Brush Past the Shuttle That Slides Through the Cold Room

I am procrastinating about taking down the Christmas ornaments, and my husband isn’t even out of bed yet, so I am going to start in on that “30 Days” Meme that everybody and their mom is doing (P.S. everybody has a different version, too, so I changed some stuff, mostly by taking out those fancy-ticklings).

Day 1: Your favorite song

Call me a loser, but I have a hard time listing a favorite song anymore. I used to listen to music when I was cleaning or sewing or doing other miscellaneous chores, but since approximately 2003, when Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix came out, I have been shifting toward listening to audiobooks almost exclusively. I think it has to do with not wanting to have my emotions manipulated by external sources. See, I had that bad emo-kid habit of listening to sad songs when I was sad, which just made me more sad. With actually reading, it’s very easy to get sucked into the emotions of the book, but with audiobooks, you’re in limbo. The book is inside you, in the sense that it is entering your ears (think of Ira Glass calling radio ‘the most intimate medium,’ though apparently he wasn’t counting books), but it is outside you, because it isn’t in your own internal reading voice. The reader might choose to put the em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble, so to speak, or might simply focus on a different word in the sentence than you would (even my favorite audiobooks have a few instances of this that drive me crazy). Audiobooks don’t command your whole attention the way regular books do; you can wash dishes or sew while listening to them, in a way that you can’t with books. This is where I disagree with Neil Gaiman: if you’ve ‘heard’ a book, you still haven’t ‘read’ it. It didn’t live inside your head the same way. Granted, I’d never say that to my students, most of whom would never read anything were it not for audiobooks. But still, I feel that if you have the ability to read, every book must be truly read first. Audiobooks are only for subsequent ‘readings.’ Plus with audiobooks, you can borrow them from the library, copy them onto your computer, and send them back again while still keeping them forever!

Anyway, my favorite audiobooks would have to be the Harry Potter series. I have the American versions, though had I the money, I’d order the Stephen Fry versions in a heartbeat (WHY they are different, I have no idea; the ‘American’ reader is Jim Dale, who is also British!). I have some short stories read by Neil Gaiman himself, and his voice is delightful. He knows the stories well, having written them, and I never have found any complaint about his emphasis, speed, pronunciation etc. I regret not buying Neverwhere on CD when I had the chance; I am assuming it would be similarly awesome. I really enjoy the Twilight audiobooks… the reader isn’t bad, and they help you laugh at yourself while listening. I have the Rob Inglis unabridged Hobbit, but the singing is terrible. Otherwise it’s fine, and I’d be delighted to get the whole Inglis Lord of the Rings (which I could do by going to Copley and copying theirs, were I less lazy). I have a version of The Subtle Knife that is FABULOUS. Philip Pullman provides the narration, but actors voice the spoken parts of the characters. You sort-of have to be in the mood for a whole radio play rather than just a book, but otherwise it is great. This is another one where I need to get off my butt and get the other parts of the trilogy from the library. Tim Curry reads the Lemony Snicket books, which would be entertaining except that I utterly hate those books with a burning passion. Then again, Curry is ideally suited to them; the treats everyone with the same sneering-endearment that the author intends.

As you can probably tell, my audiobook collection has mostly been inspired by my teaching career. I always loved Harry Potter and Gaiman and Tolkien, but the rest of the books wouldn’t likely have entered my orbit as audiobooks had I not been teaching middle school. Because of the views I espoused about the difference between listening and reading, I don’t usually choose to seek out audiobooks of serious adult literature. I’ve heard some of Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories, for example, and while I love her writing dearly, the stories were… sorta sad. And if I’m avoiding music to avoid sadness, why would I choose sad audiobooks? So maybe in the end, this all resolves to how I hate pop music, but I hate to be sad, so I listen to pop audiobooks?

Ahem. If I did have to pick favorite music, I think I’d go with the Counting Crows album August and Everything After, particularly the song Omaha. I have a very distinct memory of listening to that album, and that song, when I was a kid, alone in my mom’s car, waiting for her to come back, while opening a new pack of Magic cards, smelling that fresh-print smell and looking at dark-toned pictures of sorceresses and monsters. The lyrics aren’t fantastical, but they’re disconnected from real life but with some mystical-ish overtones. I guess the song puts me in a bittersweet, hobbit sort of mood, where all food is good and it’s nice to be at home, but we are going on a very dangerous adventure, so let’s go.

The Rest of the Meme
Day 02: Your favorite movie
Day 03: Your favorite television program
Day 04: Your favorite book
Day 05: Your favorite quote
Day 06: Your favorite radio program
Day 07: A photo that makes you happy
Day 08: A photo that makes you angry/sad
Day 09: A photo you took
Day 10: A photo of you taken over ten years ago
Day 11: A photo of you taken recently
Day 12: A biography
Day 13: A fictional book
Day 14: A non-fictional book
Day 15: A fanfic
Day 16: A song that makes you cry (or nearly)
Day 17: A two-dimensional art piece
Day 18: A three-dimensional art piece
Day 19: A talent of yours
Day 20: A hobby of yours
Day 21: A recipe
Day 22: A website
Day 23: A YouTube video
Day 24: A webcomic
Day 25: Your day, in great detail
Day 26: Your week, in great detail
Day 27: A Place
Day 28: A Poem
Day 29: A Person
Day 30: Your plans for the year

Kindle and Content Creation

So, this post originally started out as a response to Jon’s post about the Kindle content-deletion issue, but I think I strayed away from Jon’s original point. I’m talking more about content creation, I think, and where content is going to come from for the Kindle (will it continue to be bought from Amazon, bought and then hacked, or selected from freely-available works elsewhere?). Anyway, look to Jon’s post for a summary, including links to the original posts about what started the Kindle kerfuffle (A, yes I did write this whole post in order to use that little bit of alliteration, and B, Microsoft Word seems to think that “kerfuffle” is spelled “kafuffle,” which is ludicrous).

I think the issue with Kindle is that the hacking community hasn’t really gone at the thing tooth-and-nail. Realistically, someone *should* be able to create a way for Kindle users to download an e-book, turn off the Kindle wireless, dump the e-book onto a PC, use the PC to strip away the DRM, recopy the e-book into a new, neutral format (PDF? plaintext? a Word document?), and re-upload it to the Kindle (maybe this already is possible and I just don’t know it because I don’t have a Kindle) (Internet says: Yes, but maybe not anymore…). This is, in essence, what happened with the old .m4p files that iTunes used to use (and I think still uses for the ‘high quality’ stuff): after downloading the .m4p files, you could burn them onto a CD, then rip the CD back onto your computer as .mp3 files. It was annoying but reliable, and pretty quickly ‘virtual’ CD drives became available so that you didn’t even need to actually burn a disc. For me personally, I never pay to download music because I simply don’t trust Apple’s DRM, and it’s too easy to ‘lose’ a computer file. I doubt I’ll get a Kindle any time soon for the same reason.

Now I am going to make an analogy; bear with me because it will probably seem bogus for a while. You see, I played the Sims 2 and the Sims 3. The original Sims 2 came with a mini-program that allowed users to recolor the ‘meshes’ (the blank shape of the game characters’ hair and clothing) used in the game, and to share their creations with others. You could, for example, take a blank t-shirt and turn it into a t-shirt with a Red Sox logo (though I don’t know who would bother to do that, seeing as we all know the Red Sox suck, as do the Yankees). Pretty quickly, game users who were also familiar with 3D modeling programs like Milkshape created new ‘meshes,’ a functionality that the game didn’t support on its own. Now you could create a whole new ‘mesh,’ so that your Sim could wear puffy Tudor-era pants or sport a double-mohawk. This feature is probably about 70% of what kept the Sims 2 going from the initial release in 2004 to late last year. Most non-multiplayer games don’t last five years, even with expansion packs, but the additional modded content kept people interested. Nearly all of it is available free, and technically the end user license agreement of the game asserts that EA owns everything in the game, even meshes that you made and added to the game yourself. Under that banner, modders/pirates downloaded the little pay content that existed and redistributed it for free, too. EA didn’t ever take serious action against either side because all of the modders, pay and free, were creating content that generated profits for EA. Many of the mods even fixed game bugs that EA had failed to correct; by the later expansion packs, most of the EA discs shipped with so many problems that experienced game users would *wait* for mods to fix the bugs. Other mods made the game more realistic, subtly altering the game’s core code to make Sims behave more autonomously (or to make them put their espresso cups in the sink instead of leaving them out on a table, a notorious ‘bug’).

Of course, some of the content generated for the Sims 2 was X-rated, and EA would never want to be associated with it. Early on, users could disable the pixilated blur over naked Sims, but underneath the Sims were basically Barbies. As more advances were made in the world of modding, though, it became possible to download ‘skins’ that added in the missing genitalia (including a penis with different options for size, hardness, circumsized-edness, skin color and hair color), and objects that created new animations, allowing you to watch your Sims have sex (‘WooHoo’) in a variety of positions. All of the websites offering these things require you to be 18 or older to download, but much like porn, they don’t really have any way of checking, so if you’re a 12-year-old with a hankering to build your own Sim strip club, all of the tools are there on the Internet. EA never went after any of the X-rated mods, either, for the same reason listed above: some percentage of their game users wanted to be pervs, and pervs have money to spend just like everybody else.

In the later expansion discs, however, EA introduced SecuRom DRM (of Bioshock fame). The program couldn’t stop you from downloading mods, but it occasionally screwed up and killed some middle-aged lady’s CD-drive. The Sims 3 shipped without SecuRom, but the game was redesigned to use a ‘Launcher’ that connected to EA through the internet every time you start the game (somewhat like Whispernet). The Launcher also served as a ‘download manager,’ which was intended to force users to download all of their user-created content through the Sims 3 website. And, finally, it showed ads for the Sims 3 store, where you could download additional pay content (clothes, hair and furniture). Beyond the annoying Launcher, though, the Sims 3 was created to discourage modifying the game’s core code. It is constructed in such a way that, essentially, only one big ‘mod’ can be used at any given time. Advanced gamers, of course, devised a way to start the game without using the Launcher. More surprisingly, though, they are working together to make ‘mods’ that cooperate with each other, and to share the knowledge that they have gained via various reverse-engineering attempts (I guess that’s what you’d call it). Of course, the first mod that came out for the Sims 3 was a proof-of-concept that forced a Sim to pee himself, and the second mod was a ‘topless shirt’ for female Sims. Then all of the pay content mysteriously appeared, free and stripped of the Launcher-related DRM.

With the altered construction of the Sims 3, EA is clearly endeavoring to have more control over the user-created content available for their game. At this point, modders haven’t yet figured out how to create and import new clothes meshes (the Sims 3 has greatly increased the options for what size a Sim can be, making mesh-creation more difficult, but unfortunately this mostly just means that everyone in your Sims neighborhood is fat and ugly), but hair has been successfully created. If EA is smart, they will leave the modders alone, and the Sims 3 will benefit from having thousands of content creators, rather than the fifty or so actually paid by EA.

The iPhone has a similar concept going in the available ‘Apps.’ Though iPhone users currently have to add Apps using iTunes, I imagine that if Apple attempted some mass App-killing, there would be a larger push to ‘hack’ the iPhones and add Apps using a different program. Both the Kindle and the iPhone benefit from being hardware, as opposed to the Sims software. Their internal operations are, I assume, more difficult to figure out than those of an ordinary computer program. But, basically, I think it can be done. Apple is keeping the iPhone hip, and their own App-creating internal costs down, by allowing user App creation (though they are ultimately in charge of which Apps are available: a “Baby-Shaking” App was approved, then quickly removed, for example).

Unlike the Sims, which is technically a product in and of itself (and essentially the iPhone, which is, after all, just a phone), the Kindle relies on users purchasing content from Amazon to drive profits; it is a platform *for* content, rather than the content itself. Users could certainly limit themselves to out-of-copyright free texts and the self-published free-texts that abound on the internet (and which are considerably more popular in Japan). Realistically, though, at this point no one is buying the Kindle to read Twilight fan fiction. Amazon will have to figure out a way to make their downloads reliable and inexpensive, or users will become like Sims modders and .m4p sharers and find ways around the DRM. Then again, the Sims and the iPhone have the benefit of lacking any real competition. Oh, sure, you could always play “The Movies” or get a Blackberry. But no one would, because those products aren’t as good. Books, however, are still beating the pants off of Kindle in terms of affordability (no initial $299 investment, and you can get quality used books starting at fifty cents) and perseverance (they don’t magically disappear! You can even sell them and recoup some of your losses). That, more than the technical issues, is Kindle’s real hurdle. When a 2,000+ year old invention (codices first appeared in ancient Greece) does what your product does, only better, you have some problems.

You Look… Authorial?

Someone recently recommended Narrative Magazine to me, and as it is free, I figured I’d take a look. I was pretty put-off by the website right away. Under only a cartoon and the magazine’s header was a row of photographs of authors. Clicking on any story or poem brings the work up in its own window, but in the left margin is a photograph of the author. This bothers me. I don’t want to see the face of the person whose work I’m reading because I have that horrible tendency to judge people based on their appearance. If you deny having the same tendency, you are lying.

Let us take, for example, the only story from the website that I have yet read in its entirety: Conversations You Have at Twenty: A Memoir by Maud Newton. I clicked on the title, which did not appear on the front page with an author picture, because it could possibly be interesting to me, seeing as I have left twenty behind but not by so much as not to still be interested in being twenty (particularly as, at twenty, I was still in that blissful state known as ‘college’). Newton appears next to her memoir (you may view her directly via the link) wearing thick black glasses and a fuchsia shirt that makes her look a bit peaky. Her pinkish eyeshadow isn’t helping, either. She gazes off to the left, and her lips are parted, but in an expression that is more “Ugh” than “Oooh.” Given that her website offers several other pictures of her, all of which are more attractive than this one, one wonders why the editors selected this picture, or why Newton sent it in. Did the story warrant an “Ugh” expression? Is someone working toward sabotage? The website uses the same picture of her next to another story, but features a different one on the cover of their Spring 2009 issue.

But I digress. I read Conversations You Have at Twenty, and it wasn’t terrible, but I also didn’t feel as though it were my own. The beauty of reading, rather than watching a film or listening to music, is that all of the sounds and images appear in your head, just the way you want them to. But between the “A Memoir” subtitle and Newton staring at me (well, off the screen to the left actually), I couldn’t help but picture that “Ugh” face as belonging to the narrator. In reality, it does. But I don’t want to know that. I’m not trying to imagine history here. I don’t need to paint in the face of George Washington in a battle, or Queen Elizabeth presiding over the English navy. The narrator could, in my head, look like anyone so long as she has the features the author describes. She could look like me. I would not suggest that all readers must be able to empathize with the characters in a story in order to understand it; given the prevalence of very wicked characters one hopes that this is not the case, and further, it sort-of weakens the idea of intelligence if all we are able to appreciate are things that remind us of ourselves. I’d still like to reserve the option, though. Instead, I found myself stopping during the story to scroll back up and look at Newton again. When someone called the narrator “Maud,” I scrolled back up to check whether that was her first name. In the last paragraph, the narrator says, “I stood to get my cigarettes and caught sight of my bulging eyes in the mirror. They looked strange and robotic, as lifeless in their glassy protuberance as Mindy’s grim black ones.” I found myself once again scrolling up and thinking (very nastily I admit!), “Well, her eyes are pretty bulging.” Having the author’s picture there decreased the possibility that I would consider her eyes to be bulging because she’d been crying or was upset; instead, I resorted to concretes and looked at her. The quality of the story, or perhaps, the quality of my reading of the story, was decreased by having the author’s picture there.

I feel similarly about books being made into movies. For example (and forgive me for not choosing a schwankier subject), the first Harry Potter movie didn’t come out until 2001, after the first four books had been published. When the first trailer came out, I asked another Harry Potter fan and friend why on earth Draco Malfoy had blond hair. The first book refers to Draco as ‘pale,’ but if I recall correctly, no description of Draco mentions his actual hair color until the fourth book. In my mind, the two boys looked alike, both with black hair, but Draco seemed sickly and wan, while Harry was healthy, if short. Their appearances were juxtaposed as were their personalities. I probably would have kept up my mistake throughout the whole series had not the movie come out and wrecked it for me, but it wouldn’t have mattered.

Basically what I am trying to say here is that when I am a famous author (lolz, etc.), I won’t put my picture in my books. Or, at least, I won’t put my picture RIGHT NEXT TO my writing to the point that it is distracting.

Also, I apologize to Maud Newton that she had to suffer the indignity of being the person whose story I read while being bothered by author pictures. I feel sort-of anti-feminist in critiquing another woman’s appearance (which is pretty hypocritical seeing as I critique the appearance of women and men whom I dislike all the time, but not usually on the Internet). I will endeavor to forget what she looks like and read more of her work with a fairer eye at a later date. Sorry, Ms. Newton.

Why Cats Rule the Internet, and Will Rule the World

So, I just read this article* about parenting, and it got me thinking. About cats. See, unlike babies, I actually have cats. Lots of people have cats. In fact, cats are sort-of like pre-babies for the human set. And then there are sensible people, like me, who intend *only* to have cats, and no babies.

The article traces the development of the concept of ‘parenthood,’ from a time when most people shared a house with their extended families, growing up surrounded by other people’s children until they had their own, to the modern era, where most adults spend a significant portion of their life neither being nor living with children (going through both pre- and post-children phases). This is where the cats come in. See, after moving out of their parents’ house, but before having children of their own, many people have cats. They have dogs, too, but typically, because dogs are a bigger responsibility than cats (they can’t shit inside), they tend to come later and less frequently. Cats are more like roommates, in that they can essentially take care of themselves, requiring only feeding (and even then, there are a multitude of cat-feeding tools so that one can go almost a week without filling up the cat food distributor). Young adults (as in, people who have not yet had babies, not teenagers who want to be called ‘Young Adults‘ when in reality they are just teenagers) care for cats the way they cared for younger relatives in more crowded times, or the way they will eventually care for babies. Cats thus become the analog for babies.

As we all know (and if you didn’t, the article will tell you), people with babies like talking about their babies. People without babies, it follows, like talking about their cats. In the early(er?) days of the internet, when lolcats began (according to Wikipedia this was in 2005, but as we all know that is forever in Internet time), there were lots of people using their digital cameras to share their lives. Of course, for those of us with no babies, we were forced instead to share pictures of our cats. The original i-can-has-cheezburger cat may be an example of overzealous cat-parenting, seeing as it appears to be a professionally-shot, posed portrait of a cat, but regardless, many of us spend time photographing and videotaping our cats, and consider doing so completely normal. This time translated quickly into an abundance of cat photos on the internet, available for lol-ifying.

Now, there are also plenty of baby pictures on the internet, but for the most part, people don’t really spread baby pictures to people they don’t know, while there are entire websites devoted to pictures of cats. Why? Well, for one thing, it’s not really your fault if you have an ugly cat. An ugly baby, on the other hand… Plus, babies are future-humans. They will eventually grow up and get mad that you spent some part of their childhood mocking them. Cats, however, can’t read. Unless they are hungry, they don’t really care what you’re doing.

And that is how cats took over the Internet: by being adorable and mockable at the same time. Indeed, cats are the perfect babies: you don’t have to worry about them getting into college, or drive them to soccer/piano/ballet practice, but you can tell people all about how adorable they are, and prove it with pictures. Really, all that remains now is for us to stop having babies, and to start having more kittens.

*Look, I get a subscription to The New Yorker from one of my aunts, and this means that in the cold, dark times between glossy fashion magazines, which only publish monthly, my main source of bathroom reading is The New Yorker. Occasionally, I read the whole magazine cover to cover. It’s not always worth it. Then again, there are those times when my husband puts my magazines someplace completely ludicrous, like the living room, and I am left trying to make meaning out of the Victoria’s Secret catalogs. Hint: the meaning is boobs. Footnote post-script: I do feel that it is a still-positive sign of my continuing youth that I do not yet actually subscribe to any magazines on my own. Then again, this does mean that when I tell my mom I’m just plain old not reading Cooking Light, she keeps sending it anyway ‘because it’s free.’

Regular Post-Script: I am composing this entry in G-Mail because Word 2007 is too slow to function properly when iTunes is also working (currently it is downsizing some of my audiobooks from 256 kps to 128 kps because they are taking up too much room on my hard drive and sound quality is not as big a deal in audiobooks as it is in music), and I noticed that when you start a new e-mail composition, you get a screen with no ads on the right hand side, but when you return to a draft you began previously, there are ads on the right! This is a clear sign that Google is trying to force you to finish everything in one go. Google is ruining revision! The writing process will never be the same! Ahem. </masshysteria>

Where I Read

I have a confession to make: I’m a bathroom reader.  I come from a long line of bathroom readers.  My father’s masculine basement-bathroom features a rack of fishing magazines and popular guy-spy novels; my grandmother’s fluffy pink powder room displays Yankee magazine and Cooking Light in a white wicker basket, right next to the phone (I am not even joking about that last part).  Putting aside potential risk to my intestines and colon, I have to say, the articles that I read from the stack on my bathroom windowsill linger in my mind far longer and sink in more deeply than do the articles I read on the couch with my laptop, or here at my desk.

For me, the bathroom is a minor shrine to solitude.  There is no television, computer or radio in the bathroom.  The phone cannot be answered from the bathroom.  And even though we have lived together for nearly three years, my fiancé and I are still determinedly trying to move the pitched tent of love away from that other place, and consequently each of us avoids the entire bathroom-end of the apartment when the other is using it.  This lack of distraction cannot be underestimated in the modern world.  The bathroom thus provides a quiet library/study/office, something we clearly couldn’t actually fit into a Boston apartment half paid for by a teacher’s salary.  Perhaps real estate agents should advertise this.

The bathroom’s advantages do not end there.  You see, I’m also an early riser, and I like to lift my early-morning haze by reading some short, interesting article.  Consider it mental calisthenics.  Of course, magazines don’t fare well in water, and the structure of my morning forces me to reflect on my reading while I proceed with the remainder of my routine.  I usually turn on the radio as I do my makeup, but I always end up with a good, solid fifteen minutes of thinking before that, while I take my shower.

The combination of quiet during reading and time for contemplation after reading makes the bathroom my ideal reading location.  Reading on the internet always seems like a schizophrenic experience: one moves from page to page, skimming here, maybe reading in-depth there, but nearly always having several tabs open at once.  This divides one’s attention, an effect only increased by the nature of most webpages, which feature advertisements and links glaring at you from the margins around the text you’re trying to read.  Plus, how often does one sit down with the intention of reading seriously on the internet?  Computers dominate most people’s work lives, relegating article perusal to something mildly illicit.  This contrasts clearly with the bathroom, where one is unlikely to hold and flip through several magazines at once, and where no one dare intrude beyond a knock.

Even considering print outside of the bathroom, it seems to me that what one reads on paper and what one reads on the internet, though they may be literally the same articles, will be processed differently simply due to the different formats.  Take, for example, the New Yorker, a magazine that lives both in my bathroom and, in most part, on the internet.  New Yorker articles tend to be long, longer than my realistic internet-attention span.  However, they are usually a lovely length to be read in one long sitting, or two shorter ones, in the bathroom.  The New Yorker website, though not particularly untidy, hems in the main article with a blogroll on the left and advertisements on the right.  Truly ADD readers can reduce the clutter by clicking on “Print” and viewing the article on a single page, but this displays the text in ultra-wide, clunky paragraphs.  Even the most orderly, well-laid-out webpage can’t compare to the neat, justified columns of New Yorker text on gentle, eggshell-colored pages.  The words don’t flicker, they aren’t backlit: the print pages of the New Yorker are just more pleasant to read.  For me, that simple difference of appearance makes me more able to absorb the content of the article.  I don’t have to stop every few paragraphs and close my eyes (something I’ve started doing after a massive internet reading binge on my laptop, in my florescent-lit classroom, left me seeing little neon dots for hours… possibly I am getting old).

Of course, there is another major difference between the internet and print: though there are many print articles that one can read online, much of the world’s online content is only available online, for a reason.  Though there are many valid, intriguing online-only things to read out there, in general, something that made it into print is just of higher quality than something on the internet.  This fact has given a subtle prejudicial coloring to my reading: the internet is for unusual, niche topics that can’t be found on paper, or for cursory reading.  True paper print is for the things I really want to spend time considering, for the ideas I want to get cozy with.  Cozy, of course, being found on a nice, cool throne.

Oh, the Loneliness of the Rock Star

 

I’m at some friends’ apartment, and there is a Rock Band party going on.  I hate Rock Band.  I think it’s easily the worst idea ever.

First of all, Rock Band markets itself as a social activity. Unfortunately, that is a lie.  In social activities, you look at and converse with the other people participating in the activity.  This is as true of dancin’ in da club as it is of playing Scrabble.  The draw of social activities is that they are, by definition, social.  Rock Band is not, by our definition, social.  When playing Rock Band, you look at the screen, and you scarcely converse.  Your actions are dictated by the screen, and so you become a slave to it. You are ‘concentrating’ too much to converse, and obviously if you look away from the screen, you will mess up (for example, I was so afraid of looking away at the screen while *singing,* the easiest activity, that I tried to gently pass a bottle opener to one friend, and ended up nearly taking off another’s nose).

Now, some might say that it is in the nature of videogames to be antisocial.  This is not so.  Take, for example, two-player fighting games.  When your goal is to defeat your enemy, and your enemy is sitting next to you on the couch, the game is intensely social.  You taunt your enemy, you mock him, you probably shove him if you’re a dirty fighter, and you’re likely to look at him at least occasionally.  This is because your moves are dictated by your fingers, rather than by the screen.  If you know the ‘moves’ of your character, or if you are a skilled button-masher, constant eye-contact with the screen is not necessary.  Furthermore, when you are playing *against* a friend, rather than cooperatively, you have more incentive to interact; interaction might help you.

A few Rock Band fans have wandered in, and they assert that Rock Band is cooperative, in that you can get bonuses for simultaneous actions, and you can ‘save’ other players.  This is, I suppose, true.  But you’re still focused on the games within those interactions.  Again, with a fighting game, you might be reminding your friend of his lack of a girlfriend, for example, in order to ‘psych him out.’  In an action like that, you are looking toward the goal of the game, but you’re also communicating about the real world.  In Rock Band, what conversation about the real world occurs?

Rock Band is an illusion in another way.  It takes long years of practice and training in order to be a skilled musician, but you can tool around on the guitar with little expert knowledge.  However, Rock Band takes whatever concentration and effort you might innately have had, and drives it toward something totally fake and pointless.  If you had a guitar, you might learn a few chords, and maybe a song or two, with the amount of time and effort it takes to play Rock Band.  However, guitar skills stay with you forever. Rock Band-skills are important only when playing Rock Band.  You won’t be able to play Rock Band songs for your grandkids.  You can’t compose new Rock Band music.  There are no Rock Band stars, only regular Rock Stars.  And Rock Band won’t make you one of those.  Indeed, Rock Band stifles creativity: you can only make up new chords, or ‘jam,’ in a few controlled instances.  And the ‘jams’ you create are not actually tied to the real sounds a guitar or bass makes when you play it.

Back in the day, Super Mario Paint had a program that allowed you to compose music using little icons.  Each icon was a type of sound, like a drumbeat or a horn blast, and the note that sound played depended upon where on the screen you placed it: higher and closer for a higher, faster note, lower and further-off for a lower, longer note.  Without genuine training, you could make up new songs with only a bit of effort.  If you wanted to start with a preprogrammed song, like “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” you could, but you could also branch out from there, editing it until it sounded nothing like the original.  Rock Band could easily have some sort of creative functionality, but it doesn’t.  No one makes money off of licensing when you’re just composing new songs.

So, Rock Band is evil because it destroys social connections and stifles creativity.  It’s also evil because, well, it just isn’t my bag.  I’m not coordinated and I’m not musical, so I can’t keep a rhythm, and I can’t press different buttons with my left and right hands.  It’s a struggle for me to type with the home keys!  Thus, when everyone decides to play Rock Band, I simply feel left out. Singing is possible for me, because there isn’t that much skill involved, but that just goes to show that real skill and Rock Band-skill are not connected: I sing like a dying cat in real life.  At a Rock Band party, I feel like an Amish woman at a lingerie party: out of place, and a little like my values make others uncomfortable.  That’s how you get me in the bedroom typing about how much I hate Rock Band, rather than me in the living room, playing along or watching.  I mean, you can’t talk to the people who are playing.  So what’s the point? 

On the Nature of ‘Blogs,’ This One in Particular

Here is your question for the day, or mine, brought to you by my lack of desire to finish grading 8^th grade editorials, 33% of which are on “Why We Should Stop Gang Violence.” What is the function, the ultimate purpose, of an online blog (which, as a side note, is an ugly word that will find itself quite dead to me after this entry)? It is distinct from a diary, for whom the audience is one, or perhaps, one now, and the rest after death (I, being vain, did and do write my diaries that way). The diary entry model wouldn’t work for a blog, obviously, because the ins and outs of a person’s daily life are generally not very interesting, unless that person is dead and you are plumbing his or her quotidian depths in search of literary or interpretive insight. Seeing as I am neither dead nor worth researching, I cannot put those entries on the Int@rw3bz without inflicting pain on the reader.

But what does one wish to read in a blog? Many of the blogs I occasionally read are made up of links to news articles, with the blog author’s commentary on those particular articles. Occasionally this is very interesting, as when the blog author is discussing the implications for society in general of the particular news item (I Blame the Patriarchy can be a good example of this, sometimes). Occasionally it is very boring, because the person writing comments does not bother or is incapable of explaining his or her opinions, or because the articles linked-to are dull or uninformative.

Though I cannot promise never to write an entry like that, for me, a blog of commentary on other blogs is a like a long hedge maze, where the beginning rather than the end is obscured. I have too often (and thrice would easily qualify as such) spent literally hours reading blogs trying to find the ur-entry about whatever that started the whole long debate, only to be disappointed at how much electronic hot air has been expended upon nothing. Though I am fascinated and amazed by the small webs of blogs commenting consistently on a single issue, and discussing it amongst themselves, I could not do that either. I’d like to say that it is because my interests are too broad, but I know that instead my attention is too short and narrow. I enjoy reading something or thinking something, expounding upon it for a brief period of time with as little effort as possible, and moving on to a new topic, seldom to look back. I feel that this is a very twenty-first century attitude, and so perhaps the twenty-first century medium is the best place for it.

Therefore, be it hereby resolved that this ‘blog’ must be read not as a blog, but as an online literary occasional, with an author and editor of one (or, because I split their duties, .5 each). I will try to write on a single topic per entry, but I make no guarantees. These essays will be true to the original concept: my small tries at thought, with Montaigne in mind, though I suspect he would have as little care for my output as you ought.