Digibruce

Guitar Hero World Tour Drum Problems

2008-10-29T22:45:00.000-07:00

After I wrote my Getting Started - Drums review section, I learned that many people are having trouble with activation and/or sensitivity on their drums.

This is no surprise after the debacle of the initial Rock Band drum and guitar roll-outs. Clearly, early adopters of these games are at serious risk of receiving bad controllers.

I stand by my general feeling about the drum controller. It seems well-designed and solid. Mine appears to be functioning perfectly, but I haven't tried modes where velocity sensitivity is important. I'll make another post once I have had a chance to evaluate the durability of GHWT drums long-term.

Controller production issues aside, GHWT definitely got the drum experience right, and it's going to be much more popular than the Rock Band series among people who are serious about drumming. I will be interested to hear other people's opinions of the 3+2+1 GHWT layout vs. Rock Bands 4+1 layout. I can imagine that novice, casual drummers might prefer the simpler RB layout.

Guitar Hero World Tour Review Part 3: Getting Started - Vocals

2008-10-29T21:52:00.000-07:00

I can't prove it with research, but my general impression is that singing as a form of spontaneous cultural expression has been on the decline since the early 20th Century. Records and radio have doomed family sing-alongs, and by extension work songs and praise songs, to relatively small niches of the population. Most people get no vocals training or practice, and when we do sing, our crooning is held up against the high standards of professional studio recordings so polished that many pop singers can't replicate their own music live in concert.

So it's nice to see rhythm games give the music back to the masses by providing a sanctioned framework for being able to sing, developing singing talent, and evaluating your singing. Karaoke has been around for a long time, of course, but Rock Band brought singing to a whole new demographic.

Getting started on vocals is relatively simple, as long as you have a free USB plug on your console, and can stand close enough to it to reach it with the cord. I skipped the tutorial, picked Hard difficulty, and jumped straight into the rudimentary storytelling interface, just like the drum career mode. This time, however, I noticed that you do, in fact, play the first gig of your career in what appears to the be the basement of a frat house, so there is some sort of venue progression as you pay your dues.

In Original Rock Band (ORB), I found that the only way I could 5* hard Hard and most Expert songs was to hum quietly and continuously throughout the song. This seems pretty stupid, until you learn that humming different vowels is how opera singers warm up. It's a good way to develop your head voice and other core aspects of your vocal production. Humming quietly, on the other hand, is incredibly boring, and usually doesn't go down well in band play. That's what Medium is for - it's "Fun Mode" for vocals.

GHWT seems to have replicated the vocals experience from ORB, with a few twists.

There are now two types of sections that give you points or star power for singing whatever you want, and star power is activated by "clapping" rather than singing during a short activation section. I found "clapping" the mic to be extremely unreliable, so I ended up with my mic in my left hand and the Xbox controller in my right, ready to take advantage of the frequent opportunities to activate.

The most interesting difference for me was the way your pitch indicator leaves a long ghost trail that helps you understand how your pitch jumps around as you transition between different notes.

It's not immediately clear whether spoken-word sections are scored differently in GHWT, but my stellar performance on the obligatory Beastie Boys track suggests it's pretty lenient compared to ORB.

There were no tambourine/cowbell sections, which is a bit of a relief, but on the other hand makes those long guitar solos a serious yawn-fest. One of my first songs had an instrumental section so long the controller lost its wireless connection twice before I got to sing again. This is the drawback of singing in rock music-oriented games, at least when you're playing solo. When rocking out with friends of a certain type, you can always leap about and do whatever lead singers do when the axe-men are thrashing.

The GHWT star system seems more liberal than Rock Band's. The combination of the big "You Rock" fanfare, the gushing flow of money, the achievements for trivial performances, and the somewhat liberal star grading made even my most abysmal singing performances seem more like a good night for Pavarotti in his prime. The percentage of notes hit, however, told the true tale.

GHWT's score details, with notes hit by phrase and other metrics, promise to be extremely useful for the aspiring singer. I'm hoping the training mode, which I'll cover in a later part of my review, will allow the singer to start anywhere in the song.

After I sang my two sets, I decided to play around with the non-performance aspects of the game a bit. I was unable to find a song list that showed my score on all songs, the new songs that were available, etc. The "seedy bar help wanted board" interface does give you a number of song options, including build-your-own gig, but there is no central, dedicated song list like in Rock Band - at least not in career mode. I'm sure that once I get around to reading the manual or running through the tutorials, or playing with more savvy gamer friends, it will turn out I've missed something obvious. However, for solo mode, the default behavior of the GHWT interface is very different from Rock Band.

Buying clothes and dressing up is similar to ORB, but lamer (if that's possible). GHWT has awesome face configurability, and good body configurability, but it doesn't support color options for hair or clothes, so you end up with even fewer, even lamer clothing options than those in ORB.

Once again, the non-performance gameplay and metagame seems to be an afterthought for this new generation of rhythm games. However, I'm not up on all the details and latest news, so I'll withold judgment until I can research this more.

Guitar Hero World Tour Review Part 3: Getting Started - Drums

2008-10-26T16:12:00.000-07:00

Physical Set-up

I decided to give the GHWT set-up process the old "grilling the steak" test, wherein I try to get everything ready to play the game while trying not to burn a steak on my back deck grill.

I'm pleased to report that GHWT wins a grilling the steak set-up rating of "only slightly burned on one side" at moderate difficulty level (thick steak, medium rare).

Being a drum guy (not to be confused with a "drummer"), I decided to start with the Drum Quick-start guide. Following the guide, the drums snapped together easily. The frame is beefy and simple, with more positive connections than the original Rock Band (ORB) drums. The locking tabs, however, feel very flimsy, and I wouldn't be surprised if they broke after extended use. Like ORB drums, the stand is height-adjustable, but not width-adjustable. This means that you have to accommodate the stand with your feet, rather than the other way round. On the upside, GHWT drums don't have the ORB drums' sprawling plastic base, so you can choose to put your pedaling foot between the two base rods, or to the side (most people will probably choose to the side). On the downside, the unit feels very unstable on a carpet - it's top heavy, and the base rods aren't nearly long enough to prevent the unit from wobbling front-to-back. The cymbals pop on a couple of posts, and are secured with a couple of plastic nuts. They pop up to a fixed height, fairly close to the drum pads. As usual, the maximum height of the unit isn't near tall enough for me (I'm 6'-3", with long legs).

The Drum Quick Start Guide contains "tell it to me like I'm a 3 year old", step-by-step instructions for establishing the wireless connection to your Xbox 360. Since I'm a total console newb, I am often confronted with bemused condescension from my gaming "friends" as I struggle to grapple with basic operations, so I appreciated the "so easy I only screwed up once" hand-holding from the guide.

Game Intro

GHWT's game intro tells a story of a band of rockers being summoned by a nefarious-looking dude with a skull ring to rescue a legion of mesmerized fans from the clutches of a jazz saxaphonist ... with Rock! It's done in a cartoon style, and it's mildly entertaining, but I couldn't help but be reminded of the "Real America" rhetoric that's been going round lately. At the very least, it diminishes my hopes of an explosion of music-themed games in different genres. Jazz Master is apparently out, and I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for Country Cowboy. I suppose, given the natural affinity between Metal and Opera, Heldenspiel Wagner might be in the offing, but come on - can't we all just get along?

After the intro, the game suggests I "press any key to play", which is reassuringly liberal of it.

Press any key, and the cartoon storytelling theme from the intro continues. I embarked on a solo drum career with my "Rock Angel" (there's an achievement for this) Styx, a demonic, don't-mess-with me punk suitable for mixing it up in the masculine world of drumming. The character editor in GHWT allows for complete face customization. It should be possible to make a reasonable facsimile of your favorite rocker in-game.

On consoles, anything having to do with text is a nightmare, but GHWT drops the ball massively with small, cute, hand written-looking fonts that are completely unreadable on my standard def TV. Instead of using Xbox's default onscreen keyboard, they opt for the ancient arcade game of scrolling through an endless list of letters. I never found the capital letters again after I accidentally deleted the first "S", but I think my drummer is named Styx - maybe.

Unlike ORB, GHWT tries to give a sense of verisimilitude to the solo career. Gigs are found by perusing "drummer wanted" ads posted on walls in some presumably seeded club-type setting. However, unlike RB band tour mode, there is no sense of progression in the settings. You start out playing in massive arenas with sophisticated special effects. At least the songs seemed to be difficulty-scaled, but if there's a convenient song list sorted by difficulty, it certainly wasn't made obvious. I decided to leave those details to a later section of the review.

So, what about the actual drumming?

Playing the drums is very different than in RB. Just like in real life, most of the notes are Red (left drum) and Yellow (left cymbal), which represent snare and hi-hat on a real drum kit. The next most common note is Orange (right cymbal), which usually represents the crash, but is sometimes coopted to be the ride. I found this very easy to get used to, until a Blue (center drum) or Green (right drum) note popped up, at which point I would flail wildly before recovering my groove for the next big run of snare/hi-hat. My guess is that, once people get used to the new setup, they will appreciate it more than RB drums, because the trigger you are hitting nearly always matches the instrument you are hearing. It Just Makes Sense.

For Star Power activation, GHWT uses a simultaneous hit on Yellow and Orange. This corresponds roughly to hitting hi-hat or ride and crash on a real drum kit. Most of the time, it's hard to disengage both hands to make these hits, so Star Power activation is limited to certain points where the drums pause or you are already hitting the crash. I didn't really get the feel for this after six songs, but it seems to yield a gameplay experience similar to RB's - it's just not as obvious how to collect and activate Star Power as it is with RB's Overdrive and drum solos.

The base pedal in GHWT is an interesting experience. It's been a while since my ORB pedal broke the second time, so I've been using a real base pedal when playing RB. Moving to Red Octane's new flexi-pedal, and GHWT's very subtle, "did I hit that base note or what?" interface, was a bit frustrating. The pedal is very sensitive, and seems to be accurate and easy to activate, but who knows? I'm looking forward to moving back to a pedal with more feedback.

The game starts you out with two-song sets of relatively easy songs. If you do well, it makes you play an encore. My encores were "Beat It" and "No Sleep to Brooklyn", both of which seemed more difficult than the songs they followed. However, the first song in the second set was almost entirely a continuous drum roll on Red, so it's hard to be sure they are upping the difficulty for encores. I started on Hard difficulty, and scored over 95% on every song despite my problems activating Star Power and hitting Blue and Green, so I'm guessing these are the easiest drum songs.

I didn't notice any drum set wobbling while I was playing, and the pads, played with the drum sticks included with the bundle, were very accurate and responsive during fast playing. Aside from the pedal, I never thought a missed note was anything but my fault. I predict these drums will hold up under sustained Expert play, with the possible exception of the pedal.

GHWT drums clearly represent a quantum leap over the drums in any other rhythm game. They are much higher quality than ORB drums (I haven't used RB2 drums), and they are much, much more realistic. Moreover, this realism can't be fully duplicated in RB, since that game only supports 4 triggers + base trigger. Even if you don't care about how a real rock drum set is set up and used, you will find yourself more connected with the music when you are hitting a cymbal and hearing a cymbal, or hitting a drum pad and hearing a snare or a tom. The only fundamental aspect of the conventional rock drum experience that's missing from GHWT is the hi-hat pedal, which is used on most songs to vary the sound of the hi-hat cymbal (the Yellow pad), creating a tsch-tk pattern. To make sure you develop all your limbs, I recommend right-handed drummers play left-footed half the time, and, once you have gotten well into Hard difficulty, play left-handed regularly. Same goes for the lefties, in reverse! This will beef up your off-hand and help with limb separation.

The biggest problem I have with these excellent "toy" drums is that they don't fit me. I'm a tall, gangly adult guy, and the makers of these games are more focused on children. To be able to play really hard songs on my ORB drum set, I had to jury-rig a mount from my keyboard stand, to raise the drums and tip them toward me. This may be overly picky on my part, but the inflexibility of the new drum controller may be a problem for others as well. In a later part of this review, barring some horrible disaster with the MIDI interface, I will be comparing the GHWT drums with my Roland V-drum set, which has mesh head drums and is set up perfectly for me. I'll also be trying out my Omega pedal, which is a real base drum pedal set up as a Rock Band trigger. And I'll try using the GHWT drums with RB, which promises to be a real flail.

Guitar Hero World Tour Review Will Be Continued

2008-10-26T12:55:00.000-07:00

Stay tuned for the rest of my review:

Part 3: Getting Started
Part 4: The Game and The Music
Part 5: Rock Band Compatibility
Part 6: MIDI Drums Compatibility
Part 7: The Music Studio
Part 8: Long-term Impressions

Guitar Hero World Tour Review Part 2: Unboxing

2008-10-26T12:54:00.000-07:00

Industrial design freaks have to love this new generation of "toys". The box exterior is rife with typical, cheesy but informative graphics - and there's a LOT of space for details about the game, including descriptions of every instrument and component and a partial track list. Heart-stoppingly, the MIDI in feature is apparently considered too far from the mainstream to mention on the box.

Inside, however, the package design really shines, with all the parts cradled by custom cardboard inserts, including a guitar-shaped cut-out in the slim guitar sub-box. The instruments impress as soon as you lift them from the box. They clearly represent the next generation of realism, quality and sophistication.

Guitar

I don't play much guitar in Rock Band, so I will leave the judgment of the new wireless guitar controller to the expert thrashers, but it seems solid and sophisticated, and slightly larger than existing controllers. The back is contoured and has two separate lock-out switches, the purpose of which I have not yet determined. The new slider control is intriguing, especially given how it is apparently used to control the music studio. The buttons and switches seem somewhat loose and clicky, however, so it will be interesting to see how this controller stacks up against the classic old Guitar Hero axes that seem to be the instrument of choice for digital Steve Vais.

Drums

Once you get the guitar out, you're confronted with the 800 pound gorilla of the music game experience, the drum sub-box. After some lifting and wiggling, it lifts out of the main box, and a few swipes later, the cymbals are exposed, wedged on top of an egg-carton-like cardboard grid that protects the main drum console.

The cymbals are impressive, with an evocative wedge-shaped design and a solid feel. My first impression, lifting them out, was that they would provide a superior playing experience to the last-gen rubber Roland triggers I am using as cymbals on my "real" drum set. We'll see how they really play in a later part of the interview.

Based on feel alone, the main drum console is a revelation. Red Octane seems to have taken the less-than-stellar history of the original Rock Band drums to heart and produced a game controller that is an order of magnitude more solid and well-designed. The drum pads are built into a monolithic, heavy plastic base, not cantilevered precariously like the original Rock Band drums. The controller is wireless, and the Xbox controls are given more room to breath on a large console between the cymbal mounts. The pads themselves are larger, with rubber surfaces and a rock-solid feel that seems to promise more reliable hours of play on Expert songs. The stand components feel heavy and solid, more like they were designed to support camera equipment than a plastic toy. The pedal in a big question mark. It has a solid strike surface that seems like it will be very loud when playing, and it's very flexible. That's right, you can easily bend the pedal with your fingers! I can't imagine that Red Octane, having created a clearly superior drum console, totally punted on the pedal, so I'm guessing - or hoping - that the flexible design is their solution to building an affordable pedal that won't crack just behind the strike point and at the pivot point (like my original Rock Band pedal did).

Finally, to my great relief, there's a MIDI in jack on the back of the unit!

Overall, I my initial impression is extremely positive. I have not seen or played the new Rock Band 2 drums, so it will be interesting to compare these controllers, but the GHWT drums clearly win on realism, with 3 pads + 2 cymbals vs. Rock Bands 4 pads. GHWT drums are supposed to be RB-compatible, so it will be interesting to see how the different layout and extra pad crosses over.

Microphone

The mic, tucked away in a corner of the drum sub-box is a standard wired USB mic, so nothing new there. We'll see how the singing implementation stacks up to Rock Band 2 in a later part of this review.

Guitar Hero World Tour Review Part 1: Purchase

2008-10-26T12:53:00.000-07:00

For those gamers who have any interest in participating in music (or pretending to), the new generation of full band experience rhythm games have to be some of the most satisfying game purchases available. Online downloads are wonderful for their convenience and ability to deliver cheap indie games that would never see the light of day at Gamestop, but those of us old enough to remember when games came in fancy boxes with tome-like manuals and handcrafted maps yearn for something more tangible. Now we can rejoice, for what computer game is more tangible than a Rock Band or Guitar Hero World Tour full-band bundle, which comes in a box big enough and heavy enough to throw your back out if you've gotten a little too sedentary and don't bend your knees lifting it.

As a Rock Band devotee, I've been following Guitar Hero World Tour for a while now, and I've been intrigued by their claims they wold raise the stakes with a full in-game music studio and more realistic and innovative controllers. What sealed the deal for me, however, was the announcement that the GHWT drums had MIDI in, which would allow me to use my Rolland V-drums to play the game. Roll-your-own XBox 360 MIDI adaptors for Rock Band cost about $100 plus several hours of hacking and soldering to make, so the $200+ after tax GHWT bundle is a bargain when you consider it delivers a (hopefully) a rock-solid commercial MIDI interface "for free".

Unfortunately, John "Music Game Oracle" Ireton didn't give me the heads up on the MIDI interface until about three weeks ago, at which point Gamestop preorders throughout the region were closed. I decided to take my chances tracking down a full-band Xbox 360 bundle on release day at one of the big box stores that are the last refuge of behind-the-curve gamers. This lead to some minor drama, as I discovered that the GHWT distributors had decided on a brilliant "make sure everyone gets some bundles by only shipping units for 3 of the 4 consoles to each big box retailer" strategy. So, Walmart had everything BUT the Xbox 360 when I showed up at midnight, after being told over the phone that "Xbox" bundles were available. Sears, a laggard in game ordering, only had the game disk for release day. Fortunately, Target had received the bundle for every console but the Wii, and when I called at 9am on Sunday, there were 3 Xbox 360 full-band bundles left. Five minutes later I was on the road, and I arrived in time to win my prize.

Undead Stygian Dolls

2007-09-13T10:46:00.000-07:00

I've started a new blog to chronicle my recent Diablo 2 re-addiction. It's got an experimental (for me) "war correspondent" narrative style, but other than that it probably won't be of interest to more than one of the two or three people who read this blog.

I for one welcome our Spider Overlords

2007-09-13T10:00:00.000-07:00

Gaia theorists unite, Mother Nature's revenge is nigh. Reminds me of the Will Baker novel Shadow Hunter.

KUOW's Weekday Manufactures Consent

2007-04-18T10:26:00.000-07:00

This morning, KUOW's Weekday talked to Benjamin Barber, author of Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, about consumerism. Listen to this show.

Barber repeatedly invoked "capitalism" as a market force developed to meet people's real needs that had changed or been corrupted from its puritan roots. It quickly became clear that Barber either a. does not understand what capitalism is, or b. is deliberately misleading people about capitalism. When I called into the show and said he was using the word "capitalism" incorrectly, the screener decided my opinion was not "about consumerism" and thus not appropriate for the show.

This is a classic example of what Noam Chomsky calls the "manufacturing of consent". By instinctively refusing, on grounds of relevance, to allow discussion of the basic forces that govern our lives, KUOW perpetuates the delusion that we can somehow defeat consumerism at the individual level without structural changes in the economy. Barber repeatedly evoked a beneficial Puritan Capitalist Ethic that never did exist, to which we could never return. He will get nowhere with this approach, and the blighted "consumers" he is trying to enlighten or help will get nowhere either. KUOW did its job to perpetuate this ineffectiveness by insisting callers focus on surface phenomena like whether there are enough chairs at Alderwood for mall rats to ogle each other.

To his credit, Barber did mention microlending as a force for providing people's real needs. This would have been a good opportunity to discuss how real capitalism could be leveraged to defeat consumerism. But of course, without talking about what capitalism really is, we can't really talk about how it can really help us.

Here's the email I sent in frustration after being put down by KUOW's screener:

Your guest, Benjamin Barber, repeatedly invokes a mythic "capitalism" as a system whereby markets provide goods that people need at reasonable prices for both the seller and buyer. This is not and never was Capitalism. Capitalism, as its root word suggests, is a system whereby capital (money) is traded on markets. It has never had anything to do with providing goods and services people need - except for money. For example, a friend of mine who was an early employee at Amazon now "makes her living" renting her Amazon stock to short sellers. This activity has nothing to do with people's needs in the sense meant by Mr. Barber.

Note that I am not saying Capitalism is bad. Capitalism is very beneficial in many ways, but it is needs-agnostic. Mr. Barber will never win his crusade against consumerism until he acknowledges that Capitalism never was about providing individual needs - it's about lubricating markets by allowing money to be traded. Capitalism will amplify the bad or good effect of any economic system by making it more efficient overall. There is no Puritan Capitalist Ethic to which we can return Our Democracy. It doesn't exist, and it never has.

Killer Dogs vs. Wussified Humans

2007-04-16T11:43:00.000-07:00

The infamous fatal mauling by two Presa Canarios in Pacific Heights, San Francisco is back in the news as the California Supreme Court decides whether it should set a new legal standard regarding culpability for "unintended" deaths. That's an interesting topic in itself, but today I'd like to point something out about dogs, their owners, and the general public.

Dogs are pack animals, and they behave as such. Dog owners need to understand this in order to control their animals. However, even conscientious dog owners have a tendency to disrespect people who don't "behave correctly" around their dogs, thus "triggering" undesirable behaviors - from uninhibited romping and sniffing to fatal maulings.

What dog owners need to understand is that humans have to obey laws that prevent them from acting aggressively toward dogs. Back in days of yore, if a large, aggressive dog got close enough that you felt threatened, you would kill that dog with your spear or whatever before it had a chance to do anything to you. There would never be any question of your right to do this. Nowadays, if you physically attacked a dog before it attacked and injured you, you would definitely be subject to criminal prosecution. In fact, if you killed or injured a small dog for biting you, in a situation where the dog would have no chance of seriously injuring you, you could also be jailed.

This is the fundamental problem: our entire culture is built around a covenant of responsibility and non-violence on the part of its members. We don't carry weapons any more, not just because we don't need to, but because we're not allowed to. When people bring large predators they can't physically control into this environment, you are guaranteed to have trouble - it's just a matter of time.

There are only two solutions to the problem of dangerous dogs, whether they are simply biting people - as the dogs who perpetrated the Pacific Heights mauling repeatedly did, without being taken from their owners or put down - or actually killing people:

1. Responsible Alpha: Make dog owners completely responsible for every behavior of their dog, as if they themselves were that dog.

2. Superpredator: Allow people to kill dogs they feel threatened by, and to carry weapons sufficient to do that job, regardless of the size of the human or the dog. Humans are supposed to be the apex superpredator - let us act like it.

It looks like the courts in CA may go a ways toward option #1. I can't imagine #2 ever happening, but if dog owners want to be absolved of the consequences of their dogs' behavior, they must support it.

The End of Hospitality is "Thank You"

2007-01-09T17:18:00.000-08:00

In the beginning there was the swapping of I and me:

"You and me should go down to the levee."
"This is a story that affects you and I both."

Then came the use of apostrophe's in every word and it's dog.

Now, a far more sinister linguistic change has blown up in the media and, sadly, in day-to-day use: the thank you thank you.

As in:

Sawyer the Anchor: "Thanks, Bob, for reminding us that planes are still the safest way to travel."

Bob the Pundit: "Thank YOU, Sawyer."

What ever happened to "You're welcome"?

The answer is simple: "You're welcome" was collateral damage in the drive-by shooting of the Old World culture of hospitality and community by post-industrial soccer-mom gangastas and their Nintengat-wielding broodlings. The last thing "You're welcome" saw as it bled out through a gaping chest wound was a "My son is on the honor roll" bumper sticker and a discarded can of New Coke celebrating the wholesome antics of an atomic family of soon-to-be-endangered polar bears. No one mourned "You're welcome". Hell, "You're welcome" ended up on ice in the county morgue, then dumped into a pauper's grave at St. Mark's. No one liked "You're welcome" much, cause it got baggage. "You're welcome" always stank of the kind of open-ended, no-questions-asked obligation that the boundary-setting, social darwinist, New World Order folks hate the most.

The thank you thank you makes it clear: I am only doing this because it benefits me. I'm polite, so I'm thanking you for giving me this opportunity. But if you want me to throw down my expertise on another topic of interest to your viewers, I'd better get something in return.

Even shop keepers, when thanked by their customers, now give the thank you thank you. And what's so wrong with that? Well, first off, it's stating the obvious. You just gave them your money, they better be thankful. "You're welcome", on the other hand, says "Come by any time, look around, shoot the breeze. You don't have to buy anything, and I'll give each of your kids a hard candy and sit them up on the rocking horse in the corner."

"You're welcome" is about belonging. The thank you thank you is about quid pro quo. The thank you thank you says I owe you something. "You're welcome" says I will give you everything. In the Old World, that kind of hospitality bound communities with an invisible web of mutual benefit. In the New World Order, that kind of hospitality is too big a risk: we have too much of our own, too much to lose, and too little danger of losing what we have because we don't have strong social ties to our neighbors.

Or so it seems. Up in the arctic, the pack ice is melting.

World Wide Web With Wings

2007-01-09T13:31:00.001-08:00

Well, the new Apple, Inc., finally did it. The iPhone: a convergence device as far above existing phones/pocket PCs/multimedia players as the angels on high are unto the BSE prions lurking in a cow patch in South Dakota. But the real beauty is beneath the surface, even beneath the revolutionary interface. The wonder of the iPhone is that it offers nothing new at all.

AAPL could have done it differently. They could have made the most killer, most easy to use, most elegant Zune ever. Instead, they did the unexpected: rather than craft from first principles a hideous chimera, they mutated their existing PC platform, giving it the wings to fly in the mobile sphere. It's as if we suddenly started growing buildings in the shape of the chambered nautilus using nanotechnology.

In the early nineties, Novell fell to the standards-based Internet. Now prepare for the second mass extinction, as proprietary data networks and the software that runs on them become nothing more than a brief, ugly memory. The Web, in all its glory, on a mobile device. WiMax ascendant (don't forget that Apple tried to jump start citywide wireless networking back in the day). WAP obsolete.

This revolution will be posted on GooTube.

Campaign Finance Reform

2007-01-05T15:37:00.000-08:00

Today on KUOW's Weekday, the topic was Clean Elections: The Impossible Dream? A very interesting discussion, including two guests involved in the "clean" elections movements in Arizona and Maine. The conclusion: public funding of at least some candidates and disclosures of funding sources have democratized politics at the local level, allowing low-income citizens to win elections and serve their country as elected officials; however, constitutionally protected, unlimited spending on issue campaigns diluted this effect substantially.

This Weekday show was serendipitous, since I was already thinking about another aspect of this issue brought up by my very first (and possibly next-to-last) commentator, walkitout, who wrote: "What do you think of the tizzy about political bloggers accepting money from candidates?" Well, walkitout, here's the deal:

First off, as my friend Taylor said when she heard about this blog: "welcome to 1999". I failed to participate in the blog revolution of 2001-2002, in part because I was too busy getting ... wait for it ... a Digital Media Communications master's degree! The curriculum never included blogs at the time - how pathetic is that? Meanwhile, the general issue of bloggers being paid is now so old the New York Times reported on it over a year ago. So we should expect the corporatization and monetization of the blogosphere to be well advanced, and learn to live with the general phenomenon.

On the political front, it's hard for me to pin down what the "tizzy" is. Political blogs have raised lots of money for campaigns, so it's inherently difficult to distinguish between paid-off patsies and campaign workers, who are generally considered the good guys (think MoveOn if you are a progressive). Fortunately, the distinction is unimportant in the grand scheme.

Let's say this is my own blog strategy:

1. Start blog.
2. ?
3. Profit.

Now, if ? involves taking money for a quid pro quo endorsement, I might balk. But that doesn't mean the content of this blog isn't corrupted by money. Even in its infancy, with a whopping 2 comments from people who are probably my best friends (one of whom sneaks in a shameless viral plug for my soon-to-be-cc-licensed novel), this blog has already been corrupted by the power and influence of big business! See, I work for a wholesale mortgage lender, and I depend on my salary to afford the computer to write this blog on. So you won't find me blogging under my own name about mortgage industry dirt. You also won't find posts about certain highly controversial topics. Self-censorship, secrecy, and other information control is alive and well on this blog, and our culture's money&power imbalance is at the root of it. This blog exists at the whim of numerous large, powerful, rich corporate entities.

Getting back to politics, it's clear that campaign finance reform can help, especially at the local level. But I still laugh at the campaign finance reformers, because they never, ever talk about the big picture. Talking meaningfully about money and power in this country is taboo. It's always about "special interests", an empty term if I ever heard one. That's why I consider economic justice a prerequisite for democracy. Campaign finance reformers are trying to fix the wrong problem. They are on a bucket brigade in the French Quarter while people are swimming for their lives in the Lower 9th Ward.

As for the paid-off bloggers - let them eke some enjoyment from their 30 pieces of silver before they are savaged by the burgeoning pack of Woodwards and Bernsteins.

Richard Dawkins' God Delusion

2007-01-04T23:56:00.000-08:00

OK, by now we know Richard Dawkins is Mr. Meme. He's also a take-no-prisoners, atheist badass. He's a man with a mission, but is he preaching to the choir or converting the wicked?

The choir's all like "aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh" whenever Dawkins opens his mouth, and with good reason. He's the Noam Chomsky of evolution and cosmology. Hell, the two men look, act, and sound alike. Dawkins and Chomsky seem to be that rare breed of principled old white guys gazing down from their ivory towers and observing the fruits of their labors are perhaps rotting on the vine. They're trying to do something about that, at great risk to their professional and personal reputation. Certain types of geeks instantly recognize this as cool, in much the same way Slim Pickins riding an H-bomb down the godless commie pinko throat of a Rooskie missile silo is cool, but cooler because they are about creating things, not destroying them. These geeks are raising a great chorus of appreciation.

Meanwhile, inside their churches the wicked are all like, "WTF?".

I mean, let me get this straight: you, Richard Dawkins, believe that God is a meme. He's a worm propagating on the networked system of culture. So, you believe God is real. But you are trying to convince the people for whom God is most palpably real that He is not real. Right.

Here's an analogy for Dawkins' approach:

You've got your Sony-BMG root kit. It's infected the PCs of a gajillion hapless Celine Dion fans - never the most stable group to begin with. Now you tell them the only way to fix their Windows installation is to join the EFF and fight against Digital Rights Management. Technically, you are correct - over the long haul, if you get everyone on the planet to believe in the unnaturalness and scientific invalidity of DRM, the God meme^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HSony-BMG root kit-like malware will be eliminated as a worldwide phenomenon. In the mean time, that root kit on Hapless Fan's PC is sending his personal data to Sony, slowing down his machine, hiding Russian mafia bot nets, etc. Celine Dion is yowling, her fans are crying and cursing Dawkins and the EFF in the name of all that is holy, for lo, they have been cast out upon the hard plains of despair.

Dawkins is trying to convince your basic Christian that God, as they believe He exists, violates natural law and can not - must not exist. In the mean time, Dawkins personally believes God does exist, just not in the way your basic Christian thinks. Your basic Christian observes God existing - Dawkins acknowledges this is a valid observation. Your basic Christian simply has the explanation for those observations wrong. What's really important to your basic Christian - and anyone else who considers themselves "spiritually inclined" - is that a god-thing exists and gives meaning and other stuff to their lives. Also that God clearly can kick ass and enable god-fearing people to kick ass. This person may not understand that the details, their untenable beliefs, aren't central to the power of the metaphor - but that's part of the meme's evolutionary self-defense mechanism. Richard Dawkins himself came up with this analysis, yet he fails to draw the natural strategic conclusion - that he must tackle religion head-on, Noam-style, Rebel Alliance-style, as a viral meme, not chip away at the meme's outer defenses.

Perhaps Dawkins should try to get people to switch to the Mac instead.

Apologies in Advance

2007-01-04T22:38:00.000-08:00

Let's face it: my capacity for extrapolating and synthesizing small data sets is matched only by my general ignorance. So if, let's say, in a purely hypothetical sense, let's say I one day posted a blog entry (or whatever you call it) criticizing Richard Dawkins for not realizing that God is a meme, when in fact Richard Dawkins coined the term and notably applied it to religion... Let's say I did a stupid thing like that. It would be inexcusable, but also, perhaps, understandable - even forgivable. A learning experience. An opportunity. A tribute to the educational power of blog authorship. The web is rife with context-free snippets. Reader beware. That is all.

Elections = Democracy?

2007-01-04T18:49:00.000-08:00

There's a lot of talk about democracy and elections these days. It's a good time to examine the relationship between the two.

Most governments in the world today profess to have elections, and the majority have free and fair elections based on some kind of constitution. Do "free and fair" elections guarantee democracy? No. Just ask non-Party members in China, the minority Sunnis in Iraq, non-Muslims in Iran, non-mafia in Russia, non-Saud in Saudi Arabia, etc.

Democratic institutions are what create democracy. A democracy with elections is a representative democracy. An example of democratic government without elections would be the anarchist Zapatistas in Mexico, who use consensus government at the local level.

We need to remember the core characteristics of democracy, so we don't end up without one:

- The rule of law. Usually this is enshrined in a constitution and other stable codes of law, and it's always enforced by an independent judiciary.

- Equal protection under law with basic rights guarantees. This limits majority rule.

- Loyal opposition. That means no civil war or secession.

- Professional bureaucracy. Democracies must have stable, effective, corruption-free government institutions that last longer than terms of office.

- Equal representation of individuals. This could be through elections of representatives, through town hall-style issue polls, through consensus government, etc.

- Economic justice. So powerful people and institutions don't effectively run the show despite the above.

A nation missing any of these things will not succeed as a democracy.

Bloggers vs. Journalists

2007-01-04T10:51:00.000-08:00

Why does every one of 1,300 air travel deaths worldwide in 2006 make front page news, while 40,000 driving deaths every year in the U.S. barely make a blip on traffic reports?

Take a journalism class and you'll find out: "news" is defined by journalists as unusual, timely information. Traffic deaths happen all the time, so they generally don't qualify as news. Planes almost never crash, so when one does, that's news. Really. This goes way beyond the well-known "if it bleeds, it leads." Professional journalists are trained not to report on things that routinely happen. That's simply not their job.

It stands to reason that professional journalists, and the organizations they work for, are uniquely unqualified to cover long-term trends, change fundamental misconceptions about the world, or foster the public awareness necessary to solve routine problems like the yearly death of 40,000 Americans in twisted piles of smoking metal.

OK, so I'm exaggerating a bit. Newspapers and other journalistic organizations do investigative reporting, analysis, etc., that does not qualify as "news". But the fundamental truth remains: if you are primarily interested in gathering information that will help you know about, understand and solve the real problems in your life, looking only to "news" sources is, by definition, going to send you down the wrong path.

The other major problem with journalists is "objectivity". Objectivity has always been a sham, since journalists have this built-in bias toward "news", and even the most dedicated, fair-minded journalist filters events according to this bias. However, in recent years, "objectivity" has devolved to mean choosing exactly two "sides" of a notional "debate" about the story and presenting those sides' biased, self-serving perspectives verbatim. Obviously, this does not yield objectivity in the sense most people undertand it. More often than not, journalists eschew even this faux objectivity by providing exactly one perspective. When was the last time you read a report on a recent arrest that quoted the accused?

Some journalists, however, go all out with an independent investigation of the facts. It's rare, but it definitely happens, and good journalists from better news organizations always strive to infuse their stories with independently verified information - in essence, the truth. This "fact checking" is often cited as a reason to trust the professionals. Unfortunately, with rare exceptions, journalists are professionals only in the journalism field. Their understanding of complex issues pales in comparison to that of experts in relevant fields. This is obvious whenever you read a news story about a field you are expert in - you will always find factual inaccuracies, ommissions, and misrepresentations in the story. A news story that reports accurately on a complex or technical subject does come around once in a while, but you have to assume that if you're unfamiliar with the topic of the story, the truth is being misrepresented in some substantial way.

For example, this article on CNN Money states: "Meanwhile, the two houses are expected to appreciate only about 3 percent a year - the couple can do better than that with Treasuries." This is an invalid apples-to-apples comparison between the return on a non-leveraged asset (t-bills) and a leveraged asset (real estate). It's misleading and false in a way that materially affects readers' decision-making, and yet it appears in an article from an authoritative, even specialist traditional news site. Moreover, I've complained about this statement and it hasn't been corrected. Obviously, a large organization like CNN is never going to take the time to correct an error in an obscure analysis article just because a mortgage industry professional calls them on it.

The bottom line: professional journalists add little value to people's day-to-day information-gathering and decision-making process. Historically, with their unique constitutional protections and access to viewers and readers, journalists have been the only source for a lot of important information. However, this role of providing access to information has largely been taken over by other information sources, such as the World Wide Web, which gives ordinary citizens direct access to most of the primary sources, experts, and geographically distributed observers of breaking news that journalists once monopolized.

Enter the blogger. Bloggers can have horrible bias and publish falsehoods with striking ease and impunity. Journalists also publish biased statements and get away with printing falsehoods. In fact, their job is to filter events in a way that, by definition, misrepresents reality and radically molds public perception. Despite this, journalists as a profession pretend to have a special value and authority as information sources, a pretense bloggers will never pull off. When you first encounter a blog, it's just a blog. You approach it warily. You observe it carefully from a distance. It's time we applied the same standards to the news.

Reader beware.