Monthly Archives: December 2006

Would you just stop and ask for directions, already?

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TVSquad.com has a link to an interview with Damon Lindelof about the upcoming season conclusion of “Lost.” I agree with the TV Squad guy — dude could stand to shut up for a while and lessen the backlash. The part [...]

NOW look where the plot is!TVSquad.com has a link to an interview with Damon Lindelof about the upcoming season conclusion of “Lost.” I agree with the TV Squad guy — dude could stand to shut up for a while and lessen the backlash.

The part of the interview that annoyed me the most was at the end:

But I feel for the fans that are desperately waiting for the big answers. The reality is that there is an inherent catch-22 there, which is “Who killed Laura Palmer?” Once you give up who killed Laura Palmer, why watch “Twin Peaks”? Once Dave and Maddy kiss, why watch “Moonlighting”? So I feel like once we give up those big answers, the really compelling reason to watch “Lost” will be over and done with. I would really like to answer those questions because I think that the answers are very cool.

One of the reasons it bugs me is because I used to buy that schtick — hip young guy who loves TV, not just makes TV; can combine high culture and pop culture; and in touch with what fans are saying and what they want. That was before I read about a dozen of these types of interviews (and that’s only a fraction of what’s been published), and they’re all the same — unbelievably cool things are coming up in the series, so just wait; “Twin Peaks” sure fizzled out, huh?; and we want the show to be cool, but it’s all Disney’s fault.

This is going to make me sound like a Disney apologist, but I’m speaking more as a fan of the show teetering on the brink of becoming a former fan. But I’d bet one 30-second block of ad revenue that Disney just wants to make money off the show, they don’t care how it’s done. As long as the series doesn’t full-stop end, I bet anything would be fair game.

And mentioning “Moonlighting” and “Twin Peaks” is just weak sauce. What killed “Twin Peaks” wasn’t revealing who killed Laura Palmer; what killed it was having nothing planned for after the reveal. They’d put all their effort into one mystery, and didn’t start with the larger-scale Black Lodge stuff until it was already too late. “Lost” doesn’t have that problem; if anything, they’ve got the opposite. It’s all Black Lodge stuff, and they keep throwing more into the mix.

They could bring any of the big mysteries to a conclusion and keep the series going. They could bring all of them to a conclusion and — hey, here’s a thought — invent new ones. Hell, they’ve already got enough threads going; if they just devoted two episodes each to resolving every single one of the open stories, that’s at least two seasons’ worth right there.

And what about the stuff that’s been hinted at but never evolved to full-blown mystery? The Black Rock ship that’s over 100 years old — why not do a half-season of that crew and their flashbacks? I’d watch.

As for “Moonlighting,” it was on the decline a long time before they got the two leads together. Because they took a prize-winning formula from the start of the series and killed it by doing the same thing over and over again. They put so much effort into one gimmick (will they ever get together?) and didn’t have anything left over.

Sounds like “Lost” is going to waste its dozen interesting characters and intriguing premises with pointless, never-resolved subplots and more obfuscation. Look forward to the Shakespeare episode, all-musical episode, and black-and-white episode to come soon.

Notes from the Battlefield

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I made out like a bandit this Christmas — even now, the sheriff is standing next to his overturned patrol car at the county line, shaking his fist at me and slapping his good-natured but incompetent deputy over the head [...]

More Christmas with Samantha BrownI made out like a bandit this Christmas — even now, the sheriff is standing next to his overturned patrol car at the county line, shaking his fist at me and slapping his good-natured but incompetent deputy over the head with his hat while calling him a “melon-farmer.” (I celebrated Christmas on TBS).

Everyone else, though, got screwed. It was as if I were waging a war on Christmas on a scale that would terrify even Bill O’Reilly. I had the best intentions, sure, but somehow it all fell apart. Everything was the wrong size, wrong format, a duplicate, or just plain not enough. I remember wandering through stores, looking for exactly the perfect gift, and even thinking I had found a couple. But apparently something happened by the time we got to the unwrapping phase.

My brother’s got this weird magic gift-giving gene, though. Where I would plunk down a chunk of cash on something and wrap it, he goes for the bundle, accessories, and an accompanying magazine to commemorate the gift. And where I would give up and just buy a gift card in a panic, he puts the gift card in a box within a box with a specially-printed label and wraps the whole thing up. Not to mention — he got me a Wii, which he had to get up early and stand in line for.

And then he kept doing the Steve Jobs “one more thing” bit, pulling gifts and books and gift cards and animatronic chimpanzees out of nowhere because apparently exactly what I wanted wasn’t enough. I was just embarrassed at the excess of stuff coming my way. But pleasantly embarrassed, which is what I’m used to.

Ding dong ding dong

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This never really occurred to me before, but Christmas has gotten so far removed from being a celebration of the birth of Christ, that the majority of the most cherished and traditional celebrations of Christmas are about how Christmas has [...]

And a very Merry Christmas to Rosie O'DonnellThis never really occurred to me before, but Christmas has gotten so far removed from being a celebration of the birth of Christ, that the majority of the most cherished and traditional celebrations of Christmas are about how Christmas has stopped being about a celebration of the birth of Christ.

A Christmas Carol: ghost story about a guy who hates Christmas until he’s guilted into celebrating the season by a crippled child and the threat of his own death.
It’s a Wonderful Life: whiny depressive threatens to kill himself until people boost his ego enough to convince him an entire city hinges on his existence.
A Miracle on 34th Street: jaded little girl forced to believe in the magic of Christmas by an escaped lunatic.
A Charlie Brown Christmas: whiny depressive becomes despondent at commercialism of the season, regains hope via unsolicited sermonizing by his emotionally troubled friend.
The Passion of the Christ: Jews suck.

My point being that complaining about the commercialism is as much an institution as nativity scenes and midnight mass. So I’m not going to try to add anything to that.

Except this: these advertisers really need to stop with the Christmas carol parodies already.

I actually like “Carol of the Bells” a good bit — I think the coming of the Messiah should have music that is big and overwrought and even a little creepy, instead of that weak “Away in a Manger” pablum. Or at least, I used to like it. Thanks to Garmin, this year I was already sick of hearing it by the time it was even December 1st.

So an open letter to marketing types: I’m not going to tell you to stop marketing the hell out of Christmas. That’s what you do, and I know it’s important on some level. But the next time you’re coming up with an ad campaign, and you think that it’ll be cool to write a clever parody of “Carol of the Bells” or “Jingle Bells” or “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” or theme it to A Christmas Carol or include scenes from It’s a Wonderful Life, know this: that shit is played.

And if you still do it, you’re a worthless hack. And as you look around at the ruin of your talentless existence and feel so depressed by the pointlessness of it all, know that when you see the version of the world that doesn’t have you in it, you’ll see a world where everybody is really happy and better off and enjoying the spirit of the season via beloved carols that haven’t been ruined by overuse.

And in that spirit, it’s time once again to hear this rendition of O Holy Night.

Do you hear what I hear?

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Spending time at my parents’ house means seeing hours and hours of CNN, and this week that means every-fifteen-minute updates on Virginia representative Virgil Goode’s discomfort over his fellow congressman’s religion. In particular, how tougher immigration policies are necessary to [...]

Georgia moms against witchcraftSpending time at my parents’ house means seeing hours and hours of CNN, and this week that means every-fifteen-minute updates on Virginia representative Virgil Goode’s discomfort over his fellow congressman’s religion. In particular, how tougher immigration policies are necessary to keep people like Keith Ellison from being born and raised in America and taking advantage of the United States’ establishment clause.

For me, I’m just happy. First, because it’s Christmas. Second, because Ellison’s taking the high road, and a faint ray of light is finally starting to break through and show Goode for what he is: a uniquely stupid individual, and not a representative of the oppressive Conservative Republican Theocracy that controls everything in this country. And third, because for once the idiocy isn’t happening in my home state.

I don’t know if it’s the spirit of Christmas, or if I’d just gotten an unfairly negative impression last time I was here, or if I’m just getting to be less of a tight-ass, but things actually seem to be a little more tolerable in suburban Atlanta these days.

I had to go to the mall to do some Christmas shopping, and the traffic, soullessness, and commercialism were as bad as I’d expected. But it all ended up being pleasant, because people everywhere were friendly. It was a shock to the system — as much as I like San Francisco, I still say that people there keep to a strict mind-your-own-damn-business policy. The clerks here were busy but friendly, and people waiting in line would strike up conversations with me, a complete stranger.

Even better, I ended up feeling like a dope. The mall I went to is targeted primarily towards black people. I don’t know why that’s controversial to say (it’s not just on Wikipedia, where anything can be the grounds for “controversy”); apparently, it’s racist to acknowledge that retailers have target demographics. Whatever the case, Dekalb County is predominantly black, Rockdale is predominantly white, and this bastion of retail paradise straddles the two. As I was shopping, I was keeping an eye out for how people were handling having to fight for the valuable Borders and Best Buy resources that both black and white communities need.

And it turns out exactly like you’d expect — it’s a big freaking non-issue. After all my years living in the San Francisco Multicultural Biodome, I’ve become just as guilty of being Pompous Left-Coast Liberal as I used to accuse everyone of being when I first moved out there. I guess I was going in to my home county acting like an explorer observing relations between the Afrikaaners and the Zulu, or like the one blonde-haired blue-eyed college boy who reluctantly creeps out onstage at “Showtime at the Apollo.”

Instead, what I saw were a bunch of people shopping. And teenage friends hanging out; the younger they were, the less it seemed to matter what race anybody was. Maybe things will keep getting better as long as us liberal caucasians allow our sphincters to unclench. And that, as my Aryan princess Martha Stewart would say, is a good thing.

The Treachery of NSImages

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Thanks to my recent bout of unemployment, I’ve finally been able to finish one of the projects I always said I’d do when I got free time. This one is to write a complete app for Mac OS X, from [...]

Incisor IconThanks to my recent bout of unemployment, I’ve finally been able to finish one of the projects I always said I’d do when I got free time. This one is to write a complete app for Mac OS X, from start to release.

The app is called Incisor, and it’s a lightweight image editor. I’m always finding pictures I want to use in blog posts on websites, or Flickr, or from my own iPhoto library. But getting them in a usable format means having to crop and resize them in Photoshop or iPhoto, both of which are overkill for doing something as simple as sizing an image.

It’s such a common task I’m surprised it isn’t being done already, but I haven’t found an app that works exactly like I want — in particular, being able to see a real-time preview of the edit, and being able to drag it directly into another program without saving it as an interim file. (Of course, now that I’ve put it on the internets, I’ll probably hear of a dozen programs that already do that. But what the hell; I wanted to learn how to write a Cocoa app anyway).

The thing about programming for Cocoa, at least from my limited experience, is that it’s crazy powerful, but it takes a lot of work to get your foot in the door. There are plenty of excellent tutorials out there, but they either start out too high for the beginner, assuming that you already know the basics; or they are so tailored to a specific task that you’re screwed if you try to do something different. I wrote the “Currency Converter” app about four times, each time ending up with a complete program but never understanding how all the pieces fit together.

I’ve read in more than one tutorial that the mantra of Cocoa programming is, “If it’s hard, you’re doing it the wrong way.” And it’s mostly true; the problem is finding out the right way to do it. Several times I would spend hours writing a bunch of functions to do something, only to have to delete it all once I discovered it was all covered automatically by one call to the system frameworks. For example, everything complicated about image manipulation is handled automatically by the Cocoa libraries — the effort in writing this app was half connecting the UI, and half digging through tutorials and documentation to find out what was covered and what I’d have to write myself.

And I’m just finding out now that at least half the UI code I’ve written could be scrapped if I’d used a different method. I guess I’ll know better next time.

I’m not sure if it’s just my experience, but developing something for OS X at the moment seems like a lot of super-powerful pieces without enough to tie them all together. It’s almost ludicrously easy to get a full-featured app out of the built-in frameworks and tools they give you for free; you can write a functioning web browser with just one line of code, for example.

Still, there’s not really anything guiding you through the process. For a while, after seeing how powerful InterfaceBuilder and Xcode are, and how deeply-integrated AppleScript is into everything, I was starting to think that development had gotten to the point where something like HyperCard wasn’t necessary anymore. But now, after finishing an app (albeit a very simple one) and looking back on where my time was spent, I’m convinced that the system really needs something that casual programmers and even non-programmers can use to get results not built into the stock iLife apps. Bring back HyperCard!

P.S. The app has some of the ugliest icons possible. If anyone wants to volunteer to make new ones, let me know.