Trolling the Web

If I did have a working links section, then I’d use it to post stuff like the following:

Lore Sjoberg started updating his website again, including this comic strip which I’m convinced that my laughing at will somehow result in my eternal damnation.

That site is also the first I heard of Twink, the “toy piano band,” which is cool stuff for anybody who liked The Carl Stalling Project and/or electronic music. My favorite is The Broken Record, which samples from vintage children’s records. Just about every review I’ve read has a line about its making you laugh out loud at least once, but I’ve got to say it’s true — what gets me is “Alphabent.” Their stuff is on the iTunes Music Store if you’re not into hunting it down, but of course you don’t get the bunny rabbit book.

Wandering around Flickr led to Adam Koford.com. I really like his drawings of Hell, Adoption, and a monkey with a wrench.

Oh yeah, I knew I was forgetting something: Some helpful people on a message board reminded me the name of a toy I had from the early 80s, Parker Bros’ MERLIN. I’d been thinking of it because all the robot-vacuum-beeping was reminding me of something, but I couldn’t figure out what. Turns out this guy wrote a Merlin simulator for Windows, and he put the original instruction manual on his site (check the Downloads section). Unfortunately, the simulator doesn’t have sound effects as far as I can tell, so there’s no point to the music game. But the other games work, and are a good bit of nostalgia. And a reminder that the thing was a lot cooler as a Space Phone or a Space Car for my action figures than it was as an electronic game.

No, actually, I don’t yahoo.

I put up another post on SFist about Yahoo’s buying the del.icio.us site. It’s a little bit on the ironic side, since I was just thinking how much better it would be if I just had some kind of URL-sharing thing so I didn’ t feel the need to put up a new blog post every time I just wanted to post a link. It was my intention to make the “Links” section of this site exactly that, a total rip-off of the del.icio.us idea, but it’s another one of my neglected projects and probably won’t see any attention anytime soon.

That SFist article was very briefly one of the top stories on Google news again, which is still just weird. I was looking on there for links to other stuff, and there was a blog post I’d written staring back at me. There’s still something unsettling about that; it makes it seem like I’m trying to pass myself off as a “journalist” or something. Journalists actually get interviews and do research and shit; I just get off on pontificating and trying to be funny in equal doses.

Wikipedia and Intelligent Design

My SFist article this week is brought to you by the letter I, for Insomnia.

The reason I went on so long is because I’ve been reading about Wikipedia ever since I saw that libel story. And the more I read, the more I had the feeling that there was just something troubling about the whole concept. It wasn’t until I read the article from the Encyclopedia Britannica guy calling it a “faith-based encyclopedia,” and the one from the co-founder talking about “anti-elitism” that I figured out what it was.

The core attitude behind Wikipedia is the same one behind the Intelligent Design “movement.”

Every time you read about Wikipedia, people talk about it in Darwinian terms. The articles get better through natural selection, they say, and only the strongest articles will survive. It’s as close to being a pure democracy as possible, is the claim, and because everyone has equal say, it’ll eventually reach some kind of objective truth — errors are weeded out, as are highly opinionated pieces, and they maintain the rallying cry of “neutral point of view.”

Which is bunk. Robert McHenry used the quote from a Wikipedia article:

“Arguably, he set the path for American economic and military greatness, though the benefits might be argued.”

as a demonstration of just plain poor writing and the lack of editorial oversight. Sure, it reads like a C-average high school student’s history report, but there’s a deeper problem there than just lazy writing. It’s lazy thinking.

This is how they deal with “controversy.” Any crackpot with an internet connection and an opinion has an equal crack at the encyclopedia, which means that even the most innocuous articles — from Mother Theresa to The Andy Griffith Show — can result in a debate. And contributors will invariably begin shouting “NPOV!” and editing articles to acknowledge every inane point of view, watering them down to the point of being meaningless.

And whenever I hear “lazy thinking,” I immediately think of Intelligent Design. Not that the people behind that movement are lazy; on the contrary, they’re insidious and dangerous. But the way they work is by taking advantage of lazy thinking on the part of average people. It’s ingeniously disguised as a populist movement (even though, of course, it’s anything but). It takes advantage of the little sound bites and high-level overviews of fundamental concepts, then twists them in order to discredit them.

The ID crowd takes advantage of the fact that a lot of people hear “man didn’t descend from monkeys!” or “evolution is a theory!” or “there are scientists who don’t believe in human evolution!” and just stop there with their thinking. Even though those three things are true, they don’t do anything to discredit evolution and are in fact an important part of the scientific process.

The ID crowd also takes advantage of the anti-elitist, anti-intellectual attitude — the same attitude that made people think GW Bush would’ve been better suited for the presidency than Al Gore, because the former would be “more fun to have a beer with” — to try and discredit human evolutionary theory. The scare talk is: They want to keep religion out of your children’s schools, but they refuse to have their own beliefs questioned! They’re forcing your kids to blindly accept a controversial theory without listening to everyone’s opinions!

Everyone with any sense should be wary of the ID movement, but it puts liberal Christians (which I consider myself to be) in a particularly tough spot. Complain about Intelligent Design, and you’re labeled an anti-religious secular humanist cultural elitist. Acknowledge that you do believe in an intelligent Creator of the universe, and you’re still lumped in with the ID crowd and labeled a fundamentalist.

But more offensive to me than some religious debate is the idea that dumber is better. That there’s some inherent value in not being an expert or a professional. That just having a different opinion, even if you can’t back it up, is enough to constitute a “controversy.” Just because billions of people, including myself, believe in a higher power doesn’t mean that that belief has any place in a science class. And just because you believe that you are a special snowflake (Jessica’s expression) with strong opinions doesn’t mean that those opinions have any place in an encyclopedia. Get a personal blog, where you can pontificate all you want — just don’t piss on a public resource and then try to claim that it’s the truth.

“Fun” with Flickr

This is kind of neat: I wrote this little web application as a tag browser for Flickr photos. It works kind of like an advent calendar; you click on a tag to see a random picture from that tag pop up. You can click on my name at the top of the page to bring up a list of my contacts, then click on one of those names to see their tags. I only tested it under Safari and Firefox for mac, so it may not work on other browsers. And be aware that on a dialup connection, it’s going to be intolerably slow.

The app itself isn’t all that spectacular, but the potential is really neat. I mentioned that Flickr made its programming interface available to the public, so you can write your own front-ends and websites to get access to all the data stored on flickr. It’s a great idea, and I’m finally starting to get why people are so excited about the whole “Web 2.0” business.

It was also my first stab at doing something with AJAX, which is apparently the big buzzword for web programmers. It just means that you can interact with a page without forcing a reload of the entire thing; Flickr does it a lot, as does Netflix. It’s pretty cool.

Procrastination Nation

Man, I thought I’d learned everything about procrastination from college and then working at EA, but that was strictly amateur class. Now that I’m working from home, I’ve gone professional in my time-wasting.

Before, it was The Sims 2, where I’d do stupid stuff like see an interesting house in the city and then go into the game to try and build that and then put a family in it and then try to get them hooked up with one of my other Sims or have a baby and then before I knew it three or four hours had passed.

That was nothing compared to Civilization IV. That game is pure evil. I always made fun of the people who claimed they had an “internet addiction” or were addicted to games like Everquest and World of Warcraft, and I still do, because they deserve it. The idea of being addicted to a videogame is absurd. But this game is just weird. When I picked it up on Thursday, I was resigned to waste a whole day on it, and that’s exactly what happened. I got it home around 4pm, and the next thing I knew it was 2am and dark outside and I just felt gross. Really stupid, but I saw it coming so whatever.

But it’s worse than that. Yesterday I was reading a review of the game that mentioned this opening sequence (narrated by Leonard Nimoy) that I didn’t remember seeing. So I started up a game just to check that out. And the next thing I knew, it was 4 hours later. Not even my usual “I know I shouldn’t be doing this now, but I’ll make up for it later” thinking; I genuinely didn’t realize that much time had passed. So, I’ve decided to put that game aside until after I finished my work. Seeing as how I’m not a damn twelve-year-old.

So that’s left all the other stuff to creep in and take over my attention. Like how I became convinced that I wanted to add my AudioScrobbler recently-played tracks to my website like all the cool kids do. Even though I don’t listen to iTunes all that much, and nobody who reads this thing is all that interested in my music — that’s not the point. The point is that it could all track this data that nobody’s interested in, automatically. That’s Web 2.0! The future of the internets! And what’s more, I got it working perfectly, writing the code to get the data and parse it out and put it in a nice little list on the sidebar, rationalizing that I was learning about web programming as I went. But for whatever reason, it doesn’t work from my webserver, and AudioScrobbler’s service is only up intermittently. So scratch that.

But hey, check this out! Some guy made a bunch of Flickr Toys to make calendars, mosaics, Magic cards, magazine covers, and such from your Flickr photos. And what impresses me is that Flickr has complete documentation for their API, so you can write your own toys and galleries and stuff using your photo collections. That means I’ve got to write a new gallery for all my travel photos, right?

Maybe later. After I get past the outline stage and writer’s block I’ve been having with work.

For now, there’s another SFist column up. I’m only supposed to do one a week, but again: it lets me get distracted from what I’m supposed to be doing.

And finally: Happy birthday, Mac! Welcome to your 30s. It’s not as horrifying as I make it out to be.

Too Much Sisterhood, Not Enough Ya-Ya

My favorite review of DOOM is from Statler and Waldorf.

The Muppets have a new movie review show online at movies.com, and it’s about the best thing ever. The latest episode talks about DOOM, Elizabethtown, and has a hilarious bit with Animal and Dr. Teeth explaining Shopgirl. I hope they keep doing it; I wonder if they’re going to be allowed to be as brutal about Disney movies as they are with everyone else’s.

At the moment, at least, it’s the only movie-review site you need.

10,000 Pixels In Your Pocket

I wrote another article for SFist, this one about Apple’s announcement and the new video iPod. The comments section is pretty funny. As angry and bitter about computers that I am, I’ve got to laugh at being called an Apple-hater, as I’m sitting here using Safari on my Mac mini hooked up to the second iPod I’ve bought and an iSight camera and an Apple wireless keyboard and two variations of Apple mice sitting next to my second PowerBook and knowing that I sold a PowerBook to one friend and convinced another friend to buy an iBook. Part of me wonders what you’ve got to do to be a real Apple devotee, but then the rest of me doesn’t want to know because I’m not sure I could afford it.

Oh yeah, and the guy who said that the obsession with expensive gadgets is a manifestation of a greater socialogical (sic) ill of consumerist excess and social withdrawal? Well, no shit, Brainiac.

Anyway, the new iPod. No, it’s not that big a deal, just a thinner version of the iPod with a wider screen. It’s actually really nice, from what I’ve seen, and the best design of an iPod yet. It’s just not the big “video iPod” that all the blogs were leading up to. Great product by all accounts, just nothing astounding. Not even I can justify getting one, unless something… happens… to my existing iPod.

I was never convinced that any mobile device could play video worth seeing, until I saw the Sony PSP. I said it before, but including Spider-man 2 with the thing was a great move on Sony’s part. I don’t think it sold people on the idea of buying movies on UMD — it didn’t sell me on the idea, anyway. But it did show that it’s actually practical to watch an entire movie on a handheld. The problems, as I’ve said enough times now that I’m already sick of hearing myself saying it, are that UMDs suck and memory sticks don’t hold enough. It’s going to take a real video iPod, with a hard drive and everything, before you see people getting excited about mobile video.

Just for yuks, and to see what the video quality was, I did download a couple of videos from the iTunes Music Store. They’re nothing to get all excited about — they didn’t draw much attention to it in the press releases, but did mention it at the actual presentation, but the video is only 320×240. (And I’ll admit that the two videos were “Limp” by Fiona Apple, and “Least Complicated” by the Indigo Girls.)

Browsing through the video store was kind of neat, because at this point it’s still mostly old, old stuff that makes you say, “Oh yeah, I remember that video!” I’m having to flashbacks to sitting in the living room watching “Night Tracks” on TBS waiting for them to play “One Thing Leads to Another” by the Fixx again. As soon as they have “The Warrior” by Scandal Featuring Patty Smythe, I’m totally buying the hell out of that.

As for the TV shows, I’m skeptical I’ll ever use it. If I were using something like an iMac as my whole home media center, I could see how it would be cool — but then if you’re using an iMac instead of a bigger TV, then are you in the market to pay two bucks a pop for episodes of TV shows that were broadcast the night before? All the shows are DRM’ed with Fairplay, so it’s not as if I could copy the video file to a PSP, either. Or burn it on a DVD. They’ve still got to work that part out, I think.

Imaginary Prom Dates

I wrote another thing for SFist that’s up now; they’re getting lighter and lighter, I’ve noticed. This week I’m going to some big robot convention in San Jose, hopefully I’ll be able to get something more substantial from that instead of just letting Eve do the research while I add TV references.

And it turns out I need help with the TV references as well. I found out this week that for years I’d been mis-remembering the most important thing to any Generation X aspiring trendy hipster: Brady Bunch trivia. See, I always thought that when Jan made up the name of her imaginary boyfriend, she chose “Ron Glass“. And I always thought that was awesome. What better way to get attention away from Marcia and stick it to your uptight mom and homo dad, than show up at the big dance with a black man 20 years your senior?

And then when she showed up with the big black afro wig, that just knocked it over the top. Jan had gone past living out some predictable mid-70’s white girl Mandingo fantasy, and had blossomed into a true nubian princess.

But I was looking around the web, and it turns out the name she picked was George Glass. Who’s way more boring. Still, it turns out he was an associate producer for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? which I guess is kind of funny.

Meet Jack Torrance

I first heard about it from Rain’s blog, but some people on the Straight Dope did some digging to find out more about it. Apparently it’s been going around the internets and has made an impression.

What it is is a new trailer for The Shining, using clips from the movie (except for one cheat piece of dialog). And it’s genius, one of the best things I’ve ever seen on the internet. Bonus points for including the kiss and the choice of music. I can’t stop watching it.

The New York Times did an article about it with more info and an interview with the guy who made it.

On the same site, there’s a trailer for West Side Story as a horror film, but it’s not as good.

Eet ees Scieyencia!

I’ve got yet another post up at SFist, so check it out if you’re so inclined.

A lot more interesting is the story about the ski jump on Fillmore Street yesterday. I drove by it on the way to lunch yesterday, and although traffic was backed up on Broadway, it was pretty well-handled. I didn’t see much of it, but after looking at the photos of the event on flickr, I wish I’d stopped to check it out. I have to admit I thought it was a stupid idea when I first heard about it. After seeing it, well I still think it’s a stupid idea, but I also think it’s a stupid idea that’s totally wicked awesome. Locals never seem to appreciate when I say that San Francisco is like a theme park with panhandlers, but this is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about.

And it sounds like there’s a ton of other cool stuff going on this weekend, like Serenity which I already knew about, but also Mirrormask if you’re into Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, and a Free Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park. Makes me wish I didn’t have actual work I had to get done this weekend.

Do you like magic? No. I LOVE it.

Haw haw haw! Fooled you! The Terry Pratchett book signing was last week! So here I sit with a still-unsigned copy of Good Omens and apparently the onset of some degenerative brain disease. Hopefully nobody tried to go on the basis of that blog entry. And if you did, hopefully you didn’t drag somebody out of work and halfway across the city for a no-show. I’m feeling like such a moron I’m going to do the rest of this one like Jackie Harvey from The Outside Scoop.

Item! People have been saying that “Arrested Development” is great for a long time now but I never believed it. Even after watching their little mini-marathon a while back with Martin Short on it (which was damn funny, I don’t care what anybody says). But after watching last night’s episode (“For British Eyes Only”), I’ve finally come around to realizing this is the best comedy on TV.

I mean, I could watch 30 minutes just of Portia di Rossi doing the chicken dance and still be plenty entertained, but they actually add jokes and stuff. “Has anyone in this family even seen a chicken?” The Rumsfeld/Hussein photo. Dave Thomas giving an international phone number via flash cards. Wee Britian and the Itsy Bitsy IRA. “At that moment he was struck by something from his childhood.” “I think they came for the free chicken,” and then the people all bend over for the chicken feed! And all that was before “We’re not here to talk nonsense to Bob Loblaw.” I don’t care if I am coming late to the party asking if I can play too; this is awesome.

Item! I was watching “The Daily Show” tonight and was reminded of why I don’t shave. I end up looking like a cross between John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants, and Ed Helms. Eh, whatever. Considering the alternative, I guess I’ll put up with the Daily Show comments for a while. Better than being called “distinguished,” which I actually was called and which everybody know just means “old.”

Item! Serenity opens this weekend! I’m totally going to see it! If it’s not sold out and there’s not a long line! I just don’t know what to dress up as, since there’s no equivalent of Boba Fett, and Blue Sun T-shirts are just played out.

Item! Mike Doughty formerly of Soul Coughing is still playing at The Independent this weekend, this time I swear to God I got the date right. I’m going to see that too!

Item! My second post for SFist is up today. The usual day for these things is Friday, but it turned out there were enough news links from the past couple of days to fill up a column. Plus, they’re kind of fun to write.