Corollary: Technofetishism XXXVII

I received my Geko 201 in the mail today. Woot!

Magazine Me XXXIII

There must be something in the water these days. What is up with all the new magazine launches? Former Red Herring editor Jason Pontin is launching the Acumen Journal of Sciences. And Audrey is a new mag aimed at Asian American women. I can see some potential in a business magazine about the life sciences, but in a niche already crowded by some not-so-good magazines such as A and Yolk, will Audrey rise above?

Thanks to I Want Media.

The Movie I Watched Last Night LXVII

While my mother was in town for Mother's Day and Kurt and Geraldine's wedding, we watched a couple of movies on the Big Blue Couch at Church Corner:

Friday: The Straight Story
Based on a true story, this 1999 David Lynch film produced by Disney tells the tale of a 73-year-old man who embarks on a six-week journey from Iowa to Wisconsin on a riding lawn mower. It's a slow-paced, gentle movie that's quite different than Lynch's usually dark narratives, and its emotional weight and importance is impressive. Richard Farnsworth's portrayal of Alvin Straight, the aged hero of the film, is solid, as is Sissy Spacek's role as Straight's developmentally disabled daughter. For the most part, the movie is a linear hero's quest, and the story unfolds through vignettes as Straight encounters various characters along the way: a pregnant runaway, a helpful family, and eventually, the brother for whom he set out on his journey. The Straight Story is a story about family ties, honor, perseverence, and redemption -- as well as about pride and love. While I expected more of an emotional resolution or apology at the end, when Straight is reunited with his brother (portrayed by Harry Dean Stanton), the quietly accepting conclusion is impact enough. A sleeper, but substantial.

Saturday: Night on the Galactic Railroad
Admittedly, I picked up this 1985 anime directed by Gisaburo Sugii mistaking it for A Chinese Ghost Story. But the confusion was not regretted. Based on a 1927 story by Kenji Miyazawa, the anime is a modern fable about two friends who embark on a quest for self-realization and -understanding on a mysterious train that takes them to various stations. Along the way, the youths encounter various characters and scenes that contribute to their moral and philsophical learning and development. Although the anime is quite beautiful -- and the soundtrack appropriate for the film's dark mystery -- the pace is somewhat slow. Regardless, by building the young heroes' emotional and social development on a quest for one's father and independence, Sugii communicates many of Kenji's ideas and ideals to good effect. In fact, this is an interesting parallel watch to The Straight Story because both portray linear quests for understanding. When the end arrived, I was slightly surprised and dismayed by the anime's initially dissatisfying conclusion, but then another aspect of the story was introduced, and it wrapped up quite nicely. Despite an overly Western and Christian philosophical leaning for a Japanese fable, the film's animation and soundtrack is luch and impressive, and the overall effect is one of care and growing confidence.

Event-O-Dex LVI

May 16: Anchormen CD release party and Handstand Command third anniversary celebration with the Operators, Asian Babe Alert, and the Reaganauts at the Milky Way in Jamaica Plain.

The Free-Range Comic Book Project XXIV

This is an installment of Media Diet's Free-Range Comic Book Project.

Crimson #17 (DC/Wildstorm, April 2000). Writer: Brian Augustyn. Artist: Humberto Ramos. Location: On a seat near Baggage Claim 7 in Terminal C of Logan International Airport.

For more information on this project, please refer to this Media Diet entry.

News You Can Abuse III

My friend Tom Hopkins, who works with Soft Skull Press in New York City, is featured in a recent edition of the Onion. The article isn't about Tom, but the face in the photo is definitely Tom.

"A guy in this cartooning class I took at SVA this past fall was a staff photographer for the Onion," Tom says. "He took pictures of everyone in the class who was game -- and willing to be potentially humiliated in public like that."

Comic Book Collections V

I've got to come up for another header for these zine library, archive, and infoshop notices. Because this is another library or archive not of comics, but of zines.

In the Austin Chronicle, Josh Medsker chronicles his efforts to organize a zine library in Austin. Sounds like he's approaching the project in the right way, and I look forward to future reports on his progress!

Thanks to Bookslut.

Music to My Ears XXXVII

Thanks to Jim Munroe's delightful DIY video CD-ROM zine Novel Amusements #3 and Jon Sasaki's clever submission "Mixed Tape," I've been introduced to Dictionaraoke. Dictionaraoke is a Web site collecting MP3 files made by combining online dictionaries' computer-generated voices with karaoke music for hits of yesterday and today. I've never heard such a dry, passionless rendition of the Beastie Boys' "Girls." Ball2000's version of Kiss' "Rock and Roll All Nite" alternates male and female computer vocals, making for an energetic, giggle-ridden number. The chorus cracks me up. Awesome... I'll be spending some time here.

Rock 'n' Roll Business School?

Today's Boston Globe offers an interesting pairing of related items. Hilary Price's Rhymes with Orange comic strip today takes a look at what happens when dance companies go multinational. And Joan Anderman's feature story about the local band Elcodrive indicates an interesting direction for independent bands to take.

When Elcodrive sends its demo recordings to labels for consideration, they included a six-page marketing plan that outlines promotional programs for radio, retail, and touring; a report from Polyphonic HMI, a company that uses software to predict potential hits; and Soundscan and Broadcast Data Systems reports. It's a band in a box!

But the truly intriguing thing here is Polyphonic HMI (Human Media Interface). Based in Barcelona, Polyphonic has developed music analysis software called Hit Song Science. The program predicts the hit potential of a given song by applying algorithms to compare the song to the last five years' worth of Top 30 hits from Billboard and UK Official charts. While the software applies no science to song lyrics -- just musical content compared to previously popular songs -- all five majors use Polyphonic's service, which runs $3,000 an album.

Someone want to gift the Anchormen $3,000? Our new CD will come out May 16. Maybe it's better we don't know how good or bad we really are.

Among the Literati XXXVI

Wil Wheaton, former a cast member for Stand by Me and Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as a blogger himself, recently founded Monolith Press. Aiming to "give the unconventional a voice, and the world a chance to hear them," Monolith's first book is by Wheaton himself. Dancing Barefoot collects five short stories about life in the so-called Space Age. Hide and seek, time machines, Car Wars, Star Trek, and Wheaton figure prominently in the book, which looks promising. Make with the clicky click already!

The Free-Range Comic Book Project XXIII

This is an installment of Media Diet's Free-Range Comic Book Project.

Codename: Strykeforce #8 (Image, November 1994). Writers: Marc Silvestri and Mike Heisler. Artist: Joe Benitez. Location: Given to my friend Tim while on the Red Line between Park Street and Central Square.

For more information on this project, please refer to this Media Diet entry.

Mention Me! XXXIX

Thanks to Krzysztof Kowalczyk for the link love.

See You in the Funny Pages XII

In today's installment of Get Fuzzy, Boston-based cartoonist Darby Conley proposes a new movie rating: NC-99. "Absolutely nobody under 99 allowed to see it!" I like the idea of movie ratings that are more specific. But do we really need rating systems?

In Reader's Digest Canada, Rod Gustafson wonders whether viewers can trust movie ratings. Gretchen Ellis proposes some alternate meanings for the ratings. And Franklin Harris thinks we should get rid of them entirely.

For video games, we've got the Entertainment Software Rating Board's rating system. Joseph Lieberman doesn't think these ratings work either. David Walsh and Douglas Gentile have researched their validity. Gamersmark lays into "dumbass parents."

Online, there's the Internet Content Rating Association. And PC World wonders whether you can trust e-commerce rating services. "Who's rating the raters?"

The Comics Code Authority. The struggling Underwriters Laboratories. So many ratings organizations!

I had no idea there were so many. I just don't ever pay attention to them. Outside of Consumer Reports, ratings don't influence my buying habits. They mean nothing to me. They bring neither comfort nor confidence.

Regardless, I am going to rate this Media Diet entry PG. Pretty Good.

North End Moment XXXVIII

Overheard at Prince Pantry:

Customer: I'll have a small tuna sub.
Cook: What kind of tuna?
Customer: Yes, tuna.
Cook: What kind of tuna?
Customer: Italian! You want Chinese tuna?
Owner: Hey! Don't harass the help!

Yes, the cook is Asian. I was glad that the owner said something because I was about to comment on the other customer's racist remark. Is there such a thing as Chinese tuna? There is such a thing as a Chinese tuna bake.

The Free-Range Comic Book Project XXII

This is an installment of Media Diet's Free-Range Comic Book Project.

Catwoman #46 (DC, June 1997). Writer: Doug Moench. Artist: Jim Balent. Location: On a table in J.J. Foley's in the South End.

For more information on this project, please refer to this Media Diet entry.

Television-Impaired XIII

Disney Consumer Products has come out with a line of Disney-branded consumer electronics products aimed at children. The new Disney television, DVD player, digital radio, stereo CD boombox, CD player, and clock radio were designed by frog design and manufactured by Memcorp Inc., maker of the Memorex consumer electronics line.



With televisions being so boringly black and boxy these days, it's nice to see a new approach to TV design. Reminds me of the many forms vintage televisions took. The television is by far the best designed, but the Buzz & Beyond clock radio has a nice blobject-like form as well.

Clothes Whore VII

This is the T-shirt of the day.

Thanks to Anil Dash.

Mention Me! XXXVIII

Thanks to Anil Dash and Good Experience for prominently mentioning my Gel reports. Media Diet traffic has doubled over the last few days, and I'm sure it's their doing. Welcome to everyone who's finding their way here for the first time. I hope you'll stick around.

Technofetishism XXXVII

Akin to my enthusiasm about News Is Free and NetNewsWire, I've been geeking out to Mass Info Paging lately. Basicallly, Mass Info Paging offers pager- or email-based distribution of Massachusetts and New England police, fire, and emergency services announcements similar to scanner reports. Receiving the email on my Sidekick, I've been enjoying an odd form of vicarious awareness. This is a page I just received:

ROWLEY ATV ACCIDENT FOREST RIDGE BEHIND WINFRIES FUDGE 15 Y/O MALE FELL 25 FEET OFF CLIFF ON ATV UNCONCIOUS REQ MEDFLIGHT

And last night, while IM'ing a friend, the Mobil station on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge was held up... not too many blocks away from my house. I didn't really do anything with that information beyond not leaving the house, but there's no way I would have know that had happened so quickly otherwise.

The service costs $36 a year, but the first 30 days are free. And I've exchanged several emails with one of the developers, who was extremely helpful providing assistance -- even tweaking the site so it was easier to use. Just continuing my search for more news than I can use.

NetWork IV

Not satisfied with Friendster, Ryze, and Ecademy? Well, now there's LinkedIn, which strikes me as a more professionally oriented Friendster. Currently linked to two people -- Joichi Ito and Gordon Strause, who both invited me to join -- I've been playing with the search and connection request process and building out my profile. In the end, the profile development process will result in the creation of a pretty serious-looking online resume -- an activity that may prove useful in the future!

Remember the days when all we had was Six Degrees? Wow.

Music to My Eyes XVIII

In the fall of 2001, James Kochalka Superstar took to a rooftop in Burlington, Vermont, for an impromptu concert that was almost shut down by the police. Austin Sipes caught some of the shenanigans on video and word from Icebox Records is that more footage is yet to come. Lesson: People falling down are funny.

This Saturday, May 10, James opens for Mike Watt at Higher Ground. You can catch a live Webcast of the performance around 9 p.m. courtesy of the Digital Club Network.

Magazine Me XXXII

The American Society of Magazine Editors announced the winners of the National Magazine Awards today. Kudos to our upstairs neighbor, the Atlantic Monthly!

Newsletters of Note VIII

I've known Steve O'Keefe for as long as I've been involved in publishing, professionally and otherwise. Formerly of Loompanics, Steve now interacts with me occasionally because of his online book promotion work. With 20 years of publishing experience, Steve has launched online marketing campaigns for more than 1,000 books. As the head of Patron Saint Productions, Steve also publishes a newsletter entitled the Beautiful Plan. It's quite different than the last newsletter-cum-zine Steve published, Piano, which focused on piano playing and instruction. But, similar to everything else he's done, it's worth reading.

The Spring 2003 edition, the seventh issue, leads with the article "Why Authors Hate You." He draws on the experiences of folks such as Steve Roth, Richard Hoy, Katharine Harmon, and Glenn Fleishman to explore the failings of author-publisher interaction -- and how an author-focused publishing cooperative might be a viable option. Edwin Colyer looks at whether books are bound by the brands of their publishers. And Steve suggests that publishers should offer the writers they work with an outline and plan for the publishing process, identifying the responsible parties at each step.

It's a slim read at eight pages, but there are a lot of ideas here worth pursuing -- some of which remind me of the work Ben Brown and Dave Eggers are doing with their respective projects. One of the better newsletters I've come across in a while. It's not available online, but you can subscribe by sending your request on company letterhead to the Beautiful Plan, Patron Saint Productions, 741 Saint Philip St. #241, New Orleans, LA 70116.

Workaday World XXX

I've spent a couple of hours tidying up my office so far today, weeding out stuff I don't need on hand, boxing up books I don't need at work to ship home, and otherwise getting my Fast Company house in order. It's interesting how a manic cleaning binge -- and clutter purge -- can lighten one's mood. It's also interesting how this exercise is almost an exercise in professional anthropology or archaeology. Piles of stuff contain stratified layers of our past, and going through them brings back memories, reminds us of opportunities lost and experiences lived, and refocuses our attention and energy.

I was planning on enacting a similar manic cleaning binge at home tonight, but now we've got Anchormen practice. It's early, which is good because I still need to get my apartment in order for my mother's visit this weekend. I also need to practice my saxophone part in the Velvet Underground's "Rock 'n' Roll" for Kurt and Geraldine's wedding this weekend.

Back to work! Cleaning breeds clarity.

Comics and Community XI

The Cambridge Comix Festival kicks off this month. A convention will take place from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday, May 17, at Hannum Hall, 7 Temple St. on Central Square in Cambridge. The convention will feature artists' and publishers' exhibits, guest speakers, and video demonstrations. The festival also includes exhibits at four different locations:

1369 Coffeehouse, 1757 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, May 5 to June 2 (Opening reception: 7-9 p.m., Sunday, May 11)

1369 Coffeehouse, 1369 Cambridge St., Cambridge, May 5 to June 2 (Opening reception: 7-9 p.m., Sunday, May 11)

Middle East Restaurant, 472 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, May 5 to June 2 (Opening reception: 3-5 p.m., Sunday, May 11)

Zeitgeist Gallery, 1353 Cambridge St., Cambridge, May 13-25 (Opening reception: 3-6 p.m., Sunday, May 18)

Exhibitors include Rick Altergott, Ariel Bordeaux, Craig Bostick, Doug Chapel, Dan Moynihan, and others. For more information, email Hans Rickheit. I won't be going to any of the openings May 11, but I hope to be at the con May 17 -- and perhaps the Zeitgeist opening May 18.

Technofetishism XXXVI

Mmm. I just ordered a Geko 201. With spring and summer coming, I'm quite looking forward to Geocaching.

Ravaging Radio VIII

It's being hyped as Tivo for your radio, and PoGo! Product's Radio YourWay digital AM/FM radio recorder looks promising. Combining a digital voice recorder, MP3 player, and on-the-fly or scheduled digital recording of radio broadcasts, the YourWay might work well for people who don't like sticking near their stereos. Scheduled to ship later this month, the YourWay is available for pre-order now.

While I like the idea of regularly recording radio shows such as WMBR's Breakfast of Champions or Pipeline! without having to be home or aware of the time, I'm slightly skeptical of the YourWay's portable radio stature. The quality of the recordings will be totally dependent on the device's location while recording, and the assumed mindfulness required to make sure you're getting good reception while recording seems to indicate that you can't just carry this with you all the time. I wonder whether a more stereo peripheral-based, streaming radio computer-based, or satellite radio recording approach might not be more promising.

Regardless, it's interesting to think about saving radio broadcasts on my laptop, and I must admit that I'm tempted. I just emailed them to see if the device is Mac compatible. It is not. Well, that's that. Maybe I should just get the Garmin Geko GPS device I've been coveting instead.

Thanks to Lockergnome.

Technofetishism XXXV

Just when my Sidekick is starting to crap out -- the navigation wheel is increasingly difficult to use, and it sounds like there are pieces of something rattling around inside the device -- Danger is coming out with a new color Sidekick. I was going to stop by T-Mobile to swap my Sidekick for a new one because I take good care of things like this and doubt it should break so soon after buying it -- I've only had it four months! -- but maybe I'll trade up. Mmm, color.

Thanks to Gizmodo.

Magazine Me XXXI

According to the New York Times, Wal-Mart has decided not to stock lad mags such as Maxim, Stuff, and FHM on its newsstands. Seems that customers and employees complained that the magazines were to racy. Also seems out that Wal-Mart can account for 15% of all single-copy magazine sales. If you get bumped by Wal-Mart, it can bruise indeed. For the lad mags, however, it's just a glancing blow because Wal-Mart only accounts for 3% of their newsstand sell through.

Thanks to Media Dietician Jodie Peotter.

Corollary: These Links Were Made for Breaking? VIII

Maybe I was too early an adopter of Friendster when I first wrote about it in December. I was initially frustrated by the Web service because there weren't enough people in the system for me to connect to many. Now, however, I'm starting to reach some sort of critical mass. With only 15 friends, I'm connected to more than 15,500 people. Already, I've had a conversation with Jen about how Friendster oddly formalizes connections and friendships that have pre-existed for years: "It's official!" And I just learned now that someone I just met online recently -- Gregory Blake, who helped me get my RSS feed up and running -- and I are connected 10 different ways to three degrees of separation. We would've met eventually anyway! I'm slowly warming to the service despite my early snarkiness.

Digesting the Daily XIII

Recent editions of the Daily Northwestern, the student newspaper of my alma mater, featured several media-, technology-, and activism-related items that might be of interest to Media Dieticians.

Decades of dissent
On-campus activism evolves since first Gulf War
(April 21, 2003)

Library to conform to policy
NU librarians fear new plan to comply with Patriot Act could violate patrons' privacy
(April 21, 2003)

Students, Web stalkers benefit from search services
Google offers information, amusement to users in 88 countries, 53 languages
(April 21, 2003)

Wherehouse store not where it's at anymore
Soon-to-close establishment tries its best to unload the last of its music, but nyou finds plenty of crap left.
(April 24, 2003)

Harvard urges punishment for illegal file-sharing cases
Although NU receives complaints, it evaluates the charges individually
(April 25, 2003)

Keeping face, baring more: Playboy at NU
(April 25, 2003)

Playboy to seek NU students for "Girls of the Big Ten" issue
(April 25, 2003)

Video didn't kill WNUR radio drama stars
Student actors, producers keep tradition of on-air theater alive with new show on Sunday afternoons.
(April 29, 2003)

If you work for a college newspaper and would like to sign me up for a complimentary subscription, please feel free to do so. My address is in the grey bar over on the left.

The Free-Range Comic Book Project XXI

This is an installment of Media Diet's Free-Range Comic Book Project.

Yesterday: Booster Gold #19 (DC, August 1987). Writer and artist: Dan Jurgens. Location: On the Red Line between Park Street and Central Square.

Today: Brave Old World #1 (DC/Vertigo, February 2000). Writer: William Messner-Loebs. Artists: Guy Davis and Phil Hester. Location: On the Green Line between Park Street and Haymarket.

For more information on this project, please refer to this Media Diet entry.

Media in Transition 3: Television in Transition VI

Tom Vreeland: "Mycasts: New Genre of Global Television"

Tom Vreeland has been involved with electronic publishing, television, computing, and networks for 40 years. With the creation of the Mycast technology for the Web, he is bringing a new genre of television and video technology to schools, teachers, and students. Here is a rough transcript of the paper Vreeland presented at MiT3:

It's interesting on a panel about convergence to have so many different perspectives. The technical requirements to bring tailor-made e-learning systems into the K-12 classroom are the same technical requirements to develop a massively multiplayer game.

This is a big deal. What we're seeing in this change isn't just a paradigm shift. It's an earthquake. It's not convergence as we thought convergence would be. It's disintermediated. It's based on a one-to-one technology model. It's nonlinear interactive hypervideo.

It breaks out of the current video taxonomy. We're looking at pull, not push. I don't want 500 channels. I want one channel with everything on it when I want it. Mycasts are personal. My TV hasn't become a computer yet, and my computer hasn't become a TV yet, but my cell phone is becoming a TV studio. My PDA is becoming a video computer.

The traditional information economies of scale become inverted. It becomes as easy to produce 10,000 different books as it is to make 10,000 copies of one book. You can produce 10,000 different TV shows rather than one show for 10,000 viewers. Information and knowledge, the core currency of learning, are now available to learners without the traditional hierarchy of teachers.

As we disintermediate the connection between learners and information, we see one of the most fundamental differents in education. If you think about the Reuters feeds during the war, individuals could watch video of what was going on in Baghdad. You can construct your own meaning rather than have your meaning constructed for you.

Other than developing a distribution system, we're creating a hosting service with which students will be able to upload there own video commentaries. In the Berkshires, we work with a group called the Visionaries. They just granted us $10 million in educational video. It's time for the students to take back television.

Students take more techhnology to school than the school district can afford to buy them. We're going to have two networks: the informal and individual, and the organizational. We know which one is going to get the attention. We need to figure out how to use them both.

This media is not static. We're not trying to add interactivity. Interactivity comes with it. Using a technology called Tapestry, you can create video blogs like Oneworld.org. There are also tools for co-browsing and collaborative viewing. These things create a need for a new literacy for teachers and students. Organizing that information and providing access to that information is part of what we're working on.

Media in Transition 3: Television in Transition V

Christian McCrea: Games, Agency, and Television

Christian McCrea is a doctoral candidate at the University of Melbourne, where his thesis examines the deployment of narrative, celebrity, desire, and success in computer games. Here is a rough transcript of the paper McCrea presented at MiT3:

My presentation is called "Whose Screen Is It Any Way? Games, Agency, and the New Television." There is something about games that connects with convergence, but I'm not going to talk about technological convergence, but I am going to talk about behavior and habit convergence.

Games studies is a very new academic field. Right now it's not even a field. But in the next year, we're going to see 10-12 books and collections about games studies. There's one group of theorists that say we need a very specific approach to games. They're mythologists and formalists. The people at MIT focus too much on the cultural content of games, looking at narrative and interactive. A lot of good work has been done. I'm not going to focus on this too much.

My investment is to assess the moment of game play as having a moment of narrative in and of itself. I want to erase the difference. What am I doing at a TV conference? The computer game console all require TVs to operate. Games are part and parcel to the history of TV itself. The TV is not a single text. It's a receptacle. And real convergence is happening at the back of the TV set. The logic of game play is part of our television experience.

When we play a computer game, we have two options: to move forward or to fail. Most games require you to move forward. We often judge game characters and our interactions with them not on how convincing they are but on what capacity they have to react to us. Games give us incentives to succeed.

How might this idea affect how televisions are used? What has changed in television? How has the text changed? How is the home changing? The screen places new demands on our leisure time. Screen culture demands of us agency and activity. What does this mean for a generation of children?

The practice of anime fandom in the west is best described as procreation. They'll take anime series, copy them onto tape, and add subtitles themselves. It's operating on the fan level. And it's basically writing on the screen. They interact with it. These groups take pride in one translation over another. This writing on the screen allows others to access that media.

Media piracy is something that academia has been ignoring to its own detriment. Pirates have new opportunities to incorporate media. People act surprised that a generation of media-savvy kids steeped in antiauthoritarianism copy and distribute music as much as they do. Media piracy is a natural instinct to access our media histories.

I also want to look at things like the DVD, the first important sign of media collectivity. The viewer becomes an archivist. We don't just want to watch something, we want to collect all of it.

These aren't distinct phenomena. It's part of a broader cultural movement. There's something attractive to the idea of communities and groups of people who are able to interconnect to access more and more media. The logic of agency, success, and the archival impulse are seeping into our culture in many ways. TV is the most important aspect of this cultural shift.

Media in Transition 3: Television in Transition IV

Lanfranco Aceti: Interactive Integrated Media in the "Agon" of Convergence

Lanfranco Aceti is a researcher at Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design in London. He collaborates with the Imperial College, and his research focuses on the avant garde in digital media, interactivity, and intelligent systems. Here is a rough transcript of the paper Aceti presented at MiT3:

The interactive integrated media are a new form of media structure that has a multiplicity of forms and codes interacting within a superseding structured content. These formats for old and new cross-platform media will be structured in a single content producer which assumes the amorphous characteristic of a meta-medium. The production of content is multileveled, multilayered, and omnipresent. I don't want to call it a TV show that we will be living, but it's similar to that. We will be carrying it with us.

The concept of A+B=C is changed. In the theory of Pasolini, Deluze, Eco, and Baudrillard, A+B=Z. We will have several aesthetics that are new. The new narratives are composing a meta-language, which is based on the use of old media-specific narratives. We have seen a reduction to a minimum common denominator. In England, we call it "dumbing it down." This creates a process of standardization and homogenization, which is fought in the anti-globalization world.

The issue of interpretation and emergence related to the "presence of the media object" is related to the homogeny or homology of the media itself. The distinction between the two concepts becomes the element that may permit a distinction between phenomena of emergence in the aesthetic and digital structure of media interaction.

In England, Big Brother was the first interesting example of pervasive media. People would go online during working hours. They could get messages on their cell phones. Then they'd go home and read the newspaper. And it wasn't just to get updates on the show. Apple is sponsoring a reality TV show. The industry will create its own media. If you look at that picture, you can tell that they're Indian. But if you didn't know that the picture was taken in India, the picture could have been taken anywhere. The quality of the pictures is all the same. There is a Taiwanese movie called "Tears of the Black Tiger." It looked like it was made in Bollywood during the 1950s.

The war on terrorism has inspired a reality TV series that will track the U.S. military in action. The images that were coming from the war looked like a fashion magazine. They were those kinds of shoots. It was the same glossiness you would see in a magazine. That cleanness is not reality. The next one is a reality TV show to determine the new ruler of Iraq. We can see ourselves moving from that within the political system around the world.

In 1973, there was a reality TV show called An American Family. It followed a middle-class family in Santa Barbara, California, with five daughters. There is one majority element that is being forced onto society. The rest is being pushed down underground.

The BBC has been working on a show for two years with a working title of "X-Box." It's basically a video game in which people can create their own avatar regardless of whether it is real. They will be fighting each other online, and the winners will end up on the TV show. It is a video game that will translate to TV.

Will the immaculate war be the next interactive reality show? And if my army wins, do I get a million dollars?

Media in Transition 3: Television in Transition III

Michele Malach: "Behind Bars: Guilt, Redemption, and Oz Fans"

Michele Malach is professor of media studies in the Department of English at Fort Lewis College. Here is a rough transcript of the paper Malach presented at MiT3:

I'm going to be talking about a show that has no video game and no role-playing games. A comic would be great. There's lots and lots of fan fiction though. And lots and lots of discussion. Kurt and I had been talking about fandom and mythology and how people incorporate that into their every day lives. Another colleague came to me and talked about how our favorite stories tend to frame our lives. She suggested that the stories that we tend to care about choose us based on something about us. I think it's the other way around.

What does that say about fans of a prison show? The show was created by Tom Fontana, who was probably best known for his early work on St. Elsewhere. It started in 1997 and ran for six seasons. They only made eight episodes for each season, except one season in which they made 16. It was also HBO's first original, hour-long dramatic series. It was pretty groundbreaking even though It hasn't gotten as much attention.

Unlike a lot of more well-known fandoms, this one is built around a show that was never really commercially popular. But it was critically acclaimed. Most people don’t think about the show at all, but if they do its as a prison-based soap opera featuring graphic violence and male nudity. The demographics of the fans who watched it were really broad. There were clusters, but it covered a broad range. The fandom is dominated by mostly straight, educated, white women.

The people who I communicated for this particular project were all active fans online and mostly fanfic authors. I've been active in a number of Oz-related groups for a number of years, so I had relatively easy access to these people.

The character who spoke the final narrative, Augustus Hill, was basically a Greek chorus for the show. He would directly address the camera and express what the creator wanted us to take away. But of course, economies of desire are not so easily controlled, even if parts of the monologue did overlap with what the fans got out of it.

I had always thought of Oz as a Catholic kind of show. Largely because Fontana is Catholic, Homicide had a lot of Catholic themes, and there are a lot of Catholic characters in Oz. Most of the fans didn't perceive it as particularly Catholic. But the issues of guilt and redemption, at least as they're portrayed in the show, are particularly Catholic.

Religion doesn't work too well as a mythology for fandom because it's too literal. Roman Catholicism is much closer to that relationship -- not a literal belief but a contextual mythological belief. Like Umberto Eco's Macintosh, fandom is Catholic in a sense.

One woman in the group was a Quaker. Some had pagan beliefs. But they did feel drawn to the themes that came up in the show, which include the interconnection of good and evil, particularly within the individual, the possibility of redemption, and inherent humanity. The prisoners that are not religious often seem to try and find god or a meaning behind their actions and sins. Most of the people don't espouse a particular religion belief, but they still try to find a balance.

Perhaps the most consistent themes that arose in the Ozverse were guilt and redemption. These are not new themes for a prison show, but the depth that these themes were explored is new. Characters feel guilt over things that they don't do as well as things that they do do.

Most of us have guilt over something. Most of us want redemption. Redemption isn't something that you just get. Redemption is something that you work at every day You may get little bits and pieces of it, but it can also be taken away. Characters in the show are never completely redeemed. We're left with a really hopeless situation for one particular character, which is offset by more hopeful endings for other characters.

You end up feeling a great deal of empathy. I felt the same thing watching Homicide. You’ve got characters who are unquestionably evil but also quite human. Finally, there's the idea of personal responsibility in an extreme environment. Humanizing prisoners is a critique of the prison industry. When you have that extremity, you can’t always predict the kinds of choices you would make. You do have to take responsibility.

Nearly everyone who responded to the questions I was asking talked about lessons they'd learned that they could apply to their own lives. Part of what fans got was what the creator wanted. The values reflected in the show don’t necessarily reflect the values that we all hold, but the values still get taken out, twisted around, and reconstructed.

Media in Transition 3: Television in Transition II

Dan Mackay: Genre Television and the Imaginary Entertainment Environments

Dan Mackay is a doctoral student at the University of Oregon, where he studies the historical development of fantasy and theorizes about changing conceptions of the imagination in literature. Here is a rough transcript of the paper Mackay presented at MiT3:

How should we begin to discuss the genre of television fiction? Fantasy, science fiction, and other genres of television should be treated differently than other forms of television drama.

There's something about the imaginary entertainment environment. TV drama tends to focus more on character. Imaginary television tends to have more sprawling story arcs that don’t allow for as much character development. The environment takes on more of an importance. The environment itself at a certain point takes on even more of an importance than the author.

The fictional environment cuts across media. It's expressed in many forms. And each form slightly changes the environment. Each new form will incorporate the changes that have been made. Let's use Lord of the Rings. It was a discrete story written by Tolkien. There have been a couple of animated versions. There's the Peter Jackson version, which is ongoing. None of these are changing the Lord of the Rings world. The world is set. You can explore Tolkien's papers.

Then there's Star Trek. It's ongoing. Each change made in a new video game, television series, or comic book will be taken into consideration. Jean Baudrillard looks at three main stages -- an early primitive stage in which an image represents a profound reality. The second stage is an image that masks a profound reality. It no longer refers to an actual event. The third stage is one in which the image begins to mask and signify, but it masks the absence of reality. That's the existential crisis.

We take this and apply it to the world of television fiction, something like Seinfeld, for example. The streets and sets are signs for actual New York locations. In Boston, you can go to the Cheers bar. MASH signified Vietnam even though it was set during Korea. It was competing with the nightly news reports. Fantasy, science-fiction, and horror television has no such signifiers.

But as Baudrillard would say, the reality signified represents the absence of reality. The image is seductive. It's a hook. It fills your vision and hearing, and you're left with questions. What is it that's about this environment? How does this work? As you answer the questions about this absolutely useless world, a subject is constructed. There's a whole universe of meaning embodied by the show.

People inhabit their viewing selves and are creative when they watch Babylon 5 and then they project those selves back out through discussion forums and newsgroups. They allow a subject that’s only momentarily created to be continually created. They allow for the pleasure of the signifier to come out. The pleasure is their own momentary creativity that comes out while inhabiting the medium.

In the fan forums, through the performance of this self, the self is reinscribed. The subject that is created becomes an author. We see a jump at the end when the fans themselves become an author. Look at Stracyzinski. Look at Kevin Smith, They become successful to such an extent that they’re able to return to that pleasure and make a vocation of it.

Media in Transition 3: Television in Transition

I got back from New York and the Good Experience Live conference in time to make much of the Media in Transition 3 conference held by MIT's Comparative Media Studies department. I didn't make it to all of the sessions that interested me, but I did hit a couple.

Kurt Lancaster: "Babylon 5: Book of Quotations -- Parallels between USA Patriot Act and Babylon 5's Nightwatch"

Kurt Lancaster is an assistant professor at Fort Lewis College. He is the creator of the video-streaming Web narrative Letters from Orion and the co-author of Building a Home Movie Studio and Getting Your Films Online. Here is a rough transcript of the paper Lancaster presented at MiT3:

What I want to do is talk about the parallels between the USA Patriot Act and the how the Nightwatch developed in Babylon 5 to bridge nonfiction and fiction.

"The realization that one person can change the universe ... That if one man with a bullet can change the world in Dallas and Memphis and a hotel in Los Angeles, how much more can one person with a dream, with an idea, change the world?" -- 2003 interview with Bill Baker

What is Babylon 5? It's a television series that ran from 1993-1998 with a five-year story arc. J. Michael Stracyzinski wrote 90% of the scripts, so you can see the continuity running throughout. The series continues to run in syndication. And the space station is a parallel to the United Nations. There's a war without, and there's a war within.

Within the series, the Earth government, which Babylon 5 is an extension of, created this guard called the Nightwatch as a way to have citizens police each other. I want to look at how this is a parallel to the USA Patriot Act.

The parallels are frighteningly similar. This document was passed on Oct. 26, 2001, in reaction to the World Trade Center. The House and Senate voted in overwhelming favor of it. The language is written in it so that if you say the wrong thing, think the wrong thing, you can be arrested. Even in the Battle of Seattle, people could be arrested without any rights. The law allows the government to track who takes what books out of the library.

There was one dissenting vote in the Senate, Democrat Russ Feingold in Wisconsin. A man in Denver was arrested a couple of weeks ago for taking pictures of the hotel that Dick Cheney was staying at. He was arrested under the USA Patriot Act. Investigators called him a "raghead collaborator" and a "dirty pinko faggot." For his one telephone call, he called the Denver Post, and the police immediately hung up the phone. Now there are no records that this even happened.

It's interesting to see how this is playing out in the fan discussion boards. One fan takes an actual fact that happened in the real world and couches it in the plot line of Babylon 5. "Relating Babylon 5 to global five can be so much fun!" Stracyzinski intervenes and talks about how Nightwatch started as something little and built itself up from preying on people's fear.

What's interesting is the debate, One fan says fine, prove your point. Stracyzinski says that's it's about what happens after you speak up, not whether you're able to speak up. In America, we had freedom after speech. I conclude with the fact that what’s interesting about this whole thing is that you get a civil, real debate going on within the discussion board. If you look at the mainstream news, you don't get any kind of debate. You get the debate relating to this television show.

All Dolled Up

My weekend reading on the Big Blue Couch on Church Corner included a lot of serendipitous mentions of new-school dolls, action figures, and related items. KidRobot is a San Francisco-based shop that specializes in urban vinyl action figures. Think Michael Lau and Eric So, as well as Kubricks and Qees mini-figures, and the lovely plushes of Friends&Friends and Prettyugly. Wonderful stuff! As the war continues to "end," maybe we can expect a price decrease on the President Bush and Saddam Hussein action figures from Hero Builders. You can even buy a pink dress or S&M outfit for your dolls: "Embarass your villain action figure by dressing it with this lovely pink dress." Lastly, I don't know how many Media Dieticians are active travelers -- much less Red Roof Inn loyalists -- but if red is your hotel roof color of choice, rest assured that you can now acquire your very own "Red" bobble head doll. It doesn't seem to me that "Red" is a mascot with a lot of clout to get out, but for $10, bobble on.

Among the Literati XXXV

Rob's Amazing Poem Generator takes the content of Web sites and turns it into poetry. Here's how Media Diet looks all poetic like:

function pr n {n ;}
document.these trying to
create an object.
2 to come up. with
plastic sheeting covering the
groups are
you equate
the sum of our kids
that I joined AOL
community is not giving me into a rough transcript of customer one
has taken off instead
of the day in the Buddyrevelles, an
hour long time.
In a fucking sportswriter! For years,
ago.

Thanks to Boing Boing.

Hiptop Nation V

Here are some ambient snaps from my day in New York City last week for the Good Experience Live conference:









One of the highlights of the trip was briefly meeting Thomas Madsen-Mygdal of CommonMe. He's good people.

Among the Literati XXXIV

Jessa Crispin of Bookslut could use our help.

See You in the Funny Pages XI

Sunday's installation of Gary Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury was largely in French. He offers a helpful translation online.

Good Experience Live XV

Stephen Bauman: Thresholds to Mindfulness

Stephen Bauman is senior minister of Christ Church United Methodist in New York City. With a master of divinity degree from Yale University Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Bauman also has work experience that has taken him to office buildings, oil fields, and Times Square, where he worked with runaway and homeless youth. Here is a rough transcript of her talk at Good Experience Live:

I guess it is by design, although it wouldn't have been my design, that I am the last speaker. And having been here all day, I guess it is appropriate that the day end with a minister. I operate from the premise that all of us are spiritual beings. All of us function with a set of implicit or explicit transcendent values. Sometimes these are conscious. And sometimes these are unconscious.

These values leave a wake behind us as we travel through life. All of us believe the world is generally safe or unsafe.That people are generally to be trusted or not trusted. That things are more true or less true. To hold a conference called Good Experience Live reflects that some experiences are better than others. Evidentally, because you're here, you are on the lookout for the good ones.

As part of this benediction, I want to offer some snapshots of great American religious organizations. All but one are Christian because that's what I know best. For instance, Precious Moments Chapel in Carthage, Missouri, an outgrowth of the Precious Moments greeting cards and porcelain figurines. He bought up 3,000 acres in both as his graphic art and life-size figurines feature prominently. This is a destination attraction, so parking lots surround the property. This is a closeup of his depictio of heaven. The Precious Moments Chapel has nearly a million visitors a year.

Just north of Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida, is a new theme park called the Holy Land Experience. It's educational. It's inspirational. It's theatrical. Calvary's Garden Tomb is near the Dromedary Depot. Admission for a one-day pass costs $30 or you can purchase the Jerusalem Gold Pass for $75.

Now let's step back for a moment from these destination sites and consider some living, breathing churches. One is my own, Christ Church United Methodist in New York City. It sits right on the sidewalk. It is meant to be a part of people's daily experience. The doors are just three steps up from the sidewalk. What interests me about this is what I refer to as the threshold experience, stepping off the sidewalk and into this space. There's often a physical response in first-time visitors. If one has a taste for god or depth of thinking or silence, this space makes that connection. There is no parking lot attached.

In direct contrast to this, consider the Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois. Willow Creek is the model for the megachurch. Their model is that of the mall. It's I'm OK, You're OK design. Crossing the threshold of a megachurch is meant to be as easy as crossing the threshold of the Galleria mall, complete with a foodcourt, a Starbucks, and a sanctuary designed much like a movie theater. Here, the horizontal human experience is emphasized rather than the vertical experience.

Since you're here in New York, it seems appropriate to say a word about a walk. Start at the Bethesda Fountain near 72nd Street in Central Park and walk past the band shell, down through the mall, out into the Grand Army Plaza in front of the Plaza Hotel, and down 5th Avenue to about 50th street. This walk won't take much more than an hour. This park was designed as a space of spiritual respite. As you come out onto the Grand Army Plaza, take note of the buildings and spaces, and become mindful of your experience. What is it that it does to you?

The mall near Rockefeller Center is embued with mythological meaning -- spiritual meaning. At the end of the mall is the golden image of Prometheus. It's an extraordinary public space. If we were to become mindful and thoughtful, the benediction is to take that into your world. If you were to take the stroll from Bethesda Fountain to 50th Street and 5th Avenue, being mindful of spiritual matters, I guarantee that you will have a good experience. A very good experience.

Good Experience Live XIV

Marissa Mayer: Google Doodles

Marissa Mayer is the director of consumer products and a product manager for Google. A Google employee since 1999, Bayer is former technical lead for the user interface team. Here is a rough transcript of her talk at Good Experience Live:

How many people here have used Google? That question always gets some chuckles. I'm going to focus on the UI philosophies and processes within Google.

Google's mission is to organize the world's information so it's universally accessible and useful. That's very broad. And it has nothing to do with Web searches. But the Web has changed the paradigm of research. More than the Web search, Googlers are interested in doing things that matter.

You can't build a search engine unless you have too much data. You need to build something that's fundamentally useful to people and then build usability on top of that. If all you have is usability, you don't have much.

Let's look at usability. Let's look at Google's big blank home page. If you ask Sergey what were you trying to say with the big blank home page, he'd say, "We didn't have a Webmaster, and I don't do HTML." Our characteristic look was a happy accident.

One thing we do at Google to understand what's happening is user studies. At our very first one, there were four of us on the UI time. None of us had ever done a user study. We found all sorts of fundamental problems. What did we find? Users have a razor focus on results. They have the uncanny ability to cut off the rest of the site. Also, they couldn't find Helo. We also had confusing blurts of engineering speak scattered around the site.

This also served as our first focus group. We got all sorts of user reactions. People didn't get the blank home page at all. Google's come a long way since then, and a streamlined Web page seems to work well.

You need to eat your own dog food. Everyone Google hires is a Google user. We use it all the time. In February 2000, we went on a ski trip, and Sergey said the day would be our greatest test. We thought he meant a bunch of nerds hitting the slopes, but he meant that we needed to see how much of our traffic was self-generated.

Iterations are also important. Try, try again. We tested several versions of Google News. 64 iterations later, we settled on the Google News that you see on our site.

The last thing I want to talk about is the importance of humor. How many of you have seen the Google logo change? It's a glimpse at who's behind this thing. Don't be afraid to be human. We call these Google Doodles. We get huge amounts of user feedback. We've been Slashdotted. Now we have a very talented graphic designer who does all of our logos. You'd be amazed how offended Australians get when you equate the holidays with ice and snow. We've also branched out into more cultural holidays.

One of my contributions to this has been some of the more cultural logos. We've done some artists, the anniversary of the Nobel Prize. And we did DNA. But my favorite logo of all time is the Dali logo that we did last May. The logo even inspired a book store manager to organize one of the best Dali book displays I've ever seen.

Good Experience Live XIII

Andrew Zolli: After "Experience Design"

Andrew Zolli is a partner in Z + Partners. A forecaster and design strategist, Zolli edited the Catalog of Tomorrow. Here is a rough transcript of his talk at Good Experience Live:

I'm representing the big and tall wing of the decidedly less sexy than the last speaker contingent of today's program. My most recent design challenge occurred at 6:45 this morning. I had to get to a car service, and I was running a little late. There's a huge South Indian community that's grown up near where I live. The car took off. "To the New York Historical Society!" We end up somewhere that I think was Bellevue, and my driver said we're here. This isn't it! I think it's on the west side. He said, "This is the New York Hysterical Society."

We tend to equate experiences with brands. We tend to think less about the linkages between experiences and culture. I started to work on a book that's coming out next year that's about what it's like working in the sausage factory that is today's economy. I went out an dinterviewed a lot of white happy people. 400 people. 100 people in an urban context. 100 in a suburban context. 100 in a rural context.

Today companies are in the business of culture. They're brands are culture. But they're not measured or rewarded for the extent to which they further the values of our culture. In urban areas, people are averse to logos on their clothing. What they wear makes a statement. If you go to a rural area, people welcome logos. I went to Muncie, Indiana, to a church that was putting a Starbucks in. The day I visited, the two televangelists were writing a sermon called "Christianity: Are you living the brand?" Across the street, there was a funeral for someone being buried with a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. These are complex ambiguities.

The people on the left of our society have found a new cause celebre. We have moved beyond identity politics. In Monroe, Alabama, there's a company selling brand new police cars to rural communities for $1. The state has vacated. There's no infrastructure. The deal is that the cars are adorned with corporate logos. Now, you won't just see interstitial ads in between shots of white trash on the Cops TV show, you'll see it during the arrest itself.

Why is this happening? This is not these companies' fault. It's because the market has become a central meaning-making organization in people's lives. Meaning-making organizations like churches and political parties. How many of you know who your congressman is? But everyone has an opinion about Wal-Mart. The state has taken a step back, and the market has taken its place.

There are two interesting periods in history. One is the one in which everything was invented. And one was the most recent period. Think about the change you've experienced in the last two decades, multiply it by 25, and that's the change experienced in the initial invention period. What causes this thrusting upward? Globalization, new technology, deregulation, tax policy, and public policy.

Back in the early 1980s we embarked on two critical decisions. One was to deregulate. And one was to cut back on making public policy. The first one looks like Enron when you swing it all the way out. And the other looks like corporate logos on cop cars when you swing it all the way out. Companies practically wet themselves over these curves. We pushed the market into the public sphere.

At the same time, the conversation moved. Commodities changed into products changed into services changed into experiences. You can differentiate there, so do it. Here's the interesting thing. Our conversation as professionals and designers stopped there. The other side of that is culture. It's about being a cultural icon and having a different relationship.

There's also a collision between the force of intimacy and transparency. Google Home Depot. The first thing that comes up is Home Depot. Then Home Depot Sucks. Then Home Depot's suppliers. One of my favorite sites is BrandDating.nl, which matches people based on whether they're Coke and Pepsi people. What comes next? What's likely to come is a new curve elevated by new drivers: values, sustainability, accountability, dialogue.

Is growth the paramount virtue? Is scale the enemy of authenticity? Do we need a longer term view? Is profit merely financial? Are we only consumers? How should we measure and reward?

Eamonn Kelly, head of the Global Business Network summed it up best: "We've pushed market wisdom and moral wisdom as far apart as possible. The goal now is to bring them back together."

Good Experience Live XII

Maryam Mohit: Good Web Customer Experience

Maryam Mohit is vice president of UI and product reviews for Amazon.com. As such, she has been involved in Amazon's online customer experience, user interface, usability, consumer research, program management, design, and Web development. Here is a rough transcript of her talk at Good Experience Live:

What I know a little a bit about is creating good Web customer experiences. I've been at Amazon for about forever. One of the reasons I joined Amazon was because of a bad experience I had at E3 in 1995 at the LA Convention Center. There I was at E3 and the rage was all virtual reality. I said, you know what? I don't want to do this. I don't want to spend my time and whatever intellectual capital I have doing this, getting kids to spend time inside and in their computers. I'm going to figure out how to do something different with technology. How can we use technology to help people do less unpleasant things like drive to a shopping mall and parking and shorten those experiences. How can we spend more time outside and in the world?

9. Let the data drive. Whenever possible, it's better to make decisions based on statistics and quantitative data than just on an opinion. If everyone has an opinion, that's not really a useful way to spend our time. For example, we moved the Proceed to Checkout button from the left side to the right side because our tests showed a statistically significant difference. We're all on the same team. Let's let the best design win.

8. Measure the right things. If you're going to use a data-driven approach, it's really important to measure the right things. In spring 2000, our business had been growing really fast. We could no longer show all of our stores in a single row of tabs. So we added a second row of tabs. The Ziggurat of tabs was looming out there if we weren't careful. So we started working on a new mode of navigation. In fall 2000 we launched what we called personalized navigation. These five buttons included personalized stores based on your activity, as well as some stores we thought you would like. We got great quantitative statistics as well as great qualitative feedback. So we launched the new navigation. But as we used it over time, something just didn't feel right. We went back and investigated. We realized that we'd done the wrong experiment. We'd had too many variables in the experiment -- design and navigation plus personalization. There was another option: Keep the tabs, but add navigation. Being data driven is crucial but tricky. What are you really testing?

7. Listen to your customers. The point I want to make is that it's really important to listen to your customers when you don't want to hear what they have to say -- or when you don't like what they have to say. Or when they ask you to do something that's really hard. For years, customers would say to us that they loved browsing and shopping for books online, they really want to pick up the book and flip through it. We said that's too hard. It's a limitation of the medium. But we looked at it. And in 2001 we added a feature Look Inside the Book. You can read part of the first chapter. We would rather have you not buy a book than buy a book that you don't want. We want people to make the right decision when they buy a book. 90% of the people who used the feature said that it influenced their purchase decision. Doing this project was a really big pain in the butt. But listening to the customers was very important.

6. Innovate on their behalf. Use the expert knowledge that you have to innovate and make your customers' lives and experiences better. This is different than innovating to impress your friends and colleagues. The classic example at Amazon is one-click shopping. No customer ever came to us and said what I really want is one-click shopping. In fact, our first user tests made people really nervous. They thought that it was just a little too fast. We knew that people wanted fast easy shopping. One of the ways we modified the design was adding small parentheses that said, "You can always cancel it later." Another more recent example is Listmania. The idea behind Listmania is that it's a community-driven list-building feature. You can make a list of items that surface along with relevant search results. Again, this isn't something that someone asked for.

Mark's giving me the time signal, so I'm going to skip ahead.

2. Don't let your org chart show on your home page. There's no reason search is on the left side on some pages and on the right here other than that different teams built different parts of the site at different times. It's one customer. It's one Web site. It's one experience. Customers don't care who built one part of the site.

1. It's not just about the Web. It's about the 360-degree customer experience.

Good Experience Live XI

James Howard Kunstler: The Horror of the Industrial City

James Howard Kunstler is author of the books The Geography of Nowhere and the City in Mind. A resident of upstate New York, Kunstler is a regular contributor to the New York Times. He has no formal training in architecture or urban design. Here is a rough transcript of his talk at Good Experience Live:

We're concerned here with the issue of place. How many of you come from places that are more like this than New York City. Sometimes we call it suburban sprawl. I call it the national automobile slum. There's a lot of misunderstanding about this. There's tremendous distress among Americans who have to live in places like this. One of the big concerns about America is that it's all the same. Well, the hill towns of Tuscany are all the same. The boulevards of Paris are all the same. It's not that these environments are the same, it's that the experiences you have there are uniformly terrible.

The virtual is not an adequate substitution for the authentic. There's a part of our every day world called the public realm. It's the physical manifestation of the public interest and public good. And it's the container of our civic life. You have to treat that in a certain way. You have to use architecture and buildings to define space. We need to honor the public realm in order to make civic life possible.

We need to be oriented in time and culture. We need to see visibly in the language that surrounds us to know where we've come from and where we're going. We also need to have hope for the future. To remove that hope is a catastrophic event. This is all part of the culture of civic design. And it has a culture as strong as that of Web design.

Your ability to create a sense of place depends entirely on the ability to define space. There are places not worth caring about. There are environments in which no one wants to be. Then there are public spaces worth caring about. There's a particular way that you assemble a public gathering place. This place succeeds because it has an active permeable edge in which things can enter and leave.

Boston City Hall Plaza is a public space failure. And we don’t want to fix it because we don't want to hurt IM Pei's feeling. This is the back of city hall. And remember that this is an architecture design competition winner. There's not enough Prozac in the world to make people feel good about walking down this block. Ask yourself, what are the languages, grammars, and rhythms that this is saying? A kind of despotism that is unspoken.

This is a picture of the convention center in the town I live in. This building is designed like a DVD player. Aux. In. Power supply. Who gives a fuck? Now this is Main street America. You've got convenient space for shopping. You've got stores on the first floor, and other stuff happens upstairs. Also, access is on the first floor. We call that at grade. Then we've got the nature Band-Aid. We think that if we're green we can heal the sick urbanism we've got in our culture.

Here's an example of part of that culture. There's a role for nature in the urban center, and it tends to be formal. The trees have four jobs to do, and that's it. Job number one is to spatially create a special pedestrian zone visually. Job number two is to protect the pedestrians psychologically and physically from the vehicular traffic on the street. Number three is to filter the light and make the sidewalk a more pleasant place to be. And job number four is to soften the urban hardscape. We've gotten away from that.

Where does the problem lie? I call it the horror of the industrial city. You've got this congestion. The idea gets fixed in our collective urban consciousness that we need to go back to the country. You know, live in the woods. The first incarnation of that can be seen in suburbia. We'll work half a day in urbanism, and then we'll go home to our rural villa. What happened is that it mutates. It becomes kind of traffic. It ends up being not country living but a cartoon of country living. Suburbia has been promising country living for the last 50 years. It ends up having all of the congestion of city living and none of the urban amenities.

Here's a perfect example of subdivision living. What's really going on here? Why aren't there any windows on the side? The family that built the house may say they wanted to save the $4,000 it would've cost to add windows. That's bullshit. They're blinders to maintain the illusion of country living. And look at the size of that porch. That's just a television screen. You'd have to be a family of pituitary dwarves to use that porch. It's 14 inches deep. It projects the illusion that we're normal, we're normal, we're normal. And what message does this building, a school in Las Vegas, send? It tells children that they must have done something really wrong to end of there. Notice the token bit of nature. Thank you, Sierra Club of Las Vegas.

We need a new urbanism. I've been very proud to be associated with the new urbanist movement for the last 10 years. It's a movement working to reform the public realm of America, the shared public place. We've been busy diving into the dumpster of history to retrieve all of the information we haven't used for 50 years. Like, how do we design a town? You've got the public stuff, the monumental stuff. And you've got the private stuff. Put them together and you get the civitas.

One neighborhood is a village. Several neighborhoods are a town. Several towns make up a city. Cities are living organisms, and cities are more than the sum of their parts. There's a lot of experimentation going on for attempting to retrofit the architectural garbage that we're left with. This is a good example. This is a dead mall in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Eastgate Mall.

The idea was that it would be redesigned as a new neighborhood. We would impose a new street and block system over the old parking lots and structures. The more frontages you create, small little blocks, the more opportunities you will have for reconstruction. Finally, we're using the idea of the normal building block as the new approach to urban planning, not the megastructures. We can return mutilated urban places to neighborhood centers.

We're going to have to reorganize just about everything in America. Things like Wal-Mart are going to be gone in five to 10 years. The damage that these places do is difficult to calculate. And they did it with the complicity of America. That's the law of perverse outcomes. People don't get what they expect. They get what they deserve. We need to rebuild these local networks of economic dependence.

Life is tragic. Bruce Willis isn't going to come in in the third act and save us. We need to do this ourselves. The end result of creating 27,000 places that might not be worth caring about is that we might have created a country that’s not worth defending.

Good Experience Live X

Sam Brown: Computers and Comic Art

Sam Brown is the creator of Explodingdog, a Web site that is interactive only if you are lucky enough to have Brown draw a picture based on a title that you suggest. An active video gamer, Brown specializes in stick figures. Here is a rough transcript of his talk at Good Experience Live:

My name is Sam Brown. I do the Web site Explodingdog. Basically, it's just a collection of 1,200-1,500 drawings I've done over the last three years. They all work the same way. They're drawn based on phrases emailed to me by fans of the site.

I've been doing this for about three years. They're a journal or a book about my life. I have pictures of old girlfriends. I have pictures of old jobs. I've also drawn pictures of nightmares I've had about crazy-looking Roman emperors trying to steal my car keys. All of these were drawn on a drawing tablet on the computer.

My father was always really into computers. I was always into drawing and art and never got into computers until I took a class in which you plotted points to make shapes and draw pictures. When I was in fourth grade, I had to do a science project. It was the first time I had to present something I'd made on the computer to people on the computer. I made a Hypercard presentation about bridges. Everyone else came in with your usual science-fair projects. I came in with a computer. I didn't win. The kid next to me who'd glued rocks to a piece of cardboard won. But I didn't just win, I got yelled at. Everyone else had worked so hard, and all I did was bring in my father's computer. I had tried to explain how you could click around and go through the presentation, but I don't think any of my teachers had even seen a computer.

Then my dad tried getting me into the Internet in 1994 or 1995. I was a senior in high school, and if it didn't have anything to do with girls or beer, I wasn't interested. That was pretty much my attitude until 1999 when I was a senior in college. I was fed up with art school. Everything was so precious, and it was such junk. In response to these projects, I made a series of talking dogs. If you plugged their tail in, they'd say things like, "Hello, I'm a talking car." I even made a metal dog that peed oil. At the same time I made a series of 10 dog animations. They were all about half an hour long each. And they made absolutely no sense whatsoever. One of them was Exploding Dog.

I graduated from college and got this office job where all I did was sit in front of the computer. That was when I learned how cool the Internet was. And since I was no longer in school, I had no outlet form my artwork. So I made an awful Web site. At the same time I had a friend who had a performance at an art gallery. I said that I'd like to do a performance at an art gallery. I don't remember what I was going to do because I never did it. The night before the presentation I decided that if I was going to fail I'd fail big. So I made up hundreds of posters saying Come see the artwork of Sam Brown One night only. My name's not even Sam Brown. It's Adam. I made up that name for the performance and now I'm stuck with it. I went to a convenience store, bought some pads of paper, and sat at the gallery all night drawing pictures for people.

After that I put up three pictures I'd drawn with a mouse in five minutes and said send me a title, and I'll draw more pictures. I've done that for the last three years. I like to think of this as more than a title and a picture. But I like to think about it as a title, the picture, and the space between them so they make more of a story. Does that make sense? The story happens in your head.

That led me to making books, which is what I've been doing for the last year and a half. I've been trying to do stories more. I wanted to do more than a dumb comic strip or dumb comics. I'm really sold on the Internet now. Explodingdog kinda makes sense if you see one picture or two pictures, but you really need to see 28 pictures for it to make sense. There are characters, and there's a kind of Explodingdog world.

Good Experience Live IX

The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players: Look at Us

The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players is a three-piece musical group that creates music based on photographic slides acquired at yard sales and estate sales. Here is a rough transcript of remarks made during their performance at Good Experience Live:

We are the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. My name is Jason, and I play the keyboard. My name is Tina, and I run the slide projector. My name is Rachel, and I play the drums.

We are a conceptual art rock band. We read the newspapers to track down strangers' yard sales. We look for obituaries to see who died. We go to their estate sales, and we buy their slide collections. Assuming they have a slide collection. We turn these slide collections into pop rock performance exposes. We're going to do the best 15 minutes of our songs this afternoon.

This song is called Look at Me and is about two retired military nurses named Jean and Cathy. How do we know their names? Sometimes they write them on the bottoms of the slides. Everyone's slide collections says, "Look at us!" And by us I mean them.

For this next song, we were fortunate enough to acquire slides taken from a traffic education class in the '70s. We like to call this one "Middle America."

This is a slide that's been in our act for about a year now. But you see that Hershey bar guy? I just noticed him and every time I look at him he is so disturbing. This is the content of the Opnad Contribution Study Committee Report from June 1977. This song will justify our existence. These were taken from an internal McDonald's corporate marketing meeting. These slides were meant to be buried for absolutely forever. We unearthed them in Seattle. We turned these into a six-song rock opera.

Part one, "Theme from Opnad." Part two, "What Will the Corporation Do?" We took Ed Schmitt's quote here word for word and turned it into a rock opera number. Words by Ed Schmitt. Music by the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. This is a controversial piece. This song was banned in 17 states, along with our first two CD's. This song is called "Wendy's, Sambo's, and Long John Silver's." "New competitors are using network television to take advantage of efficiency." I just got the hurry up from the drummer here. That's OK. This is part four of six, and it's called "Let's Not Have the Same Weight in 1978."

Joe Casper raises several troubling questions, actually. We're at part five of six. They're at the crucial part where they need to ask the eternal important question of, "Why did we decide to take this decision to you?" Who should we take this question to, Ed Schmitt? Ed Schmitt? Then you hear some rumblings in the back: Joe Casper. Look at Joe. Everyone wanted to be a white-collar executive. Joe was a vinyl-collar executive. They don't make executives like Joe Casper any more. Joe Casper was not a man of many words. He was a many of high fashion."

Thank you so much! This is part six of six. It's the final song of our part of the afternoon. "Together, As a System, We Are Unbeatable." It's how they wrapped up their business meeting rock opera. That's all!

Good Experience Live VIII

Ze Frank: Participative Projects and Popularity

Ze Frank is an interactive artist and humorist, as well as co-founder of the design collective MediaBrand. Frank's freelance Web design and animation has been featured in Print Magazine and Communication Arts. In 2002, Frank's personal Web site won the People's Voice Webby Award in the best personal Web site category. Here is a rough transcript of his talk at Good Experience Live:

Radically inclusive environments. That's amazing. I dread any alternative. Since 1997 the porn industry is the only sector that has posted more than a 40% growth rate. I apologize for some of the terminology I'll be using. Hardware. Software. Embedded objects. Under the fold. Unix. Layouts. Mounting a drive. Web logs. GUI. Flash. I'm a little flustered today.

In March 2000 I created a poignant flash piece that was an invitation to my 29th birthday party. I sent it out to 17 people. Within four days, 750,000 people a day were coming to this site. For those of you not familiar with numbers, that's about the number of grains of salt that will fit into a toilet. I'm apparently some sort of viral marketing genius.

I was contacted by Kodak three weeks later and asked to fly down to Atlanta to talk to them about heading up their viral marketing department, The meeting went really well. It's been really great being poplar. You become fascinated by what is popular and, more importantly, how to remain popular. I maintain the site as a place for my own personal experimentation in new media. Two, it's really pretty cool. And three, it's interesting to interact with people. In the last few years, I've responded to 30,000 emails.

In the beginning, I was really, really interested in developing new content. I began to rely on audience suggestions for new content ideas. One woman emailed me to say that if I ever came out to Boulder I should rock out with them. This is me rocking out.

Oh! I have a cat. Another young woman wrote me that her mother was extremely interested in kaleidoscopes. She had a collection of more than 100 kaleidoscopes. She asked me to make her mother an online kaleidoscope. It's also a drawing tool. It was my first opportunity to interact with an audience. People could send me screenshots of images they made. I now have a gallery of thousands of images.

That's the opportunity that I have. To interact with thousands and thousands of people. These aren't designers. But I can motivate people to create things and become part of something bigger. For one project, I created an online interactive alphabet. That's the letter project.

I've done a lot of these, trying to figure out the boundaries of participative projects that end up with something that's somewhat aesthetic. In the fiction project, there are thousands and thousands of posts, and about 50 completed stories. And this year I've partnered with the people who run 24-hour blogathon to develop a 24-hour fiction writing contest to raise money for charity.

The important thing when starting a project is to know what you want to do. Before I did the letter project, I did the word project. I ended up with 2,000 words I didn't know what to do with. I wasted a lot of people's time. I apologize.

I'm also interested in games. A lot of us spent a lot of time indoors playing Zork. We felt like we were mastering something, but there's a lot that happens in the game that's totally random. You feel like you're getting really good at something, but it all comes down to a random number. I've created some games: Atheist, it's misspelled; Buddhist; and a racing game in which at the end, I subtract a random number from your score -- that quadrupled the amount of times people would refresh to play the game.

A lot of what I've done has been random, but there are a few things I've held true to. One is intimacy. I email everyone back who emails me. I talk in the first person on the site. The other thing is that I don't use any humor that insults anyone else but me. I'd rather see more humor that's self-deprecating than sarcastic and biting. Simplicity, obviously. Having limitations. And also ambiguity. I've experienced this site as a linear process. A lot of people come to the site and experience it as a whole. I have an nsFAQ, not so frequently asked questions in which I list all of the questions but none of the answers. You can make up myths about yourself. You can work on your own self-perception in a way.

Good Experience Live VII

Pam Lewis: Grassroots (Show) Business

Pam Lewis is the director of youth programs for the All Stars Project Inc., a nonprofit focusing on anti-violence activism. Lewis also co-directs the Joseph A. Forgione Development School for Youth, a leadership training program. Here is a rough transcript of her talk at Good Experience Live:

I find it very moving about people coming together. That's what we do at the All Stars Project, bring different people together to see what they can do. The All Stars has been around for a little more than 20 years. I came to New York from Kansas City with $50 in my pocket to volunteer for the All Stars.

We didn't want to take any money from the government, so we hit the streets asked people for money. We now have a donor base of 20,000 donors. We're a $4.5 million (?) nonprofit, and we haven't taken any money from the federal government. We work with 20,000, and we'd like to change the world.

We talk a lot about possibilities, experiences, and environment. The All Stars is about play, creativity, and performance. Our flagship program is the All Stars Talent Show Network. 350 kids show up for an audition, and everyone makes the show. It's a radically inclusive environment where the kids are welcome. The kids have to come back for a workshop. The groups are led by graduates of the program, and they have to come up with a show with people that they don't know. We're building community.

There are a lot of communities we don't go to. That's where the All Stars is. But we're not the kind of crazy where we're liberal. We go in slowly. We ask parents to volunteer. The community is producing it. That's the success.

Two weeks after the workshop we put on a show. Sometimes we have to turn 400 people away. Now we stay in a community as long as we need to and put on as many shows as we need to so everyone can see the show. This is grassroots showbiz.

Now we're moving into business itself. We've got the Development School for Youth. We're looking for kids who want to grow. When we interview people, we ask them the standard interview questions, and at the end, we say, OK, we'll cal you in two weeks to let you know if you got in. Guess what, everyone gets in, They go through a 12-week program. It's not important to learn facts, it's important to have experiences. Kids in failing skills don't need more remediation. They need development.

Look at Take A Child to Work Day. Poor kids don't have those kinds of experiences. So we take them to Wall Street. We don't tell kids that the way they talk is wrong. We tell them that they need to expand their repertoire and develop some new performances.

We don't look for the top 10%. We look for the bottom 90. Having more experiences is motivating. We need to think about how we're growing our kids and not giving up on the children in failing schools. We're developing new models that work. They're performance based, not acquisitional based. Our program is a growth program for everyone.

Good Experience Live VI

Rick Robinson: Connecting People

Rick Robinson is vice president of AOL Community Products. The former editor in chief of BBS Magazine, Robinson joined AOL in 1996 as the founding managing editor of Digital City Philadelphia. In 1998, he became director of the Digital City network. Here is a rough transcript of his talk at Good Experience Live:

I have a couple of rules. If you have a phone, please turn it on. Feel free to communicate. I'm OK with that. The other thing is that I'll be reading a little bit. I'm sorry if that deters your attention, but I can't remember everything. Lastly, I get a little nervous when I speak, so if someone wants to come up and sit on stage with me, feel free. Mark? Thank you.

What is this AOL community thing? It's hard to pin down, but here are some examples. In the '90s, before I went to work for AOL, I read about people who would get married in chat rooms. At the time, that crystallized my thinking about what the possibilities online were. There are no boundaries. It's the people.

Shortly after I joined AOL in 1996, there were people spending $300 a month to communicate with other people. That was when people paid by the minute not by flat rate. And these weren't basement dwelling people. They were people like you and me.

We try to empower our members. We give them an easy to use platform of tools and get out of the way. What you find is not professional-looking screens, not poetry, but real human emotions. We also try to zipper our experience. We make it one experience, taking all of the member-contributed content and zipper it together. One of te benefits of having such a large membership is that we can connect people in a lot of different ways.

People stay online for that companionship. Those connections. Despite all the gloom about AOL and Time Warner, the community is still flourishing. Connecting people is really what we do. When people discover that people are as reachable as information online, they're hooked.

Over the last couple of decades, several devastating events have really connected people online. 911. The current war. We take member-contributed content and package it with other news and content.

Connecting is more an art than a science. But suppose it could become a science. Suppose that through some co-optation of quantum theory you can create an online persona who acts in your stead while you're offline. We feel that we can match all interests, desires, fears, and hopes. This is the experience that we're striving for and perhaps the perfect example. The one to one.

Good Experience Live V

Gillian Zoe Segal: New York Characters

Gillian Zoe Segal is a photographer and author of New York Characters. Segal's work has appeared in the New York Times and Time Out New York. Here is a rough transcript of her talk at Good Experience Live:

I went straight from undergraduate at the University of Michigan to law school and then straight to work as a lawyer. I realized that working as a lawyer wasn’t for me. I 1997 I enrolled in the international center of photography. Every day I would walk from where I lived in the upper west side to the school which at the time was located on the upper east side. I kept seeing familiar faces. Including this man who ended up on the cover of my book. I went up to him and asked who are you what are you doing and why are you always here? He's known as the mayor of the reservoir. It's become his office. And he's well known within the New York City jogging world. What makes New York the best city in the world is the people. Among the 8 million of us, there are some that stand out in the crowd and really give the city its character. Some are highly visible. Some are well known in their neighborhoods. And some are involved in their little subcultures.

I set out to document these characters, these wonderful personalities. Joe Franklin became famous as a radio host in 1950 and then started a talk show. He's now known as the king of memorabilia. He has an office on Times Square, and the ceiling is falling in. His office is piled high with clutter. You literally have to walk in sideways or you'll cause an avalanche.

My next character is Curtis Sliwa who became famous for founding the Guardian Angels in 1979. One of the ways I found my characters was by asking people I photographed for recommendations. Curtis sat down with his crazy rolodex and gave me all sorts of crazy numbers. I'd also show up In a particular neighborhood and ask who's famous around here.

These are the Vodels. They're kind of the darlings of the New York art world. He's a retired postal worker. She's a retired librarian. Since they got married, they'd use her salary to pay rent. And they'd use his to buy artwork.

This is fireman Ed. He's a massive fan of the Jets. He's almost as famous as the team is. He always sits In the same section. He sits on the shoulders of his brother and leads that cheer J-E-T-S Jets Jets Jets! He takes his job very seriously. He even confided in me that sometimes he gets so nervous before games that he throws up.

This is the lemon ice king of Corona. He's been in business since 1949 in Queens. He, too, takes his job very seriously. He has one rule: No mixing flavors.

This guy is named Radio Man, but he's really about movies and television. He spends his days riding his bike between every movie and TV set. He's really a celebrity groupie. He even has a hotline you can call to learn where the shoots are. You'd think that celebrities wouldn't like him. But they do really like him.

This is the Polar Bear Club president. The club was founded in 1903. On Coney Island, they swim every Sunday between September and May, when the water is at its most freezing.

Johnny Footman is New York's oldest taxi driver. He's 84 years old and has been driving taxis since 1945.

You can't really live in New York City and escape Rev. Al Sharpton's presence. He's one of our most powerful politicians even though he's never been elected to an office.

This is a crowd pleaser. He's our subway dermatologist. He became known because of his tasteful ads in the subway. What I was curious about was how many doctors were in his practice. He is successful, but he's the only doctor in his practice. How does he come up with those ads? He makes them up himself. He shows them to his family, and if they say you cant air that its disgusting, he runs them.

Here we have John McEnroe. When you think of John McEnroe, you think about how good he is at tennis, but you also think of his temper and his famous temper tantrums. He really is like that in real life.

This is Kitty Carlisle Hart. When I met her she was 93 years old and still so with it. She represents New York's high society.

This man I call the subway dancer. He's one of the most famous subway performers. He dances with his doll Lupita, whose made with a broomstick and a mask. She's attached to his feet, and they dance to salsa music.

One of the benefits of coming to a live lecture is that you get to see some of the people who didn't make it into the book. This is the soup nazi, and he really is like he was portrayed on that Seinfeld episode. He and I got into a fight, so he wouldn't sign my release. So he's not in the book, but I can show you what he's like today.

Good Experience Live IV

Stewart Butterfield: Possibilities, Constraints, and Experience

Stewart Butterfield is president of Ludicorp Research and Development Ltd. and founder of the 5k competition, a lo-fi, high-profile design contest. A member of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences, he recently served as a nominating judge in the Best Practices category for the Webby Awards. Here is a rough transcript of his talk at Good Experience Live:

I was directing a design group at a Web agency, and one of the designers was developing a template. They were really big and super ornate and were getting upward of 60k. I told him that they had to be smaller than 25k, and he said, "No way! There's no way anyone can design something smaller than 25k." Oh, so? So I got the idea of holding a contest to develop Web sites smaller than 5 kilobytes. That's 40,960 bits. Those bits are either on or off. That's about 850 words in English. It's a pretty small picture. There's an infinite range of possibilities of things that could be 5k in size.

There's some math behind this. 2 to the power of 1 is one dimension. It's a possibility space. 2 to the power of 2 is two dimensions, a plane. And 2 to the power of 3 is three dimensions, an object. 2 to the power of 4 is a hypercube, about the limit of what we can draw on a plane. In that case, one node has three neighbors. In 5k, there are 2 to the power of 49,960 possibilities. 40,960 is a mind-blowing number of dimensions. And 2 to the power of 40,960 is even more mind-blowing. It's more than the number of milliseconds since the big bang multiplied by the number of particles in the universe.

When we started the contest in 2000, the average home page might have been about 80k. Amazon.com was 120k. So 5k is pretty small. Nevertheless, every point in a possibility space differs from its neighbors in some minimally different way. The more complex the space, the more minimally different neighbors each point will have.

The reason 5k seems small is because there's a progressive process of adding constraints. One is the way we encode information. After coding something in ASCII, you have to layer HTML. Maybe you layer cascading style sheets. Maybe you layer Javascript. All of these constraints make the possibility space smaller.

What makes sense? Constraints of natural language. Constraints of utility. Constraints of aesthetics. What is beautiful? The process of design is often the identification of a tiny island in a possibility space. If you look at the 5k competition, there's some interesting stuff. Every year, themes will come up. People will get similar ideas.

That's because constraints are everywhere. Think of music, architecture, and poetry. Experimentation usually means playing with constraints. Additional constraints are often employed in creative competition such as 48-hour filmmaking, three-day novel writing, and two-ink design competitions. There are all sorts of contests that are like the 5k.

Introduction of constraints motivates people to become more creative. The project I'm working on now is a massive multiplayer game for the Web called Game Neverending. Games are very interesting. The rules of the game are constraints. When you define a game, it's defining a set of constraints. In researching games and play, I came across this quote from Martin Buber: "Play is the exultation of the possible." And then we have Richard Pew: "Design is the successive application of constraints until only a unique product is left."

Good Experience Live III

Elizabeth Peaslee: What I Learned in School

Elizabeth Peaslee is vice president of customer experience at Travelocity. Here is a rough transcript of her talk at Good Experience Live:

Someone once referred to Travelocity as the old lady of the Internet. 18 years is a long time. For 11 years we had a product called EasySaabre, which wasn't so easy. If 18 is old, I'm in trouble, so I changed the title of my presentation from "Growing Old Gracefully"
to "What I Learned in School."

After launch, we had a pretty basic page, a branding person's dream given the size of that logo. There were some ads, and there were four buttons because there were four things you could do. In 1997, we added a search tool for low fares. There were five prominent buttons. I refer to these as our Crayola years because everything was very colorful. Travel is colorful and fun.

In 1998, we moved to a standard two-column design, what I call our junior high "studious wallflower" years. In 1999 we added a third column. We wanted to get everything people could do on the home page. We had a rather industrial-looking set of buttons. By the end of that year we moved back to a reverse two-column design.

In early 2000 we bought Preview Travel. Interviewing people about what they liked about Preview Travel was that it was fun. So we added more color. And with the merger, our home page started looking like an org chart. People asked us why we had everything on the home page when all they really wanted to do was go on a trip.

So senior year for us was about consumer research, customer interviews, and lots of user tests. This was a project we kicked off in 2001, and we decided we could take our time. We didn't want to rush our next redesign. Interviews with customers led to our next design phase. We picked three designs we thought were pretty good, and we took those to user tests. We could get 200-400 people in less than a week rather than eight in a day. We needed facts. We needed to be able to go to people and say this is why we should do something.

One of the three designs came back far exceeded the other two. Now that we knew what the page should look like, we had to add the functionality. People said personalization was very important, so we added a fare watcher. We went into another phase of testing. This was not a quick project. We tested the new home page design against our current home page design, as well as the home pages of our two biggest competitors. It was viewed much more favorably.

We rolled out that page at the beginning of 2002, a year after we started. One of our goals was to get people off the home page. We measured that throughput and bail out. We cut the bail-out rate off the home page by half. 100% throughput isn't realistically attainable.

This is the design we've had for about a year and a half. And the measurement we've been able to do has gotten the rest of the organization focusing on customer experience. Usability testing didn't use to be a discipline. We've shown people that usability testing, focus groups, and talking to your customers is important and useful. Graduation is really just the beginning. We've made a few tweaks. We improved our search tool. We reduced the number of ads. We put the personalization front and center. It's slightly fluid.

What's next? We are constantly looking at the home page. It has a little bit of visibility. Everyone looks at the home page. What's the value of something on the home page? How many people click on that? Do we make any money off of that? Maybe something should be taken off the home page. We use research and testing to justify the changes we make. We have data behind it, and we're able to show results.

Good Experience Live II

Ken Jackson: How New York Is Different

Ken Jackson is the president and CEO of the New-York Historical Society, the oldest cultural organization in the state of New York. Jackson is also a professor of history and the social sciences at Columbia University. Here is a rough transcript of his talk at Good Experience Live:

I'm delighted to welcome you to the New-York Historical Society. Many of you are not from New York. I am not from New York. As you might be able to tell from my voice, I'm from somewhere else: Memphis. But I share Mark's enthusiasm for New York. How is New York different than other places?

One way is that it's old. New York is older than Boston and Philadelphia. We're thrown off by the skyscrapers, but New York is literally the oldest city in the country. Other cities have disappeared. To call them a city in our own time is really a stretch. History in some sense in this country is for losers. Because New York won, it's often forgotten. What we think is historic is wrack and ruin. Lower Manhattan is historic, but we don't think about it as such because it's not old. 1624, what's that? In European or Asian terms, that's insignificant. Another reason New York is different is because it's old as a big city. New York has been big for a long time.

What difference has history made? New York is famous for its rudeness. We tend to think of that in a negative sense, but New York is an entrepreneurial city. We were founded by the Dutch, not the Puritans. Boston was founded by the Puritans as a religious experiment. New York is about making money. It's a company town. If you know your history, you can predict your future. Cities have history and move in a trajectory. Because the Dutch were here to make money, they were more open to other people. New York became the original melting pot. It was never anything but that. Why do people come here? At the end of the day, people in New York don't care. In a huge city like this, we don't have time to chase down the people we don't like.

What has that got to do with today? All of the life and vitality of American cities is along the edges. That's the North American model. What's on the edges? Office parks and subdivisions. Yes, New York has suburbs, but no one grows up on the edges and feels like there isn't a center. New York is a very centered region. All around the country, cities have been losing urban density. Their boundaries have expanded faster than their population has grown -- except in New York and San Francisco. People move to the suburbs and to Florida, but someone takes their place.

Another difference is where the rich live. New York has more than its share of poor people, but what makes New York different is that the city has a large population of the wealthy in the center of the city. Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, and Central Park West have the highest real estate values. The richest county per capita -- not per household -- is New York County. That's the island of Manhattan. That's astonishing. If you are very rich, you make a point to document that you are out of New York City 180 days a year so you don't have to pay New York state tax. Even with all of the homeless, unemployed, and underreported actors and actresses, we're still the most wealthy city in the world.

New York is also different in other ways. It's a 24-hour city. You can find a cup of coffee at 3 or 4 in the morning. I do an all-night bike ride every year. We've got good public transportation. One other thing is important. That is safety. When most people think of New York, they don't usually think of safety. But our crime rate is extremely low. Homicide and auto theft is down 70% over the last 10 years. Stranger crime is down 90%. But the real reason New York City is safe is because middle-class people aren't likely to be the victims of homicide. The reason New York City is safe is because we don't have automobile accidents here. Distances are short. You're not in harms way if you walk.

Let me talk about the good experiences. Assuming that being big is good, if you're here, it's because you want to do well in life. You are different. You have accepted the American ethos: to aspire. Maybe New York is the most American of places. Why is it that New York became so big? It wasn't always that way. You could argue that New York has a location that is so fabulous that finally it began to kick in. Another could be luck. After the War of 1812, British manufactured goods destined for American markets ended up in New York. The British merchants made New York their auction place.

Also, people here take charge of their own lives. When you get on the No. 10 bus, you know that there's a schedule, that there's a route, and that there's a fare. Those are managerial concepts, not technical concepts. That originated in New York. The New York Stock Exchange started in 1792. Even though Philadelphia had the first and second banks, New York far surpassed it.

Long before the Civil War, New York isn't even thinking about other cities. People did something to change their luck. We need to have a place that celebrates difference and is open to new experiences. That place is New York. And a place isn't anything without its people.

Good Experience Live

Mark Hurst: What Better Place

Mark Hurst is founder of the Internet consulting firm Creative Good. Previously, Hurst was director of product development at Yoyodyne, an early Internet marketing firm founded by Seth Godin and later bought by Yahoo. Here is a rough transcript of his introduction to Good Experience Live:

I want to take a few minutes to explain why I came to this place, why I created Gel, and what it's all about. I created a slideshow to describe where I was following the dotcom. This is the office we were going to build out just before the peak. We were going to take this sweatshop in the Garment District and transform it into a professional services office. We did, but then we laid everyone off. So I took some time off to go on a road trip.

This is the tent I slept in. I sometimes stayed in Motel 6 when I needed some time off. After 911 I had some family business I needed to take care. Family business completed, I turned west. In Minneapolis at the Mall of America, I got to thinking about experience. At the Mall, there's a line between the experience and the commercial side. There's even a Chapel of Love at the Mall of America. And on the day I was there, a couple got married.

I kept heading west to the mountains. This is the Sitting Bull monument, one man's vision of building something. The Salt Flats were one of my favorite places. It was one of the quietest places I've ever been. One of my least favorite places was not New York, but the Las Vegas version of New York. And then I got home, one of my favorite places.

After traveling across the country and having all of these experiences, I realized that New York was the place I wanted to be. Now is a time to return to our values and want we want to work on. I came back to Good Experience. Experience is more than just fixing Web sites. I wanted to put a conference together that brought together a broad perspective of good experience. New York is the place to do it. New York is an experience in and of itself. What better place to hold this than the New-York Historical Society? I can't think of a more relevant place to hold this event.

Happy May Day! II

London police disperse peaceful protesters. Anarchists take to the streets throughout Europe. Asians agitate for change. Beijing remains quiet because of SARS. Rocks are thrown in Berlin.

And in Boston? Troopers train to carry submachine guns at Logan.

Happy May Day.

Workaday World XXIX

We just got a batch of new Fast Company hats sporting the new logo.



I don't really like wearing hats unless they're stocking caps in the winter. But I made sure I got mine. Red. I'm wearing it now. Will probably tire of that soon.

Conferences and Community VI

I still owe Media Dieticians my wrapup analysis of SXSW Interactive two months after the fact. And I've not posted my notes from the Toronto Comic Arts Festival or Anime Boston, much less the first class in my CCAE course on Boston, Cambridge, and the American Revolution.

So why the heck am I planning to confblog Good Experience Live tomorrow? Because I can. I don't know if I'll be able to practice as immediate a journalism as I did at SXSW, but we'll see if they have WiFi. At the very least, I'll post reports tomorrow night. Then it's back home to Boston for the Media in Transition conference, which I also plan to report on.

Backlog, back off!

Event-O-Dex LV

May 4: Local animator Karen Aqua will screen some of her animation work for Sesame Street at River Gods in Cambridge. Soundtrack music features Ken Field, Franc Graham, Jesse Williams, Mike Duke, Phil Neighbors, Marji Alonso, Steve Langone, Dinty Child, Linda Viens, Carolyn Kaylor, Denise DiZio, Wanetta Jackson, Eric Paull, John Styklunas, Ethan Meyer, Mike Rivard, Dana Colley, Alec Haavik, Rick Barry, Randy Black, Ken Winokur, Dan Kellar, and Mickey Bones.

Music to My Ears XXXVI

Jenn just turned me onto the Buddyrevelles, an interesting pop band from Chicago. Listening to one of their downloadable songs, "Growing Old," I think they sound like a cross between the Smoking Popes and the Beautiful South -- wonderful earnest pop for a cloudy, drizzly day. Sunday afternoon music!

And Marm0t shared a song by the Long Winters from Seattle with me this morning. "New Girl" is a little more powerful in its pop, and the lead singer's voice reminds me of the dude from Zircus, an art-school rock project that recorded the Dave Sim-inspired song "My Astoria."

Workaday World XXVIII

I usually don't like posting purely personal entries in Media Diet, but I've had the most curious day so far. Having gone to bed early last night -- like 10:30, which has been rare in recent weeks -- I had set my alarm for 6 a.m. I wanted to get up early, shower, shave, do the dishes, pack my suitcase for tonight's trip to New York for Good Experience Live, and head into work before the T got too crowded.

But I like to sleep. I really like to sleep. If I wake up from a dream, I try to fall back asleep to chase the dream. This morning, I kept hitting snooze and resetting the alarm until after 8 a.m., at which point I got up. This is my usual way of waking. Snooze, snooze, snooze. The overcast skies didn't help much. As much of a morning person as I am -- and as energetic, hyperactive, and productive as I am during the day -- I need a surprising amount of sleep. I sleep at least eight hours a night. Usually more. Even if I go out. (It helps having a flexible work schedule.) But I make it up by burning brightly during the day. How much sleep do you need?

Is it possible to sleep too much? Seems not. Also, why does the snooze button give you nine more minutes of sleep? And lastly, why is that I always wake up a second or two before the alarm goes off -- instead of when the alarm actually sounds? Am I so in tune with my alarm that some inner working trips my trigger before the alarm itself gets its chance to do so? I always wake up just before the alarm goes off.

In the end, I did most of the dishes, took out the trash and recycling, packed, and hailed a cab to work because of the rain to still arrive at a relatively decent hour -- even if I did hit snooze for two hours. Sheesh. I wish I didn't need so much sleep. Chuck, the door man at the Scotch & Sirloin building, goes to bed at 10 every night and gets up at 3 in the morning. I wish I could do that.

How much sleep do you need?

Cobblestone Pie

If the weather cooperates today and tomorrow -- which it isn't so far -- the Cambridge Department of Public Works will repave the stretch of Franklin Street between Western Avenue and Pearl Street. The street is in somewhat sorry shape, but the repaving is also a shame. Why? On the block right next to my house is a stretch of exposed granite paving stones.



Not far from where I grew up in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, there was an exposed patch of wooden paving blocks that the city's work crews left exposed as a reminder of what once was. Fingers crossed that the Cambridge DPW leaves at least some of the granite paving stones exposed -- either along Franklin Street or in the bus turnaround just off Green Street. To cover them up entirely would be a shame.

Corollary: Anchormen, Aweigh! XX

We just OK'd the PDF proofs for the CD and insert designs for the new Anchormen CD, "Nation of Interns." We missed a period and had some weird date formatting, as well as a questionable nickname spelling, but it would've cost $200 to make those small fixes. So we opted to send it on as is. Typos are punk rock. And therefore awesome!

Nervy, Pervy XIV

Oh, that Philip Kaplan. The proud papa of Fucked Company just rolled out a new "public service," Pud TV. Think Suicide Girls for the dotbomb set. From the site's opening page:

So my other site ... calls out companies that lie, cheat, and steal from their employees and customers. A lot of people are out of work and FC's various message boards give a voice to the unfortunate.

But what else I can do to help? Can any good come out of a bad economy?

Why, lots of newly-jobless girls willing to pose naked for money, of course.

Word is that the site features more than 1,500 pictures of disrobing dotbombshells partially clad in Fucked Company T-shirts. "Don't be surprised if you see that hottie in marketing you used to work with," quoth Philip.

I guess we should've seen this coming when Philip started hanging out with the CES/AVN set -- and when he approached adult movie studios about scripting three- to five-minute porn videos.

The Movie I Watched Last Night LXVI

From this past weekend:

Where the Buffalo Roam
This 1980 movie features Bill Murray, who portrays the father of gonzo journalism, Hunter S. Thompson. It's a much more cartoony take than the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but if you're a fan of Thompson's work, it's worth a watch. The movie tracks Thompson's interactions and relationship with his attorney, Carl Lazlo, played by Peter Boyle, but it's really Murray's rubber-legged aping that stands out, as shallow as it is. Bruno Kirby -- who also starred in a movie looking at alt.journalism in Boston -- stars as Marty Lewis, Thompson's largely ineffectual editor. Did Kirby do any other alt.journalism movies? Or was this a followup to his 1977 role in "Between the Lines"? Curious. The most effective scene in my opinion was the bit in which Thompson speaks at a college campus. His on-stage shenanigans mirror his once-lively campus speaking tours, as does the students' willing embrace of his countercultural confusion. Reminded me of the lackluster "debate" staged by Timothy Leary and G. Gordon Liddy at Northwestern University years ago. There's also a notable quote presaging Thompson's relatively recent writing stint at ESPN.com: "What are you talking about, man? You're not a fucking sportswriter!" For Thompson buffs only, methinks.

Freeze Me
I'm pleased to report that Rareflix made good on my rentals, as dodgy as parts of their Web site seem. Their self-mailers aren't as slick as those used by Netflix, but the idea is basically the same -- even if the DVD's they stock are not. "Freeze Me" is a Japanese suspense film bordering on gore. It's the story of a young salary woman who is haunted by a rape in her past. Her assailants return when one of them is released from prison, one by one re-entering her life, much to her dismay. However, one by one, she manages to dispatch them, stowing their bodily remains in industrial-sized freezers that she stores in her apartment. "I'm opening a restaurant!" she chirps cheerily to one delivery man. Cinematically, the movie is well done, and there's a nicely tender and committed subplot involving her current lover that weaves in and out of the more horrible, staggered death scenes. But the highlight was how the cold provided by the freezers begins to affect her physically -- mirroring the increasingly deadening cold she feels emotionally as she reclaims her life for herself. Well done, and not as much of a slasher film as it could've been.

The Astro-Zombies
Another Rareflix rental, this is a loose retelling of the Frankenstein myth as seen through 1969 B-movie eyes, shades of the Milwaukee-based late-night horror program "Shock Theater" hosted by Tolouse NoNeck. Scientists are developing a technology with which a man's thoughts can be transmitted to another man's brain via radio waves and other means. They hope that this can ease space travel, as astronauts become host "zombies" controlled by people back on Earth. A slightly Soviet vixen Satana, played by Tura Satana of "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" fame -- and who also reprised her role in the 2002 TV reinterpretation "Mark of the Astro-Zombies," which I haven't seen -- strives to steal said technology for her foreign masters to use against the United States. In fact, the movie is largely made up of scenes featuring the Frankenstein-like laboratory and the noir-esque political proclivities of Satana and her henchmen -- some of which take place in a night club featuring a body-painted dancer. The Astro-Zombies themselves are few and far between. I only remember several scenes in which the Astro-Zombies are involved, largely in stalking and slaying scenes that weren't overly surprising. And it's interesting to note that even though dead bodies were harvested to create the Astro-Zombies, the director opted not to use your traditional zombie or undead makeup magic to portray the Astro-Zombies. Instead, the zombies are recognizable because they wear slightly oversized skull-shaped masks with plastic sheeting covering the mouth region. It's never made clear whether these masks are space helmets or some sort of helmet necessary for the transmission of the supposedly controlling brain waves, but it's a cheesy approach to costuming, regardless. They must have only had one, because I don't think you ever see more than one Astro-Zombie at a time. In the end, the Astro-Zombies escape Satana's control and run amok briefly before being put down once and for all. And yet again, the B-movie day is saved -- from the undead as well as from the Russians.

Event-O-Dex LIV

May 3: The Mary Reillys cuddle up with Zykos, Western Keys, and Aberdeen at TT the Bear's in Cambridge.

Anchormen, Aweigh! XX

Every day so far this week (OK, yesterday and today), I've been getting several progress notification emails from Tanya at CDman, where we're pressing the forthcoming Anchormen CD, "Nation of Interns." It's a pretty slick process. You upload your CD, tray card, and booklet designs online, they send you PDF proofs -- which I just now received -- and you OK every step of the process via email.

Some of the emails have been somewhat confusing in terms of whether they need us to confirm or not, but it's pretty seamless so far. And the design proofs look great! We'll see how the final product turns out, but the Operators have used CDman to good effect, so hopes are high. We're well on our way to being ready for the May 16 CD release party and Handstand Command anniversary celebration.

Woot!

Corollary: Sketchy Ethics

In T-Salon, a largely China-centric blog, Media Dietician Andrea Leung comments on Steve Friess' response to my commentary on his Editor & Publisher column. She argues that "this foriegn journalist had no room to advocate for change in the way Chinese state media works" and considers how to balance financial interests and the public good in Chinese media. Say, we ask the same question here!

In the Cards II

Move over Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! Not only can you get a playing card deck of Iraq's most wanted, reputedly used by soldiers to identify enemies of the state. You can now get a deck of 55 Most Wanted that need to be ousted from power in the United States to change our current regime.

If only both decks were annotated with special powers, relative strength, and other collectible card game-like characteristics. Then Qusay Saddam Husayn Al-Tikriti could go head to head with Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney.

See You in the Funny Pages X

Did you know that John Byrne has been doing the layouts for Funky Winkerbean for the past several weeks? Word from the Worst Forum Ever is that he and Tom Batiuk are close friends.

Read But Dead XIII

Worth magazine questions its self-worth, finds itself lacking, and shuts up shop. If the current publishers can find a buyer, it may resume publication in the fall. I've never been a big fan of personal finance magazines, but Worth seemed slightly more thoughtful than its ilk. It had a solid design and featured writing by Robert X. Cringely, a writer whose name is only slightly better than my own.

Thanks to I Want Media.

Covering Comic Books II

Atlas Comics' 25 All-Time Greatest Covers of American Comic Books is a wonderful roundup of comic book design examples. Judged on impact, readability, uniqueness, and presentation, the online exhibit also features the 12 Dumbest Covers of American Comic Books We Could Find, which seems to be much more subjective in their selection.

Comic Books and Copyright

Copyright is a PDF comic book published by the National Institute for the Defense of Competition and Protection of Intellectual Property and the World Intellectual Property Organization in 2001 in Peru. Written and drawn by Juan Acevedo, it's a simplified primer to the benefits of copyright aimed at musicians and artists concerned about making a living off of their work. The comic likens copyright infringement to stealing a car, addresses authorship, and glosses over copyright renewal. Stephen Downes describes the comic as the party line: "Some days I wish I had access to the same propaganda machine to get the other side of the story out." Indeed. I had to chuckle when the parrot squawked "Copyrike!"

Discontinuing Education II

Even though I dogged out of the lecture I'd registered for at the Museum of Fine Art last week -- a late talk with the new editor seemed more important than a talk on "the many guises of contemporary art" -- I did drag myself out of the house in Saturday's cold rain for a historical walk and talk put on by the Museum of Science.

Larry Sands, former fire chief for Medford, led about 15 people on a two-hour stroll through downtown Boston to share some stories and sites about the great Boston fire of 1872. Starting at the Old South Meeting House, which was saved from the blaze by volunteers draping wet blankets over the roof, we walked around much of the area affected by the blaze, which destroyed almost 800 buildings. Sands talked about how building design and construction aided the blaze, the insufficient water supply in the booming commercial district (the financial district used to be a wealthy residential section with tree-lined boulevards), and the role that dynamiting buildings played in fighting the fire. It was kind of unsettling that Sands adopted the persona of the city's fire chief at the time -- his first-person accounts fell a little flat -- and I was amused that he mispronounced Peshtigo, a Wisconsin city also destroyed by a rampaging fire around the same time -- but all in all, this was an awesome program. Even if it was raining. I'm reading a couple of books about the fire now -- fascinating stuff.

And tonight, a four-week class I'm taking at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education on Boston, Cambridge, and the American Revolution begins tonight. This is the first class I've been able to take at the CCAE -- the class I signed up for last September was canceled -- and I'm quite excited. As spring continues to come, I'm a bigger and bigger fan of historical walks and talks and continuing education courses. If you've never looked into them, consider doing so. They're a lot of fun, and you just might learn something.

Rock Shows of Note LXIII

This past season of the Boston Chamber Music Society, I only made it to about half of the performances. Sunday night, I made a point of stopping by Sanders Theatre for the season's final concert, a celebration of the BCMS' 20th year. I wasn't really into the idea of sitting inside in the dark on such a nice spring evening, but I figured I'd give it a go and leave when I lost interest.

The first piece did me in. Despite the enthusiastic audience response at the end of Johannes Brahms' Quintet in F minor for Piano and Strings, I found the almost 45-minute selection relatively uniteresting. The cyclical nature of the first movement was wearing, and while I can appreciate false endings, the almost stops in this piece only made the final conclusion of the piece even more satisfying. That said, I did enjoy artistic director Ronald Thomas' cello work in the third movement, the Scherzo. And violist Marcus Thompson secured himself as my favorite musician of the evening. With his sprawling slouch and slightly ill-fitting tuxedo, Thompson is a study in apparent relaxation blended with intense playing. He was a standout for the evening.

But when the intermission hit, the urge to leave also hit. Which was a shame. Had Bela Bartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion not followed before Camille Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals, I would have stuck around. Saint-Saens' piece is a fascinating example of John Oswald-like musical appropriation or mash up from within the classical music world. Only performed live twice during Saint-Saens' lifetime, the piece wasn't even fully published until after his death. The piece quotes a can-can melody from Jacques Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld. Saint-Saens parodies Berlioz's Valse des Sylphe. And he samples two French nursery rhymes, the aria "Una voce poco fa" from Rossini's opera The Barber of Seville, and his own Danse Macabre. I wonder if he kept the piece private because of his heavy usage of other composers' themes and work. And I wish I'd had the stamina to stick it out until the end, even if I wouldn't have recognized many of the appropriated selections.

I left Sanders Theatre to head home to Central Square, stopping off at the Field for a quick pint. There, I ran into two regulars of Paddy Burke's, a bar some colleagues frequent after work. I hung out a little longer than I'd intended initially, and when I finally left the bar, I left my shoulder bag behind. That was the cause of no little distress yesterday. Nevertheless, I called the Field yesterday morning, and they had the bag on hand, having stored it in the kitchen over night. When I stopped by after work yesterday, they'd hung it on a coat hook. Had I left my bag another place, it might have not been there the next day, and it speaks well of the staff and patrons of the Field that my bag remained intact, with nothing taken from it. Phew!

Last night, then, after a quick Indian dinner at home, I walked to the Kendall Cafe for the Sinkcharmer show. I arrived in time to catch Jef, Jen, Paul, and Kathleen finishing their dinner -- and just before So & So took the stage. I've been meaning to see So & So for a long time, but this is the first chance I've had. Comprising my friends Erin and Dan, the band is a fun three-piece that is almost two bands. The first "band" took up the first half of the set, featuring what seemed to be the songs of a woman I haven't met yet. They were well-written and slightly dour in their poppiness, but despite the apparent thematic sadness, I enjoyed them a lot. Sometimes, So & So reminded me of the Indigo Girls, but not overly so. The second "band" took the stage for the second half of the set, adding Dave on guitar and swapping Dan for Erin on the stand-up drums. These songs seemed to be Erin's songs, and they were quite a bit different. Much more energetic and bouncy, even bordering on punkish in a Go-Go's kind of way, this was a little more enjoyable. Kudos to all involved. Now, if you can figure out how to share songwriting duties or perhaps mix up your set list so it's not so schizophrenic! Just kidding, although I did suggest to Erin that they keep the split sets but play under two band names in the same show, kind of like the Hi-Fives and Thee Shatners did in days gone by.

The next act was a two-piece from Albany, Gay Tastee. Reminding me of Neil Young by way of Mecca Normal -- and Suzanne of Vic Chestnut -- the singer had quite a distinctive voice that took awhile to grow on me. When it did, I could appreciate the lyrical content of his songs much more. For the most part, the band has a MDC-like political twist, combining caustic cultural commentary with self-effacing personal narrative. It's not totally my cup of tea, but I reallly appreciated what they were trying to do. At the end, the drummer sang along during one song, making me think that he should sing more often. The harmony added a lot, as did his sitting on the floor to play glockenspiel for one song. But the best part of their show came afterwards, when I approached the singer and guitarist to buy a CD. The CD cost $5, giving no indication how many songs were on it, and when I opened it, I discovered that it's a two-CD, 15-song collection. Best CD snag I've made at a show in ages (if you don't count Tim from Verona Downs giving me their record for free). Thanks, Gay Tastee!

Last up, Sinkcharmer. As always, they were excellent. Paul had been up since 5:30, so he was a little tired, but Jen and Jef carried the energy for him until he caught his stride, punctuating "Half Life" with a gleeful "Woohoo!" I still don't know all of Paul's song catalog by title, but I love his work and recognized a lot of the pieces they played. I also think that Jen and Jef bring a lot to his stage show. Good, good stuff.

Digesting the Daily XII

Recent editions of the Daily Northwestern, the student newspaper of my alma mater, featured several media-, technology-, and activism-related items that might be of interest to Media Dieticians.

City hangs up on phone booths
Cell phones blamed for demise of street-corner fixtures in Chicago
(April 10, 2003)

"The Journey" documents college grad's 5-year trip
Filmmaker interviews students, actors, former president in quest for identity
(April 14, 2003)

Al-Jazeera hits campus TVs nationwide; NU will wait for vote
University official says no requests made for channel offered in Arabic
(April 15, 2003)

Journalists urge women to be daring while reporting
"Pioneers" chronicle history, influence of females working in the newsroom
(April 15, 2003)

Weekend detention to Bottom of the Food Chain cartoonist Alex Thomas for his cryptically homophobic comic strip about the TV show "Will and Grace" on April 16. While the punchline is sentimentally clever, the portrayal of the show's content begs some question.

If you work for a college newspaper and would like to sign me up for a complimentary subscription, please feel free to do so. My address is in the grey bar over on the left.

Corollary: Comic Books and Commerce II

Ninth Art's David Lewis considers the shape of comic book reading in an essay yesterday. Drawing on the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Scott McCloud, Dylan Horrocks, Lawrence Abbott and others, Lewis explains why comic book readers are considered readers instead of viewers, the balance of verbal and visual narrative, and what readers bring to the equation as they lend meaning to white space. One of the longer Ninth Art articles I've read, Lewis' look at the comics reading process and narrative model is quite insightful. Worth reading.

Corollary: Workaday World XXVII

Things just keep getting better today! Not only do I not have my shoulder bag with me. Not only is my arm still tingling. (Whatever could it be?) But I just realized that I'll be in New York City the night Dr. Frank plays in Cambridge. I fly down the night he's playing in New York City, so maybe I can catch that show. Aargh and aargh again.

Corollary: Daily Dosage II

Like one-time blogger Dan Pink, science-fiction author William Gibson plans to stop blogging soon in order to concentrate on a book in progress. Wait a minute. Has "no longer doing a blog" become the new "starting a blog" already? Or is it true -- as Art Kleiner suggested five years ago -- that writing blogs, personal Web sites, and messages in discussion forums can edge out "real" writing.

Workaday World XXVII

Not only am I thrown today because I don't have my shoulder bag with me, but I've been experiencing an odd, disconcerting tingling in my right arm. It's mostly in the palm and wrist of my right hand but is noticeable even up into the forearm. Is it repetitive strain injury? The lingering prelude to a heart attack? Something else? I have no idea, but I hope that it goes away.

Event-O-Dex LIII

April 28: Sinkcharmer and So & So get busy at the Kendall Cafe in Cambridge.

May 2: Good Experience Live happens in New York City.

May 2-4: The Media in Transition conference turns its attention to television at MIT.

Hanging out with Hicks III

Soft Skull Press impresario Sander Hicks interviewed 911 commission member Richard Ben-Veniste for INN Report recently. The transcript is a quick read, and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. The video is also worth watching, if not for the following two moments:

RB: I think you are going right for the capillary, if I may say so.
SH: You mean the jugular?
RB: No, I mean the capillary.
SH: You mean the fine detail?
RB: I mean the things that are ... certainly not central.

SH: If Mohamed Atta is technically a fundamentalist Muslim, what is he doing cocaine and going to strip bars with Rudi Dekkers’ girlfriend?
RB: You know, that’s a heck of a question.
SH: It sure is. Right. Well, then we agree on that.

File under Spoof to Power.

The Story of Spam IV

This is the best name ever, found in the From: field of a spam I just read.

Queenie Dinnerville

Wow. If it were Queenie McDinnerville, it'd be the perfect name. But this is pretty good. Wow.

Rules for Fools XVI

Rule No. 20: If you leave your satchel somewhere over night, you will feel absolutely naked the next day. Naked!

The Free-Range Comic Book Project XX

This is an installment of Media Diet's Free-Range Comic Book Project.

Boof #3 (Image, September 1994). Writer: Beau Smith. Artist: John Cleary. Location: On the floor outside the Million Year Picnic.

For more information on this project, please refer to this Media Diet entry.

Among the Literati XXXIII

A bookstore in Ohio has come under fire for throwing away hundreds of unsold books when it went out of business. A local TV news reporter came across the overflowing dumpster and got upset that the books weren't donated to area nonprofits. The reporter became even more upset when she learned that taking the books out of the trash was illegal.

NewsChannel5 was told that tearing front covers off new books is standard procedure when a bookstore closes. It's called "stripping a book." ... [T]o take these books from the trash bin is illegal; the books would be considered stolen property. Inside the front cover, a warning states that a book without its cover is unauthorized. It was reported to the publisher as unsold and destroyed, and neither the author nor the publisher received payment.

I just checked a mass-market paperback -- Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World -- and it has no such warning. Ah, here in Stephen King's A Bag of Bones, it says, "The sale of this book without a cover is unauthorized."

Dumpster dive away, Media Dieticians. It's legal unless you sell the books.

Thanks to MobyLives.

Nervy, Pervy XIII

Steve Almond advises a new generation of erotica writers.

Thanks to Bookslut.

Rock Shows of Note LXII

After Anchormen practice, we went to the Cambridgeport Saloon in Central Square for a couple of drinks with Leslie. We headed home around 11, and I thought I'd swing by TT the Bear's to see if Kurt and Geraldine were within eyeshot from the doorway. They were there with friends to see the Mendoza Line, and I said I'd try to stop by after practice. As it turns out, Kurt saw me as soon as I stepped inside and I arrived just as the band before the Mendoza Line was wrapping up, so I had some time to talk to Kurt and Geraldine before their set started.

Having not heard the Mendoza Line before -- and occasionally confusing them with the Verona Downs much like I confuse the Hudsucker Proxy with the Shawshank Redemption -- I was in for quite a pleasant surprise. The five piece blends alt.country with unabashed power pop, and they have so much fun on stage that they're a joy to watch. When Tim sings, it's with gusto, and his sometimes straining melodies are extremely enthusiastic. But it's Shannon's voice and gentle tambourine playing that's the highlight, most likely, especially when she's playing off of lead and pedal steel guitarist John. Wonderful, wonderful songs. Well worth the $8 even if I didn't catch any of the other bands.

The Free-Range Comic Book Project XIX

This is an installment of Media Diet's Free-Range Comic Book Project.

Blue Devil #22 (DC, March 1986). Writers: Gary Cohn and Dan Mishkin. Artist: Alan Kupperberg. Location: On a bench in the Sound Museum in the South End.

For more information on this project, please refer to this Media Diet entry.

Mention Me! XXXVII

A Humor Me entry earned me a listing in this directory of acupuncture joke resources. The Web can work in funny ways sometimes.

From the In Box: Sketchy Ethics

Almost a year after I commented on an opinion piece Steve Friess wrote for Editor & Publisher, Steve replies:

This is Steve Friess. I'm having a bit of an insomniacal night here in Hong Kong, where I'm handling SARS coverage for USAT. I decided to Google myself (actually Yahoo, but it's not as pleasing a verb) and unearthed your blog blast of my E&P column from last year about working at China Daily. I'm amused you criticized me for writing a predictable column with criticism that was at least as predictable and easy. It was the sort of facile response to journalism "ethics" that would make a Medill Law & Ethics prof proud but has little bearing on the realities of working abroad and in difficult situations. As Eason Jordan gets beaten up all over town by misinformed journalistic moralists and opportunists for the practices of CNN in Iraq in the 1990s, I'm reminded of just how arrogant and simplistic it is to sit back from stateside and presume to know what is possible and viable when attempting to work under a dictatorship.

I knew what I was getting into when I went to China Daily. It wasn't intended as a journalistic exercise, it was intended as a cultural and political learning experience. The exposure to the mentality of the Chinese Information Ministry was unique and valuable and has informed much of the rest of my coverage of Chinese issues at that time and since then. The editing work at China Daily would have been done with or without me. By doing it, I got to see how it's done. I didn't mock their "foibles" in terms of the silly words they used or the amusing malaproprisms that surfaced; I mocked their "news" judgment. But there never was a realistic sense that anything could be "done" about the Chinese efforts to publish propaganda.

Your criticism is schizophrenic. On the one hand, I was rude to my hosts by writing critically about China (and later China Daily) while I was there working for their mouthpiece. On the other hand, I betrayed my journalistic soul by not somehow standing up for American press standards in a totalitarian dictatorship. The answer that you suggest, as I'm hearing from the CNN critics, is that I shouldn't have been there in the first place, that I should have just left. And that's just stupid because if journalists didn't make compromises or place themselves in difficult ethical situations from time to time, we'd get even less foreign news than we already do.

The theory always is that once you sell your soul to the devil, you can never buy it back. Please. I challenge anyone to look over my website's archive and suggest that my coverage in USA Today, The New York Times, Wired, Poz and any number of other publications on a wide range of Chinese issues wasn't hard-hitting and balanced. You can spend the time analyzing whether it was all tainted by my other purpose for being in China or by acquiescing from time to time to the Chinese limits on press freedoms, but the reality is that my readers received better, more insightful coverage because I knew more about what I was writing about than I otherwise might have.

I'm just simply offended by the out-of-hand dismissal of my efforts to help Chinese staffers genuinely interested in pursuing work in the free media obtain admissions to Western journalism schools. To date, I've assisted four journalists come to American or British schools by advising them on the process, reviewing their essays and mailing them admissions and applications material they might otherwise have trouble obtaining. This has cost me plenty of time and money, but it's probably the best anybody can do to affect change in China's media.

Finally, I spent hours upon hours in China explaining to my Chinese colleagues how our media system works. That's valuable cultural exchange that may someday come in handy if the people of China do obtain more freedoms. I'm never going to directly force the Chinese regime to change itself in any meaningful way, but I can plant seeds among its youth at a time when the Internet threatens to make government censorship irrelevant anyway.

Media Diet: One bug in my bonnet was the assumption that American journalism was better. Sure, propaganda from the government, and press limitations are bad, but is there a locally appropriate journalism for China that's not a cookie cutter of our kind of journalism? British journalism, for example, is much different than it is here. And I don't think it's a worse form of journalism. The same could be argued about Al-Jazeera.

Let's agree that any media incapable of providing any balance or vague semblance of truth is absolutely "worse." I don't know why it's so hard for Americans to be proud of the liberties we have and recognize them as desirable to all people, not just us. Because to the rest of the world that seems like arrogance? Just because our motives are constantly misunderstood doesn't make the misunderstandings true.

This is a variation on other debates I had about the Chinese situation while I was here the first time, namely this question of whether liberal democracy is really soemthing the Chinese would want or could handle. The thinking goes that they've been oppressed for so long or so accustomed to centuries of being ruled that they couldn't possibly culturally accept the idea of self-governance without falling into utter chaos. I do agree that gradual transition is appropriate, lest we wind up with Russia, but I also know that the transition Chinese leaders are working towards does NOT include expanded personal freedoms but merely economic expansion. Economic freedom doesn't necessarily lead to political freedom unless the leaders actually intend for it to do so. Singapore is an economically successful and yet horribly repressive society.

As for the question about Chinese culture, I just point to Hong Kong and Taiwan, both Western-style democracies that have been among the most prosperous Asian nations/territories for decades. Somehow these people had precisely the same cultural backgrounds as the mainland Chinese, but THEY can handle liberties just fine. I _do_ believe there are absolute truths about humanity, and one is that most people, if they could, would govern themselves and reject tyranny. Most people, if they understood what they were missing, would want what Americans have, the rights to self-determination that are proven over and over again as the most expedient path to economic success for the most number of people. You just don't see boatloads of Indonesians washing up on China's shores begging to be taken in, do you? But they DO wash up on Australia's shores all the time. Why do people risk their lives to live in our country and countries like ours but not to live in China, Syria, Egypt, Mexico, wherever?

Well, that's more than I needed to say, but I'm now sufficiently sleepy. All this notwithstanding, I love your site and have bookmarked it for regular checks. -- Steve Friess

Thanks for the response, Steve. And best of luck in Hong Kong!

Music to My Eyes XVII

I used to date a woman with whom I could almost never agree with about music. In the car, she'd always change the radio station too fast. She rejected almost every mix tape I ever made her. In her room, I'd sit on the hardwood floor bored while she danced like a dervish to Madonna. We did, to be fair, agree on the Weakerthans, which was a gift to me. Now, Go Home Productions' online assortment of mash-ups and bastard pop is a gift.

The blokes mix the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant" and "God Save the Queen" with Madonna's "Ray of Light" to good effect. TLC's "Unpretty" bumps uglies with the Specials' "A Message to You Rudy." And the Strokes' "Someday" pops the cork on Christian Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle." Maybe she and I could have agreed on these!

Thanks to Retrorocket.

Television-Impaired XII

Charles Rolland Douglass, inventor of the TV sitcom laugh track, died earlier this month. TV Barn offers an appreciative look at the impact Douglass' invention has had on television, the laugh track's origin in radio broadcasting, and the technological innovation race several inventors ran to "improve" the laugh track first. A little-known piece of media history!

Read But Dead XII

Travel Holiday is going on a permanent vacation. The staffs of other travel mags say that it wasn't the travel industry's ad dollar that was weak -- but Travel Holiday itself. Time will tell, I suppose.

Corollary: Blogging About Blogging LVIII

Six Apart, maker of Moveable Type, is rolling out a new hosting service intended to butt heads with Blogger. The announcement of Ben and Mena's TypePad brings with it the news of a partnership with Neoteny and the hire of Anil Dash, whom I met briefly at SXSW.

People often debate the merits of using Blogger, Moveable Type, and Radio Userland -- much less the host of other tools available -- and with one leading contender rolling out a service quite akin to another's, the landscape is sure to shift slightly. I've been an avid Blogger user since day one of Media Diet, and I'm hopeful that its new relationship with Google -- and coming new version of its software -- will keep it in the clear. I'm also hopeful that the new version of Blogger rocks. Looking forward to it.

Blogging About Blogging LVIII

Part of the promise -- and charm -- of blogs and LiveJournals, much less personal Web sites in general is that they're, well, personal. There are people behind the pages. And the best sites work well because of their publishers' personalities. Invisiblog is a new service that enables people to post to blogs using an anonymous remailer network.

While I understand the allure of anonymity, I'm not sure how I feel about Invisiblogs. Sure, the best blogs need to have solid content, but in many cases you can forgive a favorite blogger a less-than-necessary post because of who they are and what they normally do. Identity has currency as well as the content. Invisiblogs will need to stand solely on content... and the writing of the publisher. There will be less leeway.

That said, blogs such as Gizmodo, which I read daily, are already largely anonymous. What's the value of blogging via an anonymous remailer? And what does this mean for the interactive aspect of blogging? Sure, you will probably be able to comment on posts, but who are you commenting on?

Thanks to Slashdot.

IM'erview with a Ween Fan

I don't get many random IM's from people I don't know via Media Diet, but I just got pinged by a Ween fan in Pennsylvania. Here's the "fan"-script:

boognishdeciple: hellow
h3athrow: And you are...?
b: a fellow ween fan
h: Friend of Jodie? [I'd just IM'd Jodie about Weezer not too long ago, not Ween.]
b: jodie???
h: Never mind.
h: How'd you find me?
b: google
h: I'm not the biggest Ween fan, so I'm slightly confused.
b: looking at ween shit
b: saw your im name
h: Ah, I blogged about the pizza adverts
b: yes
b: i downloaded them
h: Funny stuff, hey?
b: all ween
b: they are comedic geniouses
h: Who else do you listen to?
h: Any recommendations?
b: i really like the white stripes
b: tool
b: nine inch nails
h: The Stripes just played Boston on Sunday
b: omg
b: i just got their new album
b: so great
h: Do you like Hot Hot Heat?
b: is that a band
h: Yes, from Victoria, British Columbia
h: Brilliant
b: i will download sometime
b: ok
b: ty dude
b: allways looking for new good music
h: Also, I'm in a band called the Anchormen you might get a kick out of
b: i will whrite this down
b: ok
b: i will definetly check you guys out
b: i cant spell
h: Our third CD comes out next month
b: i will look
h: Where are you?
b: PA
h: Do you know Atom and His Package? [Atom's from Pennsylvania.]
h: Another band you may enjoy
b: whriting down
h: Heh
h: Sorry to overwhelm you, but it's not often I get IM'd by randoms
b: is that bad
h: No. It's fun
b: i was looking for ween fans
h: Well, sorry to disappoint... I hardly ever listen to them
h: Haven't really since 1991
h: But I was interested in the aborted adverts
b: its cool
b: you are not into them anymore
h: Do you know Meetup?
h: There's a Ween Meetup in almost 600 cities [Actually, that wasn't true.]
b: no
h: Nothing in PA though
b: pa sucks ass
h: Also... [this discussion forum]
h: might be up your alley
b: ok
b: lots of new shit to check out
h: Thanks for saying hey
b: its cool
b: ran into AmyCrawfordISM aswell
h: Who she?
b: a big ween fan
h: Ah
b: just looken for some suckas
b: i had a dream once of getting michel jackson in the face with a flame thrower
h: I don't think you need to... he's had enough done to his face
h: Might melt
b: thats the point
b: it was a cool dream
b: exept nothing would happen to his face
h: Teflon
b: it wan infaseable
h: Well, I've got to get back to work.
b: seeya
h: Mind if I blog this, it being my first Media Diet IM with someone I don't know? [Outside of Victor Cayro, whom I've also IM'erviewed, but I knew of Victor.]
b: what do you mean
h: Post the transcript in my blog
b: no
b: go ahead
h: Cool.
h: Have a good night! Sun's getting dim
b: you aswell

And that's a wrap. Or rap. Media Dieticians, if you're on AIM, don't be shy.

From the In Box: Read But Dead XI

In response to an entry published earlier today, Nick comments:

Boys are discouraged to read by their peers and environment. It's just not "manly" enough. They're also discouraged from asking questions, it being better to be independent and self-sufficient. Having doubts about yourself and seeking answers in magazines is not something one can be seen doing.

An interesting point, especially given this article from the Toronto Star. Philip Marchand reports that less than 20% of people who buy novels are men -- and that most boys stop reading fiction at the age of 12 or 13.

Is it true that men read less than women?

Thanks to MobyLives.

Technofetishism XXXIV

Thanks to News Is Free's premium export service and NetNewsWire, I'm now set up better than many wire editors at daily newspapers. This is fun, fun stuff.

Employee of the Week III

Media Diet would like to recognize the following Fifth Man Media employees for their service above and beyond the call of duty:


Always willing to listen

Jack "Jack" Jackson is almost constantly called on as a sounding board, devil's advocate, and source of feedback. He may not know what you're saying -- he might not understand what you're talking about -- but he's always available to lend a listening ear. "I'm a good listener," Jackson says. "Sometimes the most important thing isn't what people don't say, but what they're saying." Well-known around the Fifth Man Media offices for his colorful, abstract ties and quizzical, occasionally totally confused look, Jackson is "the man" (in the words of one colleague) to corner by the water cooler if you need to bend someone's ear. While Jackson is a good listener, however, he's not that great a speaker. That's part of his charm! Every so often, Jackson will repeat back to co-workers what he thinks they're saying, sometimes expressing the exact opposite of the point they were making. Correcting him and "setting Jackson straight," as it's become known around the office, helps clarify your thinking -- and that spells "good business."

Tele-Phony IV

The Payphone Project is an impressive of payphone-related news items; photographs of payphones in New York City, Georgia, Denmark, and Africa; and an online database of payphone numbers around the world. Searching for payphones in Massachusetts, I learned that the payphone outside the Harvard COOP on Harvard Square in Cambridge is 617-868-0695. Calling it just now, I got a data squelch. Do they still disable incoming calls to payphones because of the War on Drugs?

This project reminds me slightly of the payphone photos in 2600, and the directory could make for some fine Media Diet fun. If you have half a mo, make a payphone call near you today. "Calling William Morris!"

Thanks to Memepool.

Magazine Me XXX

Scott Dickensheets has compiled a handy guide to Radar magazine based on reviews and news releases. After reading this roundup, you might not need to read Radar.

Thanks to Bookslut.

Business Media Reportage Goes Bust, Now Boom? VIII

June 2 marks the 25th anniversary of Crain's Chicago Business, long held as one of the better regional business journals. Blending business reportage, regional magazine-style writing, and some lifestyle coverage, the 50,000-circulation weekly often gives the dailies in Chicago a run for their business section money. Happy birthday, Crain's Chicago Business!

Thanks to I Want Media.

Read But Dead XI

Fucked Company reports that Transworld Stance may be folding. An offshoot of the Transworld Skateboarding media empire, this magazine covering "lifestyles of the young and the dangerous" is a rare modern example of a general-interest magazine aimed at young men. Of the men's magazines, Details has long skewed a little younger than it's Esquire and GQ counterparts, as did the defunct POV, but it wasn't really until the emergence of the lad mags that men's magazines appealed to the younger set.

This fascinates me. In the history of magazines, publishers have long been able to support tiered general-interest magazines for female readers. You had your Teen, Seventeen, and Sassy, and then you had your Cosmopolitan, Elle, Mademoiselle, Glamour, etc. Now many of the women's magazines -- excluding the seven sisters of yore -- are skewing younger with slightly different titles such as Cosmo Girl! But I wonder: Why not just read Cosmo? Part of the allure of those magazines to younger readers is the aspirational aspect of pending maturity.

Men's magazines don't have this. When you're young, you get Boys' Life. Then you're left to a few older men's general-interest magazines and special interest magazines aimed at men. Sports, cars, crafts, hunting, and so on. Is this because men's interests specialize earlier on in life? Or do men just not need a general-interest magazine outside of the big three? Curious. Back in the day, there were several magazines aimed at college-aged men including titles such as the digest-sized 21 (not the wonderfully sexy French magazine).

Does the rumored nail in Transworld Stance's coffin indicate that the title didn't work -- or that the premise of a general-interest magazine for young men doesn't work?

New School, New Media Style

Stephen Downes, the educational technologist -- or technological educator -- behind the OLDaily newsletter, recently launched Edu_RSS, which "automatically harvests metadata from about 50 educational bloggers, displays the results (updated hourly) and provides a database search of all aggregated submissions."

Feeds harvested include many of the usual suspects -- such as Gillmor, Lessig, Megnut -- but also feature some nice, focused news services such as CogDogBlog, EdTechPost, and the Shifted Librarian.

Once the service is stable, Downes plans to release the code under GPL. An excellent project.

Big Brother Is Watching XIII

The more you improve security, the more people will improve ways to work around it. Yet the race continues. Hollywood has long battled against bootleggers who videotape films during closed screenings. Now, two companies funded by the Advanced Technology Program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology at the rate of $2 million are developing a technology that will embed flickering patterns in digitally projected movies to stymie folks with handheld camcorders. While the flickering patterns will be unnoticeable by the human eye, they will render the resulting recordings unviewable. While the anti-piracy captain for the Motion Picture Association of America says that the system will not stop videotaping, it will stop bootlegs from reaching the market before a domestic release.

Thanks to Lockergnome.

Rock Shows of Note LXI

I've been remiss in terms of reporting on the bands I've seen play lately, so this is a less in-depth catch-up entry. Scads of great shows lately and an overly active social schedule as spring emerges!

Saturday, April 19: Plunge Into Death played under their moniker DGXJC because of their recent show at TT the Bear's. They went on first, which was a little iffy because new member Mac Swell was running late (He got on the T heading in the wrong direction, he says.). So what seemed to be a sound check and technical difficulties troubleshooting actually turned out to be the beginning of their set. The band wasn't in the fine form they were in at TT's previously, but the set was still solid. Geisslah stepped off the stage, and the several songs that Mac joined them for were quite solid. One is quite impressive. And another, well, it kind of reminded me of boys jumping around in a basement, shouting sing-along songs. It sounds great, but visually, more could be done musically, perhaps. Still, excellent sequenced noise rap rock or whatever it is! Next up, the Japanese Karaoke Afterlife Experiment, a masked noise duo that reminded me of Tunnel of Love by way of the Boredoms. It also made me think that maybe Chris and I shouldn't pursue our nascent side project Cruel Ranch. This is basically what we'd do, only skronkier. Nice dramatic bleep-box, keyboard-bashing, drum set-slamming noise. Scads of fun, and charmingly staged. Their CD comes in a handmade sleeve encapsulated in duct tape. Then came the Janet Pants Dans Theeatre, a small, independent modern dance troupe from Los Angeles and New York City. With three dancers and a sound engineer/keyboardist, the Theeatre performed three pieces and screened a video. Despite my initial skepticism, I was quite impressed by their performance. Definitely one of the better independent dance troupes I've encountered -- much less performing at a bar. The dude playing under the name Pleasurehorse took forever to set up, but it was pretty much worth the wait. Using a PowerBook, touchpad, video game console controller, CD player, and microphone, this former member of Six Finger Satellite created a static- and scratch-drenched noise collage that was quite interesting. I do wish that when he found a groove, he kept it for a spell, or that he incorporated more tunefulness, because despite the fun I had trying to figure out how he was making all of his noises, his dramatic jumping around, touchpad pen in mouth, machine manipulation struck me as so much noodling. Make some music, dude. The technology is impressive, and the gimmick is great, but focus on the sound. Regardless, worth checking out. The last band, Life Partners, we didn't stick around for. More noise, much later. Time to go home. Kudos to Mr. Records for continuing their extremely impressive series of shows at the Choppin' Block!

Friday, April 18: I wasn't going to go out, but true to form lately, I decided to brave the springtime streets around 10 o'clock. Unfortunately, that meant that I'd miss the Mary Reillys set -- I arrived just in time to catch Deb, Keira, and Ben on the front stoop. It also meant that it'd be too crowded for me to get in to see Emergency Music. From the bar side, where I met up with the gang, they sounded like pleasing power pop. I did however get into the show side for the Brett Rosenberg Problem set. With a new CD just out, the band's added a rhythm guitarist, and this was the first of two CD release shows. They played an energetic, bash-pop set that seemed to expand on Brett's melodic songwriting, and I look forward to the new disc. The place was packed, so I was smashed into the back with Deb and Keira. Still, a good show, and I was lucky to get in because word is the show sold out.

Wednesday, April 16: This was the best Plunge into Death show I have ever seen. Their costuming was the best it's ever been. Their stage presence was the most confidence it's ever been. The sequencing of and transitions between the songs were the best they've ever been. And it was just a great show all around. The show Saturday was a bit of a let down given this evening's epiphany, but that's the way the ball bounces. You can't be the best all the time! This was also Mac Swell's first night with the band, and Mac hammed it up old-scholl style, decking himself out in an amazing track suit. Very, very good. Best PID show ever. King Cobra played next. Featuring Betsy Kwo, Tara Jane O'Neil, and Rachel Carns, the band is a Needs-like no-wave wunderkind. I quite enjoyed their set even though I didn't know any of the songs -- and it's been awhile since I've spun my Needs records. A nice followup to PID. Last up, Tracy and the Plastics, another fine no-wave band. A skronky night, and much appreciated.

North End Moment XXXVII

Parking and traffic is a mess in Boss Town today because of the Boston Marathon and a Red Sox game. So I had to smile slightly when I found this in the back alley.



Indeed: Read the sign.

Music to My Ears XXXV

The Mr. T Experience's Dr. Frank (or is that the other way around?) has written a war-related song entitled "Democracy, Whisky, Sexy." In his blog, Blogs of War, which is more politically than punk rock oriented, he describes his thinking about making live demos available on the Web, why he offers limited-run CD's only at his shows, and why listener feedback is important early in the songwriting and recording "process."

Dr. Frank's statement that "I'm not sure how many fans of my songwriting read this blog, nor how many readers of the blog might be interested in my songs" made me grin, as I rank among both circles in that Venn diagram, just as I follow Chris Imlay's songwriting and design work at MacAddict (where, I learned this weekend, a fellow NU alum also works). Thrilled silly that he'll be playing at the Kendall in Cambridge while he's on a brief Northeast tour. We didn't meet up when I was last in the Bay Area. Maybe I'll be able to meet him while he's in town.

I've been following his music since I got "Big Black Bugs Bleed Blue Blood" from Blacklist Mailorder, and I interviewed someone from MTX for my very first zine ever, Blow #1 in 1988. Thanks for the songs, Dr. Frank!

Rules for Fools XV

Rule No. 19: While it is true that if you play with fire, you will get burned, it is equally true that if you do not pay close attention to the proximity of the edge of a cookie sheet to the crook of your arm, you will also get burned.

Magazine Me XXIX

Reasons You Should Read TV Guide Even If You Don't Need To:

1. What I'm Watching This Week. Celebrities such as Leann Rimes and Shannen Doherty weigh in with their TV recommendations -- and why they watch them. On one level, who cares? But on another, the featurette gives a nice personal approach to TV viewing.

2. Cheers & Jeers. Like the Columbia Journalism Review's Darts and Laurels feature, this weekly commentary column takes on the best and worst of broadcast media. Items range from the snarkily shallow to the substantial.

3. The Robins Report. J. Max Robins' tracking of trends and developments in broadcast news lends the Guide a semblance of credibility and legitimacy in professional news journalism.

4. SportsGuide. The week's sporting events in a wide range of games -- at a glance.

5. Cable Conversion Chart. Hella easier to use than the little card that comes with your cable box -- or the online channel guide. Want to know what's where? Start here.

6. Close-Up. The Guide's more in-depth descriptions of and commentaries on programs -- while hardly at-length -- still provide useful insights on what might be particularly noteworthy on a given day.

7. TV Guide Crossword. 'Nuff said.

8. Easy multitasking. I've never really enjoyed watching TV while navigating the on-screen channel guide, program listings, or show descriptions. I'd much rather read while watching, and the Guide is something I can reach for when I need it -- and without reaching for the remote. If I wanted to watch TV Guide on TV, I wouldn't really want to watch TV, now, would I?

9. You don't have Tivo. 'Nuff said.

10. What it is. TV Guide interests me for several reasons. Beyond the actual listings and program grids, the Guide is equal parts users' guide to the television -- how we watch, why we watch -- and news source on the state of TV production and promotion. Oh, it's no Broadcast & Cable or Television Broadcast, but it's as close to a consumer-oriented sociological or anthropological look at TV viewing as we can get right now.

Comics and Conversation V

Slashdot is interviewing Warren Ellis as we speak, so to speak. Slashdot participants can post questions to the discussion forum, and CmdrTaco will pass the "highly moderated" ones onto Mr. Ellis, who will then answer the questions. A nice example of community-oriented, grassroots Q&A journalism.

The Movie I Watched Last Night LXV

Frogs
At the behest of Andrea, I watched this wonderfully bad 1972 horror movie last night. I love frogs. I really do. I have no idea whether I have a totem animal, but I wouldn't mind if it turned out to be the frog. This movie, then, fits right into my frog fetish. It's a throw-away groaner of a horror film, but it's got several things going for it. At base, it's an environmental cautionary tale. If we keep polluting the planet and mistreating the animals that share it with us, eventually, nature and its denizens might rise up against us. A domineering patriarch hell bent on quashing any and all natural infringements on his island home hosts a Fourth of July party for his extended family. An amateur ecologist and nature photographer played by Sam Elliott stumbles across the family gathering while documenting the environmental ills caused by the patriarch. He emerges as the hero figure as, one by one, the family members are isolated from the rest of the pack and killed by a host of frogs, snakes, spiders, Spanish mosses, quicksand pits, alligators, and other natural slayers. Shades of Friday the 13th, this is your basic divide and conquer horror plotline. If someone wanders off, they die. The scene in which one victim is overwhelmed by Spanish moss is particularly interesting, and the almost-constant representations of frogs and toads of various sizes is an absolute hoot. The frogs are so not frightening. Yet the sense of impending, almost Lovecraftian doom is quite effective. In the end, the patriarch comes to a deserved end, and the danger is left open as the nature photographer and his love interest escape. Or do they? Also of interest are the portrayals of interracial dating, alcoholism, and other social concerns. All are given a passing glance, but they're there. Thanks, Andrea. I wouldn't have come across this without you.

Corollary: Technofetishism II

Thanks to Anime on DVD -- I think -- I learned last night about a Netflix-like online rental service that specializes in anime, Asian cinema, exploitation, and martial arts films. Rareflix supposedly offers several tiered levels of service, much like Netflix, with the lowest running $20/month for three DVD's. But I can't seem to sign up for anything beyond the pay-as-you-go plan, which is fine to take it for a test run, I guess. The site sports some awkward -- and concerning -- typos (a la a Comdey genre subsection and typos in the FAQ), but the selection of DVD's available is quite appealing. With the pay-as-you-go plan, rentals cost $3 a piece, with a two-DVD minimum, and you get to keep the movies seven days from the date you receive them. Odd. Even though I just rented three DVD's -- The Astro-Zombies, Freeze Me, and Evil Dead Trap -- and I just got an email confirmation, my rental queue online indicates I've made no rentals. Fingers crossed that Rareflix doesn't rip me off, but if I get the DVD's -- and if they get their Web service in order -- this could be an amazing Filmfax- or Asian Cult Cinema-styled Netflix complement.

Digesting the Daily XI

Recent editions of the Daily Northwestern, the student newspaper of my alma mater, featured several media-, technology-, and activism-related items that might be of interest to Media Dieticians.

For the thrill
Chicago-based independent records label Thrill Jockey celebrates a decade of success with a broad, ecclectic roster of musicians
(Jan. 23, 2003)

Evanston resident sues theater chain for showing ads
Plaintiff says movies starting late violate contract on ticket; Loews calls lawsuit "frivolous"
(Feb. 27, 2003)

Getting active
Northwestern breathes new life into the peace movement with education, marches and social gatherings
(Feb. 27, 2003)

Eye spy
Webcams let NU students -- and the rest of the world -- play voyeur to The Rock and Lake Michigan
(Feb. 28, 2003)

Studies find heavy backpacks a drag on students, lower backs
Chiropractors advise using both straps, limiting load to 15 percent of body mass
(March 4, 2003)

Hot for teacher
A Web site lets college students rate professors on what CTECs leave out
(March 5, 2003)

NUIT to premier revamped WebEmail site Wednesday
(April 8, 2003)

Pitt study fails MS Word grammar, spell checker
Profs warn against "blindly" following software's imperfect correction system
(April 8, 2003)

If you work for a college newspaper and would like to sign me up for a complimentary subscription, please feel free to do so. My address is in the grey bar over on the left.

Comics and Conversation IV

Rich Watson offers a transcript of the "Open Minds" panel he moderated at the Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo held April 5 in Ohio. The discussion addresses approaching readers, retailers, libraries, and other potential customers and venues. Good stuff.

Thanks to Slashdot.

Music to My Ears XXXIV

War Child, an international nonprofit that focuses on helping children affected by war, released a benefit album today to aid Iraqi children. Musicians including Avril Lavigne, Spiritualized, Beth Orton, and Billy Bragg -- as well as the commercial ringers Paul McCartney and David Bowie -- donated songs, and the CD was released by London Records, which agreed not to take any profit on the project. The playlist represents a nice round-up of political pop. But Avril Lavigne singing "Knocking on Heaven's Door"? Ugh.

The Free-Range Comic Book Project XVIII

This is an installment of Media Diet's Free-Range Comic Book Project.

Saturday: The Blair Witch Chronicles #2 (Oni, April 2000). Writer: Jen Van Meter. Artists: Bernie Mireault and Abu. Location: On the Green Line between Park Street and Brigham Circle.

Sunday: Blood of the Innocent #1 (Warp, Jan. 7, 1986). Writers: Rickey Shanklin and Mark Wheatley. Artist: Marc Hempel. Location: On a bench in Central Square.




Sunday's installment is the first Free-Range Comic Book I've actually seen get picked up by somebody. After walking through Boston Common, the Public Garden, down Beacon Street, across the Harvard Bridge, and up Mass. Ave. to Central Square, Andrea and I hung out for awhile on a bench in front of the Coquette clothing store. I placed the comic on the bench opposite us. While we were sitting there, an elderly man walked up and picked up the comic. He read the front cover -- and the Free-Range Comic Book card. He turned the comic over and read the back cover. He then flipped through the comic back to front, pausing briefly to turn back to the middle. Decision made, he rolled the comic up with a packet of paper he was carrying and walked away. I hope he actually reads the comic. And I hope he passes it on.

For more information on this project, please refer to this Media Diet entry.

The Commerce of Cartoons

Instead of starting the day resolved not to watch CNN, like I do on some mornings, in the name of TV Turnoff Week, I decided to take another route. Having read a listing of anime currently aired on American TV stations in Animerica, I decided to set my alarm clock a little early, get up a little early, and turn on the television a little early.

This morning's targets? The anime Medabots. Released stateside by ADV Films, Medabots is an anime skewed at younger viewers that incorporates an evident toy line tie-in. This morning's episode on ABC Family at 7 a.m. was "There's Something About Miss Mimosa", a simple tale about three men warring over the affections of Ikki's teacher, Miss Mimosa. The animation isn't that solid, and the Medabots are used almost as afterthoughts. That said, the multimedia evolution of the Medabots is intriguing. Initially launched as a video game in Japan, the Medabots then spawned a toy line that features 2-inch figures and two-piece Ro-Battle kits. Each Medabot comes complete with Ro-Battle statistics and fighting specialties. While it's clear that the anime was introduced to the States to help market the toy line, the battle and competitive aspect of the toys and game don't really communicate well in the cartoon. Regardless, this isn't your standard fighting anime. The romantic aspect of this episode, and the occasionally Rumiko Takahashi-like character designs give this a little more depth. But just a little. (Extra credit for the student journalist character Erika.)

At 7:30, Medabots was followed by Beyblade, another fighting anime aimed at younger viewers. Done more in the style of Dragonball Z, this anime also has an evident toy line tie-in. This morning's episode, "The Race Is On" carries a light message about teamwork, trust, and patience, but for the most part, it's a tense, bide-your-time approach to a straight-ahead stadium-battle. It seems rather silly that someone could base an anime on competitive tops -- at least in Medabots, the 'bots can be fleshed out as characters -- so even though the animation is better here, the story stops short of interesting. Unless you're into fighting narratives where a team faces an ever-changing line up of competitors. Of the two toy lines, Beyblades seems more fun. In some ways, the Beyblades toys fit into the collectible toy and card game menace a la Pokemon, but, come on... battling tops? If someone wants to gift me a Griffolyon A-28, I wouldn't say no.

Why is all of this interesting? Cartoons have long been used to market toys. It's not that cartoons spawn licensed toy lines, but that the toys almost always come first. The horribly designed "He-Man Vs. the Advertisers" page indicates that many characters and plotlines in the Masters of the Universe cartoons were catalyzed by the introduction of new toys. And Norma Pecora's The Business of Children's Entertainment suggests that this effect might be best seen in the light of a market exchange model. Media organizations are suppliers. Advertisers are the source of the demand. And what do they want? An audience. Children. This is nothing new, but it highlights the fact that this has nothing to do with anime or toys.

So if cartoons and children's programming are at base advertisements, stateside or otherwise, wherefore the future of children's programming? Are kids consumers? To a certain age, their parents are in their stead. How do you reach them? One Web writer offers a brief analysis of the G.I. Joe cartoon series that aired in the '80s, positioning it within a broader cartoon cultural context -- and in a post-911 light -- barely touching on the educational and occasionally ethical messages that capped each episode. Those messages were the result of Congress intervening in children's broadcasting in the '80s as part of the Children's Television Act. By couching an otherwise commercial program in an apologetic, educational afterthought, networks could better guarantee that affiliates would air a given program.

Medabots and Beyblade have no such educational aspirations or apologies. They are commercials pure and simple. Is the CTA on the wane? Does it matter less on cable? Do international imports fall under different guidelines in the name of cultural exchange? All food for thought on the first day of TV Turnoff Week.

From the In Box: Kill Your Television VI

Lest it get lost in the Comments box of history, Media Dietician Joe Clark points out an interesting project organized as a response to TV Turnoff Week, which starts today. Turn on the TV 2003 is a week-long "exercise in living through our favorite appliance." Every day, Matt May will issue an assignment to critically assess television. Today's assignment is to watch a foreign-based news broadcast.

Comics and Computers II

Between 1984 and 1991, Radio Shack distributed free copies of the comic book Tandy Computer Whiz Kids at their stores. Blending adventure stories, computer programming, and frequent mentions of Radio Shack, TRS-80, and Tandy products, the infrequently published series is a good example of corporate comic books. The first issue, which was published in conjunction with Archie Comic Publications, featured artwork by Dick Ayers and Chic Stone. It appears that the issues, each of which featured the young computer users Alec and Shanna, were all produced under the auspices of William Palmer, director of in-house publications for Radio Shack. Kudos to the Classic Computer Magazine Archive for making these comics available online. Other magazines available in the archive include Antic, STart, Creative Computing, and Hi-Res. Does anyone have an archive of inCider or A+ magazines available online? Or Enter, for that matter? Oh, those were the days.

Event-O-Dex LII

April 18: The Mary Reillys, Emergency Music, and the Brett Rosenberg Problem sing in the release of Brett's new record at the Abbey in Somerville.

April 18-20: Anime Boston 2003 gets cute at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel.

Corollary: Blogging About Blogging LVII

I've now also added Media Diet's RSS feeds to Syndic8 and News Is Free. It also struck me that while Media Diet now has an RSS feed, I didn't really know how to get RSS feeds myself. So I downloaded NetNewsWire Lite for OS X. Now I'm up and running with the RSS set! Woot.

Blogging About Blogging LVII

Thanks to Media Dietician Gregory Blake, Media Diet now has an RSS feed. Also, thanks are due to Marm0t for the introduction.

It's an Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World XXVI
Jason Kottke shared some thoughts yesterday on whether advertising in books would make books cost less to readers -- and the publishing industry more cost-effective. His vision entails books being broken up with ads every 3-4 pages, much like in magazines, but I don't think that this is the correct model. I've long wondered why more book publishers don't include adverts in the backs of books, much like book ads in literary and cultural journals. Many small publishers already do this, including ads for their back catalog -- and perhaps other related or like-minded publishers. If you're a press that has a sensibility that people can trust -- a la, "I'll buy anything that Publisher X publishes." -- this is a good way to cross-promote your books within the books themselves. Like tucking a record label's mail-order catalog into every CD.

But Kottke's got me wondering. What if the ads weren't relegated to the back of the book like the above model -- or even school yearbooks? What if there were ads sprinkled throughout the book? I don't think his proposal of every 3-4 pages is workable. Even if books would cost substantially less because you're getting ads with your read, I think this is too intrusive and interrupting. That said, if there was an ad or two or three at chapter breaks, I don't think it'd interrupt the flow of the read much at all. My guess is that all of us tend to pause and assess what we've read at chapter breaks. I'd also wager that we read books by chapter. Chapter breaks are where we take our breaks, tucking in the ol' bookmark and putting the book down to return to later. So ads at chapter breaks might be quite feasible. They'd have a better chance of being seen, not being ghettoized to the back, and they wouldn't infringe on the reading experience as much as ads punctuating chapters might.

That said, ads are sold because of the demographics of the readers. Are books so targeted that book ads could be sold on reader profiles like magazine ads are?

Kill Your Television VI
It's that time of year again! TV Turnoff Week starts on Patriot's Day, and the fine folks at Adbusters have hit a wall trying to get an ad aired on MTV. So the scrappy media activism mag has turned to its Culture Jammers network to help "jam" MTV.

Regardless of any headway made on the MTV front, Adbusters will air a subvert on CNN Headline News, which is a coup, and the organization is helping connect media activists around the world to organize direct actions. There's not much going on in Boston proper -- where's Rich Mackin when we need him? -- but I just hung up some fliers at work.

Just One Pink
Let the Pink Watch begin! Former Fast Company contributing editor, Dan Pink, former purveyor of the blog Just One Thing -- and a big supporter of the Company of Friends -- has an excellent article about the bell curve in Wired, of all places. He's got a good eye, and a good mind. Look for his name.

Read But Dead X
After an almost-70-year run, the intellectual and cultural journal Partisan Review, perhaps best known for its anti-Communism stance in the '30s and '40s, is calling it quits with the new issue. Boston University, which has funded the journal since 1978, hopes to reintroduce a new publication in the future.

Magazine Me XXVIII
I first encountered Reinhold Aman not too long after I got into zines in the late '80s. A self-described "cunning linguist," his Maledicta Press has been in operation for almost 20 years and "specializes in offensive and negatively-valued words and expressions from all languages and cultures, past and present. Its main areas of interest are the origin, etymology, meaning, use, and influence of verbal aggression and verbal abuse of any kind, as well as language usually considered vulgar, obscene, or blasphemous."

The site features excerpts from and information about the 13 320- and 160-page collections issued to date, and includes some intriguing subsections, including looks at prison slang, outhouse poetry and graffiti, polyglot exclamations, and ribald jokes. And even though Aman now resides in California, he put in time at the University of Wisconsin and went on to teach at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which he dubs "Dungheap U."

One of the longer-running small-press projects I'm aware of -- and extremely fun stuff. It seems that Joi Ito and the Metafilter set has rediscovered his work because of the forthcoming -- and long-awaited -- Vol. 13. Good to see Maledicta still plugging along.

The Free-Range Comic Book Project XVII
This is an installment of Media Diet's Free-Range Comic Book Project.

Black & White #1 (Image, October 1994). Writers: Art Thibert and Pamela Thibert. Artist: Art Thibert. Location: On the Green Line between Park Street and Haymarket.

For more information on this project, please refer to this Media Diet entry.

The Free-Range Comic Book Project XVI
This is an installment of Media Diet's Free-Range Comic Book Project.

Black Panther Vol. 2, #17 (Marvel, April 2000). Writer: Christopher Priest. Artist: Sal Velluto. Location: On the Green Line between Haymarket and Park Street.

For more information on this project, please refer to this Media Diet entry.

From the In Box: Street Art IV
The Artomat at the ABC Carpet & Home store in Union Square was lovely! I am so happy with it and will go there bi-weekly now. It's $6 for a shiny Artomat token, and you can just throw it in the machine and pick your art. The fellow there is very sweet and offered us sweet potato brownie samples (much better than they sound), and my friend and I picked up some great jewelery (though I really want a "dumpster painting" and will get that next time). The price of a froofy drink for my own leetle art, hurrah! -- Alex

Magazine Me XXVII
Justin Hall bought an issue of Military History last weekend at a gas station in Nebraska. Then he read it and thought about it. Hard. His post in Links yesterday considers "how folks everywhere like to learn" -- as well as what kind of person might read Military History.

What magazine have you thought about lately?

The Blogging of Business II
Sense is an international network of almost 1,000 business leaders and innovators that provides market research, forecasts, and consulting services to companies such as IDEO, Procter & Gamble, and the BBC. Parallel to the Global Business Network, participants are recruited by word of mouth and vetted for their forward thinking, observations, and creativity. The network members, or sensers, also maintain a collaborative blog authored by five participants. Other members help create auxiliary blogs, including Tiger's Leap, Zen Kapital, and Counterculture. An interesting project!

Thanks to CommonMe.

Among the Literati XXXII
Dave Koch, founding editor of the new Land-Grant College Review journal of fiction, nonfiction, and artwork, tells me that their first issue has just gone to the printers. The first issue looks like a solid showing, with stories by Aimee Bender, Josip Novakovich, Robert Olmstead, and Stephen Dixon. Can't wait to see it! The world needs more little magazines.

Almost simultaneously, the third issue of Quick Fiction will be released this week. This edition includes new, quick fiction by David Barringer, Kirby Congdon, Barry Silesky, and Cecilia Woloch.  Stories are rumored to address bad women, a haunted car, baseball, boyfriends, and Ben Kingsley. The folks at the appropriately named JP Press -- they're based in Jamaica Plain -- also rolled out a new Quick Fiction of the Week feature on their home page. This operation continues to emerge as a solid source of short, short stories and prose poems.

Games People Play X
Remember the Eamon series of text-based role-playing games? Well, it turns out that you can download them, and with an Apple II emulator or the program MultiAventures, as well as the basic Eamon software, you can play Eamon and other text-adventure games from AdvSys, AGT, Infocom, Scott Adams, Level 9, Quill, and C64 Basic. Hello Main Hall & Beginners Cave!

You are in the outer chamber of the hall of the guild of free adventurers. Many men and women are guzzling beer and there is loud singing and laughter.

On the north side of the chamber is a cubbyhole with a desk. Over the desk is a sign which says 'register here or else!'

Do you go over to the desk or join the men drinking the beer?

And then after some completed actions...

He studies you for a moment and says, 'here is a booklet of instruction for you to read, and your prime attributes are--

22-2 Eam_FN SYNTAX ERROR IN 110-1 HD=FNA(8) 110-1 HD=FNA(8)

Huh. Well, I'll figure it out. Awesome!

Selling Out
Well, the second DVD I'd listed with Amazon Marketplace, "Dr. No," has also been purchased. This time by a fellow in New York City. Aflush with the rush of two successful sales in pretty short order, I've since listed about 15 books for sale. We'll see how they do. I'm sure there's an emergent science about what sells well and quickly in services like this. Cleaning, cleaning, clean!

Games People Play IX
Clive Thompson's commentary on Andrew Phelps' look at how game design is taught offers some interesting insight on how the game industry might be too creative -- and how reuse is good.

Corollary: Pulling the Plug XI
The RAVE Act passed. Enjoy live music while you can!

The Free-Range Comic Book Project XV
This is an installment of Media Diet's Free-Range Comic Book Project.

Black Cross: Dirty Work (Dark Horse, April 1997). Writer and artist: Chris Warner. Location: On the Green Line between Haymarket and Park Street.

For more information on this project, please refer to this Media Diet entry.

Event-O-Dex LI
April 15: The Trouble Dolls, Reverend Glasseye and His Wooden Legs, and Ad Frank and the Fast Easy Women take up residency at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge.

April 16: Plunge into Death, the King Cobra, and Tracy and the Plastics take charge at TT the Bear's in Cambridge.

April 19: DGXJC acts all mysterious with Life Partners, Pleasurehorse, Janet Pants Dans Theatre, and Japanese Karaoke Afterlife Experiment at the Choppin' Block in Boston.

April 22: Wish for Fire and Orange Park settle in at TT the Bear's in Cambridge.

Rock Shows of Note LX
Kurt and I headed to the Middle East Corner last night around 9 for the opening reception for the Creepshow Art Extravaganza, which runs until May 15. Featuring work by "The Count," "Salty Dave," and "Joe Keinberger," it's a good showing of comics, paintings, and rock poster art by three locals. I may be off my rocker, but I think the three artists are in fact Ed Curran, Dave Bryson, and Joe Keinberger -- the folks behind the Comb-Over minicomics.



The place was packed. Packed! Saw TD and Jamie and tried to find some open space to stand and chat after making the rounds to see the showing. Of the three, I'm the biggest fan of Keinberger's work. His Brian Ralph-meets-Ralph Steadman drawings continue to impress me with their scritchy-scratch. Bryson also had some excellent pieces on display, and Curran seems to be specializing in pretty straight-forward rock poster art these days. We didn't stick around for the performances, which included a burlesque act by Ms. Firecracker and a set by the alt.country act Lenny and the Piss Poor Boys, because it was so crowded. Instead we headed down the street to the Cambridgeport Saloon for more conversation and some video game action.

If you haven't seen the Creepshow yet, it runs through May 15. Well worth checking out.

Mix Tapeology II
Don't forget that I am almost always open to mix tape and CD-R trades. I recently received two mix CD's worth mentioning.

Shannon Okey mailed me a personalized mix CD entitled "Eleven-Headed Kuan Yin" that sports a specially printed disc sleeve sporting a photograph she took at the Cleveland Museum of Art in December 2002. The mix includes some wonderful songs by Lush, Supreme Music Program, Frank Black, Renegade Soundwave, and Pagoda Red. Shannon even included a liner note sheet offering commentary and a breakdown of categories that include South Americans Dancing and Ohioans.

I also got a mix CD recently from Jodie Peotter, an old friend from high school. Lacking any kind of playlist, the mix, which is entitled "To Lodi and Back," is a great assortment of punk rock, pop punk, and ska punk songs. If this is what she remembers me liking from high school, I fear my tastes haven't wandered too far. Even though the CD didn't come with a playlist, it did come with this handwritten explanation: "Formerly 'Jodie's Punk Junk,' renamed because I listen to it in the car b/t work and Lodi... Plus I lost the file that had the original songlist and title. Oops." No worries. Mixes without playlists can be fun. In college, I'd occasionally DJ radio programs without announcing the playlist -- we'd mention a P.O. Box people could write in to if they wanted our show's playlist zine.

The Movie I Watched Last Night LXIV
Saturday: Startup.com
It took me three sittings to make it through this movie. I'm not quite sure what it was, but I couldn't bring myself to watch it all the way through the first time. Or the second time. It's depressing! Even though the documentary was released shortly after the initial Net economy crash in 2000, the failings, foibles, and future of dotcoms still resonate strongly in the ongoing economic downturn. The mockumentary "Dot" is not just a parody of the whole dotcom craze; it's clearly a parody of this movie, which is even more effective in its emotional impact because it's real. Some of the actors in "Dot" even look like the real people in Startup.com. And the parallels continue -- the edits, the high fives, the New Age references to meditation, the language -- such as "keeps me up at night" -- the self-referential place-based references to Silicon Alley and Silicon Valley, the buzzword-driven hyperbole, and the boosterish enthusiasm. The ill-fitting suits and made-up price points! Who knew that such an of-the-moment documentary would be fodder for such an accurate mockumentary? The language, the personal dynamics, and the shared metaphoric pretense ("We were in our confrontation and debate space." Who talks like that?) all resonate, perhaps embarrassingly so. Startup.com is the story of one company's rise and fall. I kind of wish I hadn't seen "Dot" first. To make fun of something that was relatively sad and silly in so many ways just adds salt to the Net economy's wounds.

Sunday: Strange Days
A nice palate cleanser after the emotional up and down of Startup.com. This 1995 film is a somewhat hot and cold look at virtual reality via recordings of people's actual experiences, feelings, and memories; race-based urban politics; and the turning of the millennium. As a cyberpunk movie running slightly parallel to "Existenz," it works quite well. Ralph Fiennes plays a former cop turned street peddler of stolen moments. The cinematography for the jacked-in scenes isn't that impressive, but the concept is good. I'm assuming the movie was set in a stylized Los Angeles, given the Rodney King-like killing of Jeriko One, a hip-hop artist working to organize the "gang bangers." Surprisingly, Ice-T wasn't cast in this role. The racial politics aspect of the movie also works well, as the film considers street justice, the role of the police and the media in local politics, and people's responsibilities to catalyze change even if that change will bring pains of its own. Some of the best dialogue comes from Angela Bassett's bodyguard character, as she goes off on why they need to make public the disk that kicked off the movie's mystery plot line in the first place. Because in the end, this is a film noir-esque mystery movie. The cyberpunk setting is just a backdrop for a proper whodunnit storyline. In the end, the serial killings and events that set them off comes as quite a surprise, and the theoretical technology really helps amplify the suspense.

The Free-Range Comic Book Project XIV
This is an installment of Media Diet's Free-Range Comic Book Project.

Saturday: Birds of Prey #15 (DC, March 2000). Writer: Chuck Dixon. Artist: Butch Guice. Location: On the Red Line between Central and Harvard squares.

Notable quote: "what an idiot i am. Meeting an e-mail acquaintance. And he's late."

For more information on this project, please refer to this Media Diet entry.