Still trying to fix my RSS feed. Life, late 2003…
Bad date, bad feed
For reasons that I am unable to fathom the new posts to this blog since late in the day yesterday are no longer showing up in my RSS feed. Any Radio experts have an idea what to do? I haven’t changed any preferences…
ADDENDUM I think I’m figuring it out… more if I’m right…
MOREI know what went wrong (bad system clock setting for 2004 screwed up a post, and that’s munging the feed), but I don’t think I can properly repair it till I am at the office tomorrow. Curse of the client-side blog tool (there are many blessings too, of course).
Charlie Varon: Wit from woe
Longtime Salon readers may recall a feature we ran in the late ’90s known as the “21st Challenge” — a reader-response humor competition that had its 15 minutes of fame in the form of our “Error Message Haikus,” which went round the world on a million e-mail lists and wound up being mentioned in the Microsoft trial (without credit, alas!).
Charlie Varon was the co-creator of those contests. He’s better known in the Bay Area as a remarkable playwright and performer responsible for some of the past decade’s most original political theater (his shows have included “Rush Limbaugh in Night School,” “Ralph Nader is Missing,” and “The People’s Violin”).
I’m a little biased here, because I’ve known Charlie since we were in high school together and worked on the weekly student paper (he was my first editor, and still one of my best), but so what? I think Charlie is making some extraordinarily original political comedy in these dark days: it’s angry without succumbing to cynicism, hilarious without resorting to sarcasm.
You can hear it for yourself on a new CD he has self-published, titled “Visiting Professor of Pessimism.” It’s a live recording of a show in San Francisco that Varon performed in the middle of the Iraq invasion last spring. The pieces are character-sketch monologues that look, with clear-eyed, heartbreaking humor, at the terrible compromises of the war on terrorism, the awful deadlock in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and the dilemmas facing Americans committed to peace.
And it kicks off with a parody BBC newscast announcing, among other things, a new breakthrough in genetic engineering, mixing genes from root vegetables and business leaders: “The goal is to breed a humble corporate executive — or, failing that, a ruthless potato.”
You can listen to free samples here, here, or here. Or read more here.
Google pump-and-dump or Microsoft FUD attack?
The New York Times reported that Microsoft talked to Google about acquiring the company. Bill Gates denied the report. Who’s lying? Dan Gillmor walks us through the possibilities. Dan sounds like he thinks it’s more likely that the lie emanates from the Google side, since Gates, as a public-company chairman, has to follow some pretty strict rules — and the investors who are plotting an IPO for Google have a “pump and dump” incentive to talk up Google’s prospects.
I dunno. Google was a pretty hot item before anyone read any headlines about a Microsoft acquisition. Anything is possible here, but Microsoft has a long history of FUD — sowing “fear, uncertainty and doubt” — and concern about regulatory wrist-slaps would not seem high on the list in Redmond in the wake of the Bush administration’s roll-over-and-die approach to the Microsoft antitrust settlement.
Worlds within worlds
Great piece by Greg Costikyan on the philosophical question of whether MMGs (massively multiplayer games) are games at all — or something new in the way of imaginary-world creations:
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There and Second Life both claim that they aren’t games. The reason they claim not to be games, of course, is that their creators are under the delusion that they will increase their potential audience by making this claim, since games are for geeks, and they want to create MMGs for “the rest of us.” The idea being that only geeks play games, a small percentage of the population are geeks, ergo, to create a 3D world that achieves a mass audience, you must create one that isn’t a game. Let’s start with the assumption that only geeks play games. This is patently false. |
Greg’s an experienced game designer, and he takes the long view, with a historical perspective that goes all the way back to Habitat — arguing that, if you’re designing an MMG, you’d better make it a good game, or people won’t want to spend time in it.
For a somewhat different perspective, Salon contributor Wagner James Au has been serving as a kind of in-world reporter/blogger over at Second life. His Notes from within that MMG make for a fascinating glimpse inside one virtual play-space.
The Web is an amazing thing, part 3486
Andrew Leonard cooked up an incredibly feast for a small party over the weekend, as is his wont. One of the things he cooked was Szechuan duck, from a recipe in the still-amazing (and sadly out of print) “Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook.” One of the things that made the duck extraordinary was a marinade and stuffing of Sichuan peppercorns.
I wanted to know more about this ingredient, which I’d only used a couple of times in the distant past. The Web had all the answers, and more. No imaginable encyclopedia could ever provide such depth of detail. And instantly!
People sometimes get this spice confused with your basic red-hot chile pepper, since that pepper is so widely used in Sichuan cooking; but this is something different, a dried-up brown thing about the size of a matchhead that has a unique, almost numbing impact on the palate. For reasons I was dimly aware of — Andrew’s explanation was to blurt out something like “citrus infestation vector!” — these peppercorns are now illegal to import into the U.S. Which is really too bad. But at least I can read about every chemical compound they contain…
Brevity is the soul…
These hilarious “weekend update” op-ed summaries from Matthew Yglesias are making Tapped a must-read:
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WEEKEND UPDATE. Sunny Sunday keep you away from the news? Here’s what you missed:
The Columnists
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Eno time: The long and the short of it
I found myself waiting on a long line at Fort Mason Friday night, one that stretched from the doors of the Herbst Pavilion all the way out the Fort Mason parking lot gate. You don’t often see a crowd that size at the warren of funky non-profits and arts groups. A man wandered up to the line at one point and asked, a little incredulously, “Are all you people waiting for the Annie Leibovitz exhibit?”
No way. We were waiting to hear Brian Eno, who was giving a free talk to kick off a lecture series by the Long Now Foundation. But the makesift lecture hall proved all too small for the huge crowd, so a lot of people had to listen to the talk piped in over a PA to the bigger room next door. You could mill around and look at Leibovitz’s homages to ephemeral celebrity while listening to Eno talk about the value of taking a 10,000 year view.
In the mid-1970s, when Eno’s still-amazing solo albums “Here Come the Warm Jets,” “Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy” and “Another Green World” shaped my teenage musical imagination, an Eno lecture might not have filled a small broom closet. So as I waited Friday night — while distinguished ushers Danny Hillis and Kevin Kelly handed out programs and warned us we might not get in — a part of me was thinking, who cares if I get in? I’m just glad to live in a time where Brian Eno has found a following, and a place where he is a bigger draw than Annie Leibovitz.
But I’ve grown a little old for that sort of in-group pride, and besides, the topic of Eno’s talk was one that deserves mass distribution beyond the narrow circles of the Bay Area art-and-science-crossover world. If you haven’t already encountered the Long Now perspective, this essay by Eno does a pretty good job of recapitulating his Friday talk.
Lit from below just a little demonically, Eno explained the Long Now Foundation’s aim of expanding our frame of reference in thinking about the future: What if we were thinking not just about tomorrow or next year or even “the rest of my life,” but about the next 10,000 years? (One thing the foundation does in all of its literature is add a zero in front of the year — for instance, it’s 02003 right now — to “avoid the Y10K bug” and keep that longer time span in the front of our minds.)
As a longtime devourer of science fiction, I’m probably a bit of a pushover for this vision. I remember reading Olaf Stapledon’s “Last and First Men” as a 14-year-old and savoring the sense of temporal vertigo its ever-expanding timelines induced.
But there are perfectly pragmatic and down-to-earth rationales for the Long Now idea — not just in the obvious ways, like fostering a (literally) more conservative treatment of natural resources and the environment, but in personal, psychological terms. While the kind of long-term thinking Long Now promotes certainly encourages activism today, Eno argued that it also “takes the pressure off” individuals — “it makes you slightly less precious and tight about your own time on earth.” Long Now projects, like the clock for which it is most famous, are inevitably collaborations across time between people today and future generations.
Eno outlined four misapprehensions of the Long Now ideal: “The Realist” sneers, “Do you really think you can predict the future?” (They’re not trying to predict anything.) “The Pessimist” snaps, “”What bloody future?” (“If he’s wrong,” Eno argued, “it would have been a good idea id we had done something about it.”) “The Optimist” takes a Panglossian, passive approach: “Everything is working out fine,” so why do anything? Finally, “The Designer” believes that “we’re smart enough to design the future for you — we can create a perfect world.”
Each of these responses misses the basic point here, Eno said — one of “encouraging a habit of thought”: “We are building the future, whether we like it or not. We can do it with our back to it, or we can turn around and look.”
For many people, religion provides a moral framework for this long view — but if, like me, you are simply not a believer in any organized religion’s tenets, the Long Now argument makes a great deal of sense. I’ll look forward to the rest of this series.
Multi-dimensional blogging
[This post was written on Friday but some glitch stopped it from actually posting when I thought it was posted, so here it is, only slightly yellowed with age:}
It’s taken me a little while to figure out what Dave Winer has been up to this past week with his redesign of Scripting News, the site that taught so many of us how versatile the blog form could be. I think I get it now.
A lot of the comments he’s elicited have focused on the outre Amsterdam red-light-district photo that has replaced his time-honored cactus. But that’s just, as it were, the window-dressing. (As of now, Monday, that picture is already gone — I guess that image will change periodically, which is a nice touch.)
At first it seemed like Winer was just adding a bunch of categories to his blog. And hey, that didn’t seem so revolutionary — Radio Userland, Movable Type and lots of blogging tools already allow that.
But the changes now feel more ambitious than that. Dave is placing each of his blog posts into a hierarchical outline or directory. (This shouldn’t be a big surprise — Winer’s signature software product was an outliner.)
So, basically, with this new approach, each new post to his blog is now being fed into two alternative navigation systems: the chronological mode blogs all share (“Find post by date”) and a new outline/directory mode that seems new to the blog world (though obviously it’s omnipresent on the Web). In other words, every blog post is now contributing not only to a diary-like timeline but also to a Yahoo-like knowledge base.
I imagine there are other things going on here beneath the surface, but this alone seems pretty neat to me.
Regulation — it works!
It’s now been several weeks since the no-call list limiting telemarketers’ calls was put into effect, and guess what? Our household — which previously received on average of 2-3 telemarketing calls per weekday evening, inevitably ringing just when I’d sat down in front of a hot dinner or the kids were raising a ruckus in the bathtub or when we’d finally gotten them down to bed — has seen an approximately 99.9 percent reduction in the volume of telemarketing. I think we’ve received one call total, from our own phone company, which can claim it has an “existing business relationship” or whatever with us.
I consider this a major lifestyle improvement.