the mofo with the info.

1. Meditations on Babel

Look at units of measurement. I’m pretty sure that every kid in the civilized world, when they first learn of the differing units of weight, measurements of length, and degree scales for temperature, thinks to themselves at some point… what the fuck? Every seven year old that struggles remembering how many inches equal how many centimeters (and that it’s actually centimeters, you damn Yank), must think to themselves, what purpose do these competing systems offer?

Look at driving. Someone, somewhere, at some time invented automobiles and motorcycles, and through word-of-mouth, demonstration, and those nifty Mitsubishi ads with über-cool music, convinced the civilized world that they were a pretty neat thing to have. Now… how, in the spreading of this idea from person-to-person, did some people decide that it was a good idea to drive on the left side rather than the right or vice versa? If it wasn’t for my local friends and relatives, I would have been turned into roadkill 10 times over now, with my 26 years of experience looking left before crossing a street.

Look at spelling. This topic is too exhausting to cover right now, but the American version of spelling “check” just makes more sense. Right now, Australians spell the bill at a restaurant “cheque”, and then the v-shaped mark that you put in a box “check”. However, when signaling for the “cheque”, they make a “check” in the air towards their waters. Unless this is some sort of hilarious visual pun, then their system is just inconsistent, and silly.

And you don’t even want to know how many power adapters I’m lugging around in my suitcase.

Maybe it’s because I just read Snow Crash or because I’m doing my “Australasian tour” at the same time as everyone else I know, but I can’t help but notice that most of the differences dividing Americans and our pseudo-English speaking brethren here are basically standards issues. So many of these ideas are tied into our concepts of nationalism, and serve as a large part of our cultural pride; I know that a lot of the American spelling differences were a conscious effort on the part of American revolutionaries to rebel from their tea-sipping bastard parents. Is there any hope for a unified system of standards, such that a global coalition could eventually be formed, which will eventually join the United Federation of Planets in the distant future? For the sake of the possibility of First Contact and the Prime Directive, I beg that all people of the world unite behind a common standard! Naturally, we should just use the American systems, as they’re pretty much a global standard, right? While were at it… It’s pronounced “soccer”.

2. The Prophet of Coolness

The great thing about being an American tourist, is that you can be the most out-of-touch loser in the United States, and still be more ahead of cultural trends than every single person you meet. Though not one of these Wallaby-eating Aussies (dat’s pronounced “ozzies”) has heard of “Death Cab for Cutie”, I can tell them with total certainty that they will be huge here in about two months, and they nod eagerly, as if I have shared with them some secret gem of cultural importance; they look around nervously, as I have surely violated the space-time continuum by delivering this gooey nugget, stolen from their future airwaves. Despite never having watched a single episode of last season’s American Idol, I know who won; this information is apparently toxic to the local television viewers here, who constantly beg and barter with me not to reveal this classified information (Note to self: make a t-shirt). In an age of the blogs, Wikipedia, and BitTorrent (for the non-savages out there), it seems that the people here live in constant fear of having their cultural future revealed to them, and only remain ignorant through extreme diligence. At the same time though, they sit enrapt as I regale them with tales of the modern United States, and, by inference, their own dark and unavoidable path. I guess it’s no difference from Californians waiting 3 hours to find out who their Next Top Model or American Idol, or Survivor, or Apprentice is… but I guess I’ve never understood them either.

On a separate note, I also have haunted-looking girls ask me pleadingly to explain what a “Hollaback girl” is. Unable to abate their confusion, I look away, as if I have not heard their question…

3. Touristy Crap

ZOMG! Kangaroos!!one!

The minds at Penny-Arcade have a new comic dealing with their newfound feelings at having switched to the flamboyant Apple lifestyle. While they joke about the dangerous path they have set down, I saw the announcement that the two authors of the comic were switching to Macs from PCs to be groundbreaking, and a signal of a big victory for Apple in general.

Here’s some background. Penny-Arcade is the most widely read webcomic around, and they primarily deal with the topic of video games. They have a rabidly fanatical fanbase, and are treated by video game manufacturers as journalists; they have access to sneak previews of new games and consoles, they have been commissioned to make supplementary material for big video games such as Rainbow 6 and World of Warcraft. In addition to this, they have traditionally had a strict anti-Mac attitude; a character in their strip Charles, is typically ridiculed for his love of the Mac platform in general. This has made sense, as they are gamers, and there are… exactly one game (s) available for the Mac that are worth a crap. So I was pretty surprised when they announced over a month ago that they were both looking into buying Apple machines, spurred by the switch to the Intel processors. Though as a Mac fanatic, I am pretty happy about this, it had me a little confused. The switch to the Intel platform has very little impact on the immediate availability of games for the Mac. In fact, due to Rosetta issues, there are reports that some games that worked on old Macs will not work or will run slower on the faster powered Intel Macs.

So… These people were unconvinced by Apple’s switch to BSD, they were unconvinced by Ellen Feiss, and they were unconvinced by Tiger. Why switch now, when nothing has changed from their perspective? How could two users so defiantly anti-switch be swayed by a change of architecture, and the announcement of minor improvements to the basic hardware that they offered before? I have a theory, natch.
(more…)

I don’t know why most of the Apple event recappers left off the most important part of Stevie-J’s keynote, so i’ve transcribed it here.

10:49 Oh, one more thing… [The crowd goes wild]
[Steve pulls off back panel of iPod Hi-fi to reveal a fat wad of cash.]
10:51 Every $350 iPod Hi-Fi comes with $200 cash in the back of it! That’s why the damn thing costs so much! It will also be available in a $450 version that comes with $300 dollars.
[Much applause from apple shareholders. Exeunt omnes]

Much better.

Drawer is a weird word. It’s about the weirdest word I can think of at this moment. The more I look at the word drawer the more and more freaked out I get.

For one thing, there’s the whole pronunciation thing (ugh, “pronunciation” is a weird word too… I’ll have to get back to that later). According to dictionary.com, the correct pronunciation (!) is “drô’ər” or “drôr”, but I’m pretty sure that I say “drōr’ər”. Wiktionary doesn’t even list the pronunciation I seem to use, but it lists several others… of course, that list may have just been created three minutes ago by a crack addict planning on using wiktionary in an elaborate scheme to scam the Russian government. Furthermore, the word has a different pronunciation as “drawers” when referring to underwear. Though I do not personally use this construction, but I am familiar with it, having watched “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air”; I recall that Will Smith pronounces it “drôz”, and I defer to The Fresh Prince as an authority on urban matters such as this.

Above all though, drawer is just… one of those words. If you look at the word drawer too often, it becomes unpronouncible (!), incomprehensible, alien. Is there a word for words like that? Words like spies or police that you use every day, but if you flip that switch in your head and just start saying that over and over, you wonder if, the next time you open your mouth, you might be unable to form the syllables that make up the word. You could even be sitting there at your computer, mouthing out the word to yourself, and think “is that really right?”– you’re pretty sure you know what noises to make, but even when you say it out loud, you question if you’ve been saying it that way your whole life, or only now that you think about it? Drawer. Drawer drawer drawer. The whole loop just feeds on itself until the word is to awful, terrible, heavy to even comprehend anymore. Is there a word for words like that? Or, if this is true for all words if you look at them long enough, is there a word for this phenomenon as a whole (ugh, I’m not liking “phenomenon” too much either… or “liking”)? Until I find out the correct word, I’m going to call these words “Schwerwörter” because everything sounds more important in German. Banjax. Banjax to the whole lot of them, I say.

Ö = { all song titles x : | R(x | > 1 }

Where the function R is a function enumerating all songs with that title that totally rock, but are completely unrelated to one another.

Thus,

Ö = {
“Forever Young”,
“Changes”,
“One”,
“Photograph”,
“Push It”
}

NOTE: “It’s My Life” was a close contender… but the Bon Jovi song really only has cheese factor.

In a recent review of Doom, film critic Roger Ebert dismissed the entire platform of video gaming in the context of art. When questioned about it in his answer column, he responded:

I believe books and films are better mediums, and better uses of my time. But how can I say that when I admit I am unfamiliar with video games? Because I have recently seen classic films by Fassbinder, Ozu, Herzog, Scorsese and Kurosawa, and have recently read novels by Dickens, Cormac McCarthy, Bellow, Nabokov and Hugo, and if there were video games in the same league, someone somewhere who was familiar with the best work in all three mediums would have made a convincing argument in their defense.

Now, the arrogant tone of this blurb has drawn ire from the blogosphere round. I really don’t care about Ebert’s opinion on video games; for that matter, I wouldn’t ask Roger Ebert to review literature, opera, or rock and roll either. He’s a reviewer of a niche artform, and an extremely mainstream one at that. Ebert can only appreciate art forms that lay themselves out before him, and not ones that allow a user to interact and test the scenery. There are games like “Metal Gear Solid: 2″ that present a storyline that draws the user in and challenges the viewers’ expectations in ways that M. Night Shamalan could only dream of. Games like “Silent Hill” will thrill users more than any horror movie, as the user is forced to assume the role of the main character, down to feeling her heartbeat in the controller vibration. In its relatively short lifetime, the video game industry has already crafted works that are unarguably artistic in nature, and have the capacity to surpass movies or books as captivating storytelling tools.

However, I ultimately have to agree with Ebert at some level. Although he fails to mention it, there is a serious difference between video games and more persistent artworks like literature, music and even movies. Video games are linked to video game systems, which compete with each other for market share and are obsoleted and replaced every five years or so. While certain titles have been “ported” to many platforms, most video games can only be enjoyed by maybe half of the video gaming at any given time, and will not have replay value five years down the line. While my Dad and I can sit down and enjoy a Clint Eastwood movie, it is unlikely that I will be able to recommend “Chrono Trigger” to my own children. I’m not saying that the ephemeral nature of video games invalidates it at an artform, but i do think that there is a fundamental technological problem that needs to be solved in order for video games to be respectable as a persistent work of art that can stand the test of time.

An article in yesterday’s New York Times has been circling inboxes lately, especially if you are an Asian American of the Angry variety. It covers the trend in a few new Manga titles in which certain authors are beginning to brazenly deride the cultures and principles of nearby Asian nations (most notably China and South Korea), promoting a xenophobic and supernationalistic mentality. Though I thought it was definitely interesting and possibly something to consider, I did a little investigating and it seems that NY Times’ statements about the reactions from the Japanese media were at the very least misinformed, and at the worst alarmingly biased.

Norimitsu Onishi states that the Manga comics in question “have drawn little criticism from the mainstream media”, citing a quote from a book review in the Sankei Shimbun that praises the work for its balanced view. I found this to be extremely misleading, as further research revealed that many mainstream Japanese papers did criticize the book, and specifically boycotted ads for “Kenkanryu”, the Manga in question. For example, though they did not deign to review the controversial book, Mainichi Shimbun did cover the resulting controversy in Japan, and identified the work as “strongly anti-Korean”, noting that the work was turned down by several Japanese publishers for having unverifiable information before it was picked up by Shinyusha. Though Onishi identifies the Sankei as “conservative”, the full context is not given; Sankei Shimbun is known as broadly pro-Western and anti-Chinese. The portrayal of the Japanese media as being accepting of this book is akin to painting all American media organizations as staunchly anti-rap music based solely on The O’Reilly Factor. As a media organization with a reputation of its own to uphold, I would expect that the New York Times put more effort into providing context, especially with regard to sources that will be unfamiliar to an American audience. As it reads now, this article does little more than to paint the entire country of Japan as a nation of racists and irresponsibly incite more uninformed, ignorant animosity between different groups.

As an American of Chinese descent, I’ll be the first to say that many aspects of this story are worth being worried about. Movements such as the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform are eerily similar to
Holocaust refusals seen in the U.S. If the popular sales of this book
actually do reflect a growing xenophobia rather than a casual interest in a controversial title, this definitely would be something worth getting riled up over. Unfortunately, this information cannot be gleaned from the New York Times’ article, which is set on sensationalizing a foreign country’s editorial process rather than providing reasonable, reliable facts on the actual subject.

I was the esteemed Ronald Weasley for Halloween this year.

My friends all thought that was a bit drastic that I went ahead and made the carpet match the drapes, but I got the last laugh after all.