The Puget News

As kids in junior high some of my friends and I used to play this game where we’d lie around at night and tell outlandish collaborative stories. One person would start with a line or two, then the second would do the same, and on and on through everyone present. If you refused to play, you were chastised something unbelievable. We’d as long as we the game could hold our interest, soemtimes for an hour or more. We’d try to catch each other in impossible plot-twists or, being lewd teenagers, turn everything to some sort of sexual situation for the others to resolve.

It appears that a new site, storyquared has been created to approximate that same experience of creating stories together.

Anybody interested in trying it out and creating a collaborative story? Let me know, I think it’d be fun to play with.

William Burroughs coined the phrase “language is a virus.” The way he obsessed over its manipulations, you’d understand why he came to that conclusion. Via Lifehacker this morning, I discovered a website by the same name (languageisavirus.com), which is filled with helpful tools to help you cut writer’s block.

One of my all time favorite methods which Burroughs pioneered is the cut-up method, where you write blocks of text, take out the scissors, and piece them together. This site has a tool, called the “Cut-Up Machine” which allows you the modern day equivalent, the cut and paste version. Dumping the text from my first paragraph in there, this is what I get:

discovered Burroughs he manipulations, this which that way a is he manipulations, I you this manipulations, conclusion. he manipulations, coined which I with website coined languageisavirus.com, obsessed with the manipulations, discovered writer’s that you help he William discovered you you’d which “language its came called way “language

Fun!

There are many other tools at the site as well. Go check it out if you’re looking for a little something to spur your writing creativity.

Being ever-conscious of the literature I read in front of others (and who doesn’t enjoy - just a little - the smugness of sitting in a coffee-shop flaunting an 1,100 page book by Thomas Pynchon), it was with some trepidation that I opened a book entitled “Everything Bad Is Good For You.” Heaven forbid people think that I was reading a self-help book. Was I just trying to justify my need to drink hedonistically , eat rich foods, and sell meth to children on playgrounds? Alas, the book broaches none of these subjects, instead focusing on exploring some commonly held beliefs about the state of popular culture - tv, internet, movies, and video games. It takes on the Neil Postman claims that popular culture is in a death-spiral towards the lowest common denominator and instead posits that the additional complexities of our media are making the masses, which Johnson refers to as the “Sleeper Curve,” smarter. Whole geniuses and idiots remain much more stable as intellectual classes, the middle of the curve where most of us appear, is getting more intelligent by all measurable statistics. Johnson believes this is because of the increasing complexity of these cultural mediums.

Gasp! Posh! Can American Idol really be anything other than a sign of the end-times? Isn’t TV teaching us to be the Eloi (see H.G. Wells’s story “The Time Machine” if you don’t know this reference you non-reading, tv-watching heathens - you make me sick ;^)), whilst tv executive Morlocks prey upon our simplistic desires? Fortunately, there is another way to look at the intelligence necessary to deconstruct these shows. Johnson claims that the participatory nature of these newer shows has radically altered the landscape of audience engagement. Shows like “24″ not only challenge us to follow much more complex plots with a greater number of characters than in years past, they lend themselves to repeat viewings so that we can absorb the nuances, catching all of the meaningful glances between characters, etc.

The grand unifying statement from this book is really the following from the conclusion:

The cultural race to the bottom is a myth; we do not live in a fallen state of cheap pleasures that pale beside the intellectual riches of yesterday. And we are not innate slackers, drawn inexorably to the least offensive and least complicated entertainment available. All around us the world of mass entertainment grows more demanding and sophisticated, and our brains happily gravitate to that newfound complexity. Dumbing down is not the natural state of popular culture over time — quite the opposite. The great unsung story of our culture today is how many welcome trends are going up.

If this statement sounds compelling to you, I’d recommend picking this book up. While much of the middle of the book bogs down in repetitious arguments replaying over various areas of cultural media, the premise to this book is strong, buttressed with compelling but not exhaustive, data. I’d recommend reading it if you have an interest in justifying your more prurient delights. It was worth it for me just to make me feel less guilty about my own tv-watching habits and it went down nearly as fast as a DVD-worth of “24.”

• One million OLPC laptop orders confirmed - Yahoo! News
  One million laptops already ordered for “one laptop per child.” I heard that the deal is the public can get one as long as they also buy one for charity at the same time. I think I might do that.
  (tags: computers technology)
• I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Appeerances Can Be Deceiving | PBS
  Cringely speculating on the direction of the Mac hardware which is moving into our living rooms.
  (tags: drm apple appletv media tv bittorrent)

Several folks have been asking me to put together one of these “top 10″ lists for a while. The whole exercise was significantly more challenging than I thought it would be. I tried to use each author only once. Please feel free to post you own “top 10″ lists in the comments. I’d love to see them.

1. “Crime and Punishment,” Fyodor Dostoevsky

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My intent in this post is not to bring things down and I promise to return to our normally scheduled programming shortly. Several days ago was the 3-year anniversary of my father’s pre-mature passing. Those who know me know that this was a huge and horrible moment in my life. He was a bright, talented, funny, and honorable 50-year old man. I expected to have many more years to spend with him.

I remember living in the country when our TV was a house decoration with few fuzzy remote channels. As a result, we listened to a lot of music. I remember spending nights in front of the record player with Neil Young, CSNY, Leo Kottke, Jimi, and early Stevie Ray. Most of all, I remember my dad’s searing renditions of “Needle and the Damage Done” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” His voice was beautiful, powerful, and darkly soulful, which is probably the main reason he sang “Danny Boy” at the funerals of so many friends and acquaintances.

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I don’t know if any of you have happened to see the Google customized logo for today but it looks distinctly like it’s missing the letter “l.” Knowing Google’s penchant for obscure mathematical, scientific, and literary references, I did a search on the word “Googe.” Sure enough, I got a wikipedia entry for Barnabe Googe, a 16th century poet mostly famous for the following line:

I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Update: Think this is nifty? Please go digg it so more people learn about it! Share the love on Valentine’s Day!

Update #2: It was just pointed out to me by one of my friends (thanks, Derek) that there’s another, even more direct reference for the day in here - Debbie Googe of “My Bloody Valentine!” Nice find, D!

Update #3: Perhaps we are reading too much subtlety into the Google design. Google’s own blog now has a post stating that “those with true romance and poetry in their soul will see the subtlety immediately.” I still like Derek and my interpretation better so neener neener!

Update #4: And now the disgusting ones from Urban Dictionary via the comment thread from the UK Register article. Warning - these are not “safe” and explicitly reference sexual practices in a “coarse” manner. And this whole post started so innocently!

A funny Norwegian video paralleling today’s technology adoption practices with yester-year’s by parodying introduction of the first books.

I just found out this morning (thank you, Amazon Plogs) that Murakami has yet another book coming out this Spring. You can pre-order the hardcover at Amazon currently for under $15.00 on the hardcover - a screaming “buy.”

For those of you who have never read Murakami before, I’d highly recommend it. He’s definitely in both my “Top 10 Writers” and “Top 10 Books” lists - which I should probably formally create and add to this blog.

The publisher’s book description is here:

A short, sleek novel of encounters set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn, and every bit as gripping as Haruki Murakami’s masterworks The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore.

At its center are two sisters—Eri, a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion, and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny’s toward people whose lives are radically alien to her own: a jazz trombonist who claims they’ve met before, a burly female “love hotel” manager and her maid staff, and a Chinese prostitute savagely brutalized by a businessman. These “night people” are haunted by secrets and needs that draw them together more powerfully than the differing circumstances that might keep them apart, and it soon becomes clear that Eri’s slumber—mysteriously tied to the businessman plagued by the mark of his crime—will either restore or annihilate her.

After Dark moves from mesmerizing drama to metaphysical speculation, interweaving time and space as well as memory and perspective into a seamless exploration of human agency—the interplay between self-expression and empathy, between the power of observation and the scope of compassion and love. Murakami’s trademark humor, psychological insight, and grasp of spirit and morality are here distilled with an extraordinary, harmonious mastery.

“Free Books. Free Minds.” This is the Wowio slogan.

Wowio is an ebook service which allows registered users to download up to 5 ebooks a day. The site has an attractive design and their selection, while not huge, contains enough great title to make the offer very enticing. All the reading is done using Adobe’s ereader software.

And really, who are we to argue with free?

Well, if you’re smart, and I know all you folks who read my blog are smart, you WILL want to know what’s up with the “free” goodness. In this case, there is indeed a “catch.” In exchange for these books, you have to give up lots of personal data regarding your marketing preferences, race, education, and have your id verified by some fairly restrictive means (e.g. you can send scanned identification, give them a credit card for verification, or use a government/militray/state email address). In my opinion, the reward is worth it. I’ve got my data and preferences plastered publicly all over the web anyways. You’ll have to make the determination for yourself.

If you decide you’d like to give this service a whirl, let me know and I’ll send you a token so I get credit. Yeah, I’m a useless shill.