Category Archives: Entertainment

Hugo Award Nominees

Posted on 2009-03-22 by pappp

This year’s Hugo award nominees are up. The big thing to note is how many of the entries have “read online” links next to them.

The only novel nomination I’ve read is Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother which, while definitely not high-end prose (its usually classified as young-adult fiction), is something everyone should read RIGHT NOW to understand the way our paranoid society and technology interact. Seriously, go, right now, Free in your format of choice or on dead trees from a bookstore. It’ll only take a couple hours at most. I also find Anathem promising; its on my reading list, but I haven’t got to it yet and doubt I will for some time.

Otherwise, I’m not terribly impressed by most of the options, too many of the nominees are derivative, or adaptations, even down into the short stories. Some of them are very good adaptations, and many of them are very enjoyable if you’ve read the precursors, in particular, “Shoggoths in Bloom” is good fun if you’ve read “At the Mountains of Madness” (Available here via Aussie copyright law and Project Gutenberg) or any of Lovecraft’s related works. I’m working my way though the ones with read links, thus far “26 Monkeys, Also The Abyss” is the most original thing in the collection, both in terms of content and format. The format and diction is genuinely bizarre, but I found it well suited to the story and the context of reading it online.

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All of this has happened before. All of this might happen again(?)

Posted on 2009-03-21 by pappp

The end of the Battlestar Galactica TV series just finished, and it is a satisfying end to the most impressive piece of film SciFi (distinct from syfy, you audience-alienating douchebags) in years. I put it on footing with Babylon 5 and Firefly, my other two favorite SciFi TV series. Not going to spoil here, I usually torrent and watch later myself, and respect those who chose to. The thing that puts it above the rest isn’t so much the premise or plot (although both are good), it’s that the acting and writing and scoring (especially the scoring) is spectacular.
It’s basically beyond ruin at this point, even if The Plan (movie, tells parts of the story from the cylon’s perspective) and Caprica (TV series, tells the story of the creation of the cylons), the remaining two planned bits of the franchise are crap, it will still have been a great run, making it one of those rare TV series that is good as (far) more than background noise.

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RIP Philip José Farmer

Posted on 2009-02-25 by pappp

Apparently Philip José Farmer died this morning (via boingboing). Farmer has been one of my favorite (Up there with William Gibson and Kim Stanely Robinson) SciFi authors for some time, his Riverworld series is arguably one of the best efforts in world building ever, and is a wonderful widely allusive piece in it’s own right.
I’ve heard it advanced in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way that people go to whatever afterlife they believe in; if so I’ll see you at the grailstone “Peter Jairus Frigate“

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Yay Synthpop!

Posted on 2009-02-23 by pappp

Somehow I missed that Electric Valentine put out an album last November. The album is The Friends With Benefits EP and it is quite good. I went on an Amazon mp3 binge and downloaded their entire catalog… for less than the price of a normal album, and its worth listening through.
Electric valentine is made up of Lauren Baird and Chris Qualls, who are the Singer and Programmer for A Kiss Could Be Deadly. A Kiss Could Be Deadly’s self titled album was probably my favorite album of last year, and everyone with the slightest inclination toward pop/electronic/punk should give it a listen.
Seriously. Right now. Go.
The Electric Valentine tracks are generally a little less dark (the title track *isn’t* about killing a lover’s competing interest) than the A Kiss Could Be Deadly tracks. They also tend to be a little more synthetic sounding (no guitar, more “unnatural” sounds, drum machine instead of drums) and distort the lyrics more (vocoder?). That said, the fucking impeccable pop sensibilities are still there, and Lauren’s voice still manages to be at once incredibly powerful and confident, and, to borrow a phrase, make you want to say “aw honey, It’s going to be OK.” I like. Not quite as much as A Kiss Could Be Deadly, but I like it, especially “Electric Ghosts” and “A Night With You”.
In other synthpop thoughts, I gave Lady GaGa’s extraordinarily popular debut album The Fame another listen and … it’s still mediocre. It has its high points, the first single “Just Dance” is definitely catchy, and “Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)” is a good pop song, but all told the album is merely OK for the only really breakout hit from the genre recently. I end up having the same problem, although not to the same degree, with it as when listening to Kanye West — it’s not bad, but it isn’t as clever as it thinks it is, and its terribly self involved.

I have to say I’m fairly pleased with Pop lately, some reasonably Avant-garde interesting stuff is bubbling up into the public conscious, and the indie scene is producing a lot of good things. Examples arranged from the true mainstream to stuff I’d be a little surprised if anyone else had heard of.

* Katy Perry’s One Of The Boys is an absolutely impeccable pop album and far more interesting than the drivel that was passing for pop in the 90s. Definitely my favorite product of The Matrix, who are responsible for a shocking fraction of mainstream pop in the last decade.
* The Lady GaGa Example Above
* Hellogoodbye had their improbable 15 minutes in 2006.
* Vanessa Carlton is continual favorite of mine, and always hovers around on the edge of the mainstream. Heroes and Thieves was a consummate pop album.
* I only recently became aware of Tegan and Sara, a pair of lesbian twins from Canada who write excellent pop.
* The Modern, a fluidly named British Electropop band that finally put out an album in 2008 after years of producing a scattering of catchy individual tracks.
* The A Kiss Could Be Deadly/ Electric Valentine examples above

Links to pay for albums specifically mentioned in the above post (explaining my ethics system for paying for music would be as long as this post, do whatever you do):

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Another TED Talk

Posted on 2009-02-20 by pappp

One of the newly posted Ted09 talks Barry Schwartz: The real crisis? We stopped being wise (person) – Barry Schwartz articulates something that I often hear friends attempting to articulate, and often try to articulate myself; that we need to apply humanistic common sense to our lives. He uses a word I don’t like “Morals” for the topic. I prefer the word “Ethics, it (at least in part) avoids the implications of innate valuation (good v. bad), normative synchronization, and external enforcement(higher power). That said, he has an excellent point; that people do ridiculous things because they follow rules instead of reasoning. He uses my one of my favorite examples for the topic, education; that the highly “scripted, lock-step curriculum” is set to stave off disaster, but at the same time enforces mediocrity. I have heard from friends that the remedial curriculum designed by the woman who taught me 9th grade advanced English, who apparently only teaches people at least 2σ out from the norm in either direction, has been adopted as the STANDARD curriculum. Aside from the problems with the idea that a curriculum aimed at abnormal people will work well for “normal” people, and the concrete evidence of lowered standards, prevents teachers from tailoring to the individuals they are teaching. It implies a lack of trust in teachers which, while sadly often well founded, is demoralizing to the exceptional people, driving them out of education, perpetuating the system’s decline. There are several other good topics packed into his 20 minutes as well, its well worth the time to watch.
On a related note, I HATE his 2006 TED talk Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice, which basically argues that people are too stupid and petty to handle choice. Especially irritating is the idea that raised expectations and individual responsibility (from selection) lead to disappointment and dissatisfaction with objectively better outcomes; the thesis in general that, and I quote, “The secret to happiness is low expectations” is awful and defeatist; to me real pleasure comes from meeting high expectations, there is less satisfaction in meeting low(er) expectations. Then again, I am, for lack of a better schema, a Myers-Briggs INTJ (groups in to “Green” in the pyramid-scheme looking but easier to handle TrueColors system), and he does make reasonably compelling arguments that his thesis IS the case for a great many people, so perhaps it is just me being an outlier.

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TED and the Interesting People

Posted on 2009-02-17 by pappp

I’ve been watching TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talks in the background lately, and it really is inspiring to hear truly brilliant people sharing with each other. The concept of the conference (which has been meeting since 1984) is to gather the brightest people in the three named fields, and have them share their ideas in 18 minute talks. CC-Licenced recordings of the best of the talks are released online on a weekly basis after the conference for the public to watch, this year’s are just starting to pop up.

Some of the standouts this year:
David Merrill: Siftables, the toy blocks that think – (person) I love physical computing, I love interesting UI design, I love embedded systems, and I love this talk. Reconfigurable smart little widgets that are aware of one another and able to interact in a natural way. This, and the other cool people it produces, makes me really think about trying to get into The MIT Media Lab for a Ph.D when the time comes. I had a promising conversation with a faculty member here at UK that knows people there, and it sounds believable that I would have a chance. (To self-plug, over on my Ideas Page, one of the works in progress is a dumber, simpler, hobbyist-accessible version of the same idea.)

Elizabeth Gilbert: A different way to think about creative genius — (person) I like her thesis that our culture has trouble dealing with genius, exhibited in the classic image of the tortured artist; I don’t like her idea that we should go back to the Greco-Roman idea that inspiration is external to the individual as a means to cope. As a writer, she is unsurprisingly an EXCELLENT speaker.

Some old favorites:
Anderson (Wired): Technology’s Long Tail – A good overview of the normal life-cycle of tech.

Mark Bittman: What’s wrong with what we eat — Seriously, the standard western diet is awful, and the way it got that way is evil. I’m not a vegetarian, I don’t even eat an especially great diet (mmm meat), but I always try to THINK about what I eat, and be aware of it, top down, which includes preparing a large fraction of my own food. I also like his notes that the current wash of “organic” and “local” is bullshit. The only thing I object to is that he seems opposed to the industrialization of food production, rather than the details of our industrial system (I like the idea of a future of vat-grown animal tissue and such). The thesis “eat real food” is really hard to object to.

Richard Baraniuk: Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning — He is an AWFUL speaker, both voice and style, and his particular instance Connexions is not exactly a shining example of success here, but the idea absolutely rings true to me. Old media is, or should be, dead or dying, especially in education. To modify a cliche, the medium changes the message; the use of, and expectation for the use of media, be it music, video, or text, is fundamentally different when it is distributed in a different medium. People expect to be able to interact with electronic media, to modify it, extend, and distribute it. One of my favorite things about electronic media is that it is instantaneously, interactively searchable. To make it even better, the cost of replicating digital copies, and the physical volume of those copies, approaches zero. The only impediment to all this good stuff is the old IP system. As an exemplifying anecdote, I had to ILL the article from 2005 referenced in my last post, because the journal it was in has a 5-year embargo on full-text databases. There is no technical impediment; only “oldschool” publishers not “getting it”. This is offensive to me. The situation that know exists with “piracy” of audio and video is creeping into textbooks; hit major BitTorrent trackers and you will see lots of digitized textbooks being traded now. At the same time, the situation is largely being avoided; watch people look for information, and they no longer look to old fashioned texts, they look at projects like connexions and Wikipedia that are built to embrace the new reality instead of trying to cling to the old.

This all jives very well with my personal anecdotal theory that “Interesting People are Interesting”: that is, that in general, anyone exceptional enough to be interesting in one way, will generally be interesting (and likely exceptional) in a variety of ways. It will usually be hard to articulate exactly HOW someone is interesting in a variety of ways; interesting people will find ways to interrelate and integrate their interests until they begin to appear seamless. Try to think of the neat people you know, I bet you’ll have trouble coming up with counterexamples.

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Dollhouse

Posted on 2009-02-14 by pappp

In my usual “Grab it off the Internet the next day” manner (Its OK for ratings, our cruddy Insight-provided DVR at least pretends to watch everything I download…) I watched the first episode of Joss Whedon’s new show, Dollhouse. Whedon’s record makes me optimistic for the show: Buffy was, while certainly not “good”, entertaining, and Firefly was amazing, while it lasted. The first episode isn’t enough for me to try to make a call about Dollhouse; it didn’t turn me off to it, but it didn’t grab me too intensely either. The premise is that a (evil?) company has a group of people who have had their personalities removed from their bodies, and repeatedly imprints artificial personalities tailored for clients into the bodies. The long arch plots of the show appear to be the lead character, one of the people with a removed personality known as Echo, becoming aware of her situation as pieces of other lives begin to leak through, and an FBI agent attempting to investigate the company doing the imprinting.
One of my favorite things about Joss Whedon’s shows is always his ability to integrate Pop culture appropriately. He definitely still has his sense for it; there is lots of current pop music in the background of the first episode, from big names like Lady GaGa (eugh, come on people, there is much better synthpop around), to a variety of things that sounded familiar but I wasn’t able to put a name to. The scenery also all had great current pop-culture integration; the dock scene is set to suggest the similar scene one of the Daniel Crag Bond movies (Quantum of Solace?), the motorcycle chase emulates the one from Kill Bill. That said, it all reads (to me) as a reference or homage, not a ripoff.

A few other things I will note:

  • * It is “Faster” than Firefly; the long-arch looking plots developed as much in this episode as we learned about River before Serenity came out in Firefly.
  • * Tahmoh Penikett is another one of those character-ruined actors; in Dollhouse, he plays a FBI agent obsessed with finding out about the Dollhouse, but I still come up with his character from Battlestar Galactica Karl “Helo” Agathon every time he comes on screen. All the main cast of Firefly is inexorably entangled with their Firefly characters for me in the same way now, so obviously it works both ways.
  • * Eliza Dushku, who plays the leading character Echo, is adorable.
  • * Another character, Sierra, is played by Dichen Lachman, who adds to the list of Hapa-Haoli celebrities. I recently discovered that the prevalence of this isn’t just because we’re nifty people; there is evidence that both Asians and Europeans tend to find (computer-averaged) Hapa-Haolis (or “Eurasians” in the article) more attractive than (computer-averaged) people of either race. The link is a pop-psych press release, the actual article is “Kieran Lee, et al., Attractiveness of own-race, other-race, and mixed-race faces”, Perception, vol.34, no. 3, pp. 319-340, 2005.” (FlatPress’s Font tags seem to be broken :/) I’ve been working on a paper about Cognition in Mixed-Race individuals for my Cognitive Sciences class; its neat stuff, I intend to either post the paper or something based on it in the not-too-distant future.
  • * Whedon has decided to work with Fox again. Fox has an amazing track record of killing off promising sci-fi series prematurely, so don’t let yourself get too attached.

The thing that strikes me most is that premise is HIGHLY reminiscent of the back-story for Molly from William Gibson’s earlier works. William Gibson is one of my favorite authors, and the record of attempting to translate his work directly to the screen has been pretty miserable, so the idea of someone with a proven track record for making a good TV handling it is both exciting and worrisome.

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Design

Posted on 2009-02-10 by pappp

I’ve been reading a lot of things about design of late: Donald Norman’s classic The Design of Everyday Things, Jef Raskin’s (disappointing) treatise on User Interface design The Humane Interface, copies of Dwell my mother passes to me when she finishes with them. In my Cognitive Sciences course, I think of many of the topics we discuss through the lens of a designer.
I came across Dieter Rams’ Ten Commandments on Design again today. All the babbling blowhards have managed to produce with their cognitive models and quantitative approaches (which I am usually all for) is summed up neatly in these ten statements.

Good design is innovative.
It does not copy existing product forms, nor does it produce any kind of novelty just for the sake of it. The essence of innovation must be clearly seen in all of a product’s functions. Current technological development keeps offering new chances for innovative solutions.

Good design makes a product useful.
The product is bought or used in order to be used. It must serve a defined purpose — in both primary and additional functions. The most important task of design is to optimize the utility of a product’s usability.

Good design is aesthetic.
The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.

Good design helps us to understand a product.
It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.

Good design is unobtrusive.
Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.

Good design is honest.
It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it normally is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.

Good design has longevity.
It does not follow trends that become outdated after a short time. Well designed products differ significantly from short-lived trivial products in today’s throwaway society.

Good design is consequent to the last detail.
Nothing must be arbitrary. Thoroughness and accuracy in the design process shows respect toward the user.

Good design is concerned with the environment.
Design must make contributions toward a stable environment and sensible raw material situation. This does not only include actual pollution, but also visual pollution and destruction of our environment.

Good design is as little design as possible.
Less is better — because it concentrates on the essential aspects and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity!

(I find I like it better with the selectively bolded words, that was my doing). I would really like to know when and where these were originally published.

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The Rest of the World is More Interesting

Posted on 2009-02-02 by pappp

While most of America was staring at burly men charging at each other and ads for things they can no longer afford, the rest of the world was being interesting yesterday:

  • * Iceland Elected (imagine the Super Mario coin sound with each word when you read this) a(n?) Apparently Qualified, Gay, Green, Leftist, Social-Democrat Woman as prime minister of their interim government while they restructure after their recent financial crisis. Good job Iceland, Congratulations Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir.
  • * Someone in The West noticed that China is imploding MUCH faster than Chinese officials claim (via BoingBoing). Surprise everyone! Or not. This should at least slow the paranoid ramblings about China getting hegemonic aspirations in the near future, they’ll be busy dealing with their own internal unrest. Couple this with the Satyam scandal news of late; all the favorite threats to America’s ridiculous (but comfortable for a substantial fraction of Americans) international dominance are going to be defeated by their own incompetence. I’m not sure how that makes me feel.
  • * France has decided to prop up their print newspaper industry by buying newspaper subscriptions for all French teens on their 18th birthday. In related news, a few days ago, we learned that its so inefficient to print and distribute traditional newsprint that the New York Times spends at least twice as much each year printing copies for subscribers than it would cost to buy each one a Kindle (For the non-nerds, a Kindle is Amazon’s “Wireless Reading Device”. I’m not particularly found of the implementation, but the idea seems sound. I use my N810 this way.). I shouldn’t have to explain why these facts are incongruous. Death to print media.

This collection of interesting news (and discovering a new musical guilty pleasure) probably contributed to my not getting enough done over the last few days, but isn’t it all interesting?

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Battlestar Returns

Posted on 2009-01-17 by pappp

Making up very nearly the last piece of watchable SciFi currently running, (Stargate Atlantis ends in one more episode, Eureka is off indefinately, possibly back in July), Battlestar Galactica is back on. I almost never watch TV on TV, I usually get it later from streaming sites or torrents, but since I was avilable and some of the other people in the house were watching, I figured I’d do the live TV thing. Turns out it isn’t actually any more exciting than watching it later from the internet. That said, the show is still dark and novel, and probably the best thing on.

(Next weird FlatPress behavior note “Save&Continue posts, rather than saving as a draft…)

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