This Seminar about Long-Term Thinking is worth listening to. It’s from Elaine Pagels, who has written books about the Book of Revelation and the Gnostic gospels.
“The Book of Revelation is war literature,” Pagels explained. John of Patmos was a war refugee, writing sixty years after the death of Jesus and twenty years after 60,000 Roman troops crushed the Jewish rebellion in Judea and destroyed Jerusalem.
Jesus had prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem, so its occurrence was not just a horror to early Christians, although it most certainly was that. It also presented the possibility that if he had been right about that, perhaps his other prophecies would also come true. Maybe he was coming back, and if so… well, cue hallucinatory revenge fantasy.
Pagels also talks a bit about the apocryphal gospels, a subject I love. In super short form, the New Testament originally had many more books in it, such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. The early Church, starting with Athanasius the Bishop of Alexandria in 367 began to canonize the New Testament, excluding such works. Perhaps not entirely by coincidence, the excluded books often painted a different picture of Jesus than what has become common today. The Gospel of Mary quotes Jesus as saying, “Do not lay down any rules beyond what I appointed you, and do not give a law like the lawgiver lest you be constrained by it.” In the Gospel of Thomas, he says “That (resurrection) which you are awaiting has (already) come, but you do not recognize it.” He presents spiritual awakening as an interior and personal journey, one not requiring a bureaucracy of church representatives.
Anyway, it’s a good listen, and a glance into a fascinating world.
The idea of a camera that is always ready to take a photo of exactly what you are looking at seems so powerful to me, with the capacity to change the way we think about photography and videography.
And it’s not hard to take that a step further and imagine an always on camera that has a buffer of the last few minutes — with a single action you mark that frame of time to review later and it’s saved.
That’s the key, there. Saying “OK Glass, take a picture” is too clunky. But if I tapped on my watch whenever I wanted to save something that happened in the last five minutes, I could see that working. Google Glass right now is a bizarre thing, a step towards making computers less visible that actually makes them more so.
Interesting to think of photography as one of those jobs that humans just won’t do in the future. We’ll only “curate” machine photography, and even that I expect will be increasingly automated. “Save any footage of my baby laughing, and in a month, edit it together and post it to whatever hideous Mega-Facebook all the cyborgs are using.”
In this article, linkblogs are referred to as a “cancer”. A link post is described as “simple curation… generally featuring a blockquote from an interesting part of a piece, and then linking directly back to the source.” They are cancerous because they don’t carry the depth of regular weblog posts, but supplant the latter too often on too many sites. The author states they were pioneered by John Gruber of Daring Fireball.
So here’s what happened – I read that months ago, saw a couple other misunderstandings about the history of linkblogs (or linklogs), and thought I should write it up. I was blogging through that whole era, and I know what happened. But I decided to find sources for all of my vague remembrances, and that took a while, and then I got interested in drawing lines between early weblogs and current services like Tumblr and Twitter, and now it’s months later and here we are. A cursory yet mostly accurate trip down one leg of blogging’s dessicated spider-corpse!
The original weblogs were link-driven sites. Each was a mixture in unique proportions of links, commentary, and personal thoughts and essays. Weblogs could only be created by people who already knew how to make a website. A weblog editor had either taught herself to code HTML for fun, or, after working all day creating commercial websites, spent several off-work hours every day surfing the web and posting to her site. These were web enthusiasts.
Many current weblogs follow this original style. Their editors present links both to little-known corners of the web and to current news articles they feel are worthy of note. Such links are nearly always accompanied by the editor’s commentary… More skillful editors manage to convey all of these things in the sentence or two with which they introduce the link… Indeed, the format of the typical weblog, providing only a very short space in which to write an entry, encourages pithiness on the part of the writer; longer commentary is often given its own space as a separate essay.
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Robot Wisdom circa 1999. All link posts.
So the first weblogs (such as Robot Wisdom) are exclusively link blogs, as the first bloggers were all web people and links were their currency. This changed, presumably because of the growth of user-friendly blog posting software such as Blogger) and Movable Type, which allowed non-web people to maintain weblogs – people who wanted to share things other than links.
Indeed, the limitations and biases of publishing software are a big reason why the medium evolved in certain ways. Blogger came out in 1999. The first Blogger interface did not have a title field, making it more suited to linklogs and shorter-form content. But they added a title field, and Movable Type (2001) had one by default, also categories, then tags, and more and more cruft and metadata. I seem to recall that in the blogging community there was a bit of fatigue with the old-style, link list weblogs, as they were the past – stale ground in a very fast-moving world. People were into exploring the new things that tech like Movable Type made possible: longer personal essay posts, yes, but also photoblogs, videoblogs, et cetera.
Many people maintained link logs still, but they became a side blog that was put in one’s sidebar along with the “blogroll” that listed one’s friends, idols, or reciprocal linkers. Consider kottke.org in 2003 and the “remaindered links” section. This was often done on the backend as a separate weblog since the blogging software made it near-impossible to do it otherwise.
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Kottke in 2003, with remaindered links to the side.
Delicious came out in 2003, and became the backend tech for a hell of a lot of sideblogs, as well as the precursor to a lot of web 2.0 technology to come that would gradually take over the function of weblogs by making things easy and adding social features: Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
John Gruber’s Daring Fireball debuted in 2002. The “linked list”, his version of the linklog, did not appear until 2004. It was a separate page and an RSS feed intended as a perk for his paid subscribers. At some point in 2005, it shifted to the main column of the site along with the regular posts.
In a huge development, here’s Kottke.org in november 2003, featuring “remaindered links” inline with regular blog posts and several other categories.
Five types of content, one list. Each post type requires a unique “vocabulary” and a design/layout to go with that vocabulary. […]
By default, most current weblog software, including the package I use, doesn’t allow for different data for different post types displayed with different designs in the same list. Typically what people have done with their disparate data is to display them on separate pages or in separate locations on their site…so you need to visit the book page to see if there are any new book reviews or scroll down to check if they’ve added a new album to their “now playing” section.
To me, that seems not so optimal. A post is a post is a post. The newest content should appear at the top of the list of posts regardless of whether it’s a short movie review, one-line link, latest photo, or any other type of update to your site that doesn’t fit the typical title/text/category weblog paradigm and each type of content should displayed appropriately.
Setting this up was non-trivial, which explains why it was so rare:
What I’ve actually done is created 5 separate weblogs with MT and, using a bunch of MT plugins (MTSQL,Compare, MTAmazon, ExtraFields, etc.), have aggregated the 5 weblogs on the front page of the site. Which sounds complicated (and is!). But only in implementation (due to the limitations of the software). Really it’s just the appropriate data presented with the appropriate design(s) in the appropriate context(s). One site, lots of content, many ways to view it.
The observant reader will… observe that such a technical mess could be avoided by using Tumblr. Tumblr was a blogging platform based on a mutant category of blog called a tumblelog. It was almost exactly what Kottke was describing: a unified flow of posts of different types, with each type distinguished by a different design. The term was coined (by why of Ruby fame) in 2005, and Tumblr itself was launched in early 2007.
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Projectionist, an early tumblelog.
Tumblr now has over 150 million users. Some consider link blogging a type of “microblogging”, and the boss of that world is Twitter, which launched in 2006 and now has 500 million users. It’s not the same thing as a linklog, but it is indeed a service used by many to exchange links, and is displayed in much the same way.
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Twitter, structure wise, hearkens back to Robot Wisdom
Facebook, with its billion users, presents mixed links, posts, photos and other types of data units in a mixed stream, just as kottke started in 2003.
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Facebook has a structure similar to 2003 Kottke and tumblelogs
That’s pretty much the evolution as I can trace it. If there were other sites that beat Kottke to the mixed-design unified stream format, the ur-tumblelog, I’d love to know of it, so let me know and I will update this post.
Here, I fixed a bunch more stuff. The search page looks a lot better now. Also, you can get at the search fast from the menu because I’m hot shit with gratuitous jQuery effects? I guess?
Of course, in the process I broke a bunch of things, so the site currently looks like ass on the iPhone, and presumably other hand-portable general purpose computing devices. I’ll try and patch things up and get this boat out in the open seas again, promise.
Also, I totally promise to post something other than lame site news things like this. While I was testing the search I typed a lot of random things into my own search box and found some real gems like this, from Iraq War times, and this bit of snark. Man. Remember when this site was good. I can’t even think of a joke to go out on, that’s how bad this shit is now.
A year ago I made a resolution to finally learn some programming, and a week later I heard about Code Year. It seemed perfect, so I signed up and right now I stand at 89% complete, which is pretty good in my books considering in 2012 I also worked a full time job, a freelance job, and produced 30 minutes of films and one daughter.
I find my own lack of programming knowledge glaring. I was good at math. I have always been good with computers. I used to make HyperCard stacks as a kid, and further back one of my earliest brushes with video games was coding my own on the ZX-81 (the only way to play a game on that thing). For the past couple decades I’ve been fascinated by the web, and I know CSS and HTML, but never made the jump to Javascript or PHP or what have you. So close, but so far.
Codecademy isn’t without its flaws. The lessons are submitted by users, which is to say not made by professionals. Some are great, others broken, impassable without getting some help on the forums. But it’s free and the format is excellent – both the interface and the idea of weekly lessons for a year. I kept chipping away. In the fall my still-rudimentary Javascript knowledge really helped me fix something on my site that had been bugging me for a long time.
I’m trying to finish the Code Year track – hopefully it will turn out to be Code Fourteen Months. Not as catchy, sure. But I also will go on to do the Ruby course, and we’ll see what else. I am enjoying it, and it feels right, and I foresee a lifetime of side-tinkering with tiny, half-broken scripts.
If you’re at all interested in learning to code, I’d say give it a shot.
Item the first: I have been wanting to do this for some time and only recently figured out how to do it. I’ve fixed the RSS feed so that the links’ links are links. I.e., when you click an item in the RSS feed and it’s a link rather than a blog post, it will take you to the external page rather than the link’s Angry Robot permalink page. I just tripled your productivity! If I’m posting on average three times a day, and you consider reading the internet productive… actually if anything, I’ve probably damaged your productivity.
If this doesn’t seem like a big deal, please ignore! It’s just one of those things that should work a certain way and I’ve never been able to do it right because I’m a half-assed web nerd at best.
Whether this is working RIGHTNOW in your RSS reader depends on what feed URL you are using. If you don’t know, you should use this one: Angry Robot Canonical RSS Feed. The Feedburner address should theoretically still work OK, for as long as Feedburner is still around, which may not be that long.
Item the second: apparently some of you philistines prefer to get your Web Site Blog New Posting News Item Posts inserted into your Twitter, whatever that is. So use this! Angry Robot Blog Twitter Account. This faithful parrot-bot will tweet the shit out of whatever gets posted here, proper-style.
UPDATE The Twitter bot is already all mixed up and is posting bad links. I’ll look into it but in the meantime, don’t expect too much from the poor bastard.
Item the third: because I love my faithful readers too much to smother you in a constant stream of baby pictures, my lady and I have vowed to only post them in a dedicated spot (no, not landfill). That place is here. Follow that.
The notion of a Console War depends upon the need for dedicated devices that directly compete for the same pool of money. But it’s already the case that the only part of the home consoles that is unique to them is the controller, which is the cheapest part of the whole deal. Ship a Smart TV with a twin sticks gamepad and a one month trial of a cloud gaming service and see what happens… Even if no-one tries to bite that apple, the idea that Apple isn’t already taking a bite out of the console market is absurd.
Bateman rightly points out that “The Console Wars” are a construct. I’m not sure they were created on purpose by the industry, or whether they were a byproduct of how journalism covers business and tech. But I share his sense of their impending demise as Apple’s forces pour over the battlefield, to continue a metaphor well past its point of usefulness.
I wrote earlier in Portagame that iOS and to a lesser extent Android would destroy the market for portable game systems, and I think what I wrote there holds true (the 3DS is selling ok, but the Vita is in trouble). Bateman points out that the iPad alone is likely damaging the home console market:
Nintendo’s Wii – putatively the winner of the last round of the Console Wars – sold 97 million units over 6 years. Apple’s iPad has sold 84 million units in just 2.5 years, and about three quarters of those people use their iPad to play games.
But what would happen if Apple actually tried to dominate the consoles? I don’t mean building by dedicated games hardware, but making a generalized computing device for big-screen, living room use that just so happens to play games too.
Nintendo has just shipped its new console, WiiU. Sony and Microsoft have yet to announce their new hardware, but smart money is on fall 2013. The games industry tends to pre-announce far in advance, so such consoles would likely be announced at E3 in June 2013.
Even if all Apple did was open the current AppleTV up to third party developers, they could take the wind out of an entire industry. If they changed the hardware model (an actual TV set, or a dedicated controller of some kind), things would go even further. Whatever it is, they would announce it, and start shipping it, sometime between E3 and the ship date of the new Sony and Microsoft consoles. Invite a couple big developers on stage – Rockstar and Square Enix, say (who already both release their games on iOS), or Epic (what did happen to Infinity Blade: Dungeons, anyway?) – you know the drill.
Rumours have it that Microsoft will release 2 next-gen Xbox models, and one will be a cheap model dedicated to video streaming and casual games. That sounds like an AppleTV competitor all right, so perhaps they see this coming. The war continues in a whole new form.
Devastated by mental illness / the loss of a loved one / a traumatic accident / the war in Iraq, protagonist(s) discovers / must overcome their fear of / must learn to accept: a teenage call girl / life in the circus / a long-lost family member / bike couriers.
Remember Dr. Evangelos Michelakis and the Albertan cure for cancer? Y just sent me the following from 2007-ish:
So the generic drug dichloroacetate, or DCA, cures cancer in mice, but no pharmaceutical company will fund clinical trials because they can’t patent it and thereby make the kind of money off it they are accustomed to.
What’s happening now? This article wonders that, and concludes the drug is
Stalled, due to lack of interest, according to Dr. Michelakis. “We have not initiated another clinical trial with DCA in cancer,” he told me in an email this week, “It was my hope that other centres, independent of us, will be inspired to do similar trials, but I have not seen any signs that this is the case.”
However, commenter FlyingSnow points out there is an “ongoing” trial at the UofA (I fear this is the same study that the Albertan town funded – it has been ongoing since 2007), and another ongoing trial in Florida. Not being familiar with clinical trials, drug testing, or anything medical at all really, I’m not in a position to judge whether this means the drug is any more likely a) to ever be released or b) to actually work.
But man, it’s like hearing they had developed flying cars but weren’t going to make them because Detroit wasn’t interested. YOUBASTARDS!!! Oh, wait.
The flying car is being tested, and should be ready in 2013 at a cost of $279,000.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if the cure for cancer happened in our lifetimes – that seems like a perfectly normal thing to think, and it would be. But then, there is no “We beat AIDS” day. It may not be cured exactly, but it is a hell of a lot better than in the 80s, and we only barely register it.
Let’s try and remember to be excited about these things when they happen, even if the flying car is way overpriced, and even if the cure only kinda works on most but not all cancers. Let’s be amazed at the future, especially when it becomes the present.
This is no top-ten-listmaking best-show-of-the-ages type show, but it’s a hell of a lot of pulpy, batshit-insane fun.
Run by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, the writers who brought you Glee and Nip & Tuck, the first season followed a down-on-their luck yuppie family as they moved into a haunted house and suffered the consequences. The second season kept a handful of actors (Jessica Lange, Zacchary Quinto, Evan Peters) but threw out everything else, including the setting and period. Now it’s “American Horror Story Asylum”, and is set in a mental asylum in the 60s. Well, I suppose it kept its general pastiche approach. We are four episodes in and already we’ve had: an exorcism, zombies, a sadistic Nazi doctor, an alien abduction, a masked serial killer, and copycat masked serial killers. To mention the number of naked asses and whippings just seems like overkill at this point.
It’s essentially Twin Peaks as directed by Russ Meyer. The editing is furious and fearless, the characters are sex-crazed and violent, and the writing wouldn’t know subtlety if it bit it on the ass. You should be enjoying it.
There are some absolutely sensational images coming out of New York City.
There’s very little I can say that would do justice to the magnitude of this event and of the suffering caused by it, so let me move on to talk about the coverage. Things like this tend to make me a little news-obsessed, and they come up rarely enough, thankfully, that each time the way I approach it technologically tends to shift slightly.
First I went to the NYTimes iPad app, which was very good at providing the back story, as it were, and illustrating it with images. But it was not up to date. Then I went to Twitter, where the hashtag “#sandy” seemed to be the one to check. There were again amazing things – on-the-ground impressions, photos – but they were often obscured by tasteless jokes, retweets of tasteless jokes, attempts to tie the disaster to one political platform or another, and retweets of forged images of sharks in New Jersey. I briefly checked TV but we cancelled cable, and the few american channels we get now were either not covering the event live, or their signals were being interfered with by the hurricane. I briefly tussled with the CNN iPad app before realizing it was not gonna cough up a live feed and deleting it. “#SandyTO” on twitter, for the local Toronto touch, was a little better signal-to-noise wise, but not much.
There’s no magic bullet for coverage of things like this (are there any things like this?), but I wound up liking The Star’s live blog. Perhaps any good liveblog would do. It’s good to have editors to sort out the junk from the live-tweet firehose, but also to have more frequent updates than the NYTimes was capable of – although in their defense, their power was probably out! (And sharks were attacking them maybe?)
Hopefully the worst is now over but wow – what a terrible spectacle. Images of NYC flooding and/or going dark belong in Roland Emmerich and/or Batman movies, not in real life.
(There may well be a few housekeeping posts as a result of the redesign. This is certainly one of them.)
If you are following this site via its RSS feed, I have a public service announcement for you.
For a long time, blog owners have used a service called Feedburner to improve their management of RSS feeds. Feedburner lets you track your subscribers, see which links are clicked on, makes podcast feeds easy, etc. The service became successful, and thus was bought by Google for $100-million, and for a while, things were fine.
Until recently. Google announced that the Feedburner APIs were deprecated. This doesn’t mean that Feedburner feeds are going away, but it does make many of us concerned about Google’s enthusiasm for the product and how this may affect the rosiness of its future.
Just to be safe, if you think of it, you could switch your feed to the following new official, excellent, non-3rd-party-reliant URL: Angry Robot RSS Feed.
Months ago I set a goal: have a redesign of this site done before my new kid is born. I am just barely making it – kid is due in less than a week. Yeah I should be building a crib right now (kidding, there’s no way I could do that! It would have nails sticking out and shit!)
My pre-parental responsibilities are unshirked, sirs – worry not. Yet here we are, flashy new design. And what would a redesign be without a long, navel-gazing blog post? Funny you should ask!… NOTHING!, I SAY!
Goals
This is what I wanted to do:
Go down to one column. Ram was right, and I think I knew it a few years ago when we discussed it. For almost all purposes, one column designs are the best. When I see side columns these days, I mostly see feeble excuses for serving some ads.
“Responsive”! That’s the word for a design that will work on computers, tablets, and phones. Whaddaya know, one column designs really work well on phones. (Still was plenty hard to figure out though, with a bunch of new CSS / HTML tags that didn’t exist when last I dabbled in this nonsense.)
Simplify everything, strip out whatever isn’t really necessary. For me that was: tags, categories, comments, “read more” links, and assorted other bits of cruft. Heck, I even took out the name of the site. But you can see that in the address bar. If that matters. Just call it the Site That Must Not Be Mentioned.
Improve a lot of stuff on the back end. New version of Textpattern, ditched a bunch of old busted-up plugins, etc.
Speed. Hopefully all these changes will help speed things up around here. The site will be moving to a faster server, too. I hear that helps.
Unfortunately, I’m a total hack at web stuff. I dip in every few years, discover the field has changed radically, try to patch something together, struggle for weeks with a lot of trial-and-error, heavy on the error. So as per usual I haven’t tested this in the major browsers THAT thoroughly. But I think most of these checkboxes got checked.
Known issues:
RSS feed: in the link posts, clicking on the title goes to the Angry Robot archive page rather than the link destination. Yeah… it was like this before, too. Working on it. At least the occasional 404s should be fixed now.
Search page – works but looks ugly.
Site looks like ass on old versions of Internet Explorer. Probably not fixing this. Hopefully it looks okay in 10 though? Is that the latest one? Stifles yawn It should work great in chrome, safari, and firefox, at least.
If you see problems other than this stuff, can you let me know? It would be greatly appreciated.
I remember what it felt like to discover weblogs in the year 2000. The first one I stumbled upon was kottke, which I followed for some time before I knew what “weblog” meant. Then I was following some number of weblogs, and the typically short countdown to writing one took about a year.
That’s because writers of weblogs seemed worldly, curious, well-read, clever. Everything an impressionable young fella wanted to be. Some found amazing links, some penned savage quips, some bared all in crushingly personal essays, some posted pictures of their dogs.
Dean Allen did all of those things. His blog Textism was one of the best. I hung on its every word, and on the day he linked to something I wrote, which occured during a scarily long streak of unemployment featuring batches of record low self esteem, I felt in some world, by some standards, that I had made it.
Like many at this early stage, Dean had a mixture of literary talent and technical prowess. If weblogs were a cultural movement, they were made possible by a technological innovation – the rise of relatively simple personal publishing software packages for use on the internet. For publishing Textism, Dean developed his own software, Textpattern, which he positioned as easy to use for writers, and indeed it was. It has been described as “the closest thing to a beautiful CMS that I’ve ever seen.”
As much as you needed blogging software, you also needed a place that hosted your site – your own storefront from which you hawked the goods baked in your CMS. Services like Blogger would host it for you, but they were notoriously unreliable. And so it was that shortly after the official release of Textpattern, Dean started a web hosting company called – admire the consistent personal branding – Textdrive.
Tiring of dealing with venture capitalists, and eerily foreshadowing Kickstarter, he started it with a clever offer lifetime web hosting to 200 people (the “VC200”) for $200 each. This generated $40,000 that was spent on two servers.
I went for this offer, because never having to worry about hosting seemed like a great idea, but also because I was a huge fan of Textism and Textpattern, and hey, this also started with “text”. It seemed like an exciting place at first; then it was a little rocky. A few years later, Textdrive was sold to another company, Joyent, and as time went on Joyent seemed less interested in shared hosting, rather more taken with cloud computing and other buzzwords. Dean resigned from the company and then, apparently, the internet. Textism is eternally down for “retooling”.
Weblogs themselves haven’t had a great run, beset serially by war, money, and worse, social media. Once there was a nation of shopkeepers, each proudly tending to their Web Site. Now we publish and consume everything through the big malls like Facebook and Twitter, and we let them make the rules.
Last week a rather grim email was sent to lifetime hosting customers:
We’ve been analyzing customer usage of Joyent’s systems and noticed that you are one of the few customers that are still on our early products and have not migrated to our new platform, the Joyent Cloud.
For many business reasons, including infrastructure performance, service quality and manageability, these early products are nearing their End of Life. We plan to sunset these services on October 31, 2012 and we’d like to walk you through a few options.
We appreciate and value you as one of Joyent’s lifetime Shared Hosting customers. As this service is one of our earliest offerings, and has now run its course, your lifetime service will end on October 31, 2012.
“Legacy” customers like myself were outraged at this surprise “sunsetting”. As you can tell by this here post, it made me reflect bitterly on the passing of an era. I can only imagine what Dean Allen, vigorous defender of language, author – by way of example – of An Annotated Manifesto for Growth, would have said upon reading that letter.
CTO Jason Hoffman, who was, with Dean, a founder of Textdrive, did respond on the Joyent forum, speaking in actual human-speak, and sweetened the “options” a little. Then he mentioned they could be finding another company to take on the lifetime accounts.
A couple days later, Dean himself decloaked and posted
Steps are being taken to relaunch TextDrive as a separate company, run by me, with services, promises, early investment and good faith intact, running on hardware not powered by drunken late-summer wasps, with a future more dominant than a past.
Me, I’m typing this into Textpattern, and even though it stopped updating years ago, I’m still reading Textism. So as for this new thing, man, count me the fuck in.
Every heart in which
the light of love shines–
whether worshipper in a mosque
or member of a church–
and those who write their names
in the book of passion
are liberated from hell
and free of paradise.
– Omar Khayyam
I read Pitchfork Reviews Reviews now and then. You might have noticed the Gawker article in my links a few days ago; that was written by David Shapiro, who writes PRR, and is awesome. But that article wasn’t my first experience with Riff Raff, it was this video, also gotten via PRR:
I will allow that Kitty Pryde is also mesmerizing in her own right and worthy of a YouTube dig at some point, but for now, I cannot get over the Riff Raff package: Texas drawl, hair like a lion, bad tats, Kool Keith style nonsense raps. Plus he pulls a full Dylan in interviews and just bullshits constantly.
As Shapiro points out, he even lied about his height. That, his penchant for changing his name, and interest in doing characters (Jody Highroller) – makes you wonder: is this a person or a persona? Is he another Die Antwoord, a Borat?
It’s almost beside the point because this guy can rap. Observe the freestyling herein, let it play out…
He has a surprising number of videos on YouTube. They follow a strange formula: songs like personal favourite Porsche Cayenne:
Jose Canseco, Mike Tyson, Versace Bentley. There is a deep well of them; I’ve been watching for hours and have yet to reach the bottom. Riff Raff has uploaded 3 videos to his YouTube page in the past week, ten in the past month. They always feature a guest star. Riff Raff does one verse exactly. The songs have distinctive yet apparently meaningless names.
He’s like the rap game eHow, a one-man content farm, spamming out videos based on bizarre keywords. His penchant for putting keywords strings like “RiFF RAFFJAMESFRANCO SPRiNG BREAKERSHARMONY KORiNE MOViE” into the video descriptions only adds to this impression. (The story behind that is in the Shapiro article, but basically: Korine invited Riff Raff to play himself in his latest movie, Spring Breakers, but Raff didn’t respond to the email so Korine hired Franco to play him.)
The persona sucks you in. He guests on this low-budge post-apocalyptic video by an LA band. They seem pretty normal but there is Riff Raff the lion-clown king in the background, dragging your eye toward him, until he finally gets his verse in and it’s just such beautiful gibberish:
When my day begins, flawless women friends
With tactical air brushed golden skin, unblemished physique
Rap Game Dawson’s Creek
Volcano liquid lava Benz
Feels like the world is about to end
Because of the bullshit in the interviews and the mysteries about the real person, in combination with the sheer volume of nonstop free-associative flow on YouTube, the net effect is that you can learn a great deal about his subconscious, but next to nothing about his conscious self. Riff Raff likes rice, diamonds, golden skin, math. I know this. But I don’t know how old he is.
After a loose affiliation with Soulja Boy, Raff is now signed to Diplo’s Mad Decent label, which hopefully means big things. Maybe some great beats. Maybe he’ll write a song that surpasses the power of his freestyles. Maybe he will explore his character a bit more. Maybe not putting out three songs a week will be good for him. Or not. Who the fuck knows. He’s a powerhouse, right now.
One night when I was a child my mother came up to check on me and found me crying in my bed. I had been listening to a Peanuts album, and Snoopy sang an incredibly sad song about the passage of time. That kids grow up, and things change. Possibly, it was the first time I had reflected on the concept.
That’s how I remember it, anyway. I sometimes think back, wonder what the song was, and do a few google searches, returning empty-handed. I started to think I had imagined the whole thing; perhaps I was a melancholy child and somehow projected onto an innocent song about Snoopy’s harmless doggish frolicking. What kind of a song is that for a kids’ album anyway? Remember that Smurfs musical number about the Rwandan Genocide? Remember when Optimus Prime caught robot AIDS and danced a heartbreaking tango? Me neither.
Well my friends, with the patient help of my pal Y, the song is found. I did not imagine it! although I did get the details wrong. It is Charlie Brown singing about Snoopy getting older. That must have confounded my googling these many years.
It’s from “Snoopy! The Musical”, it’s called “Where Did That Little Dog Go?” and here it is.
My the Lynch Fest took a long break! Actually, it kept going, but my write-ups took a few weeks off. Anyway, a couple lesser works to get through before we get into the heavy-duty gems.
Dune
The word on Dune is that the studio botched it. It’s clearly busted: a grand and leisurely first half gives way to a second half so abruptly condensed it feels like a trailer. There is also the consistent rumour that a “director’s cut” of four-hour-plus length is circulating just out of public reach. That’s not true; there was a TV version formatted into two 2-hour slots including commercials, putting its ad-free running time at about three hours. Lynch is apparently no fan of that cut.
Dune isn’t Lynch’s greatest work, but it does have interesting characteristics that would come into play in his later work. One is a willingness to dramatize events in the abstract, in this case a lot of dreamy slow-dissolve sequences with voiceover. The other is a taste for villains so villainous that they strain the limits of the story. Like Blue Velvet’s Frank, Dune’s Baron Harkonnen is given plenty of time to indulge in villainy. Villainy in Lynch films is almost like sex in porns – the narrative grinds to a halt when it’s time for human evil to get down and dirty. Unfortunately in this case, the Baron’s portrayal as a diseased homosexual is disturbing in the wrong ways.
Wild at Heart
This is another less essential Lynch work. It retreads some of Blue Velvet’s territory, in a less sublime way. But man is it a hell of a lot of fun – mass market Lynch sure is a wonder to behold, and set a template for True Romance, Natural Born Killers and many of the most influential indie films of the 90s.
Two other things to note. The film is full of Wizard of Oz references; this will become significant for Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. Also, it was based on a book by Barry Gifford, who would go on to co-write Lost Highway with Mr. Lynch.
A sense of deja vu accompanied my reading of the Blow profile. I mean, we have been having the same discussion over and over again – hell, it even references the Ebert fiasco, which was the last manifestation of the games-as-art cosmic cycle.
But something about the whole form of the article itself seemed familiar, like it wasn’t the first time I have read a profile of the game world’s art saviour, and yeah, it wasn’t. It’s an easy formula:
Bemoan the state of video games; easy targets: sequels, shooting, breasts, space marines
Choose a champion artist-developer
Ignore all other contenters
Profit!
That we are looping through these tropes more frequently is probably a good thing. Many champions are entering the arena! Only one may leave— no wait, we want lots of them!
Good Lord have I done this a million times, compared games to film. And the industry as a whole does it a ton, whether bragging about opening weekends or demanding the Citizen Kane of games to stand up.
On that point, I’d say it’s the Birth of a Nation of video games we want, perish the thought. Cinema’s artistic potential was made manifest during the silent era by D.W. Griffith. He saw that editing was what made film unique, and developed the language of film. So yes, this bit Blow’s talking about:
Blow envisions future games that deliver experiences as poignant and sublime as those found through literature and film, but expressed in ways distinctive to games. “If the video game is going to be used for art purposes, then it has to take advantage of its form in some way particular to that medium, right?” he told me. “A film and a novel can both do linear storytelling, but novels are very strong at internal mental machinations—which movies suck at—and movies are great at doing certain visual things. So the question is: Where are games on that same map?” It’s a question Blow intends to answer.
Games have a different language than film: it’s not shot, scene, montage, mise-en-scene, but levels, rules, mechanics. So art games look nothing like art films – the language of games is too different. (Games are more like sports mixed with architecture, in This Reporter’s Opinion.) Those on the lookout for art games with a checklist they got from the film academy are going to be disappointed.
Or they are going to have to learn to like Metal Gear games.
Blame the Media
Seriously guys I am so goddamn excited by the potential for games to be art. It’s what either justifies or rationalizes – depending on where you’re standing – a cumulatively profound time expenditure. I turned this blog all-games, all-the-time for a couple years there. I have had powerful emotional experiences (Metal Gear, Silent Hill, Final Fantasy 7), engrossingly cerebral ones (Civilization, Sim City, a million strategy games), and marveled at an emerging generation of art games where game mechanics are used to expressive ends (yes, Braid, The Passage, Flower, Sleep is Death). I have seen magnificent systems that allow players to express themselves (Little Big Planet, Minecraft), or allow them to create new social entities that rival small cities (Halo, The Game Neverending, Glitch). I have seen beauty shine out through otherwise mercenary products of focus-testing and sequel-iterating (too many to mention).
So no jagoff in a fancy Atlantic jacket is gonna tell me games are dumb. It just reminds me of white people in the early 90s telling me that rap isn’t music. Maybe it isn’t, to you, yet.
But yeah, exhausted is really well said by Abbott. That’s what it is. It’s all gone on too long, this protracted, 30-year adolescence. And I think the culture around games has gone a little sour, and it turns off a lot of non-enthusiasts. Whenever they glance at games media it’s all screenshots and hands-ons of Space Breasts 6a: Sequel to the Sequel, and not a lot of finding the next Braid.
Articles like this profile don’t help, where a storied and cultured old media crow flies high and low and finds only the one shiny bauble worth keeping. Or this one that examines casual games and finds them “scary” and “stupid”. For someone not familiar with the games world the takeaway, the executive summary, is that games just aren’t ready yet. They are still teething.
I wonder if the coverage changed, if the core games media challenged and encouraged instead of shoveled, if the forays by the cultural elites reported back movement instead of starving artist in the wilderness, might we actually have a movement?
Or will cheap games via download platforms – Steam, PSN, Xbox Live, and above all iOS – make all this hand-wringing obsolete by routing around the Big Game Innustry and letting the indies run away with it all? I mean, this Braid guy is driving a Tesla.
