Four Approaches to Discontent

So, let's say we've proven that now are the zombies of our discontent. What's an angry young radical to do? How does one cope with total dissatisfaction with the structure of society? There are four approaches:

Revolution: Vive la aformentioned, comrade! Revolution is a hoot. Everybody get worked up, or at least a significant force of guerillas, and things get overthrown... but then it's up to you to implement the whole thing at once, and this is very complicated, especially if you are merely a right-handed pitcher with an enthusiasm for cigars and rambling speeches. Also, even if you intend to primarily work through violence, you are going to need a sympathetic public. This requires some fairly specific conditions, and a revolutionary without popular support is just a terrorist. Of course, you can go the non-violent route. There are both practical and ethical reasons to do this. Plus, you need to do something to get people angry while you are waiting around for the proper historical dialectic. Of course, some folks would rather avoid all that mess, which leads them to...

Gradualism: Hey look, a system for enacting change! Assuming you live in a more-or-less constitutional republic, you may be fortunate enough to live in a society that can adapt to the will of the people before they pull out the torches and pitchforks. The election of Barack Obama has of course significantly bouyed this sentiment in the USA. After all, gradualism does require that "change for the better" be a plausible concept. "Listening to reason" is also a popular catchphrase. Gradualism requires a lot of compromise -- it helps if you do not shoot anyone -- and continued pressure from the public. For this reason, you need a public that is not overwhelmingly distracted by shiny objects... Gradualists tend to support education as well. Of course, when your plan for success involves raising the next generation to be more likely to support change, you are admitting that things do not look so hot in the near-term. That's gradualism.

Seperatism: Of course, you could just say fuck that and start your own society, with blackjack and hookers -- or bigamy. And that's why we have Nevada and Utah. Separatism covers everything from survivalist militias to hippie communes. But unlike the previous approaches, which require popular support, anybody and his five smelly friends can be separatist. Pure seperatism is difficult, as it requires total self-sufficiency, but as long as you're content to interact with a corrupt capitalist/carnivorous/Godless/one-corner-world system only sporadically, you have a lot of options. Perhaps you can even serve as an example to others, although then your ideas will need to scale to a real society. I mean, we can't all be bigamists, can we? The answer, surprisingly, is yes, but it involves some rather complicated social graphs. We can expect a real resurgence in separatism if we ever figure out how to cheaply colonize space (or even the oceans). It's the same "free land -> anarchy" equation I laid out for the Internet -- and frankly, life on a hydroponic Rastafarian space station doesn't sound all that bad. Still, be sure you can afford to import soap.

Apathy: On the other hand, you may not give a shit. Sometimes change doesn't seem that plausible, and you can't get yourself worked up enough to leave your family and friends for Mars or South Dakota (Mars is the red one). Well, apathy is for you, my friend, no matter how upset it's going to make George Orwell. He will not be coming to your birthday party. Or maybe there's no hope for change and you have no means of separation -- but this is pretty rare, and you should maybe go check on your broke, oppressed neighbors and see if they don't really want to go for option #1. Unless of course you're in a police state and can't trust them not to turn you in. In this case, it is probably best to feign apathy and keep one eye on the nearest source of asylum at all times. Apathy is only really viable when things are really, tremendously shite, or when they aren't that bad at all. But it is an option, so I've included it.

Unexpected Chart Comic

Yeah, it needs a little editing.

Democracy is Not the Issue Here, Part 2

Continuing our nascent foray into social theory blogging... with another ridiculous wall of text:

I concluded my first post by claiming that "money buys noise". But first, let's take a closer look at Digg and other aggregators, and then onto "long-tail" theory and its supposed rebuttals.

Digg, unlike many sites, is straightforwardly democratic: users vote various pages up or down. For popular items there is a feedback loop: items with more positive votes are displayed more prominently, and thus have a greater opportunity to receive votes. It's negative voting that presents the most problems, however, as it allows controversial items to be denied significant consideration. As a result, we would expect the average successful item to have a broad base of appeal be quickly digestible (no Digg item that takes more than one sitting to process will have any success). I have no extensive experience with Digg, so I'll leave the final analysis to others. The governmental analog is a kind of collectivized democracy, a cross between classical Athens and Soviet Russia... with a nod to the immediacy and frivolity of the 24-hour news cycle.

As an adjunct to anarchy, Digg is not terribly troublesome; as long as there exist Diggers who are exploring the Internet in depth, uncommon items will have at least have an opportunity to rise. As a content aggregator, Digg is supposed to make interesting content easier to find; the complexity of the interlinked web is reduced to a single, linear space. The argument against this is that it reduces an infinite homesteader-style prairie into a crowded tenement (with a penthouse on top). It certainly does make things easier-to-find, though... Ah, there it is. If you like what comes to the top, Digg improves the signal-to-noise ratio of the Internet. But if the things on Digg are so common that you've already seen them, you aren't going to stick around (or do you? and do you vote them up or down?). If the aggressive explorers abandon the site, this should produce a vicious cycle of ever-more-limited content and ever-less-intrepid content locators.

Of course, it should not surprise anyone that popular things are more popular than unpopular things, but there has been a great deal of sturm and drang over just what the coefficients should be in this equation. Chris Anderson of Wired is credited with coining the term "long-tail" theory, to describe the phenomenon where, on the web, it is possible to profit from selling a large number of unpopular works. For example, let's look at this counterpoint from the Wall Street Journal, that constant friend to egalitarian theories:

"By Mr. Anderson's calculation, 25% of Amazon's sales are from its tail, as they involve books you can't find at a traditional retailer. But using another analysis of those numbers -- an analysis that Mr. Anderson argues isn't meaningful -- you can show that 2.7% of Amazon's titles produce a whopping 75% of its revenues. Not quite as impressive."

I hope what you're taking away from this is that the glass is clearly half-empty, and that Amazon sell a lot of books -- millions of titles in fact. Amazon sells over 25 million different titles, 2.7% of which is about 675,000. Quick, how many books fit in the average bookstore? This is not exactly the New York Times best-seller list. And it fails to consider the most important question: how did these books become part of the privileged 2.7%? How many of them were at one point part of the tail? And, and one more thing... Are they any good?

Back to that in a minute. I have someone to be angry at, the writer of this Slate article :

But according to Elberse, that sort of anecdote is the exception. The reason? We're not very adventurous. Elberse examined the rental habits of customers at Quickflix, a Netflix-like service in Australia. She found that no group of customers exhibited "a particular taste for the obscure." Sure, a small number of customers regularly rented films from deep in the catalog—but they tended to be people who watched a lot of movies generally and so had much more "capacity" for venturing into the Long Tail. And still they chose a lot of hits: The most widely traveling Quickflix customers picked only 8 percent of their rentals from the least popular of available titles and 34 percent from among blockbusters.

Science journalism is doomed. We aren't given anything to tie those percentages to. We're given a lot of arbitrary mosts and leasts. But let me pull a Wall Street Journal here: there is some portion of Australian mail-service film-renters, for whom two-thirds of the movies they watch are not "blockbusters." And of course, that's ignoring that such a service appeals to people who watch a lot of films (because it is monthly), and encourages them to watch films indiscriminately (because they can get as many as they want). But let's just look at that "particular taste for the obscure" line. Of course there won't be such a group... if I take the sum of all people who watched a film of (let's say) 92% obscurity, I am actually taking the average of several different obscure tastes. Where do I end up? the center! magic! Whereas if I take the group of all people who have watched rented no "blockbusters," clearly, I have such a group. Furthermore, movies are probably the most homogenized major media.

You want a long tail success story? Talk to someone whose business model didn't exist fifteen years ago. Talk to a guy selling T-shirts for a living, while providing content for free. Talk to some guys who can raise millions of dollars because they make funny pictures about video games. Yes, webcomics are our cultural standard-bearers. God bless 'em.

Wait, actually, let's look at films... why are there films that everyone has seen? Because people are only aware of movies that are showing in theaters, which are large, expensive buldings to establish and maintain. Theaters want to be assured that the movies they show will attract an audience. They want a professional movie. This requires cameras, technicians, stagehands, extras, and a whole infrastructure that simply is not required to write Finnegan's Wake. They want professional actors, preferably famous, so that you don't need to spend any effort convincing people you have good actors. They want a professional marketing campaign, so that no matter how lousy the movie is, people will see it before word-of-mouth sinks it. By the way, did I mention money buys noise?

The businesses of advertising is almost wholly based on this. Word of mouth is the gold-standard form of buzz, because by definition it comes from known, trusted sources. The hyperlink structure of the web is modeled on academic citation, which is just a more rigorous version of word of mouth. In recent years, as advertising audiences have become more sophisticated, cynical, or perhaps just overstimulated, advertisers have gone to greater and greater lengths to inspire trust (hint: you should not trust them). Of course, people know you shouldn't trust advertisers, which has inspired disguised advertisements or "guerrilla marketing," the goal of which is to inject advertisement into a normally trusted or at least independent source -- paid bloggers, press releases disguised as journalism. This tactic is also favored by spammers and computer viruses, e.g., sending the virus to everyone in your e-mail address book. The citizens of the Athenian democracy knew it as the "Trojan horse" tactic. Taken to its logical conclusion, "guerrilla marketing" eventually produces the total breakdown of society as we know it -- by gradually voiding every source of information beyond your immediate social circle. Hooray?

Okay, that's a little far-fetched, because we have things like the Better Business Bureau and people are still furious when you violate their trust. And maybe I'm being a little hasty in autamatically categorizing advertising as "noise" (shameless falsehood, if you prefer). Advertising can contain information: the name of the product, various facts about it. You may be interested in the product. But you probably aren't -- and you can't trust those facts without independent verification (information that is part-right wastes far more time than bald-faced lies). At least you shouldn't trust them, because businesses are sociopaths.

Not that I think the average businessperson is a sociopath -- possibly a greater percentage than the human average, due to selection bias -- but large, publicly-owned companies (the kind best positioned to put money into advertising) are large, complicated entities with highly abstracted chains of responsibility. Most include in their charter a clause which promises to "maximize shareholder value." This encourages company executives to put stock price above all other concerns, for fear they may be sued otherwise. If a corporation is to be considered legally a person, it must be conceded that rarely is anyone in position to act as a conscience. Now, corporations are not evil: they are very specifically sociopaths -- for my purposes, this means having no empathy but stil having ability to feign empathy if it provides advantage. In a system that does not actively prevent it, sociopathic businesses will be the most successful, as they have no moral restrictions to their actions.

Now, suppose you are a sociopath in a position of power, and that your products occupy a dominant position in the marketplace. Will you focus on providing accurate information to consumers? Rationally, you should attempt to build arbitrary brand loyalty and discourage the use or even awareness of your competitors. You do this by, respectively, exaggerating differences in your product (to prevent commodification) and disparaging all attributes of your competitor. Both of these are noisy. In fact, it is in your interest to generally increase the amount of noise in all channels. As the established player, you are in favor of the status quo, so any free flow of accurate information has potentially negative consequences on your market share. So, for example, by taking control of one channel of information and spreading doubt and uncertainty about other channels, you can easily make it far too difficult for people to bother.

As examples, which just occurred to me in force, I present to you A) the demonization of bloggers by the mainstream media, and B) the demonization of the mainstream media by Republican talk radio types.

Epiphanies aside, this should demonstrate that long-tail theory is not necessarily a fact of human existence -- it's a fact of a capitalist economy with significant information inefficiencies. At the very least, this should have a severe effect on the rate of change in the "hump" of the popularity curve, which in turn would flatten the long-term shape of the curve.

Democratic systems on the Internet are almost certainly more homogeneous than anarchical/networked systems, but we can't say by how much unless we have a way to remove external stabilizing/noise-creating forces from the system.

One more quick thought: for the general benefit, it is necessary to construct systems of laws that do not advantage sociopaths. To the extent that a system allows money to be accumulated by sociopaths, and moreso to the extent that the system allows money to be converted into power, that system is primed for failure (not collapse, necessarily, but failure to "promote the general welfare," as the Constitution puts it). This suggests, at minimum, that all political campaigns should be publicly financed and that there should be strict oversight of political advertisement. On the more general point of "noise-pollution" in information channels, the solution is more difficult, but should involve tighter truth-in-advertising laws, a rigorous and even-handed fourth estate, and most importantly a cultural movement towards intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and the absolute refusal to tolerate being lied to.

Democracy is Not the Issue Here

As my colleague Ethan has been kind enough to supply me with a starting point, I will attempt to refute him.

He correctly points out the problems of unabridged democracy, but he fails to consider the defining factors of the internet. Let's take two of the primary missions of government: protecting its citizens and maintaining an orderly distribution of resources.

Firstly, individuals on the Internet are incapable of harming each other in any serious fashion*. To the extent that the Internet mirrors the Athenian forum, each of us is maneuvering across it in a little bullet-proof Pope-mobile, which is also blessed with the power of teleportation. The potential for tyranny of the majority here is rather limited.


Governments also concern themselves with the distribution of various limited resources. And from the territorial perspective, the Internet is without bounds. Land is cheap and the construction of any edifice is limited purely by time and the skill of the architect. Anyone** can have a website, and even more so a blog, MySpace profile, Facebook account, Youtube videos. These are all proprietary services, of course, but they are all products of the cheap-space economy. So if communities can't control what you own, where you are, or what you do, what do you have to fear from government?

Well, alright, it is possible to restrict movement on the internet, as the government of China is happy to demonstrate -- you just need to control or have leverage on the entire infrastructure. This, of course, is the reason for net-neutrality advocacy -- to pressure actual governments into preserving the Internet as a level playing field with a low entry cost. ISPs, Governments, and backbone providers all have the ability to change the "laws" of the internet, but from the internal perspective these are more like physical laws.

But really, what I am trying to get across is that the Internet isn't a democracy, it's an anarchy -- at least for the individual consumer. From the view of a business, it is far more of a democracy. That's the beauty of advertising revenues -- everyone's eyeballs are assumed to be equally valuable (They aren't, especially if you want to get statistical, but it's close enough). A retailer or content provider may very well consider itself at risk of being voted out of existence if no one uses their site. But this is just capitalism layered on top of anarchy. A slightly different mechanism holds for sites dependent upon community acceptance or involvement, such as Wikipedia. Although in raw form, Wiki editing is fairly anarchical as well -- it's only when you zoom out to an extended time frame that the results look democratic.

So if your options are unlimited and no one can tell you what to do, where's the catch? In a word: noise. The currency of the Internet is information. You can go anywhere, but you need to know how to get there, and you need to derive some utility from what you find there. Utility here is anything from lower prices on bulk sorghum to intellectual debate to pictures of cats -- assuming you wanted pictures of cats. If you wanted pictures of cats and I give you hardcore pornography, your interests are not being served. Because of this, search engines are the biggest enablers of the Internet as we know it.

The search engine is an inherently meritocratic idea; your position is determined by your relevance to the question at hand. As a website owner, you don't need to do anything beyond create the site. Just be relevant, and Google or Yahoo or MSN will come find you and tell people you've got what they want -- and these people will tell their friends, and link you on their blogs or Facebooks or what-have-you. Even better, these days, most engines (Google most notably) will account for this word-of-mouth support by increasing your relevance score. At least in theory. Now back to that bit about noise.

Noise is anything bad (subjectively) that gets mixed in with what you want (the signal). If your information is noisy, it costs you more time to pick out the signal. If you can't effectively search for what you want, you just aren't going to bother. This is why no one tries to get a date by flipping through the phone book. Actually, that one is noisy both ways -- you probably wouldn't want to date someone who cold-called you from the phone book (which makes you less likely to try). It's also why no one is reading this essay by this point. And this is why advertising is the most dangerous thing for the egalitarian internet. Money buys noise.

I'm going to stop there before this becomes completely unwieldy, and expand on this in another post. Suffice to say, I don't see democracy as the problem. "Of course not," you may say, "Dumb people are the problem." Nope, not even them. Part 2 coming soon, I hope. Christ! Why is analyzing society from the ground up so complicated?

*Identity theft and fraud being the exceptions -- and this will play into my larger point.

**Above a fairly low economic threshold, at least in the developed world.

Zombie Apocalypse, Significance Thereof

I suspect that more of our culture than is immediately apparent is apocalyptic, or based on either an anticipation or desire for change. Even with the extremely cathartic election of Barack Obama, there is a sense that we are about to hit the trough of an economic "long wave", which have tended to occur every fifty to sixty years. The Great Depression was the last such trough, although a case can be made for the late seventies (oil crises, stagflation, and the end of the post-war boom). President Obama brought up the idea of American decline rather early in his inaugural address (at 5 minutes here), though he of course wishes to prevent it.

In any case, the past few decades have already seen communication and entertainment democratized and changed drastically by the Internet and the ubiquity of cellular phones. Technology appears to grow exponentially, which leads to the scenario of technological singularity, in which we create computers that invent smarter computer ad infinitum. While this is not necessarily apocalyptic in the negative sense, it is likely that society would need to be radically altered. Much of Asimov's robot fiction can be seen as dealing with the tipping point of the singularity: the point where robots/computers are competitive with humans, but not completely superior. WALL-E is probably the best recent depiction of post-scarcity humans -- fat and complacent through the simple fact of not having anything useful to do.

Because of this, a straightforward projection of the present system is not particularly comforting, even for those of us inclined -- sometimes feverishly so -- to the creation of "true" artificial intelligence. This of course leaves aside many valid reasons for discontent with society in the present tense. But it does seem that dystopian fiction -- wherein society is projected forward to an appalling but recognizable state -- has fallen out of favor since a peak in the 80s. Blade Runner is the seminal work of film here, and Neuromancer the literary touchstone.

What we have seen recently is the revival of zombie horror, and zombie survivalism as a topic of speculation among young intellectuals. The revival of zombies (as a cultural rather than physical phenomenon) has been especially strong in video games, where zombies provide an inherent atmosphere and an opponent whose physical durability and mental shortcomings have obvious explanations. Post-apocalypticism also traces much of its popularity to the 80s of course, Terminator and Road Warrior being the prime examples. It must be noted, however, that Kevin Costner almost single-handedly killed the genre in the mid-90s with Waterworld and The Postman. Zombies in and of themselves have also been present in American culture since the 60s, most notably in the works of George Romero. Dawn of the Dead is probably the first movie to address the concept of the "zombie apocalypse," though it does so with considerably more pessimism than the current trend, which has synthesized zombies and post-apocalypticism with zeal.

More substantial analyses can be made of zombies and apocalypticism in literature and film, but my immediate goal here has been simply to demonstrate that the downfall of society as we know it is the subject of heavy speculation in some circles. This suggests that a total collapse of the present socio-economic order is seen as either likely or desirable. But consider that in the present trend the agent of destruction is zombies, which are in principle non-existent and fantastical (setting aside "zombie realism", most notably the virus hypothesis and 28 Days Later). In the 80s, the culturally-anticipated apocalypse was the very real threat of nuclear war. Whether such a war was ever likely is dubious, but anyone looking possible causes of the downfall of humanity did not need to look very far. And while singular nuclear weapons remain alarming (see the nuking of Los Angeles in 24), large-scale nuclear war is no longer plausible. Ergo, zombie apocalypticism originates from a sense of discontent with the current course of society, or at least one's place therein.

...This was originally just going to be a lead-in for a post about discontent, but it got a little out of hand, so I'm going to do that another time.

Please comment if you find this interesting and/or think I am full of shit on this.

Joie de Vivre

At 6:30am, on a Monday morning, there is Latin music blasting from the apartment next door. Several people are shouting along with the music. Dancing is implied. Since I spent much of my weekend in Brooklyn, I cannot guarantee that this party is contiguous with the one that began Friday evening, but I am beginning to suspect. While I admire their audacity, this is perhaps going too far.

In these circumstances, I began to ponder my own mortality, and whether or not I should have spent the entire weekend drinking Sparks (may perpetual light shine upon it).

Post-Apocrypha

On Friday, I left work and headed directly to LaGuardia, so I could get home for pseudo-Christmas (Saturday) and get drunk for pseudo-Christmas Eve. Fortunately, my flight was delayed only 20 minutes, up to the point where the plane circled above O'Hare for an hour, and we made an unplanned stopover in Dayton to refuel. Despite an extended stay on the tarmac, we were not able to leave the plane. After some apparent difficulties (Pilot: "as you can see out the left, the fuel truck is right over there, [not refuelling us for some reason, those shitheads] -- it was pretty clear from his tone), we set out again for O'Hare, a mere four hours late. The reason: unseasonably warm weather. No, really, melting snow, light rain, and a fortuitous dewpoint had rendered Chicago and impenetrable gray mass.

I slept through the last leg of the trip, and when I awoke found we were maneuvering aimlessly across the taxiways of O'Hare. At least, I presumed it was O'Hare -- There were no landmarks to speak of. There was still snow on the ground, frozen in windblown drift and emitting streams of vapor, which mixed into the ambient fog. The ony visible objects were bright but hazy blue lights, and meaningless letters and numerals, which emerged inconsistently from the ground. We steered right and left among the roadways tangled roadways, with no sound but the steady thrum of the idling jets. The landscape, as far as could be determined, was achingly flat and endless, bordered in the far distance by glaring orange and yellow fuzzes of light. As this went on, I began to believe we had entered not an airport but a stange, endless, ensorcelled country, doomed to wander an eternity among snow and wind and fog, seeing just far enough to feel the vastness of the terrain.

Movin' On Up

I've been promoted, sort of. From Front-Office-Support-Understudy to Back-Office-Support-Understudy. This is an upgrade because it involves more databases and fewer quizzes about economic terms. Also more programming. Yesterday I successfully added a feature to one of the in-house programs, which ferries information between the market data feed and our trading platform. My mission: to add an error pop-ups when the program lost a connection. My mission after first contact with the code: to add the ability to detect a lost connection. Despite the resulting vast increase in scope, I was eventually successful.

A note on support: The people who make ORC (our trading platform) have certain flaws, but they have achieved one great triumph: naming the ORC administration tool "SAURON". Both of these are acronyms, of course.

A note on living: While today's shift to something more like useful work is heartening, I am still living my life at someone else's behest. This seems like an inherently unstable situation. Ideally, of course, someone would hand me a large some of money with the instructions, "Go do something you enjoy." Unreasonable though this is, it leaves open the options of research, start-up company, and music. Paul Graham is especially convincing on the startup front, and also has several essays on programming.

Also I bought a book on Erlang, a functional programming language which specializes in concurrent programming. The trend toward multicore processors makes this more important than ever -- unless specifically designed for it, a program can only run on one processor. Going to Borders convinces me I am unusual; there are plenty of books of C++ for Dummies, Beginning PHP, Java for Transorbital Lobotomy Patients, The Bipedal Lizard's Guide to SQL. My secret hope is to discover a book of Perl for Unscrupulous Lunatics or Javascript for the Dangerously Intelligent. Those books will get my money in an instant. I settled for Programming Erlang, with the knowledge that it was written by one of the language's designers (Joe Armstrong).

Also, if you are not familiar with FLCL/Furi Kuri/Fooly Cooly, well, you should be. It has been greatly enhancing my week. It is an anime about puberty, guitars, robots, and mostly about surrealism.

Unearthly

As I waited for the A-train, two men set up steel drums and began playing arrangements of Christmas carols. Slightly further down, there was a man playing a large, stringed, African instrument I do not no the name of. It was high-pitched and ringing, plucked in rapid arpeggios, and probably not tuned in a Western scale. He paused when the steel drummers began, and glanced over. Then he resumed, and began playing harmony, intentionally or not -- given the instruments, they have been bound to sync up on some perceived tempo and harmonic. The effect was poly-rhythmic, with orchestral level of harmony; all three instruments echoed off the tunnel walls as well. Hauntingly strange -- and all colliding over, for example, "Silent Night."

I had already seen the man with the African instrument yesterday. It's lovely on its own as well. I have a rule, actually, that if I have never seen an instrument before, I am required to give the musician money. Unique things should be rewarded.

Terror from the Deep

Remember that scene in Independence Day where the alien breaks loose in the lab and controls the dead scientist with his tentacles?

Your nightmares have arrived.

In Which the Chinese will Destroy Us All

I took this picture with the most ridiculously lousy camera I have ever seen, and I include my cell phone. It is 2-1/2" x 1-3/4" x 3/4" and it cost me $9.99. I did not expect much, but all the same I had to buy it, just to reconcile the concept of "10-dollar digital camera" with my reality. With a maximum resolution of 352x288 (and many of these pixels are dead), it is just over 30% as resolute as my free-with-contract phone.

On the other hand, Verizon charges $0.25 per picture I take off my phone.

And even more ridiculously, the thing is also a fully functional webcam, a function for which it is somewhat less embarassing, especially for 10 bucks.

To put some perspective on this, try to guess how long ago this shit would have been state-of-the-art spy hardware. "Agent Slaptyback, take this camera: it fits in the palm of your hand, doesn't use film, and can provide a live video feed once you've planted it."

And it's a keychain!

Insult to Injury

I was watching last Thursday's Daily Show on Hulu, which features a segment on the failing American auto industry. It was brought to me, per Hulu standards, by a single sponsor: Nissan.

No Manhattan is an Island

...Actually it's quite a nice island.

I live near the highest point of an island made of solid rock. This is a very strange notion. I discovered this evening that a mere quarter-mile east of me is quite a stunning overlook, consisting of massive, irregular pieces of jutting bedrock. The view is perhaps less stunning than the overlook, but it offers the Harlem River, high-rise across the way in the Bronx, and some very large bridges to the South -- all lit up bright as day, of course.

A quarter-mile can get you quite out of the way, relatively speaking. I haven't been that way before, as my block is bounded by Broadway and St. Nicholas, both major streets (Broadway, you might have guessed) that supply pretty much anything you can think of, and I have been preoccupied with exploring these for food and supplies. The side streets along the... side... of the island are quite deserted at 8 PM, and rather spooky, with empty playgrounds and basketball courts in the park just down the slope.

I imagine it is quite pleasant and pretty in the daytime (especially when it isn't winter), in much the same way as the lakefront in Chicago (though a bit steeper). It's surprisingly easy to gain a sense of stillness and isolation, even in such a busy area.

Tragedies

-That I cannot find a useful sports bar within walking distance of my apartment. Lacking anyone to see the Bears game with, I inquired with Google Maps. The suggested bar did not exist, although another may be "coming soon" to replace it. I then wandered randomly southeast, and chanced upon another supposed "sports bar" ... which was also closed. Highly mysterious.

-That I don't get a chance to wander about the neighborhood more often. The latter sports bar was along Harlem River Drive, which supplies a scenic overlook of the river and the Bronx. Manhattan is really quite pretty around the edges. I live at more or less the highest point on the island (also near the proudly-labeled "Highest Laundromat") . The structure of my work day (~7:30-5:30) prevents me from doing much during daylight during the week.

-That I don't own a camera. It's on my short list of things to acquire, after which this blog will become much more visual.

Non-Tragedy:
I have successfully acquired a couch from the furniture store down the street. Additionally, it folds down into a bed. Surprisingly, it is a better bed as a couch than as a bed. C'est la vie.

The Long Road Back to Civilization

Today I bought a toaster, and a bottle opener, and a pot in which to cook pasta. Perhaps tomorrow I will buy pasta. The unfurnished life presents challenges; On arrival, my parents and I were forced to open beer with a slot-jaw wrench, because they had gotten me a 155-piece tool set, but no bottle opener. I have been using the box cutter to make curtains, as mentioned Wednesday.

Perhaps someday soon I shall own a couch.

I go now to drink El Presidente, a Dominican beer in a Czech style (Pilsener). It is pretty good, actually.

Water Hazard

In the shower, the "C" knob should be understood to mean "Caliente." The "H" indicates "Hola, tengo agua fria." The can lead to confusion.

Strangely enough, this was the case in my last apartment as well. Credit for the "caliente" line goes to this fellow, who is on the run from the law in Nicaragua.

One Day in New York City, Baby...

-Actually, it's been five days, but Neutral Milk Hotel ("Ghost") is still stuck in my head. I arrived Friday afternoon with my parents, and proceded to haul various of my belongings up to the fourth floor of a pre-war building in Washington Heights, a neighborhood less than half a mile wide, due to the difficulty of building on the East and Hudson Rivers.

-Yes, I have an apartment. All by me onesies, as they say here -- actually, that may be London, I 'll get back to you. I have begun decorating, mainly by recasting dollar-store shower curtains as non-shower curtains (thrift is the new irony).

-And by God, there are a lot of dollar stores, but there's one in my neighborhood that actually means it. Anything without a label is 99 cents. So technically it is a 99-cent store, and is labeled as such.

-One of the distinguishing features of New York is that most things are bigger, and those which are not are comically small. There are 20 Manhattan blocks per mile, yet each contains at least one each of grocery, pharmacy, laundromat, 99-cent store, Chinese restaurant, deli, and liquor store. The average "supermarket" is under 12 feet wide.

-Also, the average liquor store does not sell beer, but is strictly "wine and liquors." The silver lining here is that the pharmacy will sell you beer. Aren't liquor laws wacky?

-As an aside, I do not recommend Leinenkugel's "Sunset Wheat". Normally I am enthused about beers involving wheat. However, this is because most such beers do not taste alarmingly of Fruity Pebbles. A little heavy on the "natural flavors" added, guys.

-I have seen the face of evil and it is IKEA. Specifically, the IKEA on Red Hook, which is a tremendously unhelpful series of labyrinths for anyone who does not intend to build a new house and fill it entirely with IKEA furniture. This would not be so bad, except that getting onto Red Hook is impossible via surface roads. It took us quite a while to learn this. The advantage of Red Hook is that the IKEA store actually has its own dock and cranes. Yes, on the ocean. Did I mention it's rather large? On the upside, I have gained, for very reasonable prices, two tables, two chairs, and a bookcase. Hooray sitting!

-Hooray free internet. I have yet to register for internet service or any utilities. Also, I sleep on an air mattress. Were it not for the obscenity that is my rent, I could be squatting.

-I tried to get a sofa-bed at IKEA, but the cheap one was sold out. Unlike every other sold-out item, it was not labeled as such (I repeat, face of evil).

COMING SOON: 10-hour workdays: Also the face of evil?

r.i.p. studs

Experiments in XML

Blogger has changed the operation of it's templates again. I am told I can use a plethora of "widgets" and a graphical interface. I am seeing how much of that I can bypass by parsing this new template and just working with text.

Also, I figured how to add goddamn titles to our posts.

Note to Self: Become Airship Privateer

You probably didn't know that the Goodyear blimp Resolute was a privateer during WWII. When I thought that the United States hadn't issued a letter of marque (which authorizes privateering or other hostile actions by civilian parties) since the War of 1812, well, my goal of being a pirate just didn't seem viable. But now that I know that there have been licensed American sky pirates, a world of possibilities has opened up.

Who wants in?

Now, you may ask, how on Earth would we get a letter of marque these days? You can vote for Ron Paul, that's how. Yes, Ron Paul, Republican congressman and noted coot, thinks the U.S. should encourage anti-terrorist privateering. Really, the only question is what to name our lighter-than-air death-dealing machine. I propose the USS Howard Taft. Or possibly Lighter Than Bombs.

(Paid for by the Alliance of Privateers and Sky Pirates for Ron Paul)

Did you know there was a new maciej-powered blog afoot?  Now you do.

Yes More Drama

In Defense of Auto-Tune

Anyone who keep at least half an ear turned towards the state of pop music today knows what Auto-Tune is. And even if someone can’t identify it by that name, chances are if you say, “you know, the T-Pain effect,” they’ll catch on quickly. Indeed, T-Pain has made truckloads of money off the simple vocal modulation software, turning his otherwise mundane voice into a hectic, delirious hook machine. By using this newfound voice to storm the Billboard charts, T-Pain brought Auto-Tune to the attention of many other hip-hop and pop artists. An interesting article published this summer in the New Yorker includes an interview with T-Pain, and details the history of the software, which dates back to 1997 and a Cher hit single. Now, as more and more high profile artists (e.g. Lil Wayne and Kanye West) begin to employ Auto-Tune, more and more music critics and fans are clamoring for its destruction, claiming that it’s been played out and is standing in the way of artistic expression. In my opinion, they couldn’t be more wrong.

It’s important to remember that this type of vocal modulation did not enter the hip-hop realm yesterday. Let us not forget the late Roger Troutman’s classic hook (recorded using Auto-Tune’s grandfather—the vococorder) on 2pac’s smash hit “California Love.” Has the phrase “city of Compton” even been pronounced as fantastically? Of course, vocal modulation in this instance was limited to the chorus, and perhaps a few more eyebrows would have been raised if Pac himself had started distorting his own voice. But let us not make the same mistake as those who refuse to admit that the genre has any relevance since the demise of Pac and Biggie. Like any healthy genre, it has evolved, tried new things, and become something that is both different and the same. I propose that the increasing use of Auto-Tune is simply another hip-hop experiment. It may remain, it may die out relatively quickly, but while it’s here, why not embrace its artistic potential?

Consider the following examples. Lil Wayne, long claiming to be the best rapper alive, only scored his first number one hit after running his rasp through Auto-Tune. So, there’s no doubt that this shit sells records. But, there’s more to Lil Wayne’s use of the technology than a simple money grab. I would argue that it allows him to put even more inflection into an already ridiculously expressive voice. Take his track “Rider,” recorded over a revamped version of Pac’s “Ambitionz Az A Ridah” beat. Created early-on in Wayne’s experimentation with the Auto-Tune effect, it lends his voice a positively tortured quality, which couldn’t be more appropriate considering he is rapping and singing about an almost uncontrollable love for a woman. “You only like her, I’m trying to wife her,” he plaintively croons. And at about 2:19 into the song, the effect crescendos as Wayne repeats the chorus: “I won’t deny her, shawty is a ridah…” It’s hard to imagine this song working at all without Auto-Tune, but it remains one of the most interesting and passionate pieces that Wayne has recorded.

To draw from slightly more recent material (in an effort to prove that Auto-Tune has not yet exhausted its possibilities), consider the song “My Life” off The Game’s new album LAX and featuring Lil Wayne. The song takes a serious tone, as Wayne’s chorus conveys both the exhaustion of a hustler’s life, as well as the survivor’s guilt that one may feel from seeing their friends fall to violence, drugs, and the legal system. Heady stuff. The additional emotional impetus that Auto-Tune affords Wayne cannot be discounted, especially on words like “grinding,” “tired,” “lawd,” and “eyes wide.” It’s impressive stuff, it continuously sends chills across my skin, and I’m glad it exists. I can’t say it would be possible without Auto-Tune.

Finally, consider Kanye West. Featured on the song “Put On,” the first single off Young Jeezy’s new album The Recession, Kanye employs the Auto-Tune effect in his verse. Now, while the effect has been used primarily in choruses, artists like Lil Wayne have not been afraid to rap entire songs using it. “Rider” is one example, “Lollipop” another (though the lyrics to that particular track are so ridiculously puerile that we won’t take it into serious consideration). The result of spitting an Auto-Tune verse is a rap that is remarkably melodic. I’ve always considered the naturally melodic nature of Wayne’s voice one of his greatest assets as an emcee. Now artists like Kanye, whose voice can be about as melodic as a dead fish at times, can record something like his “Put On” verse—a rap that I sometimes catch myself whistling as I’m riding in elevators. Touching on the loss of his mother and the lonely nature of superstardom, Yeezy’s verse is packed with emotion, and it’s all vamped up to a higher level with Auto-Tune. His voice itself seems like it’s crying as he laments the fact that he has little in his life to find solace in anymore. The amount of anguish conveyed is stunning. It blows me away every time.

I write this because of the recent news that has leaked out about Kanye’s upcoming album. Apparently, he plans to use a whole heap of Auto-Tune and sing a lot. If true, it would be a wild direction to take, but, considering what this guy has had on his mind lately, could be a fantastic artistic endeavor. And, if his Auto-Tune work on “Put On” is any indication, this could work out extremely well. Yet, as I was reading the comments below the news story, I was surprised by how many people were furious with this possibility, griping about how Kanye has sold out, fallen in line with the rest of the crowd, etc. Please, people, let’s not damn the man and the entire Auto-Tune effect just because you’re tired of T-Pain. Auto-Tune will not change who a person is nor alter their innate artistic genius, it will simply provide a new and colorful palate with which to express themselves. Even with Auto-Tune, Kanye will still be Kanye, just as Lil Wayne is still Lil Wayne. They will not become T-Pain. T-Pain is T-Pain.

There shall be rejoicing and dancing in the streets, for the evil one has finally left our fair city.

Read Roger Ebert's parting shot to Jay Mariotti.

I'm glad I read xkcd. (xkcd)

This post brought to you by the Annoy Carl Wheeler Foundation for Annoying Carl Wheeler. (Carl Wheeler)

The Commercial Rise and Artistic Fall of Dwayne Carter

It’s been two weeks since the official release of Lil Wayne’s official studio album Tha Carter III, and I’ve spent the last fortnight listening to the record, re-listening to the previous installments in Tha Carter series and wealth of Weezy mixtapes, and asking myself why Wayne is no longer the best rapper alive. I was a believer after listening to Tha Carter II—a devotee even. At that point (the album was released in 2005, but I never even heard it until the beginning of 2007) Wayne had yet to achieve the obscene level of stardom that he currently holds. In fact, I considered him extremely underrated. When I traced my steps backward and picked up the original Tha Carter, I was baffled as to how more people could not be talking about this kid from New Orleans. His dexterous yet playful verses left my mouth agape and my head shaking in a way that one generally only expects from rap saints like Pac and Biggie and living deities like Jay-Z.

Then the articles gradually started trickling in. XXL wrote a feature story. Wayne’s tattooed and grinning visage framed in trademark dreadlocks began appearing on a variety of magazine covers. His fame was growing by leaps and bounds, only aided by the immensely popular (and entirely free) Da Drought 3 mixtape, which became the hottest hip-hop topic of the summer. Weezy was finally getting the attention he deserved, I believed. Now all that was left was for him to release Tha Carter III at the end of the year and set the record straight once and for all. It would make-up for the previous, largely overlooked Carter installments and would make Wayne’s claims as Best Rapper Alive undeniable. Da Drought 3 was an excellent appetizer—the mixtape format allowing Wayne to be more playful, rapping over others’ beats and cracking jokes without really saying too much. There was entrancing wordplay that demonstrated a love for language, and a willingness to play with his voice that made his flows positively melodic, but little real substance when it came to coherent narratives—always a sticking point for Wayne, but one that he seemed to be improving on in his studio work. I awaited Tha Carter III in hopes of new tracks akin to “Tha Mobb” and “Fly In” from the Carter II—tracks with unparalleled flows that, coupled with Wayne’s newfound public following, would vault him into a higher pantheon of emcees.

Then the levees at the Young Money Studios broke. More than just a leak, the entirety of the Carter III flooded out into the streets months before its scheduled release date. Bootlegged copies of the album compiled by The Empire in a mixtape named The Drought Is Over 2 found their way onto every Wayne fan’s hard drive before the end of August. Wayne tried to play this off as no big deal, claiming he wouldn’t have used those tracks anyway—a position that we now see to be not entirely true based on his recent explosion at The Empire DJs on a radio program (numerous death threats and slurs were directed their way). I don’t think anyone could have predicted how this leak would throw Wayne’s career off kilter at the time; we were all just happy for the new tracks. Now, however, in the wake of a lackluster and underwhelming Tha Carter III, I wish the lid had been kept on the original project and Wayne was allowed to release The Drought Is Over 2 as his official Tha Carter III. All the greatness was there. There was even thematic coherence, as many of the songs dealt with a melancholic longing after lost love (perhaps signaling an emotional maturation on the part of Wayne, who had dealt primarily in M.O.B.s beforehand). Listen to tracks like “Something You Forgot,” “Scarface,” “I Know The Future,” and “La La La” for proof of this collection’s superb nature. Were Wayne allowed the time to clean things up a little more on the album, as I’m assuming he would have in the months remaining before the album’s original release date, he may have released a flawless product. As is, it’s pretty damn close, which is not something you can say of most things bootlegged. Yet, as a mixtape, it fell short of most major critics’ radar (save an article in Vibe magazine that listed most of the tracks as Weezy’s best of ‘07) and its effect on Wayne’s legacy and prestige was thusly diluted.
And the official Carter III was pushed back. Christmas 2007, initially, then January 2008. February, March, April, May followed with more rumors of release, but still nothing. In the meantime, Wayne used the extra time to further catapult his stardom by lending guest appearances to almost any artist in any genre you can think of.

And there was yet more leaking. Another whole Carter III’s worth of tracks was poached by The Empire and released on mixtapes like The Drought Is Over Part 4. While not quite as thematically focused as The Drought Is Over 2, it felt like another worthy Carter III had passed by in bootleg form. Tracks like “One Night Only,” “Trouble,” “When They Come For Me,” and “Burn This City” show Wayne in his top form. While one can’t be sure of Wayne original intentions for this material, it seems likely that he did not mean for it to wander off in the hands of rogue DJs. While nearly every track on The Drought Is Over Part 4 was impressive and album worthy (the Kanye West produced “Comfortable” with Babyface even made the jump to Tha Carter III), it should also be noted that Wayne’s flow no longer seem as tight; he began to sound lazy on some tracks and his thoughts became more disjointed—perhaps a side-effect of his chronic abuse of prescription cough syrup (and god knows whatever other drugs; you can look up the tour bus arrest reports to read about the illegal pharmacy Wayne had driving through the South).

A friend of mine thought that Wayne had become too obsessed with his own celebrity and it was effecting what he rapped about, which I suppose is the case for almost every musical artist—the best work comes when they’re still poor unknowns. Once you are a celebrity, what else do you have to rap/sing about but your own celebrity? In fact, Wayne seemed bent on crafting himself as something above homo sapiens, something he strove for through increased use of Auto-Tune (the vocal modulation device that T-Pain has built a career out of). Wayne’s voice already being one of the most unique in rap, he seemed to transcend the inherent cheesiness of the robotic vocals and became something positively ethereal. Listen to him croon painfully (in a good way) on the track “Rider” for proof of this. Still, his increased love for his new voice made me worried as he became more of a singer and less of a rapper. This is clearly evinced in the number one song in the country right now—“Lollipop”—a song so lyrically brain-dead that it’s almost painful, yet also strangely addictive. I’ve yet to switch the station when it comes on the radio, despite how amazingly overplayed it and its remix are.

When Tha Carter III release date of June 10th was finally set in stone, many fans were feeling more annoyance at the delays than eager anticipation for the product. After all the setbacks and gradual increase in his lazy rapping, I was relying on Tha Carter III to redeem Lil Wayne. If it wasn’t as good as the leaked material that came before, I would have to conclude that the peak of his artistic career had passed. Now, after listening to Tha Carter III several times, I would place Wayne’s best work in the time range of Tha Carter through The Drought Is Over 2 mixtape (though I suppose you could extend that through The Drought Is Over Part 4 and not really be wrong). Tha Carter III simply doesn’t pass muster. Wayne actually sounds tired on the album. Just listen to him sigh heavily on the intro to “Mr. Carter” (which is probably the best song on the album, and gave me false hope as the second track). He sounds positively exhausted, as if the effort needed to express himself coherently has simply become too much. One could argue that Jay-Z beats him on his own track, which is ironic considering that Hov’s verse is about passing the torch to Weezy.

In the same vein as Wayne’s apparent fatigue, he sounds out of breath on many of his verses, as if his rapping behind the beat isn’t just for effect, but that he’s actually having trouble keeping up. As opening tracks go, “3 Peat” seems tragically weak compared to what has come before—the epic “Tha Mobb” on Tha Carter II (Wayne’s best song, in my opinion) and the adroit “Walk In” from Tha Carter. The word lazy continues to be the most apt descriptor for this new style of rapping from Wayne. “A Milli” is fine, in my opinion. The trance beat grows on you, and the minimalist snares, bass and handclaps are perfect for freestyling. The only problem is that Wayne doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense on the track, which I am actually more forgiving of than many critics because I think it demonstrates Wayne’s love for individual words and being playful with language. There is no excuse, however, for “Got Money” with T-Pain. Wayne should be above such fluff.
The aforementioned “Comfortable” with Babyface is a standout, as is the other Kanye West produced track “Let The Beat Build.” West’s production seems to fit Wayne’s flow quite well, though the latter track shows the same signs of mental stumbling by Wayne that are apparent throughout Tha Carter III. Production is actually a major sticking point for me with Tha Carter III. Now, I don’t have a huge problem with Mannie Fresh, but he’s far from my favourite producer, and too much of his stuff sounds identical. So when Wayne broke from him for Tha Carter II, I think it might have been one of his best career moves. For that album he culled a wide variety of beats from a handful of mostly unknown southern producers. The end result was a fantastic sonic landscape for the rapper to navigate. Naturally, with Wayne’s increased fame, Tha Carter III would feature appropriately famous producers. The end result this time, however, is a mish-mash of cookie-cutter and just plain bad. “Dr. Carter” and “Phone Home”—two of the weakest tracks on the album—suffer from production missteps by Swizz Beatz and Cool and Dre. The former isn’t outwardly grating, but simply has no life to it, while the latter contains a hook so obnoxious that one has to wonder what Dre was hearing through those headphones. Similarly, “La La,” produced by the ever-insane David Banner, only leaves one wishing that the original “La La La” had made the album.
The rest of the album is made up of a handful of tracks that are merely good, falling short of great, and not even approaching epic. The message of “Tie My Hands” shows social maturation on the part of Wayne, but Robin Thicke is ultimately an R&B producer and his beats are almost always too laid back for a Hip-Hop album (though the jazzed-up “Shooter” from Tha Carter II came closer than most to a successful crossover). “Shoot Me Down” is positively chilling and largely a success. “Playing With Fire” isn’t quite as good, but Wayne’s comparison of himself to MLK is frighteningly passionate, and his third verse is a rerecording of one from The Drought Is Over 2 song “World Of Fantasy.” (It’s hard to blame him for this transfer of old material; it’s probably one of his best verses and it works really well with this beat.) Wayne is easily outshone on “You Ain’t Got Nuthin,” which demonstrates that his good friend Juelz Santana is perhaps the next to watch for the title of Best Rapper Alive, and the closing track “Don’t Get It” is a moderately entertaining high, rambling rant, though it’s somewhat misplaced here (one wishes he had just stuck to rapping on the track; it’s a nice beat). And then the album ends, and I think to myself, “That’s it? That’s what everyone waited years for? What happened?”

This is the realest review I’ve found yet of Tha Carter III (http://www.tinymixtapes.com/Lil-Wayne), and it purports that Wayne traded in his title of “Best Rapper Alive” for the moniker of “Biggest Rapper Alive.” That’s hard to argue with. At the very least, he had a change of heart since he recorded “Tha Mobb,” in which he rapped: “Crossover? Whatever. Mainstream? No!” Tracks like “Got Money” and “Lollipop” are about as mainstream as they come. Of course, now Wayne is richer than ever before, and it’s hard to criticize him for following the paper. Furthermore, compared to some of the stuff that’s put out these days, Tha Carter III is not actually a bad album. It’s just a disappointment compared to what has come before in Lil Wayne’s career. Now, I’m not going to say that Wayne can never regain his former greatness; stale artists find ways to reinvent themselves all the time. Personally, I would like to see him take some time off and step away from the mic for a little bit. As it is, he’s stretched himself too thin and diluted his material by oversaturating the market. Maybe he can spend some more time in his hometown of New Orleans, which he moved away from for a long time after Katrina destroyed his home. I think he still has more to say, but needs to take a rest for a little while. There have been rumours and indications from the man himself that he wants to become an R&B singer. If that’s the case, then I wish him all the best. Maybe he can breathe new life into that game, as well. Of course, on one of his own remixes to “A Millie” (pretty much every rapper in existence has one now—a testament to how nice the beat is) he says that he’s celebrating Tha Carter III’s impressive sales by starting work on Tha Carter 4. Whatever. I’m not going to protest that, either. In fact, no matter what he decides to do, I’ll probably follow Wayne’s career through its entirety. He’s certainly made things interesting thus far.

Obie Trice is the best rapper alive.

Wayne might be tied with him, but he's becoming so postmodern it's kinda hard to tell.

Now where was I? Oh right, the South: Spring break was a nine-day road trip from Atlanta to Chicago. How can that take nine days, you say, O imaginary reader who serves as a rhetorical device? Why, you go by way of North Carolina, Kentucky, and New Orleans.

Day 1:
I arrived Wednesday shortly after 11:00 PM. Zach (The Car Owner), Jason (The Pikey), Boz (The Comic Relief), and Jen (The Questionably Intrepid), are waiting at the airport. We drive north. Atlanta, I hardly knew ye.

Day 2:
We visit Ty Cobb's grave in booming Royston. A forty is puored. There is a reading from the book of Cobb ("You are driving me to Reno tonight", Cobb told his new biographer).

Later, we see Tallulah Gorge, largest conyon east of the Mississippi. There are waterfalls, gorgeous views, moonpies, and extravagant numbers of stairs. At the gorge floor, we venture into restricted areas, and sun ourselves up on the rocks of the river crossing. The crossing consists entirely of large, half-submerged rocks. Naturally, I venture halfway across, agile as a mountain goat. Before I can embarass myslef on the truly difficult portion, Jen falls in the river. She is recovered swiftly, but this necessitates a hasty retreat to the car (did I mention the stairs?).

Day2, Part2:
We attempt to drive the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina. This is harder than finding a 500-mile-long tourist attraction sounds. Eventually, we find an entrance, a visitor's center, and an abrupt closure of the road. Due to possible avalanches, we are told. Not to be deterred, we set out the opposite direction along the parkway, and are rewarded with a series of spectacular vistas.

It was shortly thereafter this that we nearly died.

As we approached the first tunnel of the Parkway, a sign indicated "Turn Lights On". Zach, driving, felt confident the lights were on. As we entered the tunnel in high spirits, we turned up the music and began accelerating, we realized rapidly that 1) the lights were not on, 2) the tunnel had no lights of its own, 3) the tunnel was curving. Zach managed to break and swerve, barely crossing the midline of the road (this was clear from the skid marks). After this he turned the headlights on. Then we headed into a bright white light.

Four tunnels later, we discovered that this part of the Parkway also dead-ended, fortunately at another marvelous overlook. As we stood gazing at the setting sun, there descended from the mountain a bearded man with flowing hair, with a companion. And yea, verily, he showed us the true path (to the ridgeline). He called himself Fiddle Dave, and invited us to his concert in Asheville.

After declaring Fiddle Dave our new savior, kicking USGS property, and identifying the sight of a midget killing, we head for Kentucky, listening to World War Z all the way. This is all the more compellign since we abandon the main highway in favor of Carolina backroads, which show an incredible favor for switchbacks. On arrival in Lexington, we discover all rooms are occupied as a result of a high school basketball tournament. We drive another 20 minutes, find a room in Georgetown, and collapse exhausted.

TO BE CONTINUED (AND POSSIBLY EDITED)...

Never ever do business with Virgin Mobile.

Ever.

Dead Reckoning
Well, I'm not dead yet. CS is really becoming a bit of a death march. Our assignment: draw shadows on a heightfield based on some angle of the sun. Seems simple enough, right? Took three people 20 hours. I wrote the drawing functions, while Rob and Alex engaged in a lively debate on how the fuck the math was supposed to work. Also, it did not help that the professor did not write useful code, and in fact had to extend the project from Wednesday to Friday, after realizing Wednesday morning that he could not complete the assignment, because his code was fatally broken.

But yes, those are how shadows should look on Puget Sound with the sun shining from the northwest.

-Loot is a play about British people doing unconscionable things. As a result, it is entertaining. Also Zach (my former roommate) and Joel (my current roommate) played major roles.

-For spring break, I am travelling from Atlanta to Chicago by car. First stop: Ty Cobb's grave (Jason's idea. I'll consider spitting on it. Ty Cobb was a dick.)

-I have considered revising my aesthetic principles. Currently, I hypothesize that the two most important factors in art are beauty (truth-based) and comedy (falsehood-based). That is, comedy is funny because it is cleverly wrong, and beauty represents soemthing fundamentally true. I realized I've missed entire genres here, most majorly horror, which I will guess is based on the "uncanny valley" principle, or a balancing point between truth and falsehood. Furthermore I'll postulate that good horror-related art is that which disturbs us in some valuable way.

Anyway, you can see how it increases the complexity to have points of excellence in the middle as well as at the extremes.

-Finally, I have disposable income. Now if only I had time to spend it. At least tech support will never go out of style.

Kinetics
Time hurries on, leaves that are green etc. I'm starting to get a hang of this quarter, now that it's sixth week. Hoo boy. I probably shouldn't think about the year being half over, especially since it's been hard to go more than a day at a time (two programming classes and a new job will do that). At least the job pays well.

Writing sporadic. Artistic portion of the brain swings between feverish bouts of inspiration and stretches of "I haven't written anything in a while, have I?".

I'm taking one class next quarter. One: Game Construction. But first I have to get through the next 6 weeks while also managing to have fun and stay active socially. I really just want to relax and then pursue my own prjects of awesomeness at about 70% of this pace.

More Intersting, Less Whining
-I put my shiny glowing balls in a spotlight. Yes, really. That's the magic of Computer Graphics. We had to program a box full of bouncing balls. They had specular highlights, and I gave them inner light.

-The custom of going drinking immediately after turning in the Computer Graphics project is an excellent custom. Note: do not order pizza from the University Pub. However, ordering Cholie's through the (nigh-legendary) "Chole Hole" at The Falcon is encouraged.

-I went to the Cove (Hyde Park's Other Dive Bar (TM)) last week with Zach and Boz. Nice place, but they do check ID.

-Moment of excellence:
Zach: "Hey guys! Watch me kick this chunk of ice and nothing bad will happen!" *SPLAT*
Pat: "You forgot to set your plant foot. Way to go, Lawrence Tynes"

-Go Giants! I saw only the first 57 minutes of the Super Bowl due to a very poorly timed work shift. I caught up online, however. Eli Manning, significantly more unstoppable than usual. Really, the city of Boston was going to be insufferable for quite a while if the Pats went 19-0. Glad they put an end to that. And it was a pretty awesome game.

-Reading my brother's Facebook notes leads me to believe I should try to explain more of my philosophical underpinnings in entertaining fashion. Also that I should make more puns about apes.

-My gold shirt has made an appearance on stage. The character who wore it was named "Fluff". The play was "All in the Timing" by David Ives. Tragically, I was denied the honor of "Special Thanks" in a UT program. I am crushed.

-It is occasionally flattering to be hit on by a dude, but ultimately not terribly useful.