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I was reminded recently of the latest string of boycotts that had rippled through video game consumers in reaction to video game producers doing questionable things or allying themselves with questionable people. Folks decided not to buy Shadow Complex because the author behind the multimedia push for that game is an demagogue, others didn't like that Modern Warfare 2 was breaking precedent by going with a specific, dedicated server system rather than allowing users to create their own hubs, others regarded a sequel of the zombie shooter Left 4 Dead came too early and was heralding the end of promised support for a game that had only been around a year, and the recent revelations about poor working conditions for the team behind the upcoming Western game Red Dead Redemption had some ready to withhold their bucks for that already beleaguered game.

A lot of this may seem like gibberish to the uninitiated, but I guess the point isn't so much that this is about video games, I just happened to be paying attention that, but about the idea of the boycott in general.

A lot of people get irritated at the very idea, as if these people were otherwise required to buy these products. I'm betting a significant proportion of boycotters were already looking for an excuse not to buy, and this just clinched it, while people who were buying it anyway, or had already pre-ordered it, were prepared with justifications even if they agreed with the reasons behind a given boycott. That's human nature.

What I don't like is that we assume that the boycott in itself is wrong, or that boycotting for a certain reason is wrong, as if we have a moral imperative to buy things. We don't. Money is ours to do with as we like, at least according to some capitalism theory. In a sense, money is the new vote, because if you support a product or service, it's much more likely to flourish. I would say that even if you're doing it for the wrong reasons, when you boycott you are sending a signal to the producers of that product that they've lost your dollar. This is something that companies listen to far better than flaming some poor customer service rep. with an all-caps email.

There are a bunch of different triggers for boycotts, too, and while I don't believe in moral equivalency, I do think some have better founding than others. I won't say, though, that because some reasons are better than others that the poor reasons are somehow invalid just because they're weak. They're invalid if they're invalid.

Case by case:

1. The author behind the book that is part of the multimedia push for Shadow Complex is outspoken in his condemnation of the tolerance of a certain minority group. The people who actually made the game, for the most part, are silent about the controversy and their own views on the subject. The target of a boycott here is indirect, and since the game is generally regarded as a success, there are going to be a lot of people who will buy the game despite the controversy, ignorant of it, or even buying it because of the controversy (although that last one's a bit silly).

If you withhold the dollars you were going to spend, you reduce the developer's gross revenue, an undisclosed part of that going to the author, maybe, for licensing or whatever.

If you buy it, you support that company, whose game does not, as far as I know, profess any of the opinions the author has stated, either personally or in connection to the fiction he has written in conjunction with the game.

A better target might be not buying his books, since that's the author himself, but you have a right to spend your money how you like (within reason, of course), and no one is ordering you to buy the game, critically acclaimed or not.

2. The creators Modern Warfare 2, in a bid to increase reliability and decrease cheating, is chopping off what is apparently a small industry in private server hosting. They also have been fairly obvious in their attempts to grab headlines, not that they needed it. Modern Warfare 2 has been a huge hit, despite boycotts for both reasons.

If you withhold the dollars you were going to spend, you won't make enough of a dent to bring them down, whether you're targeting their server policy or their tasteless publicity grabs.

If you buy it, you support the ad policy (unfortunately ads are always a bit blurry when it comes to their affect on consumer behavior) as well as their choice for server setups. You also get what is, by many accounts, a good FPS with tons of players to play against.

A better target might be building up an competitor FPS. The more competition the game series has, the more they're going to have to woo you the next time around. Again, you have the right to spend your money how you want, and submitting to the bullying on either side of this strangely animated debate just shows you should spend more time realizing how powerful that 60 dollars could be in other contexts.

3. Left 4 Dead 2, the partnership-focused zombie shooter came only a year after its predecessor from Valve, a company notorious for taking a long time crafting its games. This quick turnaround alone had many people protesting, people who wanted Valve to continue its long-running Half Life franchise instead. Others didn't like the idea that the first Left 4 Dead was barely out of the gates, and that this new release promised to overshadow the old so quickly that the content that was promised as part of the original would be ignored in a drive to support its sequel.

If you withhold the dollars you were going to spend, the company that was willing to up its production cycle to meet the high demand for its game will have to scale back its speed. Maybe they'll get your message about not supporting Half Life, or maybe not. Likewise, they may not get the message that they're not supporting the first game. They may even think that the reason sales weren't as good as expected was because it was a bit too soon for another zombie game, no matter how good (please, god, let this be the reason).

If you buy it, they may very well skip over the old game if it succeeds well, or they may even have enough money to justify creating a new branch dedicated to concentrating on legacy properties while having others focused on the new stuff. Wild success sometimes, but not always, breeds enthusiasm on the part of the developers.

A better strategy might be how you deal with Valve from now on. If it turns out to be true that they don't plan on updating the original game, that they really are abandoning it for the sake of the new kid, you have pretty good grounds to tell them to fuck off. But remember that the cool stuff, the Half Lifes and the Portals in Valve, may get hit alongside the Left 4 Dead franchise.

4. Read Dead Revolver, the upcoming open-world Western shooter was revealed to have some taskmasters you'd expect from a stereotyped report on the conditions a salariman has to deal with. False production goals, mandatory overtime, and other questionable decisions. Some have suggested boycotting the game to send a message to the management that their poor treatment of their workers shouldn't be tolerated.

If you withhold the dollars you were going to spend, all the work those poor assholes DID put into the game will be ignored in a genre game that already won't appeal to a lot of people. Even their particular branch of Rockstar seems to have projected poor returns on a game that has already overrun the budget. The managers are much less likely to suffer than the workers, too, by a lack in revenue, unless someone more benevolent than its current head makes some serious changes.

If you buy it, you may be getting a revolutionary game that blows away open-world conventions, and your money MAY be perceived as exactly what the potential boycotters feared: a justification for their behavior. Although let's be honest for a second: the software world has very often been shit as far as overwork and unsung efforts. This goes all the way back to Atari's beginnings, and helped bring about the smaller developers that have managed to crush bigger companies, whether or not the bigger companies were nicer than their predecessors.

A better target might be this same group of people if they don't make a public attempt to change their policies, because getting those poor blokes their money on a project that even the bosses don't think will break even is the least you can do. Beyond that, boycott them if you don't like what they're doing.

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I think boycotting is great, even if there was a bit of sarcasm in some of the above, because it's better than what I've seen a lot of in the past. People threatening to kill the developers of Heroes of Might and Magic because they tried to inject some science fiction into their strategy game (even though M&M was built on that sort of thing) need to be institutionalized if they're serious, and need to seriously rethink their sense of entitlement regardless.

This isn't the state making these games; these are companies. We don't pay taxes to them, we voluntarily give them money so they can entertain us. If we don't like what they're doing, no matter how dumb our reasons are, we speak clearest when we spend or money elsewhere (or save it-- that's something people keep forgetting to do). If we expect them to entertain us before we've paid, and get angry when they don't obey our wishes, in this age of comment boards we can voice our complaints and hope they hear us, but if we're bitches about it, if we threaten them, we'll get nowhere in the long run, even if they capitulate to our demands.

Because this is entertainment. The amount of energy we spent on trying to Save Farscape or spend voting in the next American Idol was spent on shit that mattered COULD go elsewhere, but it doesn't. Entertainment is obviously very important to us as a species. We need it. But it's still just entertainment, and in a way should be afforded the leeway that qualifier suggests.

We should also remember to afford boycotters that same respect. If they're being civil then they're doing the minimum that entertainment protesting deserves, no matter how dumb the reasons are. The debates are better when people point out where the flaws are, but beyond that, it's up to them to spend their money, and you most likely will NEVER KNOW what these internet people actually do. Just don't make the mistake in assuming anyone has to buy any damn thing. Again, this is entertainment. We're throwing bucks at these people so they'll dance for us, not making the world a better place. So if people want to hold off, for whatever reason, it's not the end of the damned world.

Ultimately, though, remember that companies, like individuals, also have a right to do pretty much what they want with the money they earn from their games. Don't pretend they're going to build an orphanage with parts of the proceeds, or support other games in their franchises, or get the message about their dumb ads or their petulant co-designers if you withhold the dough. Even if it is a vote, it's just about as mute as a political vote can be.
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The Chilean film Optical Illusions begins with brilliant absurdity, paying direct service to its title:

We start with a blurry image that never manages to focus, the viewpoint of a young man whose sight is restored after more than 30 years of blindness... sorta. That full focus never materializes, and so he is stuck with not being truly blind, and the ostricism he gets from his old friends, while not benefiting from sight, either.

The insurance company that helped fund that inadequate operation is facing financial ruin, and is forced to cut back on employees, while offering them 50% off for plastic surgery as a way of fleecing their own people for extra cash. One of the morose employees we meet finds herself overseeing what will eventually become a halfway house for those on the way to being fired, euphemistically called Outplacement Services.

Her brother finds a job as a security guard in a mall, which is joyfully laid back. Armed with a toy gun, he surveys shoppers until he comes across what seems to be a shoplifter, a woman who will eventually have him fixing her pipes in her miniature mansion.

We get to follow an executive who, naturally because he has a conscience, is one of the people now stuck in out-placement. He is a Jew by blood but not by creed, although his son is eager to recapture the faith of his ancestors, even to the point of chatting with a rabbi in New York over the internet.

These people further interlace through intermediary characters, and there is genuine mirth for the first hour or so as one optical illusion after another passes before our eyes as if in a collage: the ink blot during the security guard's interview and his standard-issue toy pistol, the pretense of affection characters have for another, the seeming nakedness of someone who is shown to be partly clothed once an obstructing head moves out of view, the new ad campaign that hopes to revitalize the failing company (which is based on a lie). All of these and more that I either don't want to spoil or can't remember come parading past you, and it's fun to find them all.

The isolation the characters feel, too, is almost palpable; they seem tortured by their own unmet desires for beauty, attention, love, and sight, and life seems to have punished them for daring to try to meet these desires. But past the hour mark things seem to grind to a halt. We've left some characters alone for far too long, and some of them never get the play they should have to make them truly impact the story. Their zombie-like following of their desires suddenly falls flat when the movie seems to shrug and says "well, there you have it!", never quite rewarding us for our time spent during the building of all these interesting personas.

The last shot lasts only a few seconds, then the credits roll, as if there was a mistake in editing, but it's endemic of my problem with the film: such a strong beginning demanded much more than a final act which is the last gulp of air finally seeping from a once gloriously ostentatious balloon.

If you're willing to be let down by the final act's freely spinning wheels, you will at least be rewarded with some cleverness early on. Otherwise, be warned that the saddest illusion of this film is the same early cleverness.


Since the trailer shouldn't truly affect someone's impression of the film it advertises for, I'll include a comment about it in a postscript:

The title of this movie is doubly apt because the trailer for this film is an illusion, making you feel like it's some 4th wall breaking sudamericano Wes Anderson at work, when it really is there to sell the movie. There are still strange, isolating shots that are funny and interesting to look at, but they often have little payoff, despite the sharpness of the trailer's editing. This trailer obeys my personal rule about trailers, which is that a bad trailer usually warns you about a bad movie, while a good trailer doesn't mean a damn thing.
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As in, explanation; I have no regrets.

Getting started on the Tromsø International Film Festival a bit late this year. Saw two movies today, the first of which is already up for you to read about.

Roads were slick in town, and the people a bit antsy, but the lines were by far some of the best I've seen. Maybe I've just been lucky because it's a weekday.

If you're curious about it, go to TIFF.NO for more information!
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Mumm-Ra

The first I ever heard of Earl Hammond, I knew him by his character in the afternoon cartoon series Thundercats. He played Mumm-Ra, a menacing mummy who threatened the heroes of the program, using various minions to do his dirty work. I always thought the voice work was strange, that Mumm-Ra had this weird trill to his voice that made him almost seem comical while he was being diabolical. He played the big badguy part in another Rankin Bass cartoon that came later, Silverhawks, and did other voicework until the end of his career.

Mumm-Ra: The Untold Story

As an adult I came across an audio blooper reel from Thundercats, and my semi-wholesome image of voice actors was shattered when the voices for Mumm-Ra and the rest went out of their way to swear and make lurid jokes. Not that those sorts of things bother me in isolation, but I guess when you couple that with more innocent memories it's a bit jarring.

With this mental image of decrepit Mumm-Ra making a dirty joke, I was again shocked to learn that that very Earl Hammond was the same actor playing squeaky clean Sergeant Lane in the old Rocky King, Detective television show from the sadly short-lived Dumont Network.

Sergeant Lane: Paragon of Virtue

Filmed in kinescope, Rocky King, Detective (also listed as The Inside Detective some places), was broadcast live, so there were many flubs and mistakes, but it had a certain immediacy and charm that you got from these old live programs. The writing was smart and quick, and without breaks it feels like it has the right pace even though we're accustomed now to drama programs lasting an hour.

And here was Earl Hammond playing the young, fresh-faced Sergeant Lane, who often assisted Detective Rocky King, and in one extant episode was actually the lead when Roscoe Karns was out sick. The guy was bright and amiable, nothing like my mental image of him as that lurid Mumm-Ra telling dirty jokes. But they were the same, of course.

No More Real than Reality TV

We have this image of the 40's and 50's as an innocent time, with people talking slightly fast, running around in Brylcreem haircuts and (consistently) gray suits. It all comes from these old images from TV and the movies, which seem iconic to us. What we forget is that a lot of these old programs, Rocky King being no exception, were meant to be ideals, and the laws that surrounded broadcast television and movies reflected this. The real world was, of course, full of the same nastiness, both the honest kind and the deplorable kind, that we come to expect from entertainment now. Plays at that time were already trying new, more open portrayals, and books had been doing it for a while. But because the most accessible image is the television show, we somehow think that everyone was as wholesome as the images we saw.

In a way that comes to reflect on our society, I think, because now we tend to have television that goes lower than we can go. Reality TV is an obvious example, but even the straight fiction entries seem to have a seedy tinge to them, showing what we tend to view as a more honest depiction of the world. But it's no more honest than the old shows were I don't think, it just tries to satisfy our increased taste for dissonance.

There's something to be said for the old shows, where we know it doesn't reflect real life, but it still tries to aim high, and show us how things ought to be, with hard-working detectives who are dedicated to nabbing the bad guy and are, in a sense, an example of what we want to see in our own lives, even if we don't always get to see it.

Compare the loftiness of the clean-cut Sergeant Lane and the ugliness of lurid Mumm-Ra, though, and you come closer to that truth than either depiction would ever show by itself. Like the rest of us, Earl Hammond was a human being. It's so easy to forget that when we're only shown characters he depicted.

Explore the Show "Rocky King, Detective" for Yourself

Here's the episode with Earl Hammond playing the lead, but search for Rocky King and you'll find the other 3 episodes:

http://www.archive.org/details/Rocky_King_4

You could probably just replace the "4" with 1 through 3 in the URL to get the other episodes, come to think of it. They're only 30 minutes or so long, but they're paced well and wind up being as entertaining as an hour long cop show now.

Strangely enough, in the link to one of the Rocky King, Detective episodes I'm providing, the person who posted this says that it was the son of Roscoe Karns, Todd, who played the lead in the episode, when it was really Earl Hammond. Karns' son DID play in a great many Rocky King episodes as Sergeant Hart, but he was not the lead, if we're to believe the credits of the episode and the names of the characters!
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Reading Alastair Reynolds' blog, I saw the section for appearances. Since I admire his work, my imagination immediately thought "oh, what if I could make it all the way to Helsinki for his appearance there, and show up and..." What, exactly? What would I do? I've read 1 and a half of his books, and although I like them a lot, what would I say? How would I connect with the guy?

Truth is, I couldn't. And it feels like the closer in physical space I could get to the man, the further away I'd be. For all my lamenting digital journalism combining with everyone's sense of entitlement to form the requisite comments section, I find myself glad that in some way it seems that creators are more accessible than they used to be. I feel like I could probably make better contact with the man through email than I could in person, and I've actually contacted people I've admired for decades through electronic means, Gary Gygax, Bob Pepper, and Roger Ebert among them.

But, again, how much of a connection do I make? It tends to feel incomplete to me, and it's a blip in the day of the person I'm contacting, so it feels a bit weird to even do it. Maybe some of this feeling of weirdness comes from one of my first author signings. Through a coup (which was a story in itself), a former girlfriend and I managed to slip into the Ritz Carlton in Montreal for a book signing by post-modern Canadian author Timothy Findley. I'd read The Wars and all during my reading of it, I came up with all sorts of questions I wanted to ask the guy. But standing in front of him, all I could muster was what must have sounded like a caveman speaking, something like "Me think you write good."

Worthless. At least my girlfriend managed to say something more sensible.

Some years later in my hometown, after that girlfriend was in my past, independent comics writer Harvey Pekar showed up to promote some new releases. I listened to his speech, and was really happy to see him in person. This time I managed to ask a few well-formed questions, including asking why he wasn't updating his movie-related blog anymore (answer: if they started paying him to update it again, he would). I had already bought one of the books he was promoting, so instead I asked him to sign my journal. I don't think he was too happy with that.

Both he and Findley years before gave me a similar look, or at least my memory plays it out that way. A sort of rolling of the eyes to look up at me, as if I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I didn't really, and I still don't get what the ritual is supposed to be. I don't understand the protocol, I suppose.

They're there to promote their books, and maybe gauge reactions on things they're writing. We're there to get closer to a dude or dudette who is otherwise a disembodied collection of thoughts on paper. Who are we to them, really? Who are they, really, to us?

Not too many years ago I managed to brave another signing, this time of comic book artist and writer Lise Myhre, creator of Nemi. I learned a bit about her past, and managed to get her book signed for my wife. I guess my timidity had increased by then, probably because my wife was standing next to me as I got it signed.

It felt easier than it had been before, and I think part of it was because I wasn't a huge fan of her work. I was doing it for someone else, so all the pressure of getting to the top of the mountain and asking the guru three questions wasn't there. I got what I wanted, a specialized gift for my wife (who, yes, was standing right there), and Myhre got what she wanted, another book sale. Commerce, and all that.

I was better at the protocol, but it felt like a cold, cynical exchange. Not much of an alternative to the prior encounters' embarrassment or awkwardness.

I imagine there are people who get a great thrill seeing someone they admire in person, and maybe there are few writers, at least early in a tour, who enjoy the admiration. I can't help but think, though, that this is the exception, that most writers trudge through it, and most fans feel disappointment.

I guess the perfect moment of interaction, the one that really mattered, happened a long time ago, when the writer was long done with the work that the reader is now reading. To the reader it feels like a connection in that moment, but the author is unaware, and by the time the reader can put the feeling into words, the spark has already faded a bit. They cup their hands around the spark, blowing on it, sheltering it long enough to keep it burning so they can show it to the author some day, late at night in an over-lit bookstore, one person in a line of hundreds, each of them eager to finally say hello.
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Youtube keeps changing, but it doesn't seem to have the smart design of its parent company. There are a lot of silly things that could be done away with, like converting everyone's followed channel list into a friend list without letting us choose whose comments we want to listen to.

But the biggest change to me is that now the sponsored videos are ostensibly random people who just happen to have the chance to get their vlog out there to the masses, but which are actual self-promotional skits and gossip columns. What irks me about a lot of these is that they come off as half-assed yammerings with a strangely calculated feel to them.

Many video blogs out there are intolerable because they completely lack any kind of editing; you get interminably long stretches of "ums" and "I forgot what I was thinking, just a sec" and "wait, someone at the door." Embarrassing, but at least in some way it feels genuine. You SHOULD definitely edit your video enough to where it feels like a coherent idea that doesn't drag and doesn't wander too much, but it's become a style with these sponsored links to over-edit, to plan out what you'll say ahead of time and to pull what feels more like a Max Headroom impersonation, with the vlogger's head popping up randomly all over the screen with different vocal tones, things in the background, and camera angles.

The net effect of this, beyond betraying the over-produced nature underlying this supposedly amateur blog, is that it winds up simply being a different species of annoying than the completely unedited videos. The staccato blurbs grate, the lack of focal point destroys whatever good will the listener has to stick with you, and you wind up looking like a damned fake because of the time one HAS to spend doing all these camera setups for what is supposedly some spontaneous topic.

I guess I should be happy that these sorts of things are so transparently calculated, because they're easier to avoid. I'd rather watch a boring, rambling amateur vlog, because the content tends to ultimately be more substantive, even if disjointed, and I can skip what I can't stand to get to the better stuff.

Here's a test to see if a vlog is hyper-edited: don't watch it, just listen to it. It becomes pretty clear these spazzy hyper-edited blogs are vapid when you don't have to concentrate hard on finding the vloggers face before it disappears again, like some two-dimensional whack-a-mole simulator.
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When growing up, I was given the impression that figuring out a math problem meant that you understood how the machinery of an equation worked. Once you understood the machinery you could apply it anywhere and its results were always true for the given number set. I was given the impression that charting things out and figuring out the problem by hand meant that you didn't understand the nature of the problem, and thus you were doing it wrong.

When trying to work out the probabilities for the combination of two dice, I lacked the equation. I searched in vain for the proper expression which would allow me to simply plug in numbers and make the dice combinations make sense as I wanted them to.

What was I supposed to do, then, lacking as I did the proper terms that would allow a web search to give me the tools I needed? Should I have begged a math expert for help? Is that what we're supposed to do if we don't understand, if we weren't of the mindset to absorb things in math class back when we had the chance (assuming they even talked about the thing you want to solve)?

I decided to chart it out. I made lines, made a simple, mundane matrix, and plotted the thing out by hand. The results were finite, so it wasn't like I was trying to solve for all dice, just the two I was interested in. It took time, and I made many mistakes, but as I made mistakes I began to understand the NATURE of the problem. Every time I checked and rechecked, looking for the patterns that I knew would pop up in such a regular system, I felt like I was feeling around in a darkened room and learning its dimensions. As I spent time, on the ground, feeling my way through the problem I came to have a SENSE for the problem.

By the time I was finished I had a nice graph that listed all the results for the dice as I wanted them displayed. It was way more work than what an equation would have given me, but without that crucial step I HAD to do something to solve the problem. And I did. I just dove in and I did it.

Some of us don't have the mindset to learn math the way it is commonly taught. Some of us need to know why, and some of us need to see the machinery inside, to feel our way around to understand it like we would when studying anything. Rather than being handed down the tools and just memorizing them, we feel the need to get our hands dirty, and if we're ready for it, if we're not told that what we're doing is wrong, we learn best when we make mistakes. Mistake is another way to say the overstepping of a boundary. We need to break the machine in order to fix it, to tear it apart to understand how it's assembled.

I now understand the ins and outs of this probability matrix, and I think I can slowly expand it to encompass number ranges and amounts of any size. This is how the first mathematicians figured things out, before there was Algebra and before other techniques that made mathematics accessible to others. In a sense, that same curiosity is now adrift, cut off by the professed need for rote repetition.

I like to hope that some day there will be at least two ways to learn math, and that they will be held with equal esteem. There are many of us out there who love to solve problems, but find being handed a list of tools to memorize to be incompatible with our thinking. We are not incapable of solving the problems; we are just incapable of speaking that particular language.

Just like we don't expect someone who grew up speaking English to understand Chinese right away, we need to provide those with a different mindset the chance to bridge the gap. Not only will we be helping expand math competence across the board, but we may well also be introducing the field of mathematics to an entire outlook that may help cause an explosion of new thought and explorations into the field.

All you have to do is have the patience to give those of us who are not wired to repeat by rote the chance to catch up.
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In college one of my political science professors was one of the first in my experience to use email regularly. He would announce changes in the schedule through email, and would respond to students' messages readily and thoughtfully. If you ignored his insistence on using all capital letters in his emails, he was one of the better correspondents I'd had at the time. But his capital letters were impossible to ignore, and eventually student pressure forced him to change. I looked at it as an idiosyncrasy, but after being told not to use all-caps myself, I started to see what people were talking about.

If you look at a block of text, your first impression is one of texture. Mine is, anyway. Mostly lower-case sentences are like little rows of scribbles. Big, block letters fill up space, and demand more attention. While at the beginning, before anyone was really sure about what to use for a standard email format, it was easy for me to dip into all-caps territory for a quick note to someone, eventually I could almost hear the yelling in my head, whether or not it was there.

Most people who do it now are either ignorant of the prevailing opinion, pressed for time, or doing it to deliberately goad people. That, or they're actually yelling in email. I use capitals to emphasize words when I can't print bold or italics, so I don't see the point in telling people not to do it at all, and when you actually do feel strongly about something, that sort of emphasis feels a lot STRONGER than the old standbys.

Still, if you insist on using caps a lot, you're basically screwed. It will become difficult for people to take you seriously, even if you're being satirical or ironic (though distancing yourself from what you write, being sarcastic or ironic or what-have-you, is a skill in itself to do right on the internet, and many people fail at that every day, myself included).

This blurb was inspired by this article, which discusses the inane debate over why all-caps is perceived the way it is. A woman was fired for sending mails which were perceived to be hostile, when they were probably just lazily formatted by the person sending them. In some of the strange digressions you hear various people weigh in on why people see all-caps as yelling, but it's really very easy. It's bigger, seems bolder, and fills up more space. Some simple textual comparisons will bring most people on board for that interpretation. But some people, like Paul Luna as mentioned in the article, won't be convinced of that, although his skepticism toward such an interpretation feels needlessly contentious to me.

If you do like to remove some formatting from your forum posts and emails for the sake of expediency or style, try not bothering to capitalize at all instead. It's what I used to do before my typing fingers got used to capitalization. Punctuating well, though, isn't as easy to dump. I have my share of weird habits, but doing wrong too often is potentially more distracting than all-caps, as it's giving people the wrong directions to your ideas.

In general, putting effort into your posts gets people's attention. Just like with any act of creation, combining effort with efficiency makes a better impact than screaming-- most of the time, at least.

Further reading.
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Just posted the below as a response to an interesting essay about the demographics of game players and the state of the entertainment media industries.

Depending on who you’d talk to (yes, I play games, though I think I’m below the average demographic on all three of those data points), gaming has already achieved some measure of “renaissance.” I know Bob’s not big on games but it seems like he’s addressing the design side of the industry as it has been for a few years now.

Independent titles seem to be making more headway into mainstream markets with digital downloads allowing game makers to sidestep production cycles and add to existing games, sometimes greatly improving the value of a single game purchase. Games like Fallout 3 seem to lead the way in digitally-downloaded add-ons in this regard, although I don’t know how tenable it can be for less dedicated game makers who don’t have the staff to spare.

What’s remarkable, though, is that the design philosophies seem to be more and more risky. You see much more adventurous ideas than you would ever have imagined happening during the last generation of consoles, and they are being noticed by game media and users alike. This doesn’t translate into higher sales given the numbers Bob quotes, but when you combine the nearly palpable increase in excitement over the design choices behind some games, combined with the market penetration that the Wii has managed, video games stand to see a real upsurge both in quality and in sales.

But the tentative first steps that the game design houses and smaller developers have already taken are what will help fuel this. They’ve been targeting this hidden demographic in small ways; and as the success of certain adventurous titles, the notoriously skittish producers that survive the economic downturn may continue to reward developers who make waves through novel design. Christmas sales are purposefully being dispersed this year by a lot of developers afraid of the next slew of big releases, by the way, so don’t look at the classic holiday sales numbers for the signs of video game industry recovery. 2010 will be the make-or-break year for many.

The renaissance part isn’t news; it helps to be familiar with how things have changed in this short span of time. That, or maybe your definition is different than mine.

What, Bob, do you think would qualify as a true gaming renaissance for you? I thought you didn’t care for games at all :)
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My eyes won't focus properly. I think of ideas and they never quite swim out of me. Easily distracted, my mind wanders through all my unkept promises as I refuse even the remotest pleasure for myself because, after all, someone who breaks so many promises doesn't deserve much pleasure.

Pleasure, though, is sort of like the currency of the mind. If you've felt something like above, you might have been trapped in a loop like I've been. It's easy to think about the things that need to be done, but the fact that they aren't done are sources of pain. Pain's to be avoided, so those of us with not a lot of that pleasure currency in reserve fear a mental bankruptcy and shy away from the pain.

The alternative to getting things done is to do things that are personally enriching, or to waste time. The former requires effort, which isn't so bad on its own, but when you start to tap into that other energy resource inside you, the drive that makes you a bit more alive when you do new, enriching things, it jostles the jar in you that houses all those painful debts. The jar wobbles back and knocks over any desire to do enriching stuff, saying "how can you do these things that take effort when the things that need effort are still waiting here, stagnating?"

So the only alternative is nothing, or next to nothing. Repetitive, easy, passive tasks that give you little to no stimulation or inspiration, and sometimes create new problems that get stuffed in that jar of unfinished things.

Today, for instance, I have watched many fascinating talks, learned about the abacus and the slide rule, finished off a movie, and am listening to This American Life. But even when learning about the slide rule, I never got past the introduction. I could have learned how to use it if I'd spent the time doing it, maybe triggered some thing in my head that made math make a bit more sense to me.

But no, that takes effort, effort better spent on the painful things best avoided. And so it goes.

A word of advice for anyone trapped in a loop like this: fight as best you can. Even that is effort worth doing, even if you don't quite know which direction you'll run should you break free. I don't always make it, I don't have a recipe for success. I know that it's likely related to depression, though, and depression mixes up the signals inside of some of us, making the things we need to do look ugly and insurmountable, and makes the things that will give us the pleasure currency, so to speak, to have the energy to tackle these tasks seem out of step with what we need to do.

Philip Zimbardo's talks about a cool idea to break out of this, citing how we look at time. It's been helpful to me sometimes to think of his thought model, to try to remember that even if I can't accomplish everything right now, I can at least do a little something for myself, to build myself up, so that I can still finish those tasks that plague me.

Like a disease, though, we tend to build up resistances to our tactics. Usually the people who are successful with "self-"help tactics tend to be people who could manage it anyway. Those like me, who might depend on the external help to try to break out, tend to fall on our face after a while. It suggests that the problem is somewhere inside of us, and is specific and special to each of us. That pretty much means it's up to us, as individuals, to figure out the particular key to our particular lock.

Keep fighting. I'm going to continue searching both outside and inside, starting now.
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I keep wanting to write about Metal, I guess because I've sorta learned a lot about it researching it as a little hobby for the past few years. This sort of renewed when I saw the track list for Brutal Legend (with or without umlaut, I don't care. Many people who will play this game wouldn't know how to pronounce the umlaut properly, anyway. I only happen to know because my old Chinese teacher told me one of the sounds we had to practice sounded a lot like the German one).

I realize, though, that listing favorite bands is about as boring as it gets for blogs. I'm at a loss here, really. I also know that a lot of the bands I happen to like are a bit fringe, even as far as Metal is concerned. Last thing I want to do is deal with nitpicking in a realm as broad as Metal-- in a field of music that I feel compelled to capitalize :) If you're curious about one person's peripheral journey around the outskirts of Metal, read on.

In My Metal Beginning, There Was Eddie

My life's experience with Metal had always been on the fringes. It pretty much started with a pen pal of mine from a neighboring town I met through some class-induced pen pal thing that would culminate in us all getting together and being disappointed by each other. Dude drew me this huge -actually pretty awesome for a sixth-grader- drawing of Iron Maiden's Eddie done in black charcoal. I didn't know what to do with it. My religious obsessions at the time had me vaguely fearing the thing, so I didn't keep it for more than a few years, I think. It was actually a pretty great gift, I can't imagine my selfish little self doing that much for anyone back then. When we met he shied away from my geekishness and that was pretty much it.

I was suckered into a particular brand of religious propaganda which tends to try lying in order to do the greater deed of saving. Now I think that's hypocritical, but then I had no idea they might trump up what I saw into something it wasn't. Twisted Sister may not strike you as Metal, but at the time their video for "We're Not Going to Take It", which had a kid rebelling against a patently verbally abusive father in a rather humorous way, was characterized (as the whipping boy of the decade video games are now) as changing nice little boys into monsters. I hadn't actually SEEN the video until I saw it on Youtube a little while ago, (and it's damned funny). I just assumed it was satanic and steered clear.

I can see why people hell-bent on making a false interpretation for the sake of a higher one would look at it the way they did, but now it seems pretty tame. Still, it would take a long time for me to shake that stigma, and I probably carried with me the same prejudice I had for the music to the people I would soon meet.

Now, Actually Listen to it

My estrangement from the group that tended to listen to Heavy Metal continued into Junior High. Kids started wearing jean jackets with penned in band names, black T-Shirts with bands my Weird Al Yankovic listening self had never heard of. One kid, as a joke, asked me if I even knew who Ratt or Def Leppard was. I figured they were bands, but I made some joke feigning my ignorance.

I got into acting then, briefly (I was never good at memorizing lines. Even then I enjoyed making stuff up as I went along rather than trying to stick to a script) as part of an after-school activity thing. There I met upper-classmen who were a bit more forgiving of my ignorance. I saw the T-shirts of one of them with the crazy art from Iron Maiden covers. He told me about the lore, the seventh son of the seventh son bringing about apocalypse or some damned thing, which at the time sounded vaguely satanic to me (I guess it was always sort of designed to sound dangerous. Metal seems to always have been about pushing boundaries and staring into the abyss, even thought most of it isn't quite as "evil" as the sheltered think it is). I still kept my distance until next year, when that same guy introduced me to Testament.

It was loud, but full of energy. It was modern rock (like the stuff I'd begun experimenting with when I was transmogrifying into a teenie-bopper replete with a wall full of posters, zits, and growth anxiety), but it was rougher, and it cut deeper. I was intrigued, and I slowly realized that a lot of the guys who listened this stuff were sort of like me. They were still scary to me, still people I wouldn't want to hang out with, but they weren't monsters. Some of them even became my friends, at least for a time. Around that time someone gave me a dub of Dr. Feelgood, and my outlook on Metal (as well as my hearing) was never the same since. Sadly I was too stupid then, convinced that I had to follow the rigid class system that was endemic at my school, so I eventually looked the other way, abandoning a few of my friends, including the one that introduced me to Testament so long ago. I've done stupid things since, but few that I still feel bad about after all this time. This was one of those.

Into high school, I learned of Metallica and Megadeth. I remember seeing at the local dime store a big poster of Megadeth's mascot Vic Rattlehead standing in front of a burned-out wasteland. Not as afraid of the BS propaganda of sheltered folks anymore, I kept my mind open. I don't know why I picked Rust in Peace as my first album of theirs to try out, but that has to be one of my favorite of theirs ever, one that I'd play over and over (too bad I used earphones all the time. My hearing was never quite the same after a while).

Going home from school, I would ask the ex-con who sat in the back of the school bus questions about Metal all the time to keep him from picking on other people, and he would list off Megadeth albums, other bands he listened to (like Slayer, with its pentagram logo, still scary enough even after I'd stopped pretending an evil spirit could have power over me), and the pronunciation "Sepultura," which I could never get right. Through his recommendations I tracked down the older Megadeth albums, buying them over a period of years well into my post-High School haze until I was disillusioned with one of their latest only a few years ago and quit. By then I'd also bought Metallica's eponymous (which I thought had an all black cover until I caught the snake in matte ink hiding there), several Pantera CDs, begun by hearing Cowboys from Hell late at night on the local college's radio station and ending with buying the Great Southern Trendkill.

It's Getting Crowded/Not Crowded Enough

On cable was stuff I didn't even know was considered by some to be Metal. I still don't quite imagine Nine Inch Nails that way, nor KMFDM, nor many of the other bands listed in the Brutal Legend soundtrack or elsewhere. When I listened to Manowar, it sounded a bit too light to be what I thought of as Metal, and a lot of the bands like Def Leppard that I finally heard years after those kids in black t-shirts faded from my memory sounded way too weak. I even took a stand, classifying the Crue as hard rock, because it didn't have that bite.

Metal has a problem with classifications. Just look at the Wikipedia page on it. Tons, tons of sub-genres. There are some sub-genres which have a PARTICULAR VOCAL STYLE, growling, screaming, whatever. A particular mood. Most of the stuff I liked turned out to be Glam, Nu, Alt, Speed, Power, or Thrash. To me they always seemed a bit more versatile, but I didn't really know they belonged to any classification at all. It was just about how it sounded.

I think that's why I'll always be on the edge of Metal, never feeling quite there. Even after I grew to love it, I began to hate classifications for things and people in my post-high school years, realizing what BS it was to put other people, (or myself) into a category like I was trying to package them for sale. A lesson I wished I'd learned before I'd rejected those friends of mine (I'm sorry Alex, Tim), but once learned it made me feel on the outside all over again when people were trying to let me know about their favorite bands and their hated bands, while dressing the part of a Metal fan.

I've gotten past the point where I need to let other peoples' work define me, and where I need to feel harder core than the next guy. To me it feels a bit backward for Metal to be sequestered in all these tiny categories. I continue to explore it, learn about new bands, ask metal-heads about their favorites and their recommendations, but at times I wonder if Metal is only done a disservice being divided, so I don't bother taking sides.

When taken as a whole, even if separated from lighter rock, the pantheon of Heavy Metal consists of a very diverse bunch, singing about things that are often anything but rote rock cliches. When I said that Metal was about pushing boundaries and staring into the abyss, I meant it. No matter the focus of a particular band, you always feel like they're on the edge of something. Anger. Glory. Doom. All the stuff we're scared of. I'd sometimes wonder why it was these kids were listening to stuff that seemed so bleak or terrifying. But Metal is safe, to me-- safer than most other music styles out there. It lets you explore these strange, frightening emotions and ideas with little risk to yourself. It lets you stare directly into life's intensity and blackness with a flick of a switch.

And when you've had enough, you put it down and go out into the sun again. Suddenly, the world doesn't seem quite so dark anymore.
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I've had quite a few ideas for this blog, but being a bit of a procrastinator it has to be something that really motivates me to write before I'm willing to sit here and type it out. I've got this idea for profiling some of the trends in offensive food packaging, stuff about language, sociology, whatever...

But what's burning me right now is Twitter, and a larger trend that branches from that, so that's what I'm writing about. If this isn't of interest, do a word search (control F in Firefox) for the phrase GRASP FOR THE BIRD in the next header for something that has more bearing on the the internet as a whole.

THE LAND OF TWITS

I started up a Twitter account before I began this blog. Initially it didn't seem as bad as its reputation. It was easy enough to use, and there were plenty of interesting people you could subscribe to who seemed to be active enough that it was worthwhile keeping up with them.

It didn't take me too long to figure out all the downsides to that service, and I guess I'll just lay it all out in the interest of completeness.

If you like the idea of following celebrities, note that famous folks will usually ignore you if you say something to them, because they usually already receive tons of messages and can't be bothered to pick through them, just as it is through email channels or fan letters; so it's not like this is an avenue to contacting people whose work you've enjoyed. Usually. My most meaningful interactions have mostly been with plain old individuals and the Oxonian Review, strangely enough. Any aspirations you might have for finally contacting some reclusive famous person will likely be dashed, so you'll have to get your stalking fix elsewhere. Me, I'm happy that I'll occasionally get a response if I'm thoughtful enough, and if I get no response, so be it.

I like that you can keep up with celebrities and other influential people, even if it's more a one-way communication. They sometimes say something interesting or philosophical, ostensibly in 140 characters or less, sometimes even sent from their mobile phone. That's the novelty: connectivity with mobile devices. So if Random Comic Book Writer is having airport trouble, you get to read all about it in little segments that would fit on the screen of his cellphone. Usually 140 characters isn't enough, so these thoughts will likely be several 140 character posts long.

The problem with this is that Twitter has no filters, no way to manage people, so if you're away for, say, more than a day and you happen to have a lot of subscriptions to people, you will get a wall of these posts, which are expanded back into the past by scrolling to the bottom and pressing a "more" button. You can't tell which ones you've read or seen before, and there's no metric for gauging how far back you will need to scroll before you reach your last point.

Some of these celebs are effing chatty, too. A Star Trek alumnus, or his impersonator, and his followers seem to be in a constant war of words, filling up post after post of his being snarky and his followers being abusive. That was one of the first subscriptions I had to cancel, it was ruining my mood so. They are working on authenticating the identity of influential people, though (will the real John Hodgman please stand up?).

Others are often just people referring links they received from others, using services like Tiny URL to make sure they fit into the 140 character limit. If you happen to have picked several people who are on each others' lists, you will get several posts of the same URL, when, if this was a blog, you would refer to the person who originally posted it, giving them due credit for their find.

Still others don't know the meaning of brevity, even when they're expressing a single thought. The novelty of Twitter is that it forces you to edit your posts. Some things just CAN'T be expressed in 140 characters, but it's worth it to try. One of the few things I've ever published was a piece of flash fiction, and it benefited greatly from being constrained to a very small window through which to express myself. Frighteningly enough, writers are just as susceptible to ignoring this editing paradigm as the rest, often posting four or five times about something that could have been a lot briefer.

If this sort of stuff was in a blog, that would be fine, but when you have EVERY PERSON ON YOUR LIST competing for space, creating a titanic scroll that reminds me of the reaction of mercuric thiocyanate and open flame (I had to look up that chemical name); in other words, an unmanageable, poisonous explosion of volume.

Despite authentication procedures for influential folks, there isn't much of a process for telling whether or not you're a human being. Many nice young girls with numbers at the end of their usernames have invited me to talk a look at their sexy pics (it's a trap!). What fun.

If I were only to keep in touch with people I knew through twitter, I think it might be an easier service to use. But I'm not sure I know anyone well enough who would actually update their life on that service with any frequency, and I'm not sure I'd care so much about when Polly Sue went out to get her groceries, anyway. Any meaningful interaction I have with my friends is through older channels, even if that includes texting. There's no need to broadcast it to everyone else.

AS YOU GRASP FOR THE BIRD, IT HOPS OUT OF REACH

For a while at least, my Twitter account was unable to accept my posts, making me unable to interact with the thing at all. All the strange buttons-that-aren't-links prevented, apparently, my older browser from using them. The "loading" symbol would just sit there and spin its wheels for hours. This has since been resolved, but I've run into other problems in the past, many were never resolved, with the help just telling me tersely to upgrade my browser, get a new computer, that sort of thing.

Sites are doing this all the time so that they can incorporate the latest memory intensive modules that do fancy little extra things that old HTML, the foundation language that lets me put links in this text, could never do.

HTML, though, was made because its smart inventors were trying to find a language that was universal for all systems, regardless of browser type of computer capability. I used to browse the web on a 286, using Lynx, a text browser! For the most part I was able to do it, and could look up all kinds of obscure facts on Blake's 7, participate in forums, read news, and just about anything else that didn't require graphics.

While I don't think I'd go back to text browsing just for fun, it was still blindingly quick, even on a very outdated machine. I could zip to an article in a few seconds, read what I came to read, and be done with it. Now a computer with the same generation gap chugs along while some marketing jerk's ad explodes on the screen, obscuring the text I was trying to read in the vain hope that I will care about his trashy movie. This can be tolerated, but when the basic functionality is hampered because my browser isn't up to speed, the whole point of the accessibility of the internet seems to be lost. This includes access for the blind, and for people with machines that lag behind computer hobbyists who are willing to dump large sums into their machines to keep up.

Some might explain that this is done in the name of progress, and that I wouldn't be able to use Dreamwidth itself without substantial upgrades, but all of this rings sort of false to me. I could publish every article I've written so far on a plain-old web page, with ugly background graphics, flashing text, and animated cursors, yet people all around the world could read it.

JUST FOR FUN, BRUSH UP ON HTML; IT'S EMPOWERING

Though I may change my mind later, the only markups I've done for my articles so far have been hypertext for the links (and I hand type the HTML for it, just to be obstinate), bold, and italics. I choose not to use the fancy editor available here for a reason: I don't want to arbitrarily decrease the chance that someone will read my words. Whether you're talking about clever little programs like Twitter, or the foundation of garden variety web pages, narrowing access for minimal increases in functionality seems counterproductive.

Communication is about reaching people, after all.

(Updated this article when Twitter started functioning for me again. Changed the first paragraph to reflect this, and removed references to Twitter not functioning. It still doesn't function quite right; the entangled javascripts sometimes make it inaccessible, mixing up the text and formatting, but a reload or two usually sets things right.)
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I sat down to write this entry and noticed that Roger Ebert had said he liked my "Kindle" entry. Being an admirer of his work for a long time, and even more of an admirer of his recent blogging habit, I was cheered up quite a bit to see he'd mentioned my essay in his own blog, in his entry playfully discussing reincarnation from a relatively more scientific perspective. Read it yourself and you'll get what I mean (he's a fun essayist anyway, so check his work out even if that particular subject matter sounds unappealing to you). Thanks, Roger!

... While Giving Your Eyes Some Rest

An hour or so ago I was watching videos, playing a little Kingsburg, and basically winding down at the end of my day. As things went on, though, my eyes started getting very irritated. Almost like sparks were hitting my eyes, or hot smoke. Very uncomfortable, and I'll probably have to get my eyes checked to see if it isn't some of the very stuff I talked about in my "Kindle" entry.

The pain was making me pretty irritable, though at the time I thought some fresh air might help jolt me out of this mood I was in. By the time my wife and I were finishing up our little walk to the corner market I'd just about had it. I wouldn't have shared this experience with you, though, unless there was more to it than that.

My wife and I have a little thing we do now and again as a sort of game. We don't do it regularly, but once in a while, one of us will tell the other that we can't see. The other will take him or her by the hand and lead them for as long as they can stand walking blind. It may sound strange to you, and it's a bit dangerous if you're not careful, but I can't recommend this (or something like this) enough. It's remarkable how, after just a little time, we'll adapt ever so slightly to our environment, paying attention to some sense data that we'd likely ignore before.

I told her how much the pain was annoying me, and that I'd like to play that game again. We set about walking from the market, my hand in hers, leading me forward, telling me to step over rough spots and turn sharply to avoid your usual collection of walkway hazards. It's also a nice trust exercise, although I think she and I are beyond needing those by now :)

While walking we passed by a bus shelter and I could hear the hollowness of it; cars that passed by us seemed to be much closer than they were, and after a time it felt like this familiar route, which we've walked hundreds of times before, felt like it was in a different spot in my mind. When she told me to open my eyes to see the play of the sunlight on the clouds and mountains a ways away, I felt momentary surprise that these familiar landmarks looked that way, and were in such positions.

For people who have no choice it's a logarithmically greater challenge because you know you can't just switch senses back on. For those of us with the privilege of sight though, I don't think we realize how much we ignore. Some say that these senses are more intense when others are switched off, but I don't think that's quite accurate. I think what we do is attune ourselves to what's available.

During the walk (which was one of my longest without sight, if memory serves) my perspective was altered quite substantially. I was surprised at how long it took to go from the market to home; not so much in the time it took for her to lead me, obviously it would take longer than a normal strolling pace, but that my sense of space seemed to tell me we should have been done long before we were. I also got some relief from the pain in my eyes (suggesting I may need a new prescription), and had a laugh when she told me that the people that drove by us were staring at our little show. I imagine some people might think it was a stunt, but it wasn't, and I'm glad we did it.
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In case you hadn't heard, George Orwell's 1984 and several other books were confiscated from people's Amazon Kindles after the copyright holders reported that the various publishers didn't have the right to publish through Amazon, though the folks who lost the books were compensated. I might go into that whole thing some other time (more than talking about the irony of snatching 1984 away from people), but as I sit here trying to figure out my display format for Strange Bundle, I wanted to talk about how to make your plain old computer screen less of a pain to read from, at least for as long as it takes for us to get a portable text reader with no strings attached.

The color combination I chose for my site suits my eyes, although visitors here may hate it. (Please let me know if the combination works (or doesn't)). I chose these colors because my problem tends to be with displays that are too bright; I'm the kind of person that turns the virtual lights off whenever possible just to make it easier on the eyes, though I know other people tend to prefer the reverse. One thing that's really easy on everyone, though, is to have a decent level of contrast. I've seen some crazy pages, some of them not aware that not everyone has the spectrum differentiation that computers do.

Part of what you can do as a user, if you can't find contrast switches on the site you're trying to read, is to fiddle with the ambient light of where you're reading. It helps me a lot with certain sites to turn on the lamp next to the computer on bright pages, or turn it off for dark ones. Seems to cut down on eye strain.

If you're colorblind, there's not a whole lot of help you can expect from the community at large. They just don't know what trouble they cause the 10% of the population who doesn't have a full set of conforming cones in their retinas. For colorblind folk, and people who are curious about color shades in things onscreen, try out Eyedropper. I'm not sure what they've been doing with the program of late, so use due caution in installing it and using it, but the older version I toyed with can come in handy.

For tackling a long text (ha! maybe I should have put these tips at the start of the essay? :) ), it's good to keep a few things in mind:

Lean back a bit in your chair, don't hunch over. This reduces body strain and has the added mental attitude of taking in the information you're reading, instead of confronting it that leaning forward does. It sounds like mumbo-jumbo but it is more relaxing, and it comes through in how you feel while reading.

Make the reading area big, if possible. This may not help everyone, but I find that if I hit F11 and cover as much of the screen with text as possible, it helps me feel like I'm getting somewhere. Many sites now tend to scrunch the actual valuable stuff into small frames, making it feel like you're trying to read through a porthole. Best fight back by widening things, then when you're done, hit F11 again to resume normal browsing.

For web-designers who inflict poor contrast on us, one strategy might be to highlight the text. At least then you're usually guaranteed a minimal, if possibly irritating, level of contrast.

Learn keyboard shortcuts! Page up, page down, home, end, and the arrow keys are indispensable, and a lot easier than fiddling with the mouse all the time. It helps go with the leaning-back posture a lot better than the mouse does.

Finally (and this applies to everyone, even computer veterans who think what I've said is old hat):

If your eyes hurt when you're using the computer, you may want to get your eyes checked. It's not normal to have irritated eyes during sensible computer use. The irritation may be caused by an astigmatism, a very common irregularity of the eye. This can be corrected with glasses or contact lenses in some cases. It helps correct for your eyes' distortions so your brain doesn't strain your eye muscles trying to compensate for the weird images it's receiving. Then again, your eyes might just be getting on in years and need some help. No shame in that.

If more folks used to analog books followed some of this advice, I think they might get a bit more out of online reading; they might also be a little less afraid of using the resources that are ours for the taking-- At least until someone makes a more flexible, user-friendly portable reading device.
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Perhaps you've heard about the United Kingdom's National Portrait Gallery is at odds with Wikipedia over the latter's appropriation of thousands of finely-detailed digital photographs from the NPG's own website. NPG argues that the portraits are theirs to control, and that they lose potential revenue from the loss of exclusive control of their collection. Wikipedia argues that their being a nonprofit service allows them to appropriate public content with lapsed copyright for the educational benefit of everyone.

The problem is, they're both right.

In the United States, the time for holding on to these portraits (and their reproductions such as the digital photographs in question) has expired a long time ago, and now they are in the public domain like so many other works of art. Wikipedia, a US-based non-profit, took these works under the same rubric that they take all their images: if it's in the public domain, it's fair game.

In the U.K., reproduction of images transcends copyright expiration, so it doesn't matter that these old portraits of rich people are so old that most conventional views on copyright go out the window. When Wikipedia volunteer Derrick Coetzee slipped past the NPG's flimsy protection of the detailed photographs of their works, he was, from the point of view of British Law, doing what Wikipedia tends to be rather hard on its own users for: taking images without permission.

Figuring out what should be done may be up to the lawyers, but when we look at Wikipedia's own philosophy of preserving materials for the sake of public enrichment, one has to ask how this is threatened by having these well-preserved works of art preserved in a different place. It seems like one of the main thrusts of Coetzee's own argument is aimed at the supposed revenue that the NPG is losing by the lack of exclusive control of the works, which he implies would be negligable. Conversely, destruction of the reproductions as detailed in the request from the NPG would cost Coetzee the time and effort spent harvesting them, but such is the life of a Wiki volunteer.

In response, Wikipedia cites numerous examples of their work with other museums and collections to display artwork through exclusive contracts, demonstrating how it benefits both parties. This is missing the point, though. Every one of the organizations they mention agreed to work with Wikipedia. As long as NPG has asked for the right to control the work which they are allowed to control already, and which they continue to display publicly, the only thing that is threatened is Coetzee's labor.

Wikipedia, win or lose, will likely benefit from the publicity of this battle, and so will the NPG, but while Coetzee and Wikipedia will be represented pro bono by Fred von Lohmann, NPG will be expending money in legal fees to fight. NPG may stand to lose even more money, whatever the real tally already is, protecting work that is already free for the public to view. Should Wikipedia win, they will be able to point to the case as justification for further appropriations, which may have an unintended chilling effect on galleries who don't want Wikipedia copying their collections.

It's a strange set of circumstances, but it strikes me as a silly rivalry that could easily end by Wikipedia doing the honorable thing and directing people to the NPG website. The public still benefits from Wikipedia's articles and the NPG's images, Wikipedia's public education goals are met, and the NPG gets to keep control over their collection as recognized under their regional laws. Everyone wins. Except, perhaps, Coetzee and his sore wrists.
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