Mark’s Musings

John Scalzi points us towards Orson Scott Card’s whinging, in which Card says:

A term that has mental-health implications (homophobe) is now routinely applied to anyone who deviates from the politically correct line. How long before opposing gay marriage, or refusing to recognize it, gets you officially classified as “mentally ill”?

That’s a great question: how long before bigotry is considered a mental health issue? Bigotry is an incredible source of evil in the world, it would be awesome if it could be classified as a mental illness. Alas, it is so pervasive that it appears to be part of the human condition. It may be some time before prevention (let alone a cure) can be deployed so, until then, we’ll just have to deal with it as best we are able. And poke fun at those who flash their bigotry in full view of the world.

In a recent column, Cringely writes:

We didn’t need Google, or didn’t think we did before Google came along. I don’t recall sitting around complaining about Alta Vista and Excite and the other pre-Google search engines, which seemed to do a pretty good job in their day.

Is he serious? Does he not remember all the search engine arguments from the mid-to-late 90’s? There were dozens of them. Search engines, I mean. Even more arguments about them. Some sites aggregated results for you. Some sites would present all the results in separate frames in your browser, nine at a time — nine frames at a time — so you could scroll through tiny windows and hope your results might be buried somewhere within. On one day, search engine X would find what you’re looking for, and you’d rejoice and praise it. Then on another day, another search would fail miserably on X, and your colleagues would mock you and tell you to use Y. There were enough search engines out there that this could go on for some time.

The early version of the web was chaotic. Even more so than it is today. Many sites purporting to cover a topic were just lists of links to other sites. Yahoo! eventually grew to be a well-respected site, before it grew too large for its own good, just by providing “high-quality” links: links to sites that had content. But when a search engine would dump you onto a page with a score of links to other pages, you’d have to slog through then, one by one, to see if any (a) still worked, and (b) had what you’re looking for. This was a mind-numbing experience when browsers lacked tabs, and when every webmaster thought animated gifs looked cool. Insert here a casual damnation of the inventor of the <blink> tag.

(As an aside, who remembers “web rings”? You joined a ring site by signing up and linking to the site “before” you and “after” you. That didn’t last long, of course, as pages disappeared almost as quickly as they appeared, leaving most web rings broken and useless.)

Today, using Google, you find what you’re looking for. And if you can’t, it’s more likely that it doesn’t exist at all. So, yes, Mr Cringely, we were complaining about the state of web search. We were looking for something better. We did rejoice when Google went live.

Of course, this just means I needed to find something else to complain about.

For my birthday I got, among other things, books, cards, calls, well-wishes, cake… and volumes 1 and 2 of the ultimate James Bond collection. I didn’t know I wanted this, but I really did. My wife knows me better than I do. Each volume is composed of five films, which is quite a bargain considering all the extras and remastering that you get. Here are the links: Volume 1 Volume 2.

The first Bond film I ever saw was Diamonds are Forever when we used our brand-new VCR to record it one night when I wasn’t allowed to stay up late. I saw it five or six times in a row, partly because I could — the ability to time-delay a TV show was fascinating just by its newness — but partly because I thought it was so awesome. The first Bond film I ever saw in a cinema was Never Say Never Again, the then-unofficial remake of Thunderball, because some relatives of mine were involved in the production. As I recall, it was one of the first, if not the first, 70mm projections I saw.

Over the years I managed to catch a film here and there on TV, but there were significant gaps in my education from the early Bond years. Now that I’ve got 10 of them to see, I’m really looking forward to filling in those gaps, and exercising my film-reviewing muscles. I’ll put reviews behind the “cut” in future blog posts — my skills as a reviewer are currently minimal, although I am interested in improving.

What makes a film critic good? I can’t define it, although I know it when I see it. Brian Westover suggests a few things, but I think he may be not entirely serious. At least he mentions Bond films.

A few months ago, Alec received a Nintendo DS as a gift. How shall I put this? We strongly encouraged him to give his GBA to Samantha. The GBA games that Alec had were unfortunately not really geared towards 5 year old girls. Samantha did enjoy playing his Harry Potter game, though. She got understandably frustrated when confronted with the River Troll, and it took several attempts to beat him. But the game lost her progress on more than one occasion: she’d start the game up and look for her saved game slot, and it would be empty. This made her displeased, to say the least.

So I got a copy of a Dora the Explorer game that got very good reviews on Amazon, and she started playing it immediately. There are no save game slots on this cartridge, so there’s no flash memory to corrupt. Instead, you use a password, given to you completing each level, to ‘restore’ your position in the game the next time you play. She made it past many obstacles, and then reached a point of frustration: getting past one particular snake, in order to get a key to unlock a gate.

The game has several obstacles to overcome as you wander through the environment. Bats, snakes, and alligators are just a few of these obstacles, and each has its own avoidance technique: bats require you to duck down, snakes require you to jump over them, alligators require you to jump on their backs (a la the crocs in Pitfall).

This one particular snake, the source of her frustration, can not be jumped over. It is in a cave-like complex, near a waterfall, and the ceiling of the cave near the snake is too low. Attempts to jump Dora over it merely result in hitting her head against the ceiling, and falling down atop the snake, resulting in failure. Try as she might — standing closer, standing further, doing a running jump, doing a long jump, jumping from a crouched-down position — Samantha was unable to get past this snake. The key that the snake was guarding, would be forever beyond her grasp.

I even tried it out myself, in the hurried moments between arriving at daycare and convincing her to come out of the car, and I could not figure out how to jump over that silly snake. I used Google to see if anyone else was stuck. They were! I won’t link to them here, but I found a couple of places online where people were asking for help. No answers, though, just the question “how do I get past the snake?”

This morning we figured it out. Samantha tried once again to jump over the snake from a crawling position, and I noticed that the snake was asleep until she hit the jump key, whereupon it suddenly woke up and she got the “lose” music, and was bounced back. Maybe crawling past the snake would work? It did! We had Dora crawl past the sleeping snake, and we got the key. It was a great feeling, and Samantha was thrilled.

And the ONLY REASON I’m taking about it here on my blog is that I want any other moms or dads or whoever to actually FIND THE ANSWER instead of only finding other people with the same question.

Especially if it’s done in a clever way.

I would like to take an opportunity to promote the webcomic called Jump Leads, set firmly in the sci-fi comedy genre but, given its premise, can take on almost any setting. It has elements of Sliders, of Doctor Who, of Red Dwarf, and others.

Given this, it’d be easy to assume that there is nothing new here, and you’d be right if you feel that once someone has done an adventures-in-space comedy, it’s done. Since that’s untrue, you of course would be wrong.

The title, “Jump Leads”, refers to the two main characters: Meany and Llewellyn, not to those things you use to start a car with a dead battery. They’re trainees at a space station charged with keeping order in parallel universes and making certain nothing goes wrong. Their title is “Lead”. And they get the “jump” bit from their ship, which jumps among parallel universes much the way checkers jump about a checkerboard. Only not as predictable. Maybe Quantum Leap should have been thrown into the mix earlier. On top of that, you can add plenty of explicit and implicit sci-fi references for some meta-humor.

Which brings me to Ben Paddon’s writing. I’m the first to admit that my sense of humor doesn’t align with most, but there are enough of us who prefer “dry, subtle, and clever” that Jump Leads can not only exist, but thrive. The good news is that they’ve got dry, subtle and clever in spades. For example, when Our Heros are thrown into a supplies cupboard security brig which just happens to have shelves full of paint, we get an interrogation scene.

The drama is good as well, and has successfully avoided the “melo” prefix. Paddon isn’t afraid to kill off characters and it really lends a sense of danger to this otherwise comedic story, and writes the action sequences well as well.

The art, done by “JjAR”, is very nice as well, with a unique style that’s angular yet organic. The backgrounds are well done too, having the right level of science fiction-y feel without being distracting. The characters themselves get plenty of variation, with wonderfully expressive eyes, and pass the silhouette test nicely. The second issue (the one they’re making now) introduces the first female character who, unfortunately, has succumbed to pinup-itis: baring a midriff and/or wearing figure-revealing clothing. Not that I mind, mind, being as I am all too male for my own good, but it’s a flaw in an otherwise excellent production.

This is a comic that quickly made its way to my rss reader and, as they’re only on issue 2, looks like it’ll be there for a while. If you’re interested, start here and don’t miss the extras (scroll to the bottom; hopefully the extras will get their own link page some day).

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

I do not want the FCC to be the parent to my children. I am the parent to my children and I resent government interference in that.

Unfortunately, there are many out there who would happily cede their parental responsibilities to the government. Unfortunately, they are loud. Unfortunately, they change the laws of the land. The particular law in question regards advertising in television programming. In kids’ television programming, specifically. Basically, the law says that shows cannot endorse products, implicitly or explicitly. Advertising is the only method by which products can be promoted. When a show crosses the line, then it’ll be fined. Why? Because most kids can’t tell the difference between advertising promoting products and authority figures teaching facts. I don’t dispute this. What I do object to is making it easier for people to toss the remote to their kids and say, here watch something because I need to work / nap / hang out with friends.

I’m not taking the other extreme, either: I’m not saying that kids shouldn’t get to see TV. My kids watch shows, and our TiVo’s “Now Playing” list is evidence of that. And if that isn’t sufficient, our DVD collection is. However, we vet every show they see, and they never watch them unsupervised. Doing housework counts as supervision, by the way, because you can still keep an eye on what they’re seeing, even if you don’t sit there with them every second.

Is TV really the only recourse available to people? Is there nothing else available to keep the children occupied? Dickens had Scrooge famously say “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”, but I think we can unironically ask “Are there no toys? Are there no books?” Is there really and truly nothing else but TV for children?

I’m left wondering what people did before TV came along. My grandfather likes to tell stories about what he did as a kid, and that was well before TV was even heard of, let alone commonplace (he was in his mid-twenties when the first commercial TV licenses were issued). Somehow, his parents managed.

The internet does not suffer from this sort of regulation. We’re fortunate in that our anti-censorship voices are currently louder than those advocating severe restrictions. How long will that last? Will the FCC eventually be given the authority to control what is said and shown? After all, parents could hand the computer over to their kids and say “have fun”. Adding interactivity just makes it more likely that kids will see or read something their parents would prefer they didn’t. Sites regulate themselves, depending on the audience they’re going after. Youtube, for example, disallows pornography (which of course provides an opportunity for pornographers to create their own site). Do we want the FCC to tell youtube what is acceptible? Or do we want the parents and other consumers of Youtube to define that?

Ought the FCC even be allowed to dictate content? The FCC is essentially being used as an anti-first-amendment tool right now: they are a government entity and they are telling non-government people what is allowed and disallowed.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech. And yet, if enough people want it, congress goes right ahead and makes those laws. I say strike them down. I want the FCC to be handling the licensing of the spectrum, and not defining the limits of what the spectrum is used to transmit. This autumn, we get to find out if the Supreme Court agrees with me, or with parents who are interested enough in their children to stop them from hearing “swear words”, but disinterested enough to not pre-screen the television those children watch.

The easier it is for people to allow the television to substitute for parenting, the more people will do it. I say: make it harder. Maybe the need to find alternatives will increase our ability to provide them.

Almost a year old now, but I just saw it today: photo opportunity … no?

So, the last of the big three has passed on, bringing an era of my life, and the lives of many others, to a close.

In the newen days of 2008, I translate “RIF” as Reduction In Force — a euphemism for firing people en masse. Back in the ’70’s, though, I understood RIF to mean “Reading is Fundamental“. I used to see RIF ads on TV all the time. Reading is a very important skill to both Julie and me, and we were very pleased when Alec was reading way above his grade level even before he started kindergarten.

Samantha hasn’t been so quick to pick it up. She’s a smart little girl, but she doesn’t like to work, and reading is a lot of work if you’re just starting to learn how. I try to stress to her how important it is, and I work with her almost every evening on at least some reading. She fights and she fidgets and she squirms and she uses all the possible delay tactics she can think of, but eventually she (with reluctance) and I (with patience) get through it.

A few weeks ago I was once again stressing the importance of reading. “I know it’s a lot of work, and I know it’s hard now, but it will become easier the more you do it.” And then, for some reason, RIF popped into my head, so I said, “Besides, reading is fundamental.”

She shook her head and made her curls bounce. “Well, it’s not fun ta me!”

Available at the Watchmen production blog