The link is to a Washington Post article about the phenomenon of otherwise good parents absentmindedly leaving their small children in cars to bake to death. It's not a pleasant read, but I think it's an important one. It's maybe a little easier for me than for most because I've long since accepted that I have an necessarily imperfect knowledge of who I am and what I'm capable of. I'm okay with not being able to know that I'll never be the sort of broken human being that small minds characterize as a monster. I know that's necessarily a fight waged and won over a lifetime, moment by moment. I don't think, looking at a case like Miles Harrison's, that he's a monster. I think he's unlucky, and I hope to never really understand the horror of what he goes through.
The article's discussion of a cheap, easily produced, unmarketable safety system is a clear snapshot of the kind of moral good that only a central government can accomplish, even if it hasn't accomplished it yet. People are too scared to face their own frailty, and they put lives other than their own at risk in refusing to accept their own weakness.
The Post article remains interesting over its entire length, and all of the characters in it are worth reading about. The most scarring -- and the most heartening -- is the story of Lyn Balfour, and I don't want to spoil it.
I ran into the article because it was linked by political blogger Matt Yglesias here, although he's mostly interested in the question of whether it's a crime. I think that's a very interesting question, but it's also the least interesting part of the article.
Monday, March 09, 2009
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Oh, videogames
Attention whore Tomonobu Itagaki (designer of ninja action game Ninja Gaiden and breast physics simulator Dead or Alive), quoted on Kotaku:
"I think the Pacific theater of World War II is a interesting topic," he said. "I think it would be cool to work with an American developer and do a game based on the Pacific Theater.Serious historical commentary pushing the envelope on what is still a sensitive topic in Japan, or giant robots from Planet Japan attacking the Pearl Harbor moon base. I mean, either way that sounds awesome, but somebody so undevoted to the idea of a Flags/Letters pair of games ("if" it's politically charged?) is probably not the man for the job.
"I think it would be cool to do something like what Clint Eastwood is doing for that time period," he added, referencing Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima which shows both sides of the war.
...
If it turned out that a Japanese developed game about World War II was "too politically charged," Itagaki said he might want to explore the same issues in a game set in space.
Friday, May 30, 2008
in search of good supermarket coffee
It was and still is the case that my favorite coffee beans are the ones that Blue Bottle sells me. However, I cannot be bothered to go into SF on a leisurely off day just to buy coffee, and I don't remember to buy extra coffee in advance at all times. You can't conscientiously stock extra coffee like you can tea (of which Lydia maintains a full and varied drawer) because the more interesting flavors decay. At approximately a week, maybe two weeks tops after it's roasted, you can't really taste the quality you paid good money for.
So it's important to have a backup place to purchase coffee, and luckily the Whole Foods around the corner carries a selection of beans by small roasters. Most of the roasters whose beans they carry seem to think that matching Starbucks for quality but operating locally and devoting themselves to fair trade, organic beans is good enough. It isn't. Shit, most fair trade coffee is from Latin America, and while I do appreciate a good Mexican or Guatemalan bean, I really have a strong preference for African and Arabian stuff, especially from Ethiopia. Really, I do wish ethically produced coffee wasn't dead dead dull. Somebody offer fair trade Harrar and I will get on board. I will be the goddamn conductor.
But the real problem with even well-intentioned supermarket selections of coffee is that the product has to sell steadily enough to not have coffee two weeks old on the shelf. Either you give up and sell a product that is so uninteresting that two weeks on the shelf will not degrade it appreciably, or you really need enough customers to make the enterprise work. For exactly one roaster carried by Whole Foods -- Barefoot Coffee -- it pretty much does work. Barefoot makes good, interesting coffees, and although the Whole Foods can't match Blue Bottle's "roasted yesterday" approach, the Barefoot I've gotten there has reliably been less than a week old, which is good enough in a pinch.
Coffee has developed a florid, quasi-embarassing descriptive vocabulary to match wine, and it's a fine line between describing your product to Volkswagen drivers on one hand and writing bad poetry on the other. Barefoot crosses this line with impunity.
I mean honestly.
So it's important to have a backup place to purchase coffee, and luckily the Whole Foods around the corner carries a selection of beans by small roasters. Most of the roasters whose beans they carry seem to think that matching Starbucks for quality but operating locally and devoting themselves to fair trade, organic beans is good enough. It isn't. Shit, most fair trade coffee is from Latin America, and while I do appreciate a good Mexican or Guatemalan bean, I really have a strong preference for African and Arabian stuff, especially from Ethiopia. Really, I do wish ethically produced coffee wasn't dead dead dull. Somebody offer fair trade Harrar and I will get on board. I will be the goddamn conductor.
But the real problem with even well-intentioned supermarket selections of coffee is that the product has to sell steadily enough to not have coffee two weeks old on the shelf. Either you give up and sell a product that is so uninteresting that two weeks on the shelf will not degrade it appreciably, or you really need enough customers to make the enterprise work. For exactly one roaster carried by Whole Foods -- Barefoot Coffee -- it pretty much does work. Barefoot makes good, interesting coffees, and although the Whole Foods can't match Blue Bottle's "roasted yesterday" approach, the Barefoot I've gotten there has reliably been less than a week old, which is good enough in a pinch.
Coffee has developed a florid, quasi-embarassing descriptive vocabulary to match wine, and it's a fine line between describing your product to Volkswagen drivers on one hand and writing bad poetry on the other. Barefoot crosses this line with impunity.
Ethiopian Ghimbi
by Barefoot Coffee
Black velvet apricot, raspberry dark chocolate truffle
Sinatra smooth sexy thick and heavy body, gush of love
bouquet of rose, orchids, blackberry and huckleberry
I mean honestly.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Cookie Monster was a real person?
I wanted to know who wrote "Bein' Green" (as made famous by Kermit the Frog), and apparently it's a guy named Joe Raposo, who unsurprisingly also wrote other music, for Sesame Street, Three's Company, and Shining Time Station*. He was a peripheral member of the Rat Pack and Sinatra was a big fan.
He wrote "C is for Cookie", liked cookies so much that his widow held a cookies & milk party in his memory, and was the original puppeteer of Cookie Monster. He unfortunately is not responsible for "Breakfast Time",written by Jeff Moss, as were "I Don't Want to Live on the Moon" and "Rubber Duckie". Hooray Sesame Street music.
C is for Cookie:
Breakfast Time:
* starring Ringo Starr and** George Carlin
** in sequence
He wrote "C is for Cookie", liked cookies so much that his widow held a cookies & milk party in his memory, and was the original puppeteer of Cookie Monster. He unfortunately is not responsible for "Breakfast Time",written by Jeff Moss, as were "I Don't Want to Live on the Moon" and "Rubber Duckie". Hooray Sesame Street music.
C is for Cookie:
Breakfast Time:
* starring Ringo Starr and** George Carlin
** in sequence
Sunday, May 18, 2008
My urban pride
Let me show you it.
As of this Saturday, a wall at the end of an alley at the border of SF's financial district and Chinatown became home to the world's largest lolcat mural.
San Francisco is now the world champion in a game nobody knew was being played and nobody knows the rules to.
As of this Saturday, a wall at the end of an alley at the border of SF's financial district and Chinatown became home to the world's largest lolcat mural.
San Francisco is now the world champion in a game nobody knew was being played and nobody knows the rules to.
Friday, May 16, 2008
Resident Evil and race
This is a thorny issue.
Last year, around the time I posted about Resident Evil 4 (about 5 posts below this one ha ha), Capcom put out a trailer for Resident Evil 5. If you follow games at all, you might remember the localized shitstorms that popped up all over the internet when people attempted to discuss the racial elements of the trailer, which depicts a white dude shooting and kicking a lot of black dudes along with some fuzzy all-purpose justification monologuing like "I've got a job to do, and I'm gonna see it through." Here's the thing itself:
Wherever the trailer was mentioned, the discussion that appeared was angry and useless. Despite the game industry's size, it is still the redheaded stepchild of entertainment, the one that moralizing dipshit politicians are most eager to scapegoat. We've seen it with everything from Doom to GTA for violence, and Mass Effect taught us that supermild sex scenes on a TV are okay unless the TV is outputting video from an Xbox 360. These folks are sick to death of legislators who pin blame on games because they're too cowardly to blame the bad parents whose votes they need, and scared of having gaming dragged through yet another media circus, so they're disposed to shut down any conversation of this sort with meme-laced vitriol ("instant fail" "you just lost all credibility" etc).
Also these are disproportionately (though not uniformly) privileged suburban white kids who cope with the subtleties of race relations by ignoring them. So now every one of these commenters is not only telling the others to SHUT UP, but they're secretly telling themselves to SHUT UP. Not only do they not want to talk about it, they don't want to think about it.
In trying (and partially succeeding) to find some commentary on the issue more mature than accusations of reverse racism, I encountered the term "functionally racist" for the first time, and failed completely to understand it. I think I understand it now, but I also think that it is a dumb term (basically, it means things which have effects similar to racist things, or are indistinguishable from racism when intent is not considered). I understand the motivation to latch these legitimate grievances onto a word as powerful as "racism," but "racism" is defined ideologically. Racism is discrimination based on race, not discrimination that happens to correlate strongly with race, and racist people are people that discriminate based on race, not people that discriminate based on other factors.
For example, there were people that opposed the recent immigration reform because, deep down, Latinos make them uncomfortable, and there were people that opposed immigration for other, completely legitimate reasons (worries about the effects of the guest worker program on poorer Americans of all races, for example -- you can argue whether that worry is well founded, but as long as it is sincere, it doesn't matter). It's unfortunate that the racists in the first case can conceal themselves in the rhetoric of the second case, but I do not think it is right to describe all of these positions as "functionally racist" just to make sure you've snared them all. I know "racist" is a really attractive weapon in the Butter Battle Book meme wars for the American psyche. That doesn't mean you should use it.
Anyhow, I don't think the Resident Evil 5 trailer is racist, functionally or otherwise. I do understand that a widely distributed video clip of a brawny, corn-fed white dude shooting scrawny, open-mouthed black dudes in a shanty town makes people uncomfortable -- I just don't think "racist" is the word for it, because I don't think it indicates that the game or trailer's creators are racist. That there are unemployed, moonshine-chugalugging cavemen in West Virginia and Kentucky who are buying a 360 for this game because they want to simulate killing black people is, well, irrelevant to the question of whether RE5 is racist. Racially insensitive, hell yes. And that is worth talking about.
I understand why they set the game in Africa. The staleness of the early games' smalltown America was of course the motivation in moving the games abroad, first to rural Europe for RE4. And producer Jun Takeuchi has said that he wanted to explore the origins of the RE zombie virus (which does make sense given series archvillain Wesker's established goals), so a move to Africa (home to the two scariest diseases to emerge in my lifetime: innards-liquefying ebola and persistent, unstoppable HIV/AIDS) is reasonable. Casting a character from an earlier RE game in the lead is also reasonable, on its own, given that most of the RE games draw from the same tiny stable of protagonists (RE4's Leon had previously appeared in RE2, for example).
Now, given that Chris Redfield, more than any other RE character, looks like a corn-fed, bluetooth headset-wearing Superman, these two things together probably should have given Capcom pause, and I bet they did give Capcom USA pause. As Japan is the maybe the most racially homogeneous/isolated of the industrialized nations (... Iceland?), it's plausible that this shit really just did not occur to anybody involved in the process until Capcom USA's PR department took a look at it and thought "oh shit." I don't think Capcom has done anything wrong. I think they have done something stupid.
The Guy Whitey Corngood Versus the Negro Hordes aspect of the game is easy to explain and hard to justify, but I've also seen some disgust or disappointment at the decision to set the game in a shanty town, and understanding why the game is set in a shanty town was actually my motivation for writing this post in the first place, so:
What makes zombies scary is their jealousy (they want you to be dead like them), their steadfastness (you cannot negotiate with zombies because they are zombies*), and their multitudes. They cannot be stopped with anything but bullets, they outnumber your bullets, and they are everywhere you turn. The non-negotiability of enemies has been with us since Space Invaders, and RE4's ammo rationing is so perfect as to be exquisite, so the way forward is in not knowing where the next zombie threat will appear.
The earlier RE games, from what I played of RE1 and what I've seen in footage of the others, seem much more spatially confined than RE4's village environment. Confinement is unnerving at first, but RE4's open spaces are even scarier, especially with RE4's move of the camera perspective from the omnicient (overhead) to the personal (over Leon's shoulder). You can hear that chainsaw, but you can't see it. It might be behind you, or just around that bend, or really anywhere except where you're looking right now. RE4 effectively dovetails fear of the unseen with fear of the undead, without resorting to wishy-washy bullshit like ghosts, by limiting your perspective and moving you into open environments. It understands that not knowing is scary.
It also, unfortunately, means that a lot of time is spent in daylight, where zombies in front of you are plainly visible. So how do you reconcile the fear of open spaces with the fear of not being able to see? Well, with night, sure, and night falls in the second chapter of Resident Evil 4, but if daylight is not scary and night is, we have to choose between fear and variety. Instead, RE5's creators realized that extremely bright light is just as useless to the human eye as darkness, and the game's big gimmick relative to RE4 seems to be the temporary blindness associated with moving from light places to dark and vice versa. So the game has to be moved somewhere very, very bright with unlit interiors, so that the player is moving back and forth, triggering the temporary blindness and momentarily unable to see the damn zombies. A desert shanty town. It's both brilliant and necessary.
Anyhow, I look forward to more details on the game. Should be a new trailer in a couple weeks!
* ... unlike in other games where you can't negotiate because negotiation is hard to program, bro
Last year, around the time I posted about Resident Evil 4 (about 5 posts below this one ha ha), Capcom put out a trailer for Resident Evil 5. If you follow games at all, you might remember the localized shitstorms that popped up all over the internet when people attempted to discuss the racial elements of the trailer, which depicts a white dude shooting and kicking a lot of black dudes along with some fuzzy all-purpose justification monologuing like "I've got a job to do, and I'm gonna see it through." Here's the thing itself:
Wherever the trailer was mentioned, the discussion that appeared was angry and useless. Despite the game industry's size, it is still the redheaded stepchild of entertainment, the one that moralizing dipshit politicians are most eager to scapegoat. We've seen it with everything from Doom to GTA for violence, and Mass Effect taught us that supermild sex scenes on a TV are okay unless the TV is outputting video from an Xbox 360. These folks are sick to death of legislators who pin blame on games because they're too cowardly to blame the bad parents whose votes they need, and scared of having gaming dragged through yet another media circus, so they're disposed to shut down any conversation of this sort with meme-laced vitriol ("instant fail" "you just lost all credibility" etc).
Also these are disproportionately (though not uniformly) privileged suburban white kids who cope with the subtleties of race relations by ignoring them. So now every one of these commenters is not only telling the others to SHUT UP, but they're secretly telling themselves to SHUT UP. Not only do they not want to talk about it, they don't want to think about it.
In trying (and partially succeeding) to find some commentary on the issue more mature than accusations of reverse racism, I encountered the term "functionally racist" for the first time, and failed completely to understand it. I think I understand it now, but I also think that it is a dumb term (basically, it means things which have effects similar to racist things, or are indistinguishable from racism when intent is not considered). I understand the motivation to latch these legitimate grievances onto a word as powerful as "racism," but "racism" is defined ideologically. Racism is discrimination based on race, not discrimination that happens to correlate strongly with race, and racist people are people that discriminate based on race, not people that discriminate based on other factors.
For example, there were people that opposed the recent immigration reform because, deep down, Latinos make them uncomfortable, and there were people that opposed immigration for other, completely legitimate reasons (worries about the effects of the guest worker program on poorer Americans of all races, for example -- you can argue whether that worry is well founded, but as long as it is sincere, it doesn't matter). It's unfortunate that the racists in the first case can conceal themselves in the rhetoric of the second case, but I do not think it is right to describe all of these positions as "functionally racist" just to make sure you've snared them all. I know "racist" is a really attractive weapon in the Butter Battle Book meme wars for the American psyche. That doesn't mean you should use it.
Anyhow, I don't think the Resident Evil 5 trailer is racist, functionally or otherwise. I do understand that a widely distributed video clip of a brawny, corn-fed white dude shooting scrawny, open-mouthed black dudes in a shanty town makes people uncomfortable -- I just don't think "racist" is the word for it, because I don't think it indicates that the game or trailer's creators are racist. That there are unemployed, moonshine-chugalugging cavemen in West Virginia and Kentucky who are buying a 360 for this game because they want to simulate killing black people is, well, irrelevant to the question of whether RE5 is racist. Racially insensitive, hell yes. And that is worth talking about.
I understand why they set the game in Africa. The staleness of the early games' smalltown America was of course the motivation in moving the games abroad, first to rural Europe for RE4. And producer Jun Takeuchi has said that he wanted to explore the origins of the RE zombie virus (which does make sense given series archvillain Wesker's established goals), so a move to Africa (home to the two scariest diseases to emerge in my lifetime: innards-liquefying ebola and persistent, unstoppable HIV/AIDS) is reasonable. Casting a character from an earlier RE game in the lead is also reasonable, on its own, given that most of the RE games draw from the same tiny stable of protagonists (RE4's Leon had previously appeared in RE2, for example).
Now, given that Chris Redfield, more than any other RE character, looks like a corn-fed, bluetooth headset-wearing Superman, these two things together probably should have given Capcom pause, and I bet they did give Capcom USA pause. As Japan is the maybe the most racially homogeneous/isolated of the industrialized nations (... Iceland?), it's plausible that this shit really just did not occur to anybody involved in the process until Capcom USA's PR department took a look at it and thought "oh shit." I don't think Capcom has done anything wrong. I think they have done something stupid.
The Guy Whitey Corngood Versus the Negro Hordes aspect of the game is easy to explain and hard to justify, but I've also seen some disgust or disappointment at the decision to set the game in a shanty town, and understanding why the game is set in a shanty town was actually my motivation for writing this post in the first place, so:
What makes zombies scary is their jealousy (they want you to be dead like them), their steadfastness (you cannot negotiate with zombies because they are zombies*), and their multitudes. They cannot be stopped with anything but bullets, they outnumber your bullets, and they are everywhere you turn. The non-negotiability of enemies has been with us since Space Invaders, and RE4's ammo rationing is so perfect as to be exquisite, so the way forward is in not knowing where the next zombie threat will appear.
The earlier RE games, from what I played of RE1 and what I've seen in footage of the others, seem much more spatially confined than RE4's village environment. Confinement is unnerving at first, but RE4's open spaces are even scarier, especially with RE4's move of the camera perspective from the omnicient (overhead) to the personal (over Leon's shoulder). You can hear that chainsaw, but you can't see it. It might be behind you, or just around that bend, or really anywhere except where you're looking right now. RE4 effectively dovetails fear of the unseen with fear of the undead, without resorting to wishy-washy bullshit like ghosts, by limiting your perspective and moving you into open environments. It understands that not knowing is scary.
It also, unfortunately, means that a lot of time is spent in daylight, where zombies in front of you are plainly visible. So how do you reconcile the fear of open spaces with the fear of not being able to see? Well, with night, sure, and night falls in the second chapter of Resident Evil 4, but if daylight is not scary and night is, we have to choose between fear and variety. Instead, RE5's creators realized that extremely bright light is just as useless to the human eye as darkness, and the game's big gimmick relative to RE4 seems to be the temporary blindness associated with moving from light places to dark and vice versa. So the game has to be moved somewhere very, very bright with unlit interiors, so that the player is moving back and forth, triggering the temporary blindness and momentarily unable to see the damn zombies. A desert shanty town. It's both brilliant and necessary.
Anyhow, I look forward to more details on the game. Should be a new trailer in a couple weeks!
* ... unlike in other games where you can't negotiate because negotiation is hard to program, bro
Thursday, May 15, 2008
AA Tbl 4E?
I signed up for the beta of TinEye, an image search engine, based on this graphic explanation of what it does. There was a week and a half between signing up and being accepted into the beta, so I apologize if my enthusiasm has waned somewhat. What it seems good at is finding the un-Photoshopped versions of Photoshopped things, or finding versions of a watermarked image with the watermark removed, or finding out where a picture of or by you is being hosted without your permission.
So far I haven't accomplished much. I found the worldly owl to your left. Also found a variant with slant eyes, buck teeth, a rice paddy hat, and the caption "O RRY?" That one I decided not to post.
What I did not find when conducting my ORLY examination was the QUITE RLY owl, which is more than a little disappointing.
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