krinndnz

After surprisingly little effort, I think I've got the fundamentals of web design down cold!

1. Light backgrounds, dark text.
2. Internet Explorer is the devil.
3. Your clients will ask you to make pages that make them look bad. Don't remind them of this until after you have their money.

Most of the way through the first week of serious bike riding after a shameful delay in starting. I like it, mostly. There are two utilitarian trips that I end up making pretty often - the 8-mile round trip from home to work and the 30-mile round trip from home to my parents' place. Both remind me that I'm hideously out of shape, but that's okay. I'm riding every day, which is a big improvement. I still haven't figured out what I'm going to do about groceries, which is a bit of a hole in the matter.

I only started driving when I was 20, five years ago. Right around when I had the option of starting to seriously drive, my bike at the time, a huge heavy steel-framed thing, broke. So I switched to the driver's seat, and I liked it well enough. There were some troubles. I had a hard time learning to drive a manual transmission because of the first car that I tried it in. The shifter's knob was broken, so if you pressed down too hard while shifting, the knob would slide down and the top of the shifter-stick would stab you. I got a little jittery about shifting in that car. My family went through a few cars during that time, all various shades of user-surly. Even though I never drove it, one of the ones I remember most fondly is the big, brawny, loud 1970s GM truck '71 Chevy Cheyenne that kickachupacabra called The Pirate Truck. Thing had dirty, scrappy, gleeful charisma to it. I tended to drive stodgier cars: the Volvo, the Aerostar, the Crown Vic.

This, by the way, should highlight a thing about me. I may look like a Child of the Future, but I get really cranky and suspicious about a lot of the modern world. Part of this is the weirdfolk-friendly homeschool upbringing, I think - I only really started to experience the modern world around age sixteen and on. I still feel weird and disconnected from a lot of it - and paranoid about its influence on me. Hence putting off driving. I need my cell phone as much as any of us scuttling city-dwellers need our bandwidth, but I've never actually owned one. I resent advertisement and I'll talk your ear off about it - and part of that is that I get paranoid about not having whatever antibodies other people have built up that keep advertisements in general and just about the whole medium of TV from invading your attention span. I love my computer to pieces, but I'm wincingly conscious that I've made some really, really bad time-management decisions in the past with its help. This reflects pretty clearly on my politics: I like the shiny, glittering, cavorting toys that modern market capitalism produces for us, but I really don't trust them.

I'm going to cut off that line of thought for now.

Back on a bike, perceptual changes grab me again. It takes a hell of a lot longer to get where I'm going (except, amusingly, for my actual work commute), obviously, but there are other things I notice when I don't have a whole car wrapped around me. The texture: things I thought were flat are actually rolling, things that were noticeably rolling become hilly. There's a lot more birdsong, a lot more scent in the air, and a lot more side trails that I itch to explore. There are a lot of inconveniences, and I'm still stinging from the lack of convenience - but I don't want to stop biking. It's giving my brain a much-needed shove.

I feel pretty dang good about myself. Lots of biking today, which helps make up for Saturday going almost entirely down the drain. It was a fairly warm day, but I kept myself hydrated and didn't die too badly. I also took a route that I hadn't before, just to see where it led. It turned out to be a pretty decent shortcut - doesn't actually reduce the time I spend riding, but makes it a lot more pleasant. This makes, I think, four weeks in a row where I've ridden to my parents' house and back on the weekend, which is a 30-mile round trip. Not bad. On the downside, that's almost all the biking I've been doing: scandalously lazy, I ended up not biking to work at all during the week. Going to fix that this week.

There was also encouraging signage. For a chuckle, when I rode past a horse ranch, there was a red-with-white-border octagon that said "WHOA" - cute stop-sign variant. There was also a yellow hazard sign that originally said "SUBJECT TO FLOODING" but its (most recent) graffiti rendered it into "SUBJECT TO CAUSALITY." I am thinking very positive thoughts towards that existential tagger.

The other productive-ish thing I've been doing over the weekend is eBay. I'm auctioning off a bunch of Magic cards that belong to a friend of mine and splitting the money with him. He has some shitty cards, and some decent cards, and so I'm looking forward to a bit of pocket change from this. This has also meant reading and sorting (and sorting, and sorting, and sorting) Magic cards. I'm reminded that writing for Magic (the card game) is an interesting task: do your world-building in one- to three-sentence chunks without knowing in what order your audience will read them. They do pretty well at it. For instance, reading through the Urza-block cards I have here, I'm reminded that Radiant the archangel is a total fascist. I'm also reminded that Energy Field plus Wheel Of Sun And Moon is very amusing.

As well, I'm still eating from a stir-fry that spiceworms and I made on Thursday. This is one of the dynamics of our friendship: if we hang out for any significant length of time, food gets involved. When possible, we cook: experimenting with stir-fry is easy, fairly cheap, and oh-so-gratifying. We might also go out for Thai curry, for sizzling rice soup, for sushi - for several things, mostly Asian, but it wanders. It's a nice supplement to our socializing: food kind of grounds us. I really should learn to cook a few more things, but there's time for that.

Also, not dead. Very important.

Local elections are coming up along with the nationals, and on the same Head Start program as them, apparently. I'm seeing signs and mailers. This is going to be a long season, and it's already sour. Candidate Z managed to quickly squander the awesome value of having a name that starts with Z by sending out a mailer that demonized SEIU, then did an encore: a big ol' "Vote Candidate Z!" sign is planted on the lawn of the local Scientology mission. I have no idea who else is running, but at this point I'm perfectly willing to vote against Candidate Z.

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Holy wow, Salty Dog Method got a boost between editions. In Exalted's first edition, it was "you avoid seasickness." In second edition, it's "+3 to everything as long as you're on a ship or in some kind of nautical situation." This is a big boost.

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Share my happiness: I just had some financial trouble clear up in an interesting way. At the end of bossgoji's very nice visit about a month ago, my car (a huge white Crown Victoria Police Interceptor known alternately as "Moby" and "the patriarchymobile") went belly-up. I was actually remotely prepared for that. My mechanics had told me back in January that it needed lots of repairs and that I was running a risk of being carless by continuing to drive it. When it costs $1600 to repair a car that cost $900 to buy, you do what I did: walk away. The car wouldn't start, and some basic troubleshooting came up blank. So I stripped everything of mine out of the car, took the license plates, and called relatives for a ride home.

My initial plan was to just get another $1000 beater car and drive that until it, in its turn, died. That didn't work out: couldn't find one. I also tried financing a cheap-end newer car by going through Enterprise. That didn't work out either, for two reasons. One is that as a person with very little credit history, interest rates that I can take seriously are not available to me. The financing I was offered was at around a 19% APR, which is nearly usurious. I know why they offered that, and the reasons are sound. I don't have to take their offer, though - which is good, because I was handling the car situation foolishly, overall (Krinn driving rental consistently = Krinn working for below minimum wage).

Boss Morgan, for reasons completely unrelated to my problems, shifted around our company's work environment. For a good while, I'm going to be working pretty much entirely in the office. I won't have to drive out to clients' homes and places of business, nor pick up parts for him, nor any other car-centric errand. Since those parts of my job were 95% of the reason I needed to buy a car, this is good news. I took the time to clarify it with him, and I'm on: it's Bike To Work Day every day for me from here on out. I may slip up once in a while, but I'm really elated at this. It solves a bunch of my personal financial trouble instantly, and it relieves me of a lot of angst about buying into the car-using infrastructure at what I think is a really bad time.

I expect to see gasoline at $5/gal before the next occupant of the Oval Office settles into the warm spot left by George Bush's can't-leave-soon-enough ass. I hope to be bicycling past the station when I do see that number.

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I got to indulge in the guilty pleasure recently of, rhetorically, unloading on someone with both barrels. Gratifyingly, kenshi responded in a way that makes him both someone that I, ideologically, completely despise, but also someone that I wouldn't mind arguing with again. I think that this particular argument is already at an impasse, which is too bad. I think I remember a bit of back and forth with this fellow before over some issue at theferrett's blag, in which I was called an irredeemable idiot immediately after mentioning that I take Noam Chomsky seriously, but my memory might be faulty here.

A while ago I took spiceworms down south to visit Chèz Inaki. There was a pleasant social situation, but while I was there, I saw that that household had a server room. I was sad. I thought to myself: "Why doesn't my house have a server room?" This weekend, I was able to put some work in and do something to correct the situation:

( Gentlemen, behold! )
Also, BayCon was a pretty good time, and it was very nice to get to see paka, baxil, kadyg, and Special Guest From Out Of Town rantmaster. Hope to see all of you again soon.

Changing directions again, because I need just a little more room before I talk about serious things again:

Holy wow, Faerie Macabre is a beating against Ichorid. There's a very good chance, I think, that it'll replace Leyline of the Void as graveyard meta in a number of decks, and an outside chance of replacing a couple of copies of Tormod's Crypt. It takes out critical pieces of Ichorid's threat structure (Ichorid, Bridge from Below) for zero mana - a very important cost in Vintage - and does so without advertising itself, at instant speed. If you're using Crypt or Leyline, usually they have to be on the board, which allows the Ichorid deck to play around them. The Faerie, on the other hand, can sit in your hand until the exact moment you need it, which gives you more flexibility and power. As well, Ichorid's answers to Crypt and Leyline are useless against Faerie - it just has Cabal Therapy, which people already know how to play around. As well, it's less likely to be a dead card: it can still get in for two, which neither Crypt nor Leyline can do. Two isn't much, but Vintage is all about taking every advantage you can get. I'm looking forward to seeing how people fit this into their Vintage builds.


Regarding Standard, though, I have no goddamn clue at all. Considering the track record of things, I'd bet on aggro to win PT Hollywood basically because in fresh formats, either aggro wins because no one's figured out the most efficient control strategies or someone breaks the format and wins with that.

I didn't see the movie version of The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe for a variety of reasons, the main one being the inertia that comes from not actually watching movies. The cinematic version of Prince Caspian, though, I believe I will see. I want to see if they get the werewolf right. The werewolf is my favorite character in the Narnia cycle (or at least, most awesome per page):

A dull, grey voice at which Peter's flesh crept replied, "I'm hunger. I'm thirst. Where I bite, I hold till I die, and even after death they must cut out my mouthful from my enemy's body and bury it with me. I can fast a hundred years and not die. I can lie a hundred nights on the ice and not freeze. I can drink a river of blood and not burst. Show me your enemies."

That boast is one of my personal high-water marks of badassitude. I want to see it done well.

Oh wow: my respect for White Wolf just went up. A big chunk of the Yu-Shan book is an allegory for the current state of the US economy, especially regarding the transition from manufacturing and lifetime employment to service and screw-the-employees. Paraphrased, it goes like this: "we used to run the world and everything was fine. People's jobs were lifelong and their loyalty was rewarded. Then there was a catastrophe, which we could have recovered from except that the people at the top of the heap turned out to be really uninterested in the welfare of everyone below them, so now we have uncertainty and a permanent underclass and rife corruption because the people at the top have made it clear that they don't care if you screw your peers so long as you don't upset the parts of the status quo that they're happy with."

I really hope that it's intentional. I might be over-analyzing.

Somehow I've ended up spending my morning slithering into the swamp of Internet capitalism. This is disturbing and unusual and grotesque: it's porn, it's SEOs, it's endless loops of referral schemes and affiliates and ways to game the system. It's terrifying.

There are layers to the terror. For one thing, raw, greed-driven, amoral capitalism terrifies me in general. The things I'm reading are way out on the cynicism axis of commerce - they are utterly unconcerned with providing useful things or social good or not doing social harm. It's pretty much the logical way that our contemporary mainstream practices of advertising and marketing go when you take off even more of the safeties: the simple objective here is to extract value from the consumer. It's like reading the god-damn Rules Of Acquisition. It strongly calls to mind Matt Taibbi's "The Great Iraq Swindle" and its nightmare vision of a "paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureaucracy." These online marketers don't go that far, but they're close. I think that they're working from almost exactly the same mindset as the war profiteers. Remember, capitalists generally don't want to be capitalists. They'd rather be rent collectors or monopolists or something like that: actually competing in a free market is hard.

The experience is reminding me of a couple of lessons that I've been trying to absorb. One is the Bounded Rationality thing, which circuit_four whimsically calls "reality tunnels." This Internet Capitalism - it's very, very unlike my tunnel, which is why I can see very clearly that it's a tunnel. Another comes from bradhicks - in his review of Against His-Tory, Against Leviathan, he mentions a spell:

The book itself starts, although it doesn't warn you of this, with a spell. As with the famous (fictional) The King in Yellow, if you read that first chapter all the way through then the spell is automatically cast on you, and you lose a certain amount of sanity to start with. Its beginning is as incoherent as the famous opening chapter of Shea and Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy, and for a similar artistic reason. The author doesn't just want to teach you history. He doesn't just want to teach you an alternate reading of history. He wants to challenge the assumptions that underlie everything you think about history, the deepest habits of thought that you use to construct a meaningful interpretation of chronology. He could try doing that with a reasoned, philosophical argument. In fact, in his much earlier and most famous 1969 essay, "The Reproduction of Daily Life," he tried just that. But when it comes to over-writing deep linguistic and logical structures, philosophy is a poor tool, like trying to use a screwdriver to pound a nail. So he opens his 1982 book with (although he doesn't label it that) page after page of poetry and spellcraft. That gives the book a certain "surface tension" that, I don't doubt, has kept many people from finishing it, and thereby preserved their sanity. But to the susceptible, once you break that surface tension you find that it's just as hard to penetrate from the underside going up and out as it was from the top down and in. Once you've absorbed his pattern of thought, and learned the unique constructed vocabulary of Against His-Story, Against Leviathan, the harder it is to un-think it.

I'm using the "magic is a psychological discipline" school of thought, here - and with that lens, the marketers become magicians. This, too, is scary. They tell you in so many words the psychological buttons to get the monkeys to buy: shiny, unusual, fear, greed, hope. Then you notice that the things they're selling to one another, the marketing tools and site creators and banners and AdWords: they use the same buttons. I'm reading a couple of eBooks right now that would have cost a fair bit if I hadn't torrented them - and those books are, like Perlman's introduction, spells. They tell you how to be a marketer - and they get you thinking like a marketer - and again, once you've absorbed [this] pattern of thought, and learned the unique constructed vocabulary ... the harder it is to un-think it.

If you ever wonder why I have this abiding hatred for advertising and marketing in their current forms, this should help explain why. They creep me the fuck out because they are striking straight at the brain. and I have an ongoing conversation about things that are impossible to un-see, un-hear, and un-think. It's a fascinating psychological question to us: what makes things stick to your brain? The Internet capitalists are a part of this discussion now, endlessly chasing greater fools, scheming and scamming. Something is sticking to people's brains: what, and why, and can it be changed?

Do we want to change it?

That's the last bit of the freakout, here: their success. I happen to think that the whole lot of them aren't fit to carry guts to a bear. However, they're (claiming to) make lots of money on this and they have evidence. Maybe it's a tournament structure, like drug dealing or the stock market, with a fabulously rewarded elite at the top and a bunch of struggling mopes who subsidize them at the bottom of the pyramind. We're in a culture where wealth is virtue in the dominant narrative. Hence, the marketers have cultural force on their side: they're making bank, and the Benjamins forgive all sins. So either society is wrong or I am. That particular species of discomfort should be familiar to most of you - and I bet you can think of enough times that society's been wrong that the question is a genuine toss-up.

Who wants to join the Internet Capitalists? It won't cost much - only your voice.

Tags: patriarchy-blaming, personal

Current Music: The Anxious - Industria

You know what'd be really nice? A Truth & Reconciliation Commission at some point. American history is so thoroughly stained with ugly stuff, even if you restrict yourself just to living memory, that I think it would be a huge boost to an administration that had the chutzpah to say "Okay, let's get everything on the table. We can't fix it all immediately - but we can stop lying about it starting right fucking now."

Of course, presuming that an Administration would be honest eliminates the current Republicans, and presuming that an administration would have chutzpah eliminates the current Democrats. Whatever nods that last sentence produced are a testament to how badly our collective faith in the ability of any government to accomplish something worthwhile has been shaken - which, in turn, is part of why it would be great to have a TRC.

Necessary to a proper TRC, of course, would be indictments and criminal trials for a variety of people so notorious that I'll save myself some space and just call 'em The Usual Suspects. A real TRC would end with the lot of them behind bars, a real good TRC would follow international law and send 'em to The Hague or wherever the ICC convenes these days.

If such a thing is attempted, too, it can't be in the least half-hearted. A half-assed TRC would be a terrifying failure, because just like other disciplinary measures - like impeachment and such - it would be decried as a tool of mindless partisanship by the current Republicans, then immediately appropriated as such. It must hit them hard enough to splatter their brains all over the wall. There are certainly people with a (D) after their name or who claim such affiliation that must be investigated, have their crimes laid bare, and be appropriately sentenced. They are far, far outnumbered.

Of course, after all that, the real work of not shooting the entire project of human civilization must begin - it's just that it's tough to do that when you've got a toxic ideological group in your midst who are, when viewed with an eye to the million-year scale on which humans eventually have to survive, obsessed with suicide.

Again and again, they seem to be going back to the Trunchbull strategy - making things so outrageous that it's hard to believe them. They're well on track, for instance, to break the Reagan administration's record number of indicted officials. The last 30 years of Republican rule (Brad Hicks and Sara Robinson are great resources for the effects of this) have, among other crimes, pretty thoroughly demolished the idea that a government can get shit done. It's time to end that notion - and the best way to end it would be by introducing the people who caused it to appropriate punishment for their decades-long crime spree.

So I have an idea that I hope you'll let me inflict on you: which of these snippets of free-write-mode is the product of the last week, which is the product of the last month, and which is the product of late 2005?


( In Which Chris Rock Is Imitated )

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( In Which Coffee Is Not Forthcoming )

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( In Which A Cheetah Imitates Proust )

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Small note: the "free write" tag means turning off my internal Quality Assurance process, which, like that of most creative people, tends towards the hyper-critical.

I was driving along and I saw a little boutique called "Bee Kind." Cute, I thought. Bee-themed store.

I got a little closer.( POIDH obeyed here )

Regarding the changes to LJ's account structure, which is causing considerable furor in some quarters, I'd like to point out that as well as the principled solutions, there are lazy solutions: using a real browser with ad blocking. With that setup, the ads vanish from LJ whether you're logged in or not, making the distinction between Basic, Plus, and Paid purely features-based. It also makes the rest of the web much, much easier to deal with. Highly recommended.

I have a literary writery question for the public at large: what is the onomatopoeia sound for the sound of rubber against rubber? For instance, wearing dishwashing gloves and rubbing your hands together, or taking two bricks of thick, slightly sticky rubber and dragging them against one another.

Happily, my weekend had back-to-back moments of Ded From Cute. On Saturday, I went to the San Francisco Zoo with paka. I hadn't been there in at least a decade and I was really hankering for it, especially since I'd been frustrated in January - I decided to stroll down to SF for a zoo visit in early January, when the zoo was still closed. Spent a moment looking at the empty enclosure, no memorial, and being cranky. Seeing as how at any given moment there are fewer Siberian tigers in the world than there are drunk assholes in San Francisco, let alone humans in general, you'll forgive me for taking a dim view of Mr. Sousa, Mr. Dhaliwal, and Mr. Dhaliwal's behavior and maybe rooting a bit for the 250-pound predator. Tragedy both coming and going. I dwelt on that for a solid two minutes or so, then went to see the otters. There were river otters, they were adorable. We moseyed around and chatted, and I hope that that helped a bit: Paka's been in trying situations lately.

On Sunday, I went to a wild-cat exhibition thing. If you went to FC2008 and saw the cat show there, it's the same folks. They brought lynx (floofier than bobcat), king cheetah, cougar, serval, and leopard, gave their speech and demo. Polished. I was happily able to ignore noisy kidlets and be overcome with "eeeeeeee awesome!" Their king cheetah is very, very impressive. One of the trainers spoke about how they exercise the cheetahs.

• Step one: get into a field where you've got about 700 meters of free space.
  
• Step two: cheetah's natural prey - a bright red tennis ball. This ball is on a long wire. On the other end of the wire is a pitching-machine-like motor and winch. You need to keep the ball ahead of the cheetah.
  
• Keep in mind that two seconds after starting to run, cheetah will be going 45mph.
• Four seconds into the run, cheetah will be going 70mph.
  
• This is why you need a big-ass field.
  
• Now, your partner's at one end of the field with the ball hidden under a little lean-to and a cheetah on a leash. You're at the other end of the field with the motor and the trigger for it.
  
• They let the cheetah off-leash, you press the trigger. Cheetah will take off after ball.
• Keep the ball ahead of it.
• Congratulations, you are exercising your cheetah!
  
• ... and now you have a cheetah coming straight at you at 70mph, thinking it's chasing food. Cheetahs are like planes: getting them to start running/fly isn't that hard compared to getting them to stop running/land without killing anyone.
• This is why, on the wire between motor and ball, you have a traffic cone. Near the end of the ball's run, it'll pop into the traffic cone and disappear.
• Cheetah will be a bit confused and skid to a halt: where did that ball go? Put a panful of warm meat in front of cheetah at this point.
• Cheetah goes "oh, okay, I killed it. Nom nom nom nom."


• This is where you put a leash on the cheetah again.

I had a good weekend.

Both trips bore Reality Check value, too: I've gotten way too used to representations and shortcut versions of pretty much everything outside my tiny sphere, and so it was good to be able to sit there and go "Okay, that's a giraffe. Real giraffe. Splotches. Long neck. Hooves. Got it. Observe carefully." It's more of the Postmodern Condition stuff - I think I'm at risk of becoming a zoanthrope, all brains and malicious spiky bits and very little else. Going to the zoo is an excellent way to avoid this.

I really never have appropriate things to say on these occasions - not when someone I dislike dies, not when someone who I thought was cool dies, not when a friend's dear family dies. About all I have to say is that death sucks, and we ought to get our collective shit together such that people are not obliged to shuffle off the local coil until they're good and ready. If I wanted to have anything remotely coherent to say when death touches even nearer, I'd have to start writing now.

Sunday was a huge improvement over Saturday.  Saturday was filled with brain-toxins which bossgoji slogged through and dragged me out of: for which, huge thanks.

On Sunday, I got together with the Emergency Russian, whom I haven't seen in quite a while, and cooked for my whole household.  Made a big mess of stir-fry.  I make stir-fry often because it suits my style of cooking - lazy and improvisational.  The Rock roommate eats vegan (the Scissors roommate doesn't, but is sympathetic), so that's what kind of stir-fry it was.  Bell peppers, onions, celery, ginger, garlic, tofu, water chestnuts, all over rice.  It came out pretty dang tasty!  Next time I'll use a bit less bell pepper: their taste was fairly loud.  In this dish, it was a bit like artificial banana in that it kind of shoves everything else out of the way and loudly reminds your tongue that it's there.  The ginger and garlic, on the other hand, faded into the background nicely except when you bit into a chunk directly, but even then, the harshness was gone.  The onions were just about perfect - crunchy and sweet and just a hint of bitter.  The tofu didn't do as well - I wanted it to sizzle in the oil and get a crunchy shell, but we used too much oil in that batch and so it cooked, but didn't really work out that way.  Still, it was good.  So I fed four people and still had leftovers, which are my lunch today.  This I am happy about.

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Latest silly idea: I wish to install a camera in my mechanic's office for a while and grab from that camera all the footage I can of people describing the noise that their car is making.  Lots and lots of improvised onomonopoetia.  There will be a video that's just several minutes of people making car noises and gestures.  I think that that could be hilarious in the right mindset.  A step further: there will later be an edited video, using those sounds to play a song (either a cover or an original song). 

I am finally learning some Perl! This is really really gratifying for several reasons. One is that I've finally gotten my brain around some of it after nearly ten years of wanting to. I have been wanting to do this for a very long time, and it's nice to have actually made a serious step. It's also good because it's been annoyingly long since I'd gotten the "I learned something new and awesome!" buzz. Lastly, it's good because I learned the chunk I needed to quickly and did something useful with it. That's reassuring, that I can stuff things into my brain quickly when I put the effort in.

I also learned two important lessons that I will reproduce here:

• No matter how clever a line I write, it won't do anything if I leave it commented out.
• If I make the program open a file and change some text, it won't do anything if I don't tell it to then save the file.

Blatant rookie mistakes, but that's what happens when you're right at the beginning of the learning curve.

Learning new things, yaaaaay!

Now I just need to convince my boss that Perl is useful, since I've spent a big chunk of the last two working days learning this (in order to avoid hand-editing 70 HTML files, making the exact same changes to each, a perfect example of what to have a computer do for you). My work is mostly helpdesk/tech support stuff.

Aside from semiotic concerns and QA, a big part of what bothers me a lot about TV/video/cinema is the way that control of the media experience shifts. Video works tend to eat up my whole attention span at once while I'm dealing with them. Frankly, I resent that.

Maybe it's cold, but I've been more and more mindful of information-extraction efficiency in my media diet over time. My experience of the media environment is that I can get much, much more out of ten solid minutes of reading than of watching. I like that higher density a lot - especially since when I say "information" here, I'm talking about the whole experience, including emotional resonance and inspiration. theferrett had an interesting thought about this density issue a while back.

That low information density really exacerbates my problem with video works - that almost invite my participation. That really sours an experience for me. For instance, phone conversations are annoying to me because they, like TV, tend to eat up my whole attention span while I'm dealing with them, but they're interactive and with practice and a bluetooth headset I could overcome some of that. Audio isn't interactive, but it's fairly generous with my attention span and lets me compromise with comprehension. Video works combine the attributes that annoy me. A remote-control is a fairly crude tool for controlling your media experience, really, and it's not always available. When I am reading, especially when I'm reading hyperlinked text, I am creating and participating in the media experience: there is a guide in the direction of the text, but I can turn to other things very easily, or switch modes to writing.

Worse still is when video resorts to the two things that make me want to put a ballpeen hammer through the screen: commercials and laugh tracks. Both of these vile, vile devices emphasize the viewer's lack of agency in the experience. Commercials take the video toolkit (a toolkit I should note that I really like) and use it to smear shit on your brain. Laugh tracks content themselves with reminding you that you're a moron who can't be trusted to tell what's funny and what's not.

All of this is, of course, my subjective experience of these media and I don't expect it to be the same as anyone else's. I do expect it to be a sufficient explanation, though, for my habits. If you send me a YouTube link, I won't click it. If you hand me a DVD or video and tell me to watch it, it'll take me years to get around to it. If you tell me about this awesome movie or series, it will sound interesting to me - I am totally happy to listen to people talk about the things they like - but I won't actually watch it. Pretty much the only way to get me to watch video stuff in any sustained way is to sit down, watch it with me, and be the interactivity layer (which is why I was quite happy to watch most of a season of The Wire with bossgoji in one shot). Once I have something like that, then it's quite easy to suspend disbelief and engage with the video work, but without a layer I can engage with, it's just a greedy media experience that wants my time and my attention and can't guarantee anything or be effectively previewed. I don't need that: it's not worth my time.

J'accuse circuit_four of reading the post about memes and taking it as a dare: from that fecund brain has marched a great example of the thought-experiment meme. Paraphrased, it goes like this: you have a six-cylinder revolver that shoots comprehension of a work of culture - one per chamber. Each chamber can hold one full-length media item: 1,500 pages of text, 90 minutes of music, 3 hours of film, one entire video game, a full speech, several dozen images from a single artist, a single season or plot arc of a TV series, one full live performance, detailed architectural plans and photographs for one building, even a full meal -- any discrete cultural work. When you fire it, the entire artistic contents of the chamber you choose will be instantly uploaded into the target's memory and cognition. It will be as if they have not only experienced the work, they understand it at the same level you do, with all prerequisite knowledge also uploaded. You get the gun for a year, during which you can fire it as many times as you like. Which six works do you choose and who do you go after with your thought-weapon?

I love this one to pieces because it's not only a very good example of a good thought-experiment meme, it also exhibits high reproductive fitness, something I meant to talk about earlier, and it comments on the postmodern condition, a meta-layer that's absolutely delicious to me.

It's got high reproductive fitness because it's quick to explain, it asks people about a subject they're expert on (themselves), and it invites them to put forward their opinion as valuable. Further, it's easy to do it - in conversation or in text, it's an engaging task, and it has the lagniappe layer of begging people to finesse it into talking about other things they want to talk about. In short, it's easy to ingest, easy to pass on, and makes you want to pass it on - three absolutely critical components of a meme's reproductive fitness.

It also assumes that people's minds can be changed and that perspective and mental environment are pretty critical. Notice the assumptions that the meme makes - that if, just for instance, Dick Cheney possessed your keen and profound understanding of The Bombing Of Guernica, that he would become a different person. Look at that! So postmodern in the way it assumes people's fluidity - but at the same time remixing the earlier tradition of the Canon, of the Great Works theory, the idea that if people only understood a central set of Classics, that they could be made into model citizens. It invites you to create your own canon, to fantasize "yes! If only they understood the way I do, the world would be a better place!" Now, I don't know you: this may be true. I certainly hope it's true of me. But whether it's true or not, it's a subtle and virtuosic appeal to ego.

Hence, a very generous hand of applause to circuit_four for answering the unspoken challenge with radiant good form.