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Shocktoberfest

The Feed

(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.

Behold, New Design

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:

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:

If you see problems other than this stuff, can you let me know? It would be greatly appreciated.

EOL

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.


(source)

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.

Update a year later: see this hupdate.

An Observation

When you scan through a sitcom in fast forward, the laugh track sounds like an alien hissing.

It’s way funnier than the show. Plus, you’re done with the thing in a third the time.

Still, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the alien in the audience, as it got angrier and angrier with every stagey joke.

Quote:

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

RiFF RAFF is mesmerizing

And I am mesmerized.

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 RAFF JAMES FRANCO SPRiNG BREAKERS HARMONY 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.

Sad Snoopy

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.

Enjoy weeping quietly about your lost youth!

Lynch Fest: Dune & Wild at Heart

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.

Dangerous Gamer vs. Brainy Gamer

Meta

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:

  1. Bemoan the state of video games; easy targets: sequels, shooting, breasts, space marines
  2. Choose a champion artist-developer
  3. Ignore all other contenters
  4. 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!

Will things get better once Indie Game: The Movie comes out maybe?

Press “A” to compare me to film

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.

Insert conclusion here.

Hitler Playing Video Games

(via)

The Cast of Twin Peaks Endorses a Japanese Canned Coffee

How could I not post this?

Skate 3 Glitches

I don’t know why but I found this video impossibly funny.

That is all. (via waxy)

The Toronto Downtown Relief Line

Last week I tweeted “Fun fact: the Sheppard subway has lower ridership than the Queen streetcar.” This is true, according to TTC numbers, which say the Sheppard line had 47,700 riders per day in 2010, whereas the 501 Queen had 43,500 and the 502 and 503 Queen have 7,800 (also from the TTC). So hearing Ford and his “rump of sycophants” (nice turn of phrase, Gee) force this issue into a suburbs vs. downtown battle royale, in which the hideous downtown elites want to hog all the subways for themselves and force real people to ride “trolley cars” or “fancy streetcars”, well, it’s frustrating. I’m one of the theoretical downtowners who wedges himself into the trolley car every day. I think of the near-empty cars sailing through Toronto’s least busy subway station, Bessarion, and try to pretend I’m hogging a subway right now.

I may not need to pretend much longer. New TTC Chief Andy Byford has been doing more than whisper about the awkwardly-named Downtown Relief Line:

“Fundamentally, there will come a point with the city’s population increasing exponentially where we do need that new capacity,” Mr. Byford said. “The downtown relief line has got to be looked at and has got to be talked about right now.”

The DRL is an idea that has been floating around in some form for many decades. As this Spacing post nicely summarizes, a 1911 proposal was for Toronto to have Bloor, Yonge, and Queen subway lines. The 1985 plan “Network 2011”, which also proposed the Sheppard subway, positioned the downtown relief line as a way to relieve congestion at Bloor and Yonge:

The first phase of the DRL would have been built to relieve the Yonge line south of Bloor and at Bloor-Yonge Station, by encouraging downtown-bound passengers from the Danforth line to transfer at a point further east to avoid Yonge. Following the study of different route options, the alignment chosen would have met the Danforth subway at Pape Station, running under Pape to Eastern Avenue and across following the railway and Front Street to Union Station and on to Spadina Avenue on the west.

Here’s a map of that plan, courtesy blogTO:

Transit expert Steve Munro recently examined the 1985 plan:

The Sheppard subway was expected to have 15,400 peak riders by 2011, but the actual number on the existing line is 4,500. The projected peak demand for the full line in 2011 is now 6-10,000.
[…] The Downtown Relief line was projected to have 11,700 peak riders by 2011, and the demand projection today is 12,000. This is no surprise given that the DRL would serve a demand that actually existed 25 years ago, rather than a notional demand in a regional plan.

How’s that for downtown subways? Here are a couple of maps of possible DRL routes:

Those are obviously quite different. First, the western part is considered by Munro and others less urgent, since the University line already relieves the Yonge line travel from the west. But
there are also capacity problems at Union station, so that might not be the best intersection point with the Yonge-University line.

Why is this line a subway and not LRT? First, there is no space for the downtown part to be above ground. Secondly, given that as much as 40% of the peak Yonge line traffic might divert to take the DRL, and also considering the high ridership on the Queen car as well as the neighbouring King and Dundas lines (57,300 on King, 31,000 on Dundas), the demand already warrants a subway.

How feasible is this line? It would cost somewhere between $3- and $9-billion, depending on length and route chosen. The Sheppard subway extension would have cost $3-billion. It wasn’t funded, but council has asked for a study of “new revenue tools” (i.e. taxes) that might pay for transit expansion, and has also moved to consider the Downtown Relief Line. Obviously, the new head of the TTC is a proponent. As this fascinating article makes vividly clear, the Yonge line is already at capacity.

If Rob Ford’s re-election pitch is going to be “subways, subways, subways”, relief line advocacy might be an effective way for more progressive councilors to save themselves from being branded “anti-subway”. I suppose this is a downtown elitist subway, but there are DRL proposals that have it going up the Don and connecting with the upcoming Eglinton LRT. This would be a good way of making sure Eglinton Station itself doesn’t go the way of Bloor-Yonge.

But before that, perhaps it needs a better name? Downtown Elite Line?

Personal Lynch Fest

Because it’s been a while for me, and because my lady still hadn’t seen some of my favourite living director’s films, I decided to curate a personal David Lynch film festival for us. We’re watching at least one film a week. Here’s what’s on the list so far:

A few of these are available on Netflix in Canada: Elephant Man, Dune, The Straight Story, and the entire run of Twin Peaks(!). There are Blu-Ray releases of some, but nowhere near enough: Dune, Blue Velvet, and a German box set that has Mulholland, Lost Highway and Inland Empire.

I will try and write up most of these films as we go. We’ve gotten through a few films already, and my writeups are lagging, so I wanted to post this part first.

Minecraft 1.0

MINECRAFT 1.0

I wonder if some of Minecraft’s appeal will dissolve now that it’s a 1.0 product and will probably see less frequent updates.

I seem to play it once every few months and whenever I do, I see something new, not just because the human perceptive system is selective blah blah but because quite literally new things have been added to the game since I last played. I was roaming around and I saw a wolf. Wolf!

One’s natural reaction is to search on the Minecraft wiki to see what you can do with a wolf. If you feed it a bone, you can tame it. Then it will follow you around and attack your enemies. You can even tame a whole pack. God damn!

The preceding paragraph indicates the other arcane appeal of Minecraft that is rare in games: it’s almost a game about looking things up in a wiki. The game does a notoriously poor job of telling you what you can and should do, so you’re trained to consult out-of-game sources from your first in-game night, when you were probably eaten by zombies since you didn’t build shelter before nightfall (surprise!) because you didn’t run up to a tree and punch it to make wood blocks (surprise!) enabling you to make a craftbench enabling you to make tools etc etc…

That’s the risk, that what any rational game critic would call improvements to the early game will take away some essential charm. Similarly, the cessation of the perpetual beta, if it does in fact mean the game needs fewer updates, could take away some of those surprises, which were legion this last play: wolves. Breeding animals. Enchanting. Potions. Back to the wiki!

There’s so much good there though that one needn’t fear too much. Almost certainly that sense of wonder, exploration, and enterprise will remain. I watched a doc about early man whose thrust was that homo sapiens was unique because of his ability to imagine what wasn’t there. He could imagine the path of a herd of big hairy prehistoric elephant type things, and conceive of a trap to put there. He could imagine the path of a projectile.

He could see a near-infinite world of blocks and imagine building the USS Enterprise out of those blocks.

It’s not genius but it’s ingenuity, and that’s what makes Minecraft feel so human. I know as a downtown champagne-socialist elitist I should decry the path of human history which paved paradise with highways and clogged our seas with oil, but you can’t help sometimes being impressed.

Like if you ride on a jet, don’t you sometimes think, “Dude! We fuckin’ made this. What have monkeys built lately?”

The hero of Minecraft is born with nothing in his hands and then he punches a tree and soon his basic needs (hut, torches, pork chops) are taken care of and after a bunch of lifting he is riding a minecart out of the earth’s core up into his sky castle. It’s the ascent of man in a nutshell.

If games have real-life value inasmuch as they train us to deal with life in certain ways, Minecraft teaches us to see how much is possible in this world of ours, to learn more about it, and then go fucking build that.

BTW as of press time (ha! I love saying that) Minecraft is actually version 1.1, and the latest snapshot release added, amongst other things, the breeding of ocelots.

Final Cut Pro X Updated

For free, to add a few features:

The non-linear editing program was initially launched to protests by the pro-editing community, but Version 10.0.3 addresses nearly all of the remaining criticisms of the post-production tool, adding multicam support, external broadcast monitoring (still a beta feature), and detailed chroma-key controls. And perhaps the biggest criticism—the lack of an upgrade path for projects built into previous Final Cut versions—has now been addressed by a third-party plugin called 7toX, from Intelligent Assistance.

Happy now, internet?

The recent fear and loathing about Apple dropping the “pro” market was based on two things: the perceived dumbing-down of FCP, and the neglect of the Mac Pro. It never made sense to me though. Why would Apple bother with a huge, from-scratch rewrite of Final Cut if it planned to ditch it?

The speculation was that since it a) borrowed some interface from iMovie, b) contained some DSLR-friendly features, c) was drastically cheaper, and d) was missing a bunch of features, that Apple was targeting “prosumers” (shudder) and not “pros”.

a) If the same people who rethought iMovie a few years back were doing the same to FCP, it follows that some interface will be shared. If they’ve figured out better interfaces for editing, they’re going to want to use them. As I stated before, traditional editing software packages (NLEs) are based on a tape-to-tape interface metaphor which isn’t helping anyone anymore. We should be happy that Apple is trying to improve it.

b) DSLR workflow is a file-based workflow, which is obviously the future. Things like background transcoding and auto-sync are just plain handy for whichever files you are importing, whether prosumer like AVCHD or pro like Redcode.

c) FCP X is $300 to Final Cut Suite’s $1000. Suite contained extra software like Colour and Soundtrack that Apple no longer offers (it has folded some features of these apps into FCP itself). It also contained Motion and Compressor, which Apple is now selling separately for $50. Furthermore, there is no upgrade pricing on the App Store, so the next time Apple decides to charge for a new version of FCP X (XI?), we will all be paying another $300 + $50 + $50 – and if you want Logic to take the place of Soundtrack, add another $200. It’s not that much cheaper.

d) This latest update should allay concerns about dropped features. This is how Apple does it: they don’t include features they feel they haven’t gotten right yet. The original iPhone was missing a bunch of features we take for granted now (copy & paste, multitasking, third party apps).

I’m actually pleasantly surprised multicam support has been added already (especially since I have a project coming up that will need it). So the big question mark now is the Mac Pro. Informed opinions say that Apple is just following Intel’s rather slow-moving Xeon roadmap, which suggests a March update. Okay then!

Ninja Christmas

I still think this Snake Eyes christmas mashup from 2 years ago is really good:

But then again, I’m biased.

Comedy Rebrand – Looking Good

It’s the final piece of the puzzle, the missing link of new logo promotion:

Love the magic golden sax man.

Comedy Rebrand

The look of The Comedy Network, the channel I work for (along with SPACE), is changing next week and I have been snowed under with all the work that entails. Everything my department does – all the promos IDs, bumpers, tags etc – had to be replaced. It’s exciting work though and we’re all really happy with the new look.

To make ourselves just a little bit busier, we also did a teaser campaign about the new logo. Here are the spots. In case you’re too lazy to click that, here are two:

There’s one more spot that only starts airing on tuesday – I’ll post it here shortly thereafter.

Prisencolinensinainciusol

In 1970-ish, “The Italian Elvis” Adriano Celentano recorded a song called “Prisencolinensinainciusol”. To the Italian ear it sounds like English, but to the English ear it sounds like gibberish, which is what it is. If the Joycean slurry of near-meanings wasn’t awesome enough on its own, it’s set to a stripped down, crazy-funky droning four-on-the-floor arrangement so that the whole setup prefigures both rap and disco. (That said, I think James Brown and Bob Dylan are the real influences, and there’s nothing magical about the song’s foreknowledge, but that doesn’t make it any less thrilling). Add to that the boss dancing, and you have a timeless classic on your hands.

I tried to figure out how the internets learned about this, but I can only trace back so far. There’s this, announcing an edit of the song, and giving a bit of history. (Here’s the mp3 of Greg Wilson’s edit BTW.) There’s this, which gives us the black and white original:

Which is then picked up by Sasha Frere Jones, then Metafilter, then BoingBoing, and then years later, your unreliable narrator stumbles into the whole mess via an Easter egg in the game Glitch. Anyway, the important part is when you search Youtube for Prisencolinensinainciusol and uncover gems like these versions with different sets of subtitles, all set to a mashup of the two videos:

Precinct Calling Ace Vantuso / Prison Colon ends in I choose all / Freezing culmination I choose all.
hope something / poke something / awesome babe!

It’s amazing to see how we project meanings onto sounds. It’s worth adding that in Celentano’s words, from the intro to the TV show staging, the theme of the song is incommunicability, that “we don’t understand anything anymore”, and prisencolinensinainciusol means “universal love”. I also love this karaoke staging of the song for drunken Portlandians, which seems to sum it all up.

Let me just say that when I added the song to iTunes, I chose the genre “heaven”.

Scenes from Glitch

This means I have a garden, so I get some seeds and start planting in my little garden patch. I grow rice, potatoes, spinach, tomatoes. With the result I cook, but there’s always something missing for new recipes – where do I get a pickle? I check the auctions, they seem pretty expensive. I keep farming, but soon I get some fruit tree beans, which means I can plant trees that don’t vanish when they yield their crop: cherries. With the fruit changer, I can change these into other fruits. With my blender I make orange juice. It’s pretty good. I can sell this at auction.

I explore the auctions more. There are cherry trees everywhere in Bortola, so I harvest them whenever I pass. Before long I have a hundred… The item screen says these are worth 1 currant each. I list them at that price and they sell instantly. Well, sounds like I can sell them for more than that. at 5 each they still sell instantly. When I need the money to buy something, I go out and harvest.

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I’m still experimenting with all the things you can learn and do: alchemy, element handling, tinkering, cooking. Every recipe needs salt or some other seasoning. It’s hard tracking them all down at the vendors. It would be better to harvest allspice, which grows on spice trees, and can then be transformed into other spices.

But where are the goddamned spice trees? Nowhere in Bortola. I ask in global chat, and people point me to remote, exotic climes where there are indeed spice trees, but they are much rarer than cherry trees. I gather enough allspice to last and then go back to my hood. I tweak my avatar, give him a nice fro.

I realize I can sell cherries at 8 currants each. I level up in tree-related skills, so now I can harvest twice and get more cherries. I am selling mad cherries now, not even bothering to hold on to any to cook with. I am the Cherry King. I will drive a Porsche with CHERRY as the vanity plate. Well, there are no cars in Glitch – but I do dream of getting a huge ass crib. I can see them in the real estate listings, with their slick design and lots of garden and storage space.

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In the forums I see a post lamenting the lack of spice trees, which used to grow in the central locations. Turns out you can cut down trees! And poison them. And if no one waters them, they die. I feel guilt – I haven’t been watering all the poor trees I have been exploiting to build my cherry empire. I thought they were always there, or respawned periodically, like in every other game. I vow to be a better glitch.

Someone knocks at my door. That’s odd! I answer. The stranger glitch tells me she is considering buying in my neighbourhood and wants to look around a property. I show her. I tell her what I know about the gardening, tree growing, etc. We add each other to our buddy lists.

I plant a spice tree in my garden. I learn to capture pigs and bring a couple home. I waste a lot of time learning meditation skills – when you meditate you restore your mood and energy, but the amounts don’t seem to justify the time it takes to learn the skills. Oh well.

I explore a lot. The desert is a mysterious place, with a lot of treasure and some back story that isn’t super fleshed out at the moment. A bandit (NPC) steals my focusing orb, which I need to meditate. I eventually buy a new one.

Down south there are a lot of mines, which are full of people. You can make mad currants mining, people tell me in chat. But I find it boring. It’s just click and wait.

You can grind down ores you mine into elements that can be reassembled. I’m not skilled at this, so it uses a lot of energy. When you use up all your energy or mood, you die. I inadvertently grind myself to death and wake up in hell. Someone there tells me all you have to do is step on a bunch of grapes. Consider it done.

In the forums people are talking about how farming has been nerfed. It used to be comparable to mining, or earned a bit less but people enjoyed it. Now they are pissed because it takes way longer and you can barely make a living farming. After a while the devs say they will adjust things, and then they do, and everyone is happy. (Mostly.)

I am level 15 now and halfway to getting my mansion. I have been watering the trees. The game test period is almost over; I have heard of the “Apocalypse Parties”. I get the location and head to Ajaya Bliss, deep in the caverns.

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There are many many people there. They are doing “no-no powder”, giving gifts. I use my meditation skill “radiate” that gives others mood bonuses. People invite each other on races. I give away some green eggs I made. In the chat, GOD starts giving warnings. Then it is over.

An Open Letter to my Mayor and City Councillor About the Jarvis Bike Lanes

I sent the following letter to Mayor Rob Ford and my local Councillor, Mary Margaret McMahon. You should do something too, the vote is tomorrow or wednesday.

Dear Mayor Ford and Councillor McMahon,

I am writing today about the removal of the Jarvis bike lanes.

As a driver and a cyclist, I understand the frustrations of both groups. Toronto has terrible commute times, and it’s very important that we do something to improve them. But eliminating the Jarvis lanes will not improve matters. Existing cyclists will clog up the curb lane, forcing cars into the passing lane. It will needlessly endanger the cyclists and frustrate drivers. City planners found peak transit times have increased by only two minutes since these lanes were built. The city’s staff considers them a success, and casual surveys of motorists on Jarvis indicate the majority want the bike lanes to stay.

When I’m driving a car, I like bike lanes because they keep bikes out of my way. And the more bikers on the road, the fewer motorists. As a cyclist, I know that bike lanes are safer and encourage more people to take up cycling. Bike lanes are a win for both groups and while it may take a few years for bike lanes to reach optimal use numbers, I encourage you to have the patience to plan for our city’s future and not for the present.

Toronto’s population is increasing by 100,000 people a year. New condo buildings are springing up in every neighbourhood in the city. We cannot continue increasing our city’s density and expect all the new residents to drive, as we have no more road space for cars. We need strong alternatives, and cycling is one of them. Let’s build for the future by building strong transit and a functional bike network, not retreat into an impossible past by pulling up newly built bike lanes at the taxpayers’ expense.

Thank you for your time.

Worst Song Lyrics Ever

This AV Club post about terrible lyrics reminded me of my favourite worst lyrics ever, which I seem to post about once every few years:

I was feeling no pain
Feeling good in my brain.

Tom Petty/Traveling Wilburys, “Last Night.” Like yeah he was feeling plenty good in his shitty brain, that he let that zinger make it to the record. To be fair, these are the following lyrics:

I looked in her eyes
They were full of surprise.

Kind of puts the savant back in idiot savant. There’s a story there, at least.

I’m glad Zack Handlen brings up Katy Perry – that song Firework drives me insane. OK so ostensibly it is about celebrating one’s individuality. Then why use the metaphor “firework”, a device so rarely used individually that the singular form of it just plain sounds weird? And in fact, if you set off a single firework, everyone would be profoundly disappointed. Perhaps the song is actually a subversive takedown of individuality, and I should recalibrate my distaste.