Wow me.

Given the competition in the video game industry, what can you do to make your game stand out on store shelves?

Well, you can try copying another game, that's coming out and hope that the non-serious gamer (or mother) won't be able to tell the difference. This happens all the time with poorly-made rushed movies that coincide with upcoming blockbusters, so why not make it work for you?

You can go with the old standbys, Tits and Gore. Also popular are big burly men, and dusty, grainy action images of soldiers. But of course this relies on you making the sort of game that needs those things on the cover, pandering to the widest possible audience. (obligatory call to stop making WWII games)

Why not try some subtlety? You could make your cover look like a book from the 1960's. Gamers seem to respond well enough to that to make their own, even. How about classing it up? Make your cover show that you are the Criterion Collection of games. Show that you love the product as much as you hope a potential buyer will. Or have some fun.

This approach is somewhat backwards. Gamers have to like the game to make to make alternate or fake covers, and that means you have to sell it first. All the games in the posts above were bought and loved with whatever cover they originally shipped with. I know that the quality of a game has nothing to do with its cover. And plenty of terrible games have decent covers, too. If that helps them sell, so be it. But your game is good, and so you're back to the original problem.

Well, I'm inclined to think that for every person who buys a game based on cover and back cover description alone, there's at least one who buys a game they heard was good, or read a review of and has already decided to purchase when they walk into the store. This wasn't always the case, but with the internet and all, fewer and fewer people are dropping $60 to find out if the game matches the cover quality. People buy used games on impulse but you don't make any money off that, do you?

So let's do this. Make your game good. That way word of mouth and reviews will do the majority of your marketing for you. Make your covers compelling. Not tits-in-your-face, balls-to-the-wall, hoo-rah exciting. And I, for one, will promise to at least look at your game in the store, which is more than I can say for the cookie cutter covers I see in there all the time. (See how nicely I avoided even mentioning the better-than-average cover of Rock Band?)

Or don't. Covers might not even be around in a year or three, thanks to digital distribution. But please, do find some other way to show you've put care and love into your game. We'll say thanks with money.

Thanks to Mike Mayday, who can be reached via wp.pl for the drawing I used in my Neverhood box art.

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Eldritch: Way back in the day, Mac games had some truly amazing box design. Forget the plain old rectangle, games like Marathon 2: Durandal were triangular, with a flat back and a raised front, and the recessed Marathon logo in the middle. Then there was Spectre Supreme and Spectre VR, which had boxes that were angular representations of the tanks from the game. Beautiful to behold, but such a pain to open.

Fun fact: Spectre VR was packaged with a free copy of Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash way back when. How's that for cross-promotion?

Pseudonym:MMMMMM, like the old Sierra games. Square, yes, but consistent, lavishly-painted covers, beautiful context-providing instruction manuals, maps... those were the days. Nowadays you get a DVD case with a PDF manual. Better for the environment, more expensive, and not as good.

Overheard in a Small Town

Presented without comment:

#1:
(In a chain bookstore's fiction section)
Woman: "Oh! The books are arranged by last name!
Man, annoyed: What? No they aren't.

#2
Seen on the bumper of a car less than 24 hours after the 2008 presidential election:
(Crude bumper sticker) Don't Blame Me, I Voted For McCain!
(Second crude bumper sticker) Palin-Rumsfeld 2012!

---

Pseudonym: Since there was a disagreement, how were the books arranged? I've seen many different arrangements in bookstores, including last name, subject and even... date?

Obviously the best method is by color, but it'd still be interesting to know which of these individuals was correct (my money's on the chick).

Eldritch: You are too optimistic. This was the plain old fiction section. Alphabetical by last name. You should have heard the confused disdain that was dripping from this guy's voice. By last name? Preposterous!

This is what you get, Larry, when you find a stranger in the alps.

I remember watching an army movie on a local channel one sunday afternoon as a kid. Apparently "ass" was on the list back then (though it's all over ass the place now). I remember thinking how odd it was that a solidier would cry in anguish after being shot in the "buttocks".

Yippie Kay Yay, Mr. Falcon.

Please leave a comment to post any you've seen or heard.

The Right to Choose

No, it's not a post about pro-choice vs. "pro-life". We've made an explicit decision to avoid politics. This is a (-nother) post about the software industry.

In the beginning there was Silicon Graphics. This was the first real commercially-available package designed to produce 3d computer graphics and animation. The package typically consisted of a powerhouse computer (Motorola 680x0) and custom software designed by Silicon Graphics. This was the mid-80s, and the sort of things it was used for were flying logos for network news stations, extraordinarily-expensive commercials, and the like. Prior to this, most 3d computer graphics (Think "Tron" or the video for "Money For Nothing") was done with proprietary software, and rendered on mainframe supercomputers like the Cray.

Silicon was the right product at the right time. 3d Graphics exploded in the late 80s, early 90s era, producing the sort of awe and inspiration that George Reeves did as Superman in the 50s, flying via the aid of what was then pretty impressive technology, rear-projection.

As an interesting aside, Christopher Reeve as Superman was filmed in the late 70s using front-projection, producing a clearer, more vibrant effect, and allowed the camera to move much more convincingly. Though the effect looks nearly as cheesy as George lying on a table with a fan on him (14:30 - keep watching to hear the wonderful line "no, i don't believe it", delivered with the acting ability of a packet of soy sauce), it was amazing at the time, and still ingeneous to this day. The front projection worked via a system of one-way mirrors that allowed the projection to come from the exact direction of the camera. What is precisely behind Christopher is actually his shadow, cast on the reflective backdrop. You never see this because he's always in the way.

Videos like Michael Jackson's ground-breaking, 1991 famously expensive "Black or White" were hallmarks of the new technology (later, facial morphing technology became commonplace and required no more than a 486 computer, due to the stunning originality seen in Jackson's video). Later, the cost had come down enough, though not by any means cheap, to use 3d graphics in feature films, most famously in Jurassic Park. (Steven Spielburg, so smitten with Industrial Light and Magic's Silicon Graphics workstation, even gave it a role in the movie, being the computer on which the unix our intrepid young hero knows is running.)
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Silicon's industry clout and power was almost complete. It had become a defacto standard, and the company itself was able to acquire several competing properties, such as Wavefront, Alias and even the old horse itself, Cray Supercomputers.

All this time, the charge of the Computer-Aided Design (CAD) industry had been led by its own champion, Autodesk.

The history of Autodesk itself is fascinating, though by no means unique. The part that is unique is the fact that you can get access to it via one of the company's original founders, John Walker. Download it (zipped PDF, ~5.5MB), it's worth your time if you're intersted in computer history.

Autodesk was becoming its own standard, and its flagship product AutoCAD was used by architects all over the world to design most modern buildings. Autodesk had several other products, each sort of tuned to specific architectural challenges, like electrical wiring, landscape design, etc. Computers were getting more powerful, and cheaper, though, and desktop computers were able to do some pretty amazing things. Autodesk had a team develop a 3d design and animation package that could run lower-end non-proprietary workstations called 3d Studio.

The first shot had been fired.

The spinoff company was eventually renamed Kinetix, and after several changes in the naming of their core product (3d Studio MAX could run on Windows, instead of DOS), and in 1999, Autodesk bought Canadian company Discreet Logic, and merged it with Kinetix, keeping the Discreet moniker.

Meanwhile, other packages had sprung into existence, most without the power and influence of these industry titans, but with some surprising abilities. Softimage|3D, produced by Avid (makers of desktop video editing software) was a surprisingly effective and popular product, as was Silicon's own subsidiary's return volley at Discreet, Alias Maya.

Stay with me. I know it's complicated.

Maya was eventually ported to run on Linux, and Macintosh workstations as well as Windows, giving it a cross-platform ability that Discreet's heavily Windows-oriented 3d Studio MAX could never match. But at the time, Mac and Linux user share was even more dismal than it is now, so the overall benefit of this was somewhat questionable. Still, these packages did pretty well and the competition was fierce, resulting in yearly releases (unheard of for programs of this kind of complexity, and, to be honest, nearly identical feature sets. I happened to be a 3d Studio MAX person, since version 2.5, but had I learned Maya (which was originally more common in design schools), I imagine there would be no real discernable difference.

All these packages decimated Silicon's own market share. Now Maya was an Alias product, but its parent company had never had competition of this magnitude before. The bottom dropped out of the highend unix-based mainframe rendering market (due in part to advances in 3d graphics technologies available on consumer desktops, thanks to nvidia and ATI), and Silicon was just barely hanging on, with Maya its only lifeline. Autodesk, however, was doing really well, with 3d Studio MAX competing well against Maya, but with the company's other products, many purchased properties, such as the rest of Discreet Logic's video-production line, it was only a matter of time before Maya gave up the ghost.

In 2005, the struggling subsidiary Alias sold Maya off to the highest bidder, after its parent company Silicon Graphics got delisted from the NYSE for having too low a price per share. The highest bidder? Autodesk.

Similar circumstances caused Softimage|3D's successor Softimage|XSI to be sold to the highest bidder in 2008. Again, Autodesk.

Mudbox, the 3d sculpting software developed by the ex-members of Weta Digital? Sold to Autodesk in 2007.

Revit, the parametric 3d CAD program (competing with and better than in certain circumstances AutoCAD). Bought in 2002.

Look out, Lightwave. Look out, modo. Your founders might benefit from a big buyout, but your customers may not.


One might say that the aquisition of all this software by one single company helps the integration between the software and allows for smoother workflow for projects large and small. One might also say that this idealism is somewhat short-lived (see Adobe's purchase and awkward merging of Macromedia's assets). I would suggest though that, as with Adobe, it's only a matter of time before one of Autodesk's internally competing products is killed off, no doubt with some marketing speak about how you don't even have to integrate them any more being the rationale. (Freehand forever!)

All this is just the way of the world in software-land. I suppose it's only a matter of time before Autodesk, or some other large company snatches up the remains of DAZ 3d (nee eovia, nee MetaCreations), SmithMicro (nee efrontier, nee also MetaCreations). The big daddy of them all, Microsoft Corporation has purchased the company responsible for the first 3d modeller I ever used, trueSpace, no doubt to compete with Google's aquisition of SketchUp, in an effort to improve their 3d mapping feature.

It's a melancholy and somewhat funny future to muse on - Adobe buys Autodesk, and is then purchased by Microsoft, or Google or who cares. In the land of software, there's always the danger of monopolies, the lack of choice, same as any other industry.

But look at how we're combating the industries we see as monopolistic. Software has open-source, music has Creative Commons, even telephony, the poster child for monopolies, is being subverted by jailbreaking and VoIP. Even while the Baby Bells are reforming into their version of Voltron, the industry is moving past them.

---

I used to be worried about all this Mergering and Acquisitioning. It bothered me that every time I looked into a new package, it turned out to now have "Autodesk" at the front of its name. Now I feel somewhat sorry for the folks at Autodesk who have the task of trying to make their software look and feel similar to the product line (something which Adobe is still trying to do, even with software it created 20 years ago). Microsoft and Google aren't going anywhere anytime soon, so if you're a fan of the product, maybe it's a good thing that it might be bought up by a company that has more than a piddly $1.7B in sales per year. More secure.

I wouldn't say no to a little choice though.

Nowadays, I use Blender. No, it's not as good as 3DS MAX. I'm not nearly as fast in it. Yeah, the interface is weird (but then again, so is MAX's). But I don't have to worry about whether I'm going to be able to afford it, which platform I can run it on, whether I have a beefy enough computer to run it. It does the job I want it to do, and I don't have to boot into Windows to use it. I can run it on all my computers, and the files are interoperable. Not to mention that the last several years have seen some impressive improvements.

This isn't a post about how Open Source will change the software world forever. To begin with, I don't even believe that. But it works for me and if it works for you, too, then great! I look forward to seeing your work, no matter what platform or program you made it in. Let the big software companies worry about how they're going to get your $1800 (only $1200 if you upgrade every year!), adding the thinnest of features, and questionable UI paradigms. We'll worry about actually making content. It's better that way.

---

Eldritch: Wow, Silicon Graphics. That really takes me back. I'm reminded of our High School's annual pilgrimage to the local university's computer fair, where the few hundred or so computer enthusiasts from around the region could gather and bathe in the heady atmosphere of bits and bytes. Of course, the vendors came, too, dutifully trotting out their wares. None were more despised than the narcs from the Business Software Alliance (Don't Copy That Disk!), but the nirvana of geekdom was the SGI workstation that Silicon Graphics trotted out (well, that and the Cray. Oh, the Cray).

One year, one of our more precocious (and foolish) classmates walked right up to the Cray salespeople and began asking about the workstation. Much like any one of us pale, emaciated geeks and a member of the fairer sex, this fellow just wouldn't have known what to do with a Cray if he ever got his hands on one. But the salespeople indulged him, answering his questions dutifully. Then, nodding along, the nerdy fellow finally dropped the bomb: "So how much would one of these cost me?" The salesperson (somehow) kept his calm, and just said "Well, they start at around a million dollars." The nerd's face went pale, and he stumbled away.

I wanna rock!

This was going to be a post about the crazy confusion a new Guitar Hero convert would have to face in order to figure out how to get what songs onto whatever console(s) she might have. The questionable practice of putting maybe 13 good songs, 10 decent songs, and a whole lotta crap in each game in order to stretch the licenses out over games and into downloadable content is very annoying and has led to a lot of confusion.

As a Wii owner, I'm in the worst position one can be in with regards Guitar Hero/Rock Band, as a lot of songs never made or will make it to my console, which is odd considering how well it sells. Still, I can consider myself fortunate that I also own a PS2, which means I can play the best Guitar Hero game, Guitar Hero, and the worst (rocks the 80s, which was shamelessness taken to a new extreme). But it saddens me that those Guitar Hero 1 songs can't be played in multiplayer mode and I have to hook up my PS2 to play them.


Ideally, you could buy the instruments you want, and a DVD with no content on it, and then download only the songs you want from the downloading services. They'd have the entire catalog of all the songs that were done (by that company, Rock Band and Guitar Hero are two separate properties, so I can't be totally unrealistic) and you could just make your own custom game. I personally could care less about the rockers, the customizable guitars, extra characters, venues, etc. They make the game a bit more interesting for people watching, but meh, I could do without.

I'm aware that playing Guitar Hero 1 made me actually like some of the songs I had never heard enough to include them on my "custom" set list, but there's no reason a song couldn't play, say, twice before you had to buy it, or you might listen to the song itself and not get to play it until you bought it. All of this is moot anyway, since you can't do what I'm imagining. The real problem is this: by having so many customers interested in the game, it's become necessary to make the songs available in each game extremely varied, from 80s pop ballads to country to death metal to whiny, annoying modern "rock". Games based in certain genres seem to be the key here, but instead, out comes "Guitar Hero: Metallica" and "Guitar Hero: Aerosmith" each of which include no more than 5 songs I'd like to play on them. Big names sell. Licenses sell. But not to me. Not unless "Guitar Hero: Alice in Chains" shows up in the future.

I don't want this post to turn (any more) into a rant about certain types of music and how terrible some of the songs on the games are, but for the sake of potential curiosity, click the link to see the songs I'd put on my customized Guitar Hero game, (not that I can actually get many of these songs on my console or play them with my controllers). And before you mention it, yes, "Godzilla" is on there twice. It's that good.

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GH1: 22/47
"Ace of Spades"
"Bark at the Moon"
"Cochise"
"Crossroads"
"Fat Lip"
"Godzilla"
"Godzilla"
"Heart Full of Black"
"Hey You"
"Higher Ground"
"Infected"
"Killer Queen"
"More Than A Feeling"
"No One Knows"
"Sharp Dressed Man"
"Spanish Castle Magic"
"Symphony of Destruction"
"Take It Off"
"Take Me Out"
"Texas Flood"
"Thunder Kiss '65"
"You Got Another Thing Comin'"
"Ziggy Stardust"

GH1-Bonus Songs
"All of This"
"Behind the Mask"
"Caveman Rejoice"
"Eureka, I've Found Love"
"Even Rats"
"Fire It Up"
"Get Ready 2 Rokk"
"Hey"
"Sail Your Ship By"

GH2: 27/40
"Beast and the Harlot"
"Can't You Hear Me Knockin'"
"Carry On Wayward Son"
"Cherry Pie"
"Crazy on You"
"Free Bird"
"Freya"
"Girlfriend"
"Heart-Shaped Box"
"Jessica"
"John the Fisherman"
"Killing in the Name"
"Last Child"
"Misirlou"
"Monkey Wrench"
"Mother"
"Rock This Town"
"Search and Destroy"
"Shout at the Devil"
"Strutter"
"Surrender"
"Sweet Child O' Mine"
"Them Bones"
"Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight"
"Trippin' on a Hole in a Paper Heart"
"Woman"
"You Really Got Me"

GH2-Bonus
"Jordan"
"Less Talk More Rokk"
"Soy Bomb"
"Trogdor"

GH:80s 12/30
"Because, It's Midnite"
"Heat of the Moment"
"Hold on Loosely"
"Holy Diver"
"I Ran (So Far Away)"
"I Wanna Rock"
"No One Like You"
"Synchronicity II"
"Turning Japanese"
"The Warrior"
"We Got the Beat"
"What I Like About You"

GH3: 15/73
"Bulls on Parade"
"Black Magic Woman"
"Cherub Rock"
"Cult of Personality"
"Even Flow"
"La Grange"
"My Name Is Jonas"
"Paint It Black"
"Pride and Joy"
"Rock and Roll All Nite"
"Rock You Like a Hurricane"
"Same Old Song and Dance"
"The Seeker"
"Story of My Life"
"Sunshine of Your Love"

GH3-DLC
"This Is a Call"
"The Devil Went Down to Georgia"
"Any Way You Want It"
"Don't Speak"

GH WT: 24/86
"About a Girl" (Unplugged)
"American Woman"
"Band on the Run"
"Beat It"
"Do It Again"
"Everlong"
"Eye of the Tiger"
"Float On"
"Go Your Own Way"
"Hey Man, Nice Shot"
"Hotel California"
"The Joker"
"Livin' on a Prayer"
"No Sleep Till Brooklyn"
"On the Road Again" (Live)
"The One I Love"
"One Way or Another"
"Ramblin' Man"
"Rebel Yell"
"Some Might Say"
"Stillborn"
"Sweet Home Alabama" (Live)
"Today"
"Up Around the Bend"

GH WT - DLC
"Hot Blooded"
"Jessie's Girl"
"No Rain"
"1979"
"Gimme All Your Lovin'"
"Fat Bottomed Girls"
"The James Bond Theme"
"Very Ape"
"Stay Away"

GH-Aerosmith: 5/31
"I Hate Myself for Loving You"
"All Day and All of the Night"
"Livin' on the Edge"
"Love in an Elevator"
"Sex Type Thing"

GH-Metallica: 3/49
"Enter Sandman"
"No Excuses"
"Stacked Actors"


RB1: 14/45
"Black Hole Sun"
"Blitzkrieg Bop"
"Cherub Rock"
"Creep"
"Dani California"
"(Don't Fear) The Reaper"
"Enter Sandman"
"Gimme Shelter"
"In Bloom"
"Learn to Fly"
"Orange Crush"
"Roxanne"
"The Hand That Feeds"
"Vasoline"

RB- Bonus: 2/13
"Brainpower"
"I Get By"

RB2: 29/84
"Alive"
"American Woman"
"Any Way You Want It"
"Bad Reputation"
"Carry On Wayward Son"
"Drain You"
"E-Pro"
"Everlong"
"Eye of the Tiger"
"Float On"
"Give It Away"
"Go Your Own Way"
"Hungry Like the Wolf"
"Livin' on a Prayer"
"Lump"
"Man in the Box"
"New Kid in School"
"One Way or Another"
"Pinball Wizard"
"Pretend We're Dead"
"Psycho Killer"
"Ramblin' Man"
"Round and Round"
"Spirit in the Sky"
"Spoonman"
"Today"
"We Got the Beat"
"White Wedding (Part 1)"
"You Oughta Know"

RB2- DLC: 77
"Fortunate Son"
"My Sharona"
"Heroes"
"Queen Bitch"
"I Fought the Law"
"Buddy Holly"
"Interstate Love Song"
"Last Train to Clarksville"
"Wonderwall"
"Siva"
"Roam"
"Sex Type Thing"
"March of the Pigs"
"The Collector"
"The Perfect Drug"
"Still Alive"
"Sprode"
"Call Me"
"Zero"
"My Best Friend's Girl"
"Snow ((Hey Oh))"
"Burn"
"Capital G"
"Last"
"Rio"
"Breaking the Girl"
"Under the Bridge"
"Gone Away"
"Breed"
"Lounge Act"
"On a Plain"
"Polly"
"Something in the Way"
"Stay Away"
"Territorial Pissings"
"Dune Buggy"
"Feather Pluck'n"
"Pretty Noose"
"This Is a Call"
"You Got It"
"Entangled"
"Space Cowboy"
"Losing My Religion"
Ten (11)
Texas Flood (10)
Coulor and the Shape (13)

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Eldritch: The song selection is one thing, but I can't help but put the songs in two very different classes: those by the original artists, and those by the unnamed Guitar Hero cover band. Honestly, I tend to skip right past the cover versions and stick with the original artist recordings. I just can't stand listening to favorite songs done in a mediocre way. Less of an issue for songs I don't like very much, but then I'd probably skip those by anyway.

I can see the appeal of an a la carte take towards Guitar Hero content. The gameplay is great, but (as with most games, really), it's all about the content. I'm a little leery of digital downloads for games, though. I think most game publishers would love to sell a game without any content and then nickel and dime the gamers for every bit of content. That makes me very nervous. It moves games (and other software) away from being a 'product' and more towards a 'service.' And whenever a company has control of your service (ISP, utilities, whatever), that generally means the same thing: higher prices and poorer service. But that's a whole different rant.

Pseudonym: Ah, I forgot to mention how terrible songs like Heart-Shaped Box and Them Bones are on Guitar Hero 3. Fans of the originals might have a hard time listening to the remakes. Fortunately the newer games are nearly all original master tracks, which is a blessing. Playing Stacked Actors is a joy that would not have been possible without the original recording.

I think it's ok to have DLC, provided it can be stored on external media. In the Wii's case, it is a necessity, but I can see your point. Is there any guarantee that the company will be around in 10 years when you want to play Guitar Hero 1 instead of the newly-released Guitar Hero: Wesley Willis. This is a common argument against DRM but it applies here. I didn't say that my idea would be good for the industry, just good for me. And while I'm dreaming, I'd like the blue shell removed from Mario Kart.

Why does the blogosphere hate newspapers?

There's no love lost between bloggers and newspapers. You can't swing a dead cat around the blogosphere without hearing about how newspapers are dying, or references to "dead tree media," and invariably, newspapers are lumped in with the so-called 'Mainstream Media,' or MSM (not, of course, the other, more hilarious uses of the acronym). It's hard to tell, exactly, what beef blogs might have with newspapers. The notoriously libertarian blogosphere is filled with appeals to government transparency, open-access, sunshine laws and freedom of speech, expression and the press. These are exactly the same causes that newspaper journalists have been arguing for since the dawn of the republic.

From the Reporter's Committee for Freedom of the Press, to Reporters without Borders to Sunshine Week, to any of the dozens of Supreme Court cases protecting free speech and freedom of the press (from the Alien and Sedition Acts to the Pentagon Papers and forward), newspapers have been on the side of First Amendment protections, which you'd think would endear it to the universe of blogs.

But newspapers have the bad luck to be mostly published on paper, not online. The moniker "dead tree media" has stuck, and the smug self-congratulatory nature of opinion blogs have meant that virtually any mention of newspapers should be accompanied by a sneer and a reminder that newspapers are dying anyway, and soon, citizen journalists will magically replace newspapers.

The truth of the matter is, most of the criticism of the 'Mainstream Media' is fair and true. It just doesn't apply to newspapers. Broadcast media is emblematic of the worst excesses that bloggers bring to light, and are guilty of the most shallow, cheap, profit-driven coverage possible. All the while, newspapers are toiling away, producing hundreds of thousands of words of accountability coverage, investigative reporting, and in-depth journalism. When the blogosphere deigns to mention newspapers in their media critiques, they generally focus on the editorial page, completely ignoring the firewall between editorial and news coverage at newspapers, and focusing on a tiny portion of the newspaper's total coverage.

Of course, just because bloggers aren't always right about newspapers' shortcomings, it doesn't they aren't dying. Slate's Daniel Gross summed up the situation well: newspapers may be dying, but it's greedy owners sucking value out of profitable companies that are doing the killing. Most people don't know that newspapers are by and large very profitable. The dire predictions from analysts and media critics focus on the assertion that newspapers aren't profitable enough.

So perhaps bloggers and newspapers should bury the hatchet. After all, most bloggers are commenting on newspaper's original coverage, and if newspapers continue to be mismanaged, they may find themselves joining the ranks of new bloggers.


Pseudonym: You know what's odd? This morning, before I read this post, I thought it was strange that there were two comics in the newspapers talking about this very thing. A lot of times they seem to have in-jokes, or at least some communication between authors who decide to do, say, golf jokes. And then there are gems like the Sally Forth/Pearls Before Swine crossover, which is in a league of its own. But I suspect today's Non Sequitur and (again) Pearls Before Swine being about the same subject and an esoteric one at that is an odd coincidence. Happy to be corrected...

Eldritch: The whole idea of newspapers giving away free content is a tough one. Truth be told, I don't think there was any way for the newspapers to win. When the newspapers were first moving online, all content was free. The expectation, and the demand, was that anything on the internet would be free of charge. In fact, there really wasn't even a mechanism for people to charge for content yet. So if newspapers tried charging for their stories, or just ignored the internet, I think they'd be in even worse shape than now.

Of course, the prevalence of free content has given people the expectation that they shouldn't have to pay for journalism, and that's no doubt fueling people's abandonment of the core business (printed papers). But the real lynchpin of the problem is advertising. Newspapers have tons more readership than they've ever had from mere print publishing. It's the fact the online advertising doesn't pay nearly the same as local, print advertising. So you could say newspapers are thriving, but newspaper advertising is withering.

Pseudonym: I agree 100%, but I'm still sickened by the awful weekly column in my local major paper about the authors two "hilariously" precocious kids. The byline gives the blog address her column is pulled from. It's not so bad that the content itself is bad (which it is), but the fact that papers are pulling content from online for filler. I read the newspaper for interesting news and events, things that are meaningful to me, and to other people. Not to read someone's personal anecdotes about their stupid kids that leaves me wondering "why are you telling me this?". Blogs seem to be much more to me about the "pull"; that is, the seeking out of information specific to what you're interested in, rather than newspapers, which, in my opinion, are about the "push" - editorial decisions about what affects the majority of the people. This is also what bothers me about local news, how most of it is local human-interest (re: worthless) stories and US news I read on the internet the day before. In the case of our Blogger Turned Serious Journalist, if I wanted to read her column, I'd read her blog.

Read our blog.

Edit: Seriously??

Medical Mysteries

What could cause eleven men to fall ill, their skin each colored blue? Or what would make an entire farm family to go blind shortly after dinner? Or how could an otherwise normal man turn bright orange?

Each of these medical mysteries, and dozens more, were reported by the legendary medical writer Berton Roueché, who in the 1940s and 1950s wrote the "Annals of Medicine" section of the New Yorker magazine. (The answers are: accidental ingestion of sodium nitrite; dinner cooked with tomatoes crossbred with jimson weed; and a massive daily ingestion of carrots and tomato juice).

Though many of his 20 or so books or now out of print, Roueché has enjoyed a resurgence of sorts: dozens of the medical mysteries first reported by him have been recycled by the writers of the Fox television show House, M.D.. Though Roueché's articles are exactly the sort of cat-and-mouse epidemiology that are the hallmark of House, it is amusing from time to time to see the 21st-Century doctors struggle to deal with easily-treatable diseases that were much less straightforward in the first half of the 20th century, like trichinosis or leprosy.

If the medical science behind House is of interest, skip the mass-market crap capitalizing on the show's popularity. Dig up a copy of one of Roueché's books, and see where the creators of House got all their ideas.

Pseudonym: If this sort of thing interests you, you might also look into the career of Paul Ekman, who as a microexpression expert is the inspiration for the House sequel, Lie to Me. Lie to Me is so far pretty good, about 8 episodes in, and is the only show I watch live. (So OF COURSE it's nearly always pre-empted by some stupid reality tv show about singing.)

If you're not keen on reading wikipedia (or our own ramblings), then why not listen to NPR's 3-part series on Ekman and lie detection via microexpressions?

It's pretty good. I wouldn't... lie to you... AAhahaha


Eldritch: Obligatory webcomic link to parody of Lie to Me.

Disclaimer: I haven't actually seen Lie to Me yet; I just thought the comic was funny. I did meet Tim Roth once, though. So I guess that makes me kind of an expert.

Pseudonym: Can I tell you how difficult it is to watch that show without expecting him to just suddenly pull a gun on people and start shouting? Cause it is.

But, as usual, parodies are funnier with a kernel of truth. Lie To Me has me laughing sometimes at how obvious the actors try to make the expressions that do them in. Like a facial tic becomes a full-blown epileptic fit. It's still a solid show as long as you're willing to accept the science for what it is, not what sells advertising.

When I was your age...

When I was a kid, we listened to albums on records. Vinyl records. Dirty, scratchy, skippy, hissy records. Is it just nostalgia that makes it seem to me that the music of that time was richer, and better-sounding (even if the content was somewhat childish)?

Nope.

As audiophiles (and some regular philes) know, the sound from a vinyl record is analog, which means that each sound off the record is produced with a smooth frequency wave. The sound was transferred to the record directly: Sound goes into microphone, onto tape, mixed, and then etched into a record using the same frequency wave. Microphones are just speakers turned backwards, as you may know, with a vibrating membrane CAUSING electrical impulses to travel down wire, instead of the electrical impulses causing a membrane to vibrate, producing the sweet music of Artie Shaw.

Records are actually cut with V-shaped diamond chisels that travel through a spiralling groove cut in the record. Analog signals sent to a membrane that the chisel is attached to causes the chisel to cut deeper or less deep, depending on the amplitude, and swing side to side depending on the frequency and stereo position. As it swings side to side, the V-shaped chisel cuts each side of the groove in a different way as it rides up one side of the groove and down the other, resulting in a cut groove, that, when played back by another needle, can detect the changes in the grooves as it plays, sending that analog signal back to the amp and then through the speakers. Artie's sounds to the record to your ear.

So why do records sound so "crappy"? As an analog medium, they're subject to all sorts of interference, from dust particles in the grooves, to scratches across grooves, causing skips, to signal interference from electrical devices near the wires the sound is travelling through. So they snap, hiss, pop and skip.

On your record player. Record players used by audiophiles are very modern, with excellent signal sheilding, more sensitive electronics, and quality components. Also, audiophiles tend to keep their records in excellent shape, in the sleeves, vertically stored. If you ever get a chance to listen to a good record on a good system, I suggest you take it.

Cut to the early 80's. Records had been around for many decades, and despite being a quantum leap ahead of the wax cylinders they replaced (imagine a singer having to sing the song for each cylinder produced. You get a unique copy, they get tired.), other advances in the world of electronics prompted a new way of listening to music. The 8-track and audiocassette were ok; smaller, easier to store, easier to keep clean, but subject to their own problems. 8-Tracks had limited length, causing albums to be trimmed, Audiocassettes broke, warped, melted and stretched, and hissed badly enough that Dolby Noise Reduction (really just a single-band equilizer that cuts off the frequencies near where tape hiss occurs, often muddying the sound in higher ranges) became a standard feature on most tape decks.

Enter the Compact Disc. Smaller than a vinyl record, more durable than audiocassette, longer-playing than 8-track, and perhaps best of all for those of us with smudgy cheeto-stained fingers, didn't require turning over. An audiophile's dream come true. Because it's based on optical technology, with lazors rather than physical needles or tape heads, there was no "analog hiss". The laz0r itself removed the need to touch the surface of the CD, meaning that there was, if you were careful, (many of us were back then, mostly due to habits after owning records), your CDs could remain as pristine as they were when you bought them. If they ever DID get smudged, you could wipe 'em clean with a little water. If they ever got scratched, the CD player itself had built-in error correction.

All this was made possible by DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY.

More... Instead of the smooth curving sine wave of analog signal, that signal was emulated with numerical values. A song might be sampled 44 thousand times a second, and each sample would return a value of, say 1 to 256. Think of it more as a series of steps that approximates the original analog signal. This does have an effect on the overall output of a song, since sampling rates are limited, whereas an analog signal has all its peaks and valleys. The difference for most people is pretty minimal, and when factoring in the hassle of records and tapes, plus the total removal of skips, pops and especially hiss, CDs sounded GREAT. Clear and subtle, like the orchestra was in your room.

That was the mid-late 80s. CD "mastering" back then was a job of taking a master recording, plonking it down on CD and calling it good. After all, there were 50 years of back-recordings to get onto CD, and each recording couldn't be meticulously mastered specifically for CD. The backlog was necessary to cash in on the improved sound CDs provided, meaning that once again, we were buying our albums all over again. New music was released on CD, Tape and Vinyl, and often not on CD at all, due to adoption rates of the new technology, and the small amount of studios doing a huge amount of CD mastering work. When you got a CD, it was packaged with the album cover on the front, with a no-frills CD inside, listing the name of the album and the tracks, black on silver. Simple.

Over the years, as vinyl died off, CDs hit their stride, eventually becoming the ONLY medium most albums were released on. A few bands had/have limited runs of their album material on vinyl for real die-hard fans of record albums, but it's pretty rare, especially nowadays. Ask for the latest Shakira album on vinyl and see what kind of looks you get. CDs were starting to become more of a product rather than a medium through which the product would get delivered (think DVDs a decade later). Lush, glossy booklets accompanied the CD itself, with lyrics, interviews, photographs, and the CD was silkscreen printed to help make it stand out in your collection, and blend it together with the other packaged materials. Sometimes, the standard plastic jewel case was replaced by a different case altogether. (As a side note, while these looked cool, they were a bitch to store with the others. I'm looking at you, Reznor.) CDs had finally made the big time.

But wait a minute. It seemed to me that with CDs becoming commonplace, the discs themselves were actually getting thinner. They felt... cheaper and less sturdy. Well, ok, that's to be expected. It happens with all media - companies try to cut costs to offset the increased production values. The CDs themselves sounded the same, they worked the same, so no big deal.

That's not all that changed. As the music scene exploded with the communication and internet ages, there was much more fierce competition for who got played on radio and on tv. Record companies took advantage of an interesting aspect of the way human auditory systems work to start producing albums that sounded "better" to the average listener. Don't consider radio and TV for a second, those are analog signals, that are often somewhat degraded to fit within bandwidth and frequencies, and to comply with FCC guidelines concerning amplitude (loudness). The aspect being taken advantage of was this: all else being equal, people overwhelmingly prefer LOUDER music, feeling it's clearer and with a larger variance between loud and soft sounds (called "dynamic range").

So CDs got louder. And louder. And louder.

Even albums released by the same band, over time, would have louder music put on the CD. Don't believe me? Take a listen to your music collection, on CD, with headphones. Pop in the first CD a band released, and then the last. Don't touch the volume at all.

Well that's not so bad, right? If humans think louder is better, then higher amplitude is good! Heck, now we finally have a reason to buy the remastered versions of CDs that seem to come out every 5-10 years. Oh yeah. If you happen to have the same song on several CDs, listen to them back to back. The newer one will most likely be louder.



That's "Something" by the Beatles, from Abbey Road, from 4 different "remasters" of the CD.


Ok, fair enough. The Beatles always sound good. Let's look at another innovative British band Depeche Mode (Thanks to sharoma.com for the images):



That's "A Pain That I'm Used To" from Playing the Angel. Looks good.

Oops. Fortunately Depeche Mode is one of those bands that releases on Vinyl. Which is what you're looking at up there. HERE is the CD waveform:



See how the waveform goes off the top and bottom? That's called "clipping" and it occurs when the amplitude of a song gets louder than the medium can handle. In this case, every sample at which the amplitude is above 0 (amplitude starts at 0 and goes down, as the graphs show) becomes 0. This causes the dynamic range to shrink, the frequencies at those ranges to flatten out and distortion occurs, like what happens on an electric guitar when "overdrive" is turned on (though in that case it's on purpose).

The vinyl release of Playing the Angel sounds better. Depeche Mode themselves would likely tell you that they prefer the vinyl release too, but it's not their choice to make. Studio executives and A&R people force these masters to give them an edge over songs in the same genre, with the expectation that you'll buy the album that sounds better. That this is totally outdated thinking is a post for another day.

There's a movement going now to stop this process from happening. Naturally it's coming about 10 years too late, as the industry shifts away from CDs, but this sort of awful mastering can apply to digitally produced tracks too. For more information, check out "TurnMeUp", an organization dedicated to this cause, and to wikipedia, which as usual has a lot of good info, and some great links with examples (and which is comprehensive enough to make this post useless.) :)

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Eldritch: The whole 'loudness war' thing is pretty insane, and I won't quibble with that. But let's be a bit careful when praising anyone calling themselves an 'audiophile.' These are the glassy-eyed zealots that pay hundreds (and thousands, and hundreds of thousands) of dollars for wooden stereo knobs, $13,000 power cords, and optical media demagnetizers. Audiophile should be a dirty word.

Pseudonym: Let's not confuse audiophile with moron, either.

I mean it in the traditional, real sense. The meaning you're thinking of has been adopted BY these idiots for themselves. Spending money on something proves you're more vested in it. But there are people who genuinely care a great deal about how their music sounds. Even after the post above, I do not consider myself one of these people, as I have an Apple "iPod" containing highly compressed audio played through tinny earbuds.

An ugly pile of words

I loved Mark Z. Danielewski's debut novel House of Leaves. It was a sprawling, complex, recklessly innovative novel. Reviewers quickly honed in on the unique typography, extensive footnoting and text that ran up, down and backwards through the book. But wrapped up in the unusual form was a great story. It was actually two stories, one told through footnotes to the other. But at its heart, House of Leaves was a really fantastic ghost story, an impeccably-plotted and mindbending gothic tale. I still rank it as one of my favorite novels of all time.

So it's not an understatment to say I was disappointed to find his second novel to be a righteously awful book; a total piece of shit.

Only Revolutions was Danielewski's sophomore effort, published six years after House of Leaves. Taking the experimental typography to an over-the-top level, Only Revolutions is actually two separate books, each one reading upside-down and backwards from the other, beginning from the front and back cover, and meeting in the middle.

This time, however, Danielewski has eschewed not just the external trappings of a traditional novel, but any attempt at intelligibility or comprehensibility. It is so much of a jumbled mass of rambling pseudo-poetry, it would be inaccurate to call Only Revolutions a novel at all. Lest you think I exaggerate the meaninglessness of the prose in this book, witness the first lines of one of the halves of the book:

Samsara! Samarra!
Grand!
I can walk away
from anything.
Everone loves
the Dream but I kill it.
Atlas Mountain Cedars gush
over me: ---Up Boogaloo!
I leap free this spring.
On Fire. How my hair curls.
That's all. Big ruin all
around. With a wiggle.
with a waggle. A spin.

Every page is like this. You could pick any random page from this hideous abortion of a book and you would come across exactly the same amount of plot, character development, conflict or story. Oh, and just to kick the pretentiousness into high gear, Danielewski decided to color every instance of the letter 'O' either green or brown, on every page of the book.

The fatuous self-importance simply drips from the official Only Revolutions web site. One blogger took it upon himself to reproduce the color, layout and arrangement of one page's worth of text. The result would be funnier the book itself wasn't just as foolish, in appearance and content.

It would be quite one thing if Only Revolutions received the scorn and derision it deserved, but some reviewers, apparently having written their review before they received the book, praised it as a post-modern masterpiece. In the largest and most hilarious example of The Emperor's New Clothes effect, the book was even nominated for the National Book Award. I can only imagine the nominating committee meeting, each member terrified to admit that book didn't make any sense to them, and instead of saying so, meekly voting for it to continue to the shortlist.

House of Leaves was a witty, carefully constructed novel with a fantastic story. It also had its share of dry humor and carefully-hidden messages. I can only hope that Only Revolutions is a well-orchestrated prank on the literary establishment, a dead-tree troll on an unprecedented scale. Because the idea of someone actually writing this book in all seriousness is too depressing to contemplate.

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Pseudonym: I keep meaning to read House of Leaves. Thanks for the heads-up on the 2nd.

I remember reading some tripe similar to the excerpt you posted in one of my freshman English classes. When the prof asked what we all thought about it, no one had anything to say, for fear of, what, insulting her? I did speak up to ask if there really was some meaning behind it or if the author was having a laugh at our expense. Her reply was "what do YOU think?" with a self-gratifying smirk.

I told her it was clearly the latter. Literature is about communication, communication of an idea, or a feeling or a sensation, not the senseless brain-drippings of completely random phrases mashed together like the result of a stenographer's fever dream.

Read our blog.

Kick it up a notch

Here's a list of things you can say during dinner on the one night a month you cook dinner that will help make you a jerk, and some ways that you can give it that extra flair that make you a full-on jerkwad:

Original Jerk: "Wow, this turned out great!"
Jerkwad Bonus: Never having ever said it about any one else's dinner.
Double-Jerkwad Bonus: The above plus it not being very good at all.

Original Jerk: "Hey, did the dog poop yet today?"
Jerkwad Bonus: It's the first thing you say when someone is sitting down.
Double-Jerkwad Bonus: ... to your dinner of Egg Fu Yung. I'll have the tossed salad next time.

Original Jerk: "I'll let you clean up."
Jerkwad Bonus: You've never once cleaned up.
Double-Jerkwad Bonus: Say it while making a big deal about how tired cooking made you.

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Eldritch: Ah, the majestic Jerkwad. Loping through the praries, belittling the denizens of the Wad peninsula. Before him tremble the huddled masses of Dorkwads, Dipwads, and Gaywads. Of course, the Dickwads could probably stand up the Jerkwad, but they're too busy being, well, dicks.

I'm reminded of the seminal work in scholarship on the Wad population, from the academic journal The Onion: Gaywads, Dorkwads Sign Historic Wad Accord:

...pan-wad unity is considered unlikely in the near future. Numerous wad factions, including the dickwad, dipwad, jerkwad and fuckwad groups, refused to participate in the wad accord.