Friday, January 26, 2001
They don't seem to have put it on their site yet, so you read it here first (even if you've heard it already on the radio): Triple J's Hottest 100 for 2000 finished with:
- Coldplay, 'Yellow'
- Wheatus, 'Teenage Dirtbag'
- Powderfinger, 'My Kind of Scene'
- U2, 'Beautiful Day'
- Powderfinger, 'My Happiness'
Rock'n'rolllllll!
link
____
Scott McCloud's first Zot! Online story is now complete. Good stuff.
link
____
Lab rats dream of mazes. But the mice in our house dream of stealing the cheese out of the traps I set for them. (Yes, still.)
link
____
Owen shows how patent battles almost crippled another world-changing technology in its infancy. Fascinating, and sobering.
link
____
One of the stranger sights in Thailand (click on the thumbnail). I saw these dolls on sale in a couple of towns; this photo was taken in Kanchanaburi at the end of October 2000. If I were a sociologist I'd make a real meal of this: Westerners objectified as the 'Other', rampant Occidentalism, etc. But I'm not, so I was just able to enjoy them free of academic analysis. What a relief.
link
____
I finally saw Pleasantville last night. What a wonderful film. It's one of the best uses of technical trickery in the service of a story that I've seen. It uses an amusing but modest idea to say some significant things about the 1950s, nostalgia, change, personal discovery, art, bigotry, and, well... life. Why wasn't this a bigger hit when it first came out? God knows. Sometimes I feel totally out-of-touch with popular opinion.
link
____
I really shouldn't link this here. It'll be of no interest to anyone who reads this weblog (well, except you, Paul, if you're reading) and it makes me look too trainspotterish for words. But hey: a fan's gotta do what a fan's gotta do.
Besides, in some of the longer pieces I transcended the specific subject of the musician concerned and said some thoughtful things about art and music per se, and if you like that sort of stuff you might find them interesting whether you've heard of this guy or not.
(And thanks for the link, Graham.)
link
____
Thursday, January 25, 2001
I have piles again. Piles of books next to my bed. Why do I do this to myself?
And they're almost all travel-related. Right now I'm armchair-travelling in Iran with Peter Moore, round Ireland with a fridge with Tony Hawks, across the Nullarbor with Bill Bryson, around Madagascar with Peter Tyson, and through India with William Sutcliffe. I'm even preparing to hack my way with a mental machete into Irian Jaya with Tim Flannery.
Strange to be keeping all of those unfinished journeys in my head at one time, all of them comparing and contrasting with my own of the past year. It feels almost as if we're all talking to one another. I've turned my brain into a youth hostel dining room...
link
____
Nostalgia. Thanks to some fortunate timing, the Dungeons & Dragons movie is screening while I'm in the same city as an old friend and fellow player, so naturally we went along to see it together last night. In an impressive display of social insight for two former D&D players, we both correctly guessed that neither of our wives would be in the slightest bit interested.
Yes, I used to play D&D (first edition AD&D, to be precise). It took over our lives for a couple of teenage years. Stuart observed that while he often can't remember what was said in a meeting that morning, he can still remember countless rules and details of the game, which we haven't played since about 1985.
Certainly it all came flooding back while watching the movie. It's actually a pretty good representation of the feel of a D&D campaign, even if some of the more pedantic players-turned-critics have been picking the script apart. Okay, so it's a bit unlikely that low-level thieves and magic users could take on a high-level MU and an army of red dragons; personally, I was more annoyed by Thora Birch's staggeringly wooden performance as the young empress, a terrible piece of casting.
Given that it was ten years in the making, the producers must be annoyed that some of its thunder was stolen by The Phantom Menace, of which Dungeons & Dragons is now a little reminiscent. But apart from that, there's plenty to enjoy here for former players, from Jeremy Irons's hammy performance to Tom Baker's cameo (now that was better casting). All the D&D staples are here: taverns, equipment-buying, thieves' guilds, mazes, gold pieces, dragons. When I saw the Beholders (a classic D&D monster that is essentially a floating ball of eyes—eye of the Beholder—geddit?), I knew that here were some movie-makers trying to do this properly.
The sets and costumes are terrific, and the CGI is mostly of a high standard, although it can't compete with Menace. The plot only has a few holes—particularly during the final show-down—but most of the actors get into the spirit of it well.
I do wonder, though, what non-players would make of it all. So much of the pleasure of the movie comes from knowing the game. I guess it's no worse than movies of video games—better, I'd say, since D&D is inherently a story-telling game—but some of it may seem a little odd to the uninitiated.
But that's nothing. If you want odd-to-the-uninitiated, wait until Lord of the Rings.
link
____
Wednesday, January 24, 2001
The letter to The Australian that I mentioned writing last week was published today in their Higher Education section, so I've now posted it elsewhere on this site. As I said, it pretty much sums up some thoughts I've had for years. Now that I've swung the cat around my head and flung it into Trafalgar Square, it'll be interesting to see what sort of response it gets.
link
____
Thoughtful article on The Ghost of E-Books Past at the Atlantic Monthly [via NUblog], from one who made them.
link
____
Eminent anthropologist Clifford Geertz writes on the Yanomami scandal for the New York Review of Books. If you know the background already, the last page puts it into perspective well.
link
____
Hear the Earth sing [via Haddock]. Requires QuickTime.
link
____
Tuesday, January 23, 2001
The Graphospasm: A Weblog for Fiction Writers. Looks good.
link
____
Good Lord. There's suddenly a Mac OS 9.1. I was so busy pondering things X that I didn't notice. There's also a list of issues as long as your arm, but that's par for the course.
link
____
Free stuff and not-free stuff, via the 'Filter.
link
____
link
____
Renée Zellweger wins the Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. Yessss! Of course, it won't mean a damn thing for the Oscars, because Comedy is not Serious Art, oh no, not even a movie that is really only one part comedy to one part thriller and two parts drama. But still.
link
____
Monday, January 22, 2001
And now, thanks to yours truly, Dirk knows that 'techno' is connected to 'Madagascar' because 'the techno music of the Vengaboys is played on taxi-brousses in Madagascar'. Heh.
link
____
Hey now. Dirk knows about Madagascar, and it's not a bad six-fact primer. Still, I know more, and some others (including 13 million Malagasy) know a lot more, so the score is still Humans 1, Artificial Intelligence 0. Go, Humans!
link
____
It's true; that always-on-convergent-broadband-video-on-demand stuff is a little overdone. I've had more fun on some mailing lists than I've had watching most TV programs, and I'll bet I'm not the only one.
link
____
Read between the lines of the piece below and you'll be able to deduce two things: one, I'm about to take another break from weblogging (not this week, maybe not next week, but soon) to concentrate on building bigger, better, and less inward-looking things; and two, they'll be web-entertainment-related.
Um, and I'm still looking for work in the UK and developing a Madagascar travel book proposal. It's a tricky balancing act. Jane has recently started a couple of months of temp work in the city, which is bringing in some money and giving me a breathing space. I don't want to waste that time updating a log every day, although I'm considering replacing Walking West with a weekly so that I don't lose half my audience (as I have on previous breaks—man, can't a guy take a few weeks off without everyone abandoning ship?).
As for the main project—well, I've hinted at it before; it's the same one I got excited about last September. But unfortunately, even though it's all there in my head, you can't just will these things into existence: they take time. Still, now that I've made enough headway on the Madagascar stuff to be able to set it aside for a while (and see what some publishers think before writing a whole hefty tome), the time is finally right to start some mad coding.
A shame that the venture capital opportunities have pretty much disappeared, but ahhh, who cares. I'm doing it anyway.
link
____
The latest issue of A List Apart confirms what web designers already know: it's getting ugly out there. The dot-com crash has led to end-of-year lay-offs throughout the US, as the stories in this issue confirm.
All of which brings a certain wisdom in hindsight. Possibly, going to the Bay area in the third quarter of 2000 to convince employers to go through the laborious H1-B visa sponsorship process to take on yet another web designer was not the best timing in the world. Possibly, the reason I could get a job offer to do what I didn't want to do (learn a new programming language and operating system in the space of a few weeks to trouble-shoot installation problems for a web-based business product on hardware I hadn't really used) but not one for what I did want to do (use my existing skills and learn more so that I can do great work in the field I love) had more to do with the impending doom of the industry than with my resumé. Possibly. (Hey, this is my weblog, I can wear the rose-tinted sunnies of hindsight if I want to.)
Fortunately, things don't look so bad in the UK, though with my luck I'll get there three months before the blight hits Blighty as well. (But that's okay; my UK Ancestry permit won't depend on holding down a particular job.)
It's all a passing phase, of course—anyone who seriously thinks that this is the death of the web is kidding themselves (or a day trader—same difference). The reason we've seen more tulipomania surrounding the web than there was around radio or TV is simply that at the end of the twentieth century we were well-primed for hi-tech breakthroughs, and were prepared to bet/invest accordingly. We could actually believe that they would change the world in a way that our ancestors couldn't.
That said, the early years of motion pictures were a similar tale of boom and bust: there was a huge craze for short films when the technology first appeared, but it tailed off quickly once the novelty wore off. Motion pictures only regained and held their grip on the public when they turned into something else: movies. Longer narrative pieces. Substantial entertainment, as opposed to insubstantial entertainment.
Most of what passes as web entertainment these days is not substantial. It's all short cuts. Flash tricks. Throwaway gags. Make no mistake, it can be very entertaining, and I have no problem with short-form entertainment: I'm a cartoonist, and I love sketch comedy. But a single-panel cartoon is not as likely to grab the world's attention as a full-length movie. Until the web can make that transition to longer narrative works it will continue to be seen as a relatively trivial medium, no matter what the converted (the ones I'm preaching to right now) say to the contrary.
What's that? The web is a business tool? A tool for direct marketing and improved mail-order services? A way of pushing glossy brochures down a phone line instead of through a mailbox slot? Well, yes, it's those things too. But so is television, and nobody buys a TV just to watch infomercials.
If you want to be an Internet rock-star, start behaving like a rock-star, not a one-hit wonder. Record albums, not singles.
link
____
An era ends as Zeldman closes his guestbook. That's one guestbook I was proud to be in. Even prouder when Jeffrey took one of my emails (a gentle parody) and posted it to his site, which said volumes about the kind of guy he is. Undeterred, he later began posting personal entries regardless, and we've all been the richer for it.
link
____
Sunday, January 21, 2001
Insert Something Meaningful Here [via MetaFilter].
link
____
As promised, a photo from another country this time: a lying Buddha at the Nakhon Pathom Chedi (a giant domed temple) in Thailand. The gold leaf was stuck to it a square at a time as an act of devotion by Buddhist worshippers.
link
____
