. Even Sense-of-the-Senate resolutions have failed! Sen. Palpatine (I-Naboo), chairman of the Senate, is granted by his fellow senators emergency powers which give him authority to raise a clone army of about a million. This presumably will be sufficient to teach Greedo Reb a lesson.

The argument against passing this resolution is the familiar creeping-fascism argument: the 'emergency' will become permanent, Palpatine will seize absolute power, the Republic will descend into Empire, and the clone army will be used as ineffective cannon fodder throughout the next four movies. This is, as we all know, exactly what happens. But what did you expect? It's a brainwashed clone army! You're going to breed people specifically for warfare and somehow demobilize them after the war? Perhaps I'm just old-fashioned, but to me "brainwashed clone army" has always meant "permanent standing army".

The obvious alternative: there are ten thousand planets (my completely random guess) in the Republic. You could call up a hundred reservists from each planet and have a million-organism army, each member of which has a moisture farm to go back to after the war's over. Each planet would have to be politically capable of handling up to 100 body bags, and the logistics would be more difficult (each species would have to provide its own ships and equipment, and differing battle doctrines might hinder cross-species operations), but look on the bright side: you wouldn't all be crushed under the jackbooted heel of the Dark Lord Of The Sith! Isn't that worth considering?

Also, an idle thought that occured to me. Wouldn't it be incredibly cool if, in Episode III, it turned out that Senator Palpatine wasn't Darth Sidious? I don't know how this could possibly happen, but I could probably think something up if George Lucas put me on the payroll. I'm not doin' your thinking for free, George.

Leonard, are you aware that the website known as Builder.com has been revamped and moved to a new url? It is now at builder.com.com

Given that you've written about the pronuciation and spelling of "dot com" a number of times, I'd keen to read your thoughts on builder dot com dot com.

I have no particular beef with "com.com", but I think that once you control the com.com domain there's no reason to stop at com.com. Since you can create subdomains, why not com.com.com, com.com.com.com, or even com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com? Import some singing Vikings, make good. A family-friendly website. Community! Why not make it interactive? Flash introduction! Viral marketing! Socially conscious! First to market advantage: leverage, disintermediate, revolutionize! Supply chain, old economy, new economy, innovation business model open source change! It's peer-to-peer! Sand Hill Road! Close to the Spiritual Machine: One Hacker's Travels with the Selfish MAME. The Coming Crisis In Design: Giving Thanks For Virtual Sexbots. Identity Over IP. Queueing Theory. The Fundamental Theorem of Calculus.

This is a Muppet News Flash! Scientists at Muppet Labs have created a conceptual singularity! In one test, incredibly high concentrations of the '.com' meme somehow fragmented the structure of meaning itself, causing seemingly thoughtful discussion to degenerate into buzzword-laced Joycean rambling. More research on this topic will have to wait until construction of the Semiotic Supercollider is completed in 2004, but the future of high-energy textual analysis is bright. We anticipate eventually being able to reduce all attempts at communication to meaningless sounds and nonsensical scribbles.

Sumana wears (wore) a pocket protector with the logo of a Linux company on it. 200 points!