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August 21, 2007

Mythopoeia

No story exists as an island these days. Books beget movies and vice versa. Sequels, prequels, and tangentially-related storylines are published and consumed. Graphic novels, anime, television series, and videogames flesh out the rest of the universe.

This is all market-driven, which is why it isn't new. But the web and the low barriers to user-created content have sent a small exploded moon's worth of fictional ephemera* into orbit around popular stories. Alternate realities, fan fiction, 3D worlds, even amateur video series fill in any remaining gaps. Narrative today abhors a vacuum.

This is exciting, though it has been mostly theoretical for me. I mean, I know it is out there, but I rarely encounter it. As with so many things, it takes the perspective of a child to really make clear how powerful an idea can be. My six-year-old son is a huge Star Wars junky. He can't get enough. He's seen all six movies, both Clone Wars animated series, has dozens of books, has thoroughly mastered LEGO Star Wars I and II, and consumes any other info he comes across. Wookieepedia has changed his life.

Here's the thing. My son knows that Star Wars isn't real. He really does. But he also believes that it is a complete fictional universe. The movies? Oh, well, they're good, but in his opinion they are just slivers of the stories in this galaxy (from A Long Time Ago) that someone happened to film. The movies don't have any real precedence over detailed articles in Wookieepedia about, say, the massacre at The Battle of Rodia, the fallible Jedi Set Harth, or the renowned Sullustan journalist Den Dhur. No, I hadn't heard of any of these either.

Clearly there are limits to this sense of completeness. My son will ask a question about a planetoid or something that none of the games, videos, or wikis can answer. But in his mind it isn't that the fact or storyline doesn't exist. It is that it has not been found yet. And isn't this how we think in the age of The Google? That wanting to know something is more a matter of locating it than wondering whether it exists to be known?

The Star Wars universe is Borges' Library of Babel and my son is lost in the stacks. Happily so.

Of course, you'll argue, the best fiction deliberately leaves things out, opens a space for the imagination. One could no more know everything about a given fictional world than one could know everything about real life.

Well, I think of Lost. The world of that island is meticulously crafted; half of every show is backstory. But obviously there are massive gaps in the storyline. This annoys lots of viewers, but it is also what keeps people coming back and, of course, is precisely what enables the universe to expand, whether by ABC scriptwriters (alternate reality game, “official” in-world websites) or by fans (an archive of over 3500 fan-created videos, a dedicated wiki ).

Soon I'm sure my son will arrive at where the sidewalk ends. Some Star Wars story path he's on will hit a dead end. He'll confront an incomplete world and will be required to suspend a new kind of disbelief. But if he's anything like me this will also be the moment when he realizes that creating is even more fun than finding.

[*] Odin Soli has called these overlapping stories “fictional ecospheres.” I like that.

Tags: lost, borges, narrative, starwars, storytelling

Posted at 1:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Words

August 17, 2007

Do you kill people for hire?

If so, you might like this dish.

Spaghetti All'assassino (Spaghetti of the Assassins) is possibly the best pasta dish I have ever eaten. On our last night in Matera, we had dinner with friends and they introduced me to this devilish concoction.

Like many traditional Lucanian dishes it is simple with a twist. In this case the twist is heat -- of all kinds. Basically you undercook a bunch of spaghetti then throw it into scalding hot oil olive. (Stand back, it pops.) This chars the outer “nest” of pasta and cooks the inner pasta to completion. As this is happening you dump in cooked tomatoes and peperoncino in powder. That's it. A fiery combo of crunchy on the outside and al dente in the middle.

I cooked the dish last night and screwed up approximately half of it. The tomatoes burned and I got the outer shell a bit too hard. But this is how we learn.

Here's the recipe. It serves four.

400 grams of spaghetti
300g fresh baby tomatoes
virgin olive oil for frying (at least a cup)
peperoncino in powder to taste

1. Cut the baby tomatoes in half and fry in very hot oil for about 6/7 minutes, they should get a bit mushy but not brown, add salt. You need to do this in a large deep frying pan.
2. Cook the spaghetti until really 'al dente' - if it says 8 minutes on the pack, take them out at 5.
3. Drain the pasta really well and pour into the tomatoes and boiling oil (if the oil is hot enough it will make a big noise). Add peperoncino and stir a little to get oil around all the spaghetti.
4. Leave for about 2/3 minutes before stirring/moving around/turning the burned parts around and then leave again for another 2/3 minutes. If you stir continuously the crusty brown bits don't get formed.
5. DON'T add parmesan.

Thanks for Mikaela Bandini for introducing me to the dish and for the recipe.

Tags: basilicata, pasta, italy, recipe

Posted at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Basilicata | Topic: Food

August 14, 2007

Duplicate

Second Life has its first art museum that is a complete copy of a major real-world institution. The Dresden State Museum in Germany recently opened a sim that is pretty much the spitting image of its Old Masters Picture Gallery. (Teleport directly.) They claim that all 750 pieces in the collection are available.

It is impressive, for sure, and it definitely feels like a museum. Ceiling-to-floor wall-to-wall canvasses in darkish rooms with a single two-sided wooden bench in the middle. Wired claims that they've even modeled the museum's trash bins. (What's missing are the crowds, and that's a good thing.)

But I have to wonder. Is this an added value to the museum experience? There are plenty of museums in Second Life (here's a fave) and most all partake of an architecture that is suited to movement in SL (easy vertical movement, sparse use of walls, etc). It seems to me that older museums are hard enough to navigate in real life without imposing such constraints on virtual movement. How many Old Masters-type museums can you think of that don't make you scale dozens of stairwells? This is discouraging in SL.

The larger point though is about choosing a medium. The web is actually very good at presenting images catalog-style like you'd encounter in a museum gallery. No crowds, good-to-great information, search, high-res zoom -- all web based. It seems to me that a 3D museum space needs to afford more than just image viewing. I won't say much more except to note that I suspect that some of the functionality you'd hope for in a virtual world-based museum is lacking in the Dresden gallery because of technical limitations of Second Life.

Still, a good project and one to keep an eye on. The museum outsourced this build to Anshe Chung and Co. so you know they are serious about it.

Of course, I'm not unconcerned with these matters. Bookmark this post to tell me how hypocritical I am in a year.

Tags: dresden, museum, oldmasters, art, secondlife

Posted at 2:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Virtual Worlds

August 10, 2007

Next to godliness

Managing hard drive space (yes, settle in folks, this post is pure fun) is a constant problem in my home. Recent smiting from Olympus notwithstanding, keeping up with the onslaught of music, video, photos and work files is a challenge.

Recently I've come across a few apps worth mentioning for keeping tabs on just what is bloating my Macs.

I have a Smart Folder set up that only lists files over 100MB. This is useful for pruning big-ass files, the easy marks. But, other than mail archives and video rips this is a small folder indeed.

Enter Grand Perspective.

This (free) app seems like eye candy, but it is a lot more than that. It gives you a visual tapestry of your file system (though it sorta looks like a map of drive clusters, which it is not). Mousing over the map shows you collections of files, grouped by color and outlined together. This is super-useful as it highlights groupings that may be huge even if the individual sizes of the files may be small. For instance, Grand Perspective helped me move nearly 10GB of support files for LiveType onto an external drive. I would never have known all that crap was in there.

A nice complement to Grand Perspective is WhatSize, a more traditional listing of every file on your machine by size. Also free. WhatSize retains folder organization so you can see at a glance what should get the heave-ho.

Lastly, Hazel (US$21.95), an app that I have had in trial mode on my machine for a while but which, like Quicksilver, I needed a kick in the pants to get really using. Hazel is a bit like Smart Folders except that you can set up rules for nearly any kind of file. It can do just about anything to a file, especially in conjunction with Automator actions. For example, Hazel constantly monitors my drive for duplicate files, segregrates PC-only attachments I receive (for purgation in the holy fires of iWork) and automatically prompts me to remove support files when I nuke an app.

While I'm at it I might as well list a few apps that I am very fond of lately. All Mac, unless otherwise noted.

DropCopy - Opens a little wormhole on your desktop for dragging files to other machines. Unlike a folder alias it can have multiple destinations.

iPhone Remote - Access your Mac from your iPhone. You can use it as an iTunes Remote, PervCam remote viewer for the iSight, file browser, or to stream files to.

Coda - Superb single-window web coding app. Dreamweaver cowers in the corner.

Mouseposé - Nifty app that turns your pointer into a spotlight for highlighting things during presentations. Also has a keystroke mode where your typing is highlighted in big letters onscreen.

Flickr Export for iPhoto - If you manage photos in iPhoto and post some to Flickr this is indispensable. You can do everything to the photo pre-upload but geolocate it. Really solid. There's also an Aperture version.

NetNewsWire - The latest version of this newsreader adds a few great touches like iTunes-style “cover art” for the site your feed is being pulled from and great handling of embedded media and microformats. Also synchs with online version, PC app NewsGator, and an iPhone web app!

Earth Addresser - Yanks all the addresses from OSX Address Book and plots them as a layer on Google Earth. Interesting at-a-glance view of the folks you know.

HandBrake - The latest version of this DVD rip ... er, backup program has defaults for AppleTV and the iPod/iPhone. Handy. There is a PC version but it rather blows.

iStat Pro - Puts the dashboard in Dashboard. Highly configurable system status widget.

Dashalytics - If you use Google Analytics to track website traffic, this is a great window into the data. Also a Dashboard widget.

Weather Underground Dashboard Widget - Like the site it is a visual fiasco, but it displays great info. Way better than the default weather widget.

And lastly, apps that I desperately want to like, but just don't yet. (There's hope. I went through this with Quicksilver and Hazel.)

Tinderbox - Eastgate's hypertextual note-taking system-cum-personal CMS. Their Storyspace changed my life. I guess I'm expecting this to do so as well. Perhaps I should set my expectations lower for a piece of software.

Joost - Remind me why I want to watch full-screen TV on my laptop?

iPhoto '08 - Permit me to step out of the RDF for a moment, but isn't an Event just a smart folder by date?

Slife - A very cool idea for tracking and visualizing app usage over time, but it is a serious resource hog and supports apps inconsistently.

Now, go be productive.

Tags: apps, filemanagement

Posted at 4:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Housekeeping | Topic: I Like

August 9, 2007

Thunderbolts and thievery

Dear Internet,

Don't take this the wrong way, but lately it seems that you think all I do is travel the world and party (as-a-verb) with friends. This is not altogether true. You see, this blog is really a carefully pruned excerpt of a mostly mundane and often exasperating life (in-progress). People sometimes read this blog and say “I want your life.” Well, Internet, I'm here to tell you that all is not rosy at 1¢ Stage.

Recently we've had some intense summer storms here in Chicago. We lost power during a lightning strike. This was initially charming in the way that the buzz from one beer is fun where the stupor from eight really is not. Several hours later, well into our gridless stupor, the lights came back on and I realized that my two networked media drives were no longer accessible.

This is, perhaps, the worst technological calamity which could befall my home. For this is what happens when you have digitized all your CDs and DVDs and wired up the whole place to access it from the network. And this is what happens when you were midway through a really well-intentioned, disciplined backup strategy but couldn't afford that second terabyte of space.

So now we are a home of disconnected media islands. The kids' Apple TV only has on it what was synched there before the electrical storm. The only music in the house is what I had on my iPod at the time. My hope is that only the controllers are fried and that I can get the media off the drives. Damn you, Zeus. We hurl our fists at you from the Archipelago of Re-Runs and Tiresome Playlists.

Oh, but it gets better. You may have read about how wonderful the iPhone was overseas as a conversation-starter. Well, here's a conversation for you. I had assumed that international data roaming rates were only going to be as bad as the highway robbery of international voice roaming. In fact, it is grand larceny. While AT&T offers an international unlimited data package for the Blackberry, the iPhone gets a lovely two-cents-per-kilobyte surcharge. That may not seem like much, but the iPhone was made to view the regular web, and regular maps, and suck down regular bytes -- not watered-down WAP-py data. 2.7MB, for instance, comes out to $54. That's a hefty 10 minutes of web browsing. So what did the entire week of intermittent data access run me? Over $800.

When I called to complain I had to slog through the Three Stages of Customer Service: Encounter with the Script-Reader, Argument with the Pablum-Spewer, and Anger Management Therapy with The Middle Manager. Well. They certainly weren't going to waive the fee. Heavens no. Just because I didn't know it was two cents per KB didn't mean I could get out of paying for such lunacy. If only I had drilled several dozen pages into the byzantine innards of the miscegenation that is the merged Cingular-AT&T website to learn that international data roaming is their dirty little secret. Seriously, it took two separate agents over 15 minutes to figure out what the rate was. And they work there.

Turns out there is a plan for international data. $25 gets you 20MB. Then it is a half-cent per KB after that. That will still bankrupt you if you are trying to do much more than, say, nothing -- just more slowly. I switched to this plan and they “re-rated” my past charges to it. Ultimately I “saved” over $700. Oh, and I am now paying $25 more per month.

I swear, the irony of a user-focused company like Apple working so closely with a it-ain't-my-problem company like AT&T gets more and more bitter every time I pause to think about it.

So, Internet, that's what's been going on. My life isn't all warm, mixed nuts on trans-Atlantic airliners, you see.

Yours Sincerely,
John

PS - I also have a toothache at the moment.
PPS - Are you really just a series of tubes?

Tags: at&t, iphone, lightning, failure

Posted at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Notes

August 1, 2007

Back alley transaction

This Saturday we're participating in a multi-family garage sale here in Roscoe Village. Hopefully beery Retro on Roscoe festival-goers will stumble by and lighten their wallets. Update: An address might help. Stop by 3537 N. Leavitt between 8am and 2pm, Saturday, August 4.

Garage sales in the city have always seemed odd to me, given that garages are in the rear on the alley. But I do like them, having grown up with a grandmother pathologically addicted to scouring them. But then, who doesn't enjoy sifting through their neighbors' detritus? Socially-acceptable dumpster-diving.

In advance of the sale I figured I'd offer up some of the geekier goods we hope to offload. Consider it an early-bird special. Let me know if you want more detail or photos or if you want to make an offer.

SOLD! Harmon Kardon HK3270 Receiver
Basic stereo receiver. 65w/channel, A/B speaker switching, five stereo inputs. Makes a great second-zone or audio-only amp.
$45

SOLD! Sony VHS-C Camcorder
Includes extra battery, recharger, carrying case, and VHS adapter.
$35

SOLD! Audiotron [Note: A friend of mine has two units he's willing to sell for the same price each, if you are interested.]
Network audio player. Scours network for playable audio files and offers a variety of ways to access them for playback through your stereo system. Mint condition. No moving parts. This is a choice piece of hardware. More info here.
$45

Roku Photobridge (formerly HD-1000)
Network media player, akin to Audiotron but for photos and video (including HD). Includes image packs. Also mint condition. More info here.
$45

SOLD! Canon Powershot G1
3.3 megapixel camera. Includes 1GB microdrive. You may have this camera, but you may not have the love in my heart I have for it. More info here.
$65

Sony Wireless Stereo Headphones
Infrared-based, 40' range. For use with stereo or television at home.
$15

Gateway VX1110 20“ CRT Display
1600 × 1200 max. resolution. It ain't flat, but that's still a lot of screen real estate.
$75

Nokia 447Xi Plus 17” CRT Display
1280 × 1024 max. resolution. Best CRT I ever owned.
$50

Pronto TS1000 Universal Remote
Screen-based, highly-configurable universal remote. Download templates for your A/V components from the web. More here.
$20

Tags: chicago, garagesale, yardsale

Posted at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Notes