Let’s follow up about the recent CRTC announcements I linked to last week. Here’s a good article with some more detail and some good analysis. There’s also this (thanks, Xorkaya) that seems to indicate US specialty brands are salivating about how dropping genre protection may mean they can move some channels north. I would point out that unless the CRTC is changing more rules than I’ve heard, those channels would still have to be Canadian-owned and subject to CanCon restrictions (which of course have been eased), so similar to existing branch-plant channels like HBO Canada, History, MTV, Discovery, HGTV, etc. Certainly killing genre protection means we’ll see more American brands up here, but they’re probably still going to have to enlist a Rogers or Bell to do so.
There are further rulings coming Thursday, and it’s likely the CRTC will announce how pick-and-pay for cable channels is going to work.
My opinion? (Not in any way my employer’s opinion!) A lot of this is water under the bridge. The bridge is red and has the word “Netflix” on it. Not that Netflix is the only future, but the future is going to look like a grid of icons with things like “Netflix” on it. Each of them opens up to a grid of shows. (Or perhaps a live feed? The exact thing that opens up is in play now.) Regardless, these things replace channels, and the purpose of these things is to get as many subscribers as possible, so they want to be on as many platforms as possible. They also need content. The Canadian producers / distributors / brands / entities / whatever you want to call them that can either provide content or be the actual icon in the grid, those are the entities that, long term, will survive. It’s similar to the past, but the cultural walls around Canada, if they ever existed, are crumbling. That isn’t scary. We should be thinking about where else in the world we can develop a taste for poutine, maple syrup, good comedy by people who haven’t moved to LA yet, or profoundly terrible hockey teams.
I had one of these articles caught in my Instapaper for some time, and I finally just read the whole series. It’s a little meandering, but highlights include some consideration of “black cool”, and a brief history of disco. I might as well link them up for ya. Here:
Yup, that’s why I didn’t post here much. I suppose I could have warned you ahead of time, but that would have taken planning and foresight! Which I had just enough of for the novel, and nothing in surplus for the blog.
I had tried this once before, years ago. I didn’t have much of a plan back then – only the vaguest idea of what I would be writing. It didn’t work out very well. Failing at something big like writing a novel makes you think you’re not cut out for it.
Luckily, I forgot that thought. And wonderfully, completing a novel – even a shitty, nonsensical, and in-need-of-years-of-revision novel – makes you feel like a complete writing boss. Like, a complete champion. Like, you guys should probably fear and respect me. And call me Lord Wordgunnz from now on.
Anyway, here are some thoughts about what to expect if you have thought about trying NaNoWriMo, but haven’t yet.
- First off, have an outline. Maybe not for the whole book, but the more detail the better. You just want to have thought through certain issues first and not be doing them as you put words on the page. You absolutely do not want to change your mind about the direction of your book and need to rewrite something, because THERE IS NO REWRITING when you have to do 50,000 words in a month. There is no going back.
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How hard is it? It’s 1,667 words a day that you have to do. That’s about six or seven pages, depending on what kind of page you’re imagining. It sounds like a lot but it’s doable. I found it to be about two hours of work a day. I actually thought I’d get a lot done at work (ssshh), but that wasn’t the case. If I was lucky I’d get 500, which you can do over lunch, and the rest I’d do once the kid was in bed. I’d get a bit behind some days and then catch up on the weekend, because my wife was very supportive.
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Get ahead in the beginning. Go for it, hit the ground running, do Future You a favour. Future You will thank you. Bring your daily word total down to a cool 1,400 words a day, or less if you can.
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You don’t want to miss a day. You probably will (I did), but it sucks, because it means you have to do 3,000 the next day to get back on track – and that’s a lot of words. Even if you’re hung over, had 1 hour sleep and have meetings all day, you’re better off getting 400 words in on your phone on the subway than getting nothing at all.
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The muse is fickle, my friends. Some days you sit down and barf out 2500 words as quick as… barf from a sick person’s barf hole (sorry, used up all my similes on the novel). Other days, you are pulling words out like teeth and you check your watch and it’s been two hours and you have 78 words (true story). You can’t plan around that, you can just allot a certain amount of time, and spend more or less depending on the fancies of the muse. But I did find, if you had a lot to get through (aka it’s the weekend), it’s better to do shorter spells followed by substantial breaks rather than thinking you can churn out words in a solid eight-hour block like you’re working the night shift at the Hemingway factory. Short controlled bursts, like they say about machine guns.
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It should be obvious, but it’s important to not have any illusions about the quality of your writing. Your goal is not to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in a month, it’s to write 50,000 words. Most of these words will be shitty. Your novel will be shitty. That is just what you get. But the proverbial Shitty First Draft is a hell of a lot better than no draft. Don’t judge it, laugh it off and keep moving.
Final thought: the advice above is applicable to a lot more than novels, isn’t it? So whether you want to record a shitty album really quickly, or build a shoddy, unsafe house in record-breaking time, you know where to turn for hot tips!
Jessy Lanza looks like she is fourteen. She is slight, short and wearing a short skirt, with a mane of long wavy hair. She is dwarfed by the massive synth in front of her. She nods her head quickly, stoops to tweak the synth or the computer, and then lifts up the mic.
I recall someone’s review of Lanza’s album in which they say her slow jams work well, but the fast songs are duds. The opposite is the case tonight. Unfortunately, she has many more slow jams than fast; her relative immobility makes the slow tempo less effective at getting the crowd into it. But the fast ones really kick. I had actually rated the song “Fuck Diamond” two stars in iTunes, and I make a mental note to raise that to at least three. I make a second mental note that I could dance around with my daughter to this song, provided I tell her that Lanza is singing “fun dad”, not “fuck diamond”.
Lanza’s voice is amazing though; sweet and misty. Her production and palpable love of vintage synths are also great. Plus, did I mention she’s from Hamilton? How awesome is that?
Rating: three stars, would see again.
Lanza has been touring with Caribou for a month or two. It strikes me as Caribou begin playing: if Dan Snaith gave her such an opportunity, he should have gone all the way and given her access to his light show.
An aside about LED lighting. I had been looking into smart bulbs for a pair of lights we have in our living room and have been impressed by the capabilities of these little LED bulbs. Much more light from less power, dimmable, adjustable colour temperature, and controllable from a smartphone app. Sounds like fun! And when we were doing a colour correction session earlier that day, I was speaking to our director of photography about LED lights on film shoots. Big lights on film sets often require big power sources, so you might need a generator or a genny truck, which is massive and expensive. Plus, you have to worry about different colour temperatures; mixing light types can lead to nightmares of different shades of colour that you try vainly to get out in the colour correct. Sure enough, they are starting to use LED lights to great effect.
So when Caribou comes on, and suddenly there is a blasting throbbing temple of light in the air, made out of smoke, supported by pillars of photons, sweeping one way and the next, changing colour, timed to the music, silhouetting the band – I think, yes! LED lights. LET’S DO THIS!
Visually it looks a lot like an iTunes visualizer, except far more badass. (Far badasser, far badderass, far worseass?) Come to think of it, the silhouetted-band look is also reminiscent of mid-2000s iTunes ads. But again, badder-ass.
Dan Snaith himself looks a lot more like a tech mogul than a rock star: balding, white jeans, tight shirt. He could sing developers developers so softly into that mic instead of sun sun sun. He had Lanza back on stage to do the song “Second Chance”, which I have played 22 times in iTunes (make that 23 now, damn), and afterwards the stage lights came up a bit for him to thank her, as this was the last date on the tour and could be the last time they do that song together. We said to each other, “he’s so nice!” He used to be a math professor, and he probably was a very good professor – the sort of professor you could talk to about your problems.
So imagine, then, Mr Rogers popping a couple pills, firing up the smoke machines and the light beams, and taking you on a swirling light-tunnel journey of sound into the deepest corners of your soul. Musically this is some next level shit. Caribou sits somewhere at the intersection of rock, dance and singer-songwriter music. He’s playing with a guitarist, bassist and drummer. He’s singing in his wispy, meek falsetto songs of love. And underneath he is marshalling a tsunami of sound, all the thundering sonics that modern electro-acoustic science can bring to bear upon affairs of the heart.
He is master above all of the rise and fall. Mostly rise, not much fall. Songs start quietly and mount until you think they can’t mount any further and then they mount further and further. It’s present on the album from the first song on, but it’s all the more present live, where he – I should say they, it does seem like his fellow white-outfitted silhouette people have a say in the ups and downs of the songs – where they turn an arpeggio loop that lasts maybe four bars on the album version of “Sun” into a four-minute escalating odyssey. And those damn LED lights and smoke machine make you think you are a giant space robot from the future finally connecting to the Motherdome through your Lightcord.
Or maybe that’s just the drugs talking.
Rating: 10 to the power of 26 Lightcords
Here are two posts from old-school bloggers declaring their intent to resume old-school blogging operations: Andy Baio and Gina Trapani.
“Sorry for the lack of updates” blog posts are a classic of the genre, and these are exemplary examples – I’m not being sarcastic. I particularly like Trapani’s list of personal rules, which made me think what mine would be. Sometimes I wonder why I do this! It doesn’t really make much sense. But essentially this is how I roll:
- Blogging is therapy foremost. I write to organize thoughts. If they get organized, I post them. If they don’t, I often don’t post them. I have probably ten drafts to every post.
- Post interesting links. If there’s a lot more of this than there used to be, it’s because sometimes that’s all I have time for. That’s ok.
- It doesn’t matter who reads it. I don’t check anymore. I only know when someone tells me in person. That’s all good, I do this for me.
- No bitterness. There’s no shortage of snark on the internet, so try and post constructive, thoughtful, silly, or beautiful things instead.
- Keep it stripped down. No tags, no “read more”, no comments. Not adding enough to be worth the hassle.
- No guilt. It’s not work. No need to maintain a posting schedule or anything. Do it when you feel like it. If it stops being fun, stop doing it. Or try something new.
Some of these rules are harder to follow than others – it’s especially hard to value something posted publicly without thinking about its reception, audience, etc. And sometimes you have to. Here are my problem areas, things I want to get better at, or find better solutions for:
- Posting personal stuff. This is an age-old problem with writing. Sometimes I want to but don’t for fears that someone else might get hurt, I might look like an idiot, etc.
- Keeping the blog reflecting my life. It feels like it should, but it doesn’t really. I don’t post at all about my daughter, home renovations, work.
- I’d like to post pictures more but for mostly technical reasons I don’t.
- Get better at ending posts. Better to cut it short and take it up in a follow-up post than to not post at all. Drop the mic, walk away.
Here’s Leigh Alexander’s vitriolic, already-seminal piece on Gamergate. She argues that Gamergate is the death spasm of “gamer”, the identity based around games, which is becoming obsolete in an era when everybody plays games.
“Gamer” isn’t just a dated demographic label that most people increasingly prefer not to use. Gamers are over. That’s why they’re so mad.
And here is an interview with Mikael Colville-Andersen, head of Copenhagenize, a bike-related urban design company and associated weblog. This passage is interesting:
The cycling sub-cultures are a hurdle to mainstreaming bicycle culture, even though that may sound counter-intuitive. The nature of sub-cultures is insular. They are not often keen to see their beloved hobby/activity become mainstream. Much bicycle advocacy in North America is done by the “avid” cyclists. They have a sense of ownership over all things bicycle. They don’t, however, realize that the 99% doesn’t want what they want. They don’t want over-complication with gear and fancy bicycles. People – Citizen Cyclists I call them – just want to be able to ride a bicycle safely and conveniently.
Having avid cyclists doing the talking about bicycles is like having race walkers doing the talking about pedestrian-friendly cities. It doesn’t work. It’s two different things.
The parallel is striking, and weird.
Ultimately, if you think about telling hobbyist cyclists that they “drank the kool aid” and are “angry young men” who should “grow up” because “traditional [biking] is sloughing off, culturally and economically, like the carapace of a bug,” it seems waaaay over-the-top. These are just a bunch of dudes who enjoy riding around with their friends, really fast! You would want to say something much less threatening, like “you guys are right, biking is awesome! While we value your advocacy, we also need to hear from other bikers, people who may not share your point of view exactly, and in fact those people already outnumber you. But this doesn’t mean you have to have to change anything – keep doing what you’re doing!”
It’s a shame that the Gamergate thing has already gotten so out of hand that such dialogue seems impossible. I guess that’s what happens when the death treats start.
Ben Thompson writes –
At the first iPad presentation, Steve Jobs was at pains to explain that the iPad would only work as a product if it found a spot between the iPhone and Mac where it did some number of things much better than either. […] Over time, though, that middle has shrunk.
Phones have gotten bigger and Macs have gotten smaller and get better battery life.
Last year I bought an iPad mini for the first time. Initially I loved it, and was thrilled that I could carry it everywhere I brought my bag. But increasingly I realize that I don’t use it that much. I mostly use it at home, where it might as well be the bigger iPad Air.
There are very few things the iPad can do that the iPhone can’t, and that’s why – when you’re out and about – you’re almost always going to reach for your phone. The iPhone Plus may well be just as good for reading, which is one of the main things I use the iPad for.
Thompson notes that “the downside of a bigger phone is reduced convenience and portability, opening up room for a device that is even more portable and always with you – the Apple Watch.” If you’re carrying a big phone that may not be usable one-handed, you can see why you’d want a smartwatch. A lot of my iPhone uses are relatively brief interactions that require a minimum of data presented: weather, figuring out when the next streetcar is coming, seeing a notification, fast forwarding a track. You can see how this could be taken over by something on your wrist.
Tablets are far from useless, however. I prefer a touch interface to a mouse or trackpad for many computer-y tasks (web browsing, feed reading, photo editing, music creation, games). Also, the sheer size of a tablet makes it better than a phone at other things (games, reading, video).
But it strikes me that a) I want the biggest size since it will only get used at home, b) I don’t need the newest, fanciest model, and c) maybe don’t even need it to be iOS. The video apps I use are all on Android as well – it’s really just games that would make me stick with iOS.
That is something Thompson notes: there was an opportunity for the iPad to define itself through killer apps, and Apple has mostly blown it. When you see a good iPad app, it’s impressive: all the fun and usability of a phone app, most of the power and real estate of a desktop app. The iPad is more of a computer alternative (and eventual replacement) than it is a phone. The middle hasn’t vanished, but it has moved, and may be swallowing one of its neighbours.
I realize these are dull first world problems for people who have more than one fancy gadget. Still, it’s interesting to see how computing changes over the years based on both tech and how people actually use the things.
I’m no jazz expert but I did take a lil’ course in university and one thing that stuck with me was the definition of jazz that the prof gave us: the blending of European harmony with African rhythms. There was nothing about improvisation.
I’ve continued listening to jazz since that course (you go to see some live shows and drink some sangria and realize, hey this is really fun, despite the knock on it that it’s just for middle-aged white guys now). As the saying goes, I listen to a lot of stuff, but a personal staple is electronic music, and it struck me a while ago that the definition of jazz applies equally to that genre.
The biggest stumbling block for people is that jazz emphasizes improvisiation and live performance, whereas electronic music is traditionally a recorded art. But that has changed with time. Software like Ableton Live and various live-performance hardware tools, and the coordination of elaborate visuals, have made electronic music more and more performative. On the flip side I can think of a few jazz releases of the past few years that were very much studio albums (say, Takuya Kuroda’s Rising Son).
Two recent electronic releases have really cemented that: Aphex Twin’s Syro and Flying Lotus’ You’re Dead. The Aphex Twin album is very much a studio production but the palette is all polyrhythm meets jazz harmonics. Looking into the FlyLo album I see Herbie Hancock played keys on much of it, and Flying Lotus’ aunt is Alice Coltrane (John Coltrane’s wife, who played piano with him).
People may think jazz is dead. Those same people may listen to these albums and not even think about jazz. But it’s still there, maybe moreso than ever.
I am a huge Bungie fan, having loved their games since Marathon in the 90s. And I was a big Halo player – I’m not in a frat and I don’t like cursing at complete strangers over the internet, but I did like playing it with my pals, for a time. So it’s almost inconceivable that I’m not planning on buying Bungie’s latest game, Destiny.
The reviews are not good. Back when I was really into console games, it bothered me that almost every heavily-marketed AAA game title got review scores in the 90s. And here we are with one of the most expensive games ever made and the reviews are floundering in the 70s. Here’s one bad review from Giant Bomb, here’s one from Polygon. Surprising!
But more than that really, I’m just not playing console games at the moment and am reluctant to spend $70+ on something I’m not sure I’ll play. I have a small child and that means I only get a couple of hours of contiguous leisure time per day. Plus I DEFINITELY don’t like paying that kinda scratch, because my media consumption is spread thinly across a lot of different things: a bunch of shows, movies, iPad games, and books. Paying $70 on one thing feels like I want it to monopolize my attention, which I don’t want. Besides that, neither shooter nor MMO lies close to my games-taste wheelhouse these days (if it was a turn-based pixel-art WWII space conquest 4X, I’d be out-innovating 8-bit Space Hitler right now, not writing this crap).
Still, it seems slightly sad to not be playing it.
My 1.75-year-old daughter received an animal puzzle as a gift. It has pieces shaped like different animals, and when you place them in the appropriate spots, it plays that animal’s sound. Which is great! She’s gotten pretty handy with it, which is also great. Only problem is that the zebra sensor-thing has gotten out of whack, and it goes off seemingly at random. Like late at night when you are tiptoeing through a quiet house. Which is not great, because have you heard what a fucking zebra sounds like?
Here you go
I can say without hyperbole that a zebra sounds like a clown that got bitten by a werewolf and then fell into a vat of toxic chemicals.
Here’s a take on how AppleTV could disrupt gaming. Consoles, pursuing hardcore gamers, have gotten more and more expensive relative to PCs. As I’ve mentioned many times before, smartphones & tablets have replaced consoles for casual gamers. They are general-purpose devices that happen to run games really well. Why buy a dedicated gaming device when you have something that does the job in your pocket?
Like the iPhone and iPad, AppleTV also runs iOS, just a more restricted version, without the App Store. As this post details, though, recent changes to iOS mean that the AppleTV is just about ready to transform into a pretty great gaming box. It would be easy to play the games on your phone on your TV, with an optional hardware controller (like one of these). There would be better performance than before (the new AppleTV would presumably have the chip currently in the iPhone & iPad, but this may even work on current-gen AppleTVs). Games you buy on your AppleTV would also work on your phone & tablet. Suddenly the console of choice for casual gamers – and many hardcores – would become clear.
Here’s Apple’s iOS 8 Overview site. And here’s the site for OS X Yosemite. I’m more psyched about both new OSes than I have been for any in a while. My favourite upcoming features, which all solve problems that I’ve faced quite recently:
- iCloud Drive, in which iCloud acts like Dropbox, and the related
- iCloud Photo Library, in which Photo Stream is replaced by something that works the way you’d want
- Spotlight on both OSes is much more like Quicksilver or LaunchBar and looks to be much more useful (and bypasses Google quite a bit)
- Continuity, in which things you’re doing on one device can be easily picked up on another (still not clear how the UI will work)
- They opened a lot more of iOS up to developers, including share sheets, notification center and documents, meaning complex workflows will get a lot easier.
- Family Sharing, in which sharing media among a family’s different Apple IDs isn’t a bewildering hellstorm
In other news, The OS X design flattening is quite tasteful (font: Helvetica Neue). Finally, I’m not a developer but I’m excited for Siracusa that a new programming language has appeared as he hoped it would.
I like Dropbox as much as the next nerd, but my work blocks it. I’d switch to Google Drive but I don’t really trust Google anymore. So I was glad to learn about Copy, another competitor in the cloud storage category with a couple of good things going for it. First, it starts at 15GB, and if you sign up with this link you’ll get an extra 5GB (full disclosure: so will I). Second, it will use a service called mover to migrate all your stuff from Dropbox or whatever over to Copy automatically. It has apps for every ecosystem you’d probably want (including Raspberry Pi!), but I doubt it has the broad-based support amongst iOS text editors that Dropbox does. Anyway, after a few days’ use, it seems pretty sweet.
I have been going through my photo collection on my computer because I was going to try out an online photo service and in the process write an article for my site about various photo storage problems and options. The service I signed up for costs $7 a month for 100 gigs. Turns out my library is 140 gigs. That would cost $15. I knew I could get it down. There are a lot of duplicates and rejected shots.
The collection starts in 2003 with the purchase of a digital camera. It was small and cost $700 for very little quality by today’s standards. The photos are sporadic. At first there are single tentative photos here and there, then – realizing the cost structure of digital photography – they blossomed, in fits. A night out, blurry and grainy. A day with visiting family members. Another night out.
They’re not from every day, but reflect conscious efforts to use the camera. A series of photos from a walk to work. Pictures of the condo I used to rent a room in. Pictures of the locations of the failed film I worked on. Of Lucy, my then-new girlfriend, now my wife.
They reflect my bizarre obsessions. There are quite a few of Toronto grafitti (all works which are now, I would assume, long gone). There are many shots of alleyways, signs, and abandoned things.
The years advance. Friends’ kids grow. A trip to Cuba, a couple jaunts to Ireland for a funeral and a wedding. Lucy cycles through various haircuts. There are shots of the first apartment we got together, and Christie subway station nearby, and the decrepit barber in between, and the tree that fell after a storm.
In 2008 I got an iPhone. The photos multiply. Many are mundane, fleeting images: a bruise I got after a bike accident. The serial number on my mom’s washing machine. A shot of a stranger on the subway. I delete a few but start realizing that these photos also tell little stories.
A year later another camera enters: the Panasonic GH1. The photos are all of a sudden much better. Some are beautiful, even. I bought the camera for its video capability as I wanted to shoot a documentary in Windsor. I took a ton of stills with it. The photos of abandoned things, of urban decay, explode.
I try to decide what to delete. I mostly delete only duplicates. There are quite a lot, as if the photos, left unsupervised, have been breeding like rabbits. But when it comes time to evaluate other photos I defer. Some of these I would have deleted years ago had I been paying attention, but now with the time passed, they seem much more interesting. Who am I to say what I will find interesting in another five, ten years?
A trip to Windsor, photos of the Detroit skyline. Around this time my dad was falling ill with dementia. There are only the occasinal photos of him. They are then followed by 40 pictures of my new Kindle. I was writing a review of it for my site.
Lucy’s parents’ cottage. My friends getting older. Abandoned buildings in Windsor. An image of my dad in the dark. I remember the occasion distinctly: he asked about my brother. I do not have a brother.
Then, 80 pictures from a shoot for work, with Star Wars characters. A trip to dim sum, with closeups of pristine teacups and chopsticks.
I start to realize I should not be writing about online photo storage problems and solutions. I start to wonder what reality my current urge to write such things obscures.
My dad is now three years dead and I have not written about it. I have but I have not shared nor finished it. But I am ok now with his absence. It does not seem as sad, or rather, the sadness has a character of beauty.
The photos continue unabated. Pics of houses for sale. A mortgage agreement. Our new house. Our new daughter. I do not want to delete anything.
I rethink.
Some rumours were going around that sounded silly:
[Evercore Partners analyst Patrick] Wang predicts that Apple wouldn’t just simply release a larger iPad — he sees the company using the additional screen real estate to create a hybrid-style device that could serve as both a tablet and a notebook, and would make the iPad lineup more appealing to business customers.
Apple’s never targeted the “enterprise”. (Aside: I know I’m a huge nerd but when I hear that word I always think of the starship rather than business people doing business things). Why would enterprise users need a bigger iPad anyway, and/or why would Apple feel the need to change strategies to compete with Microsoft’s keyboard-wanting Surface, which is not selling anywhere near as well as the iPad? Silliness.
But then I thought about “Pro” in an Apple context, which means creative professionals, and then I realized that Apple’s pro software products – Final Cut and associated apps, Aperture, and Logic – still do not have iOS versions.
In this context, a larger screen iPad would make a lot of sense. I once bought an 11” MacBook Air, hoping to edit a project on the go. It was too small a screen to edit on, however. Certain apps need certain elements on screen at all times. Video editors need a timeline, a clip selection window and a playback window, and when the screen gets too small, the utility of these elements is compromised. Step up to a 13” Air, however, and editing works much better.
It is by no means a given that Apple will release its pro apps on iOS. They may feel that the consumer creative apps – iMovie, iPhoto, and GarageBand – fit the bill. That the iPad is only for playing around, and when you need to do real work, you go to a computer. That doesn’t sound much like this pitch though, does it? Or, you could argue that Apple isn’t that interested in the pro market any more. And as an Aperture user, I can sympathize with that. Surely the pro market is a lower priority than their much larger consumer markets in different categories, but if they didn’t care about pros anymore they wouldn’t have just revamped Final Cut and redesigned the Mac Pro from the ground up.
You could also say that yes, Apple will eventually release Pro apps for iOS but no, that doesn’t mean there will be dedicated Pro iPads. Look at the marketing for the iPhone 5s first, though: “forward thinking”. “the most advanced technology”. “desktop class architecture”. Isn’t that very close to a pitch for pro hardware? Or look at the history of any of any Apple product line since Jobs’ return: start simple, and add an increasing number of models over time. I would expect a bigger, pro iPad, and maybe even a 10” pro iPad. I just wouldn’t bet on when.
Are there other distinctions this thing could have, hardware-wise? Besides the obvious (faster processors, faster graphics, more storage), I would argue for pressure sensitivity. Artists, designers, musicians and even photographers would benefit from it. Would they make a keyboard? I doubt it. When you think of these sorts of jobs – music, design, illustration, film & video, photography – a keyboard is not the tool that they need. If anything, different custom inputs depending on the role might be interesting; imagine a mixing board for music production, for example. But really the touch screen is the ultimate custom input, and is much more direct.
A 13” display isn’t the biggest thing in the world, but if the iPad Pro displays get any bigger – and one would guess that they might eventually – Apple would probably want to make a stand for the thing that would optimize its use on a desk. You would want to approximate the ergonomics of a drafting table; the stand might elevate the thing at a 15° angle and prevent it from sliding around.
The biggest thing holding back such a device isn’t really the hardware at all but rather the software. Apple has just last year completed the consumer-level iLife suite for iOS (do they even call it iLife anymore?). The pro apps would have to be a big upgrade from those. The OS itself may need substantial upgrades as well.
That’s it – some completely unqualified speculatin’ about an unreleased Apple product. Just what the internet needed.
I’ve been dangerously obsessed with the iOS/Android game Hoplite. It’s good, miss-your-streetcar-stop good (right Steve?). All the more impressive given how simple it is. Anyway I would like to channel the obsession into something useful. So here are some pointers for strategy.
General points
- You don’t get any points for killing demons. If you can pass them by, do it.
- Don’t go chucking your spear every which way. You may find yourself unable to get it back.
- Until you have some energy upgrades, don’t jump around too much either. You only have enough juice for two jumps by default.
- It’s beyond the scope of this article, but get a sense for the specifics of movement and which types of movement result in attacks. Jumping right at someone: good. Jumping over someone: good. Getting close to a demon in a non-straight line: bad. It’s hard to explain all the ins and outs, but it’s important for you to know.
- I tend to go after demons in this order: wizards, archers, footmen, demolitionists. Wizards and archers are dangerous in groups as they can control whole rows, blocking your movement. Demolitionists are unpredictable and can be dangerous, but their bombs are also really handy for bashing into enemies.
- VERY IMPORTANT: archers and wizards will not fire through their allies. That means you can use footmen & demolitionists as a screen.
- You regain energy (needed for jumps) by +10 “when moving into a tile with an adjacent monster” (per the dev blog). Good to know.
Upgrades
- There are some base upgrades, but others are unlocked by getting achievements. The available achievements are listed in a screen off the game’s main menu.
- Clearly, not every altar has every upgrade. Certain things are only offered if you have the base upgrade in that category, and other things are only offered at specific altars.
- If you do not see an upgrade you want when you go to an altar, get ‘Fortitude’. The best upgrades require sacrifices of health capacity, so bank some early on.
- Expand your throw distance early on by getting ‘Greater Throw’. That’s so demons who think they have retreated out of your throw range will still feel the sweet kiss of your spear. I also like ‘deep lunge’ and ‘mighty bash’.
- My favourite upgrade by far is ‘agility’. Once you unlock it you will only be offered it on level six, along with two other possible upgrades that depend on killing three turns in a row. With agility, if you get a string of three, you get a free turn. What the description for agility doesn’t express, however, is that if you keep killing you KEEP GETTING FREE TURNS. It’s killtacular. The later levels are so packed with dudes that I’ve managed to massacre everyone on a level, with time stopped, and then exited to the next level WITH TIME STILL STOPPED ready to kill again like a total time-destroying MONSTER. I think you’ll agree that the all-caps passages were ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.
UPDATE: the latest version has changed this behaviour. Now you only get one free turn at a time. Perhaps those all caps weren’t necessary after all.
- Another great upgrade is “winged sandals”. They increase your jump range. Sounds not that thrilling, but in later levels you will appreciate the huge range of possible moves it opens up. Pair it with increased energy to make hopping quickly to the exit a viable strategy. These are only offered at the level 10 shrine.
- I thought ‘teleport’ and ‘recall spear’ were great upgrades but I’m not as sold any more. In practice it often doesn’t work out – either there’s a demon standing on your spear, or you can’t teleport/recall without getting dinged by someone.
- I haven’t yet unlocked all the upgrades, so I’m probably missing some good strategies. So far winged sandals plus agility have gotten me to level 27, but I think now I’m just going to try and get all the achievements as some of the others sound pretty neat.
Here’s an interesting report on Sony’s cloud gaming initiative, PlayStation Now. It sounds like for the moment it is a backwards compatibility play, allowing PS4 owners to insta-stream PS3 games. However, as I wrote in Portagame, “Well, at least Sony kinda has a leg up in the TV set business.” The service was demoed on Sony’s TVs, and would theoretically allow the owner of a Bravia set (or a Sony phone or tablet, control issues notwithstanding) to play a rather respectable library of games without actually buying a game console. Another layer of hardware vanishes.
Another thought: this idea of streaming could carry over to Apple TV speculation. Part of the issue with an Apple TV set is that people don’t upgrade their TVs that often, leading to less upgrade money for Apple and a potentially frustrating experience for owners as Apple improves the product every year, marketing new hardware features and speeds that aren’t available to those with old devices. However, if the hardware that was rendering the interface was actually in the cloud, as it will be with Sony’s service, the user experience could be upgraded independently of the client hardware. Like an OS upgrade but with faster speeds part of the deal too. Not that Apple is any good at cloud stuff, of course.
I was off on a shoot yesterday and the volume of Ford news that has passed since my last writings is truly staggering. I’ve read some of the unredacted police interviews with Ford staffers, which are amazing. And then there’s “I have more than enough to eat at home”, and the council proceedings today.
But I don’t really have time to unpack everything, and you presumably know all about it anyway, so I just want to reflect on one aspect: I’m definitely feeling pity for Mayor Ford, in a manner I did not expect. This guy is the worst mayor in Toronto history, maybe in history general. He’s a liar and a hypocrite and a bully. But I also think of how he just wanted to play football and him as a teen huffing around the track alone, trying in vain to lose weight. How it seems he has always been bullied by his brother. How he must have felt obliged by his father’s legacy as an MPP to enter politics. How his family has misled and enabled him.
Most of all though this is a story of denial, both Ford’s self-denial and his followers’ denial about him. Ford is led astray by two primary self-delusions. The first is that he has a political future, and the second is that he doesn’t have an alcohol abuse problem (and perhaps other substance abuse issues). If he disabuses himself of the first delusion while holding onto the second, he could be in a lot of trouble and this could end very badly. I don’t want this to happen – partially because of some shoots of humanity yet emerging from my charred and blackened heartscape, partially because if he died it would really take the glow off all of the fun we’re having.
Ford more years!
There was a good Fifth Estate episode about the Ford affair on friday, and it’s now online. The followup post from the ‘broker’ of the crack tape is also key. Here is what Rob Ford can expect in rehab – a moving piece from someone who has experienced it. But lest we get carried away in our sympathy, we should deconstruct his fiscal record. Also: will Rob Ford give crackheads a better name? Somehow I doubt it. I’m not sure on that article’s claims about crack’s exaggerated dangers (there are no studies on many illegal drugs because it would be illegal to do so), but who knows.
Funny that I thought I could “deal” with this matter, in terms of posts to the site and in terms of time spent, by updating once a day. The story is too unstable though, unscripted, as unpredictable as a… well, as a crackhead. Notes made early yesterday seem almost quaint by the end of the day, after Doug Ford’s attacks on Police Chief Bill Blair, Rob Ford’s stunning admission of crack use, and then a teasingly dramatic press conference in which Ford failed to resign. Good summary of the day here, but odds are you know what happened.
What happens now? When Ford made his admission after months of stonewalling and lying, it came to mind that the timing must indicate some upcoming disclosure he was trying to get ahead of. There was news from the courts indicating information gathered in the wiretaps of Projects Traveller and Brazen 2 could soon be released. This would include alleged Ford dealer Lisi’s cellphone wiretap transcripts, so that will almost undoubtedly be more bad news for Ford.
City Hall is essentially trying to route around Ford at this point, with two different motions proposed – one that would strip the mayor of his powers to appoint the executive and committee chairs, essentially demoting him to lone-wolf councillor status. The other would force him to take a leave and seek help. Both have the support of his once-allies, but the former seems more likely to work. The longer he stays in, the more dirt will surface, the more negative international attention will accrue to our city, and the more unanimous the desire to get rid of him will be.
Other things of interest: that Vice article I posted yesterday has been disputed by both Towhey and Massoudi. Also, read Robyn Doolittle’s account of how the crack video story began.
One last thing: will Ford get re-elected? A lot of people are worried about this because there was the Forum poll that reported his support had gone up since Blair confirmed the crack tape exists. That was a 5% increase, within the margin of error and part of a poll that also reported a majority wanted him to resign. There is a more recent poll that has Ford losing all hypothetical 2014 races. Yes, Ford Nation still exists, but the borders are receding as time and dirt wears on. Ford won election with the support of a number of visible minorities, to say nothing of soft support across Toronto (including some 30% of downtowners who may not have realized just how much he was at war with them). As the dirt in the news wears on, no longer dismissable as some bizarre conspiracy, the contradictions in the Ford myth become harder to sustain.
OK, the fun part. The Daily Show’s take, and Colbert. Chris Farley tribute mayor!!
The Star has a couple good ones: Rob Ford may have paid bills for 15 Windsor Road, the crack house, and a mysterious email gap in Ford’s office in the days after news of the crack tape broke. Also, Ford was encouraged not to attend the police chief’s annual gala. That’s what happens when you dare the police to arrest you, I guess (although wouldn’t that be a nice spot for it?).
The story is back in the international media and figures heavily in US talk show monologues yesterday, although I don’t have video for any of those yet.
UPDATE: here’s a link to The Daily Show’s coverage.
So, where were we? When he was tailed by a news helicopter on Friday I thought we were in the climax to Goodfellas and figured he would get busted soon, ideally after a horse chase with the Mounties. But no, he stopped to get a pepperoni stick and pronounced it “hot” and “good”. His executive council held a press conference where they basically said they were worried but wouldn’t say what they were going to do. Then on his radio show sunday he apologized, but not for what you were thinking maybe? Seems like he was apologizing for public drunkenness and distracted driving, but won’t quit drinking, isn’t an alcoholic or a drug addict but won’t say whether he’s ever done drugs, or what was in the packages he exchanged with Lisi in parking lots, forests and gas stations across Etobicoke.
This is why that’s not good enough – but you probably know that.
What happens now? First off, the Lisi ITO still contains some crazy redacted stuff, including the actual transcripts of Lisi’s wiretap and the interviews with the mayor’s staff. And, while the police can’t release the crack video while it’s evidence in a court case, there is another video that could theoretically be shown. Blair has said that Brazen 2 is still ongoing. This matter will hang over Ford and City Hall and indeed Toronto, until Ford is history.
The biggest enemy of LRT in Toronto isn’t Rob Ford, or some suburban subway fetish, or a mistrust of surface rail. It’s the technology’s own vague identity.
In Toronto, we know what subways are, and we like them. That’s because we have two well-run lines that are the backbone of our aging transit network. The trains come frequently, and they run fast. Given traffic issues, the subway is often more reliable than driving.
We have less of a sense of what LRT actually is. Wikipedia has a decent definition: “typically an urban form of public transport using steel-tracked fixed guideways that operate primarily along exclusive rights of way and have vehicles capable of operating as a single train or as multiple units coupled together.” When the technology was proposed back in the 60s, it was differentiated from then-unpopular trolley/tram/streetcar systems by the following features –
- having the capacity to carry more passengers
- appearing like a train, with more than one car connected together
- having more doors to facilitate full utilization of the space
- faster and quieter in operation
Dedicated rights of way, multiple cars and low-to-the ground operation tend to be important. Wider-spaced stops and all-door boarding are other common features of LRT lines. LRT speeds average 27km/h, closer to that of subways (32 km/h) than streetcars (17km/h). Many LRT systems operate off-street, in their own corridors and with their own stations, more like a subway than a Toronto streetcar line. Essentially, LRT is something you can build in areas with less density, areas which don’t yet need the expense of the subway, but need something better than buses or streetcars.
Opponents in Toronto have managed to tar LRT with the brush of two less-loved technologies: streetcars and the SRT in Scarborough. The SRT is a type of light rail, but a very poor implementation of it, based on an unproven (and now discredited) technology, ICTS. It is loud, unreliable, and slow.
Streetcars have been running in Toronto since 1861 and were the backbone of our transit system for almost a century. Their modern implementation, however, is marred by old, unreliable cars, poor route management, and – more than anything else – by their operation in mixed traffic on some of the most congested streets in the country.
The TTC itself has muddied the waters around LRT, often affixing the name to streetcar-based projects like the Spadina, Harbourfront and St. Clair streetcar lines. Combined with the poor state of the streetcar system and of the taxonomically-similar SRT, it’s no surprise that LRT has gotten a bad name.
Things may change once people are able to take a ride on the Eglinton Crosstown LRT (currently under construction), which will run underground for most of its length, and which has subway-like stations (although more closely spaced). Unfortunately, that won’t be until 2022 – and transit advocate Steve Munro is worried that if the current irrational trajectory of transit debate in Toronto continues, even the crosstown line could get torpedoed.
Before then, those who want a rational transit network in Toronto will have to paint a better picture of LRT – or we will be paying for expensive, underused suburban subway lines like Sheppard and the prospective Scarborough extension for decades to come.
I saw Stray Dogs at TIFF this year. If I had actually done my homework and realized this is by Tsai Ming-liang, the director of Face, which I saw at the fest in ’09 and hated, I would have skipped it, which would have been a shame, as it was amazing. It’s tortuous though; much like Face, it’s long take city. Sometimes, 15 minute takes in which very little happens. You will watch a man eat a whole meal in one long shot. You will watch people sleep. Stare at things. Take a piss. But you will also see some amazing things, like the cabbage scene, or the film’s penultimate shot.
I will confess that slow cinema is an idea that does not excite me in the slightest. I would be much more taken by fast cinema. However, when I look into it a little bit, I see that Antonioni is considered a progenitor. I fucking love Antonioni – but I’ve never considered his films slow. There’s a lot going on in those shots. There’s always something to be watching.
I also know I had noted something interesting going on in Asian cinema – extremely languid pacing throughout a film, but periods of frenzied action. Seven Samurai, for instance, takes its sweet time until the end, when it becomes a fast cutting action fest. And the action is all the action-i-er for it.
Stray Dogs has something like this going on. It entrances you. It immerses you in the character’s world, bathing you in the sound. There is a strange phenomenon that is at the core of film: just by watching someone you develop a bond with them. Hitchcock and/or Spielberg would do this with point of view shots, but they aren’t even necessary. It happens in Stray Dogs without you realizing. And what has been left out, when it does show up, takes your breath away.
When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism is another film you could call slow cinema. In its case, the characters are often talking about cinema – they’re a director and actress who are having an affair while working on a film. Most scenes are long single takes, albeit stuffed with self-referential dialogue.
How is a film different from real life? How is it different from theatre? A seemingly innocent scene – the character leaves the shower and gets dressed – is rehearsed and debated over and over, and when a character does just that in the “real life” of the film (and not the film within the film, which you never see), you watch it like a hawk. They talk about how it would be better to film an argument as it occurs in real life, over half an hour, than writing a seven page scene of one. When the film ended, suddenly rolling credits, an audience member blurted, “what?!” In a way, yeah – but I’m still mulling it over a couple days later.
In the context of losing a cellphone, doing without all the edits of little electronic distractions every few seconds, I actually find slow cinema kind of interesting. The eye of the slow camera isn’t ours; it doesn’t blink. But it sees different things.
