Looking Past the Screen

Wilfred S1 Ep1: Happiness

2011-07-01T19:32:00.001-07:00

While it is hardly high concept in this day and age to have a guy in the middle of an everyman's existential crisis to befriend a guy in an animal suit, there is something subversive about Wilfred. This feeling goes beyond the all the sight gags the series got out of the way tonight with Jason Gann in his dog get up humping women and kissing Elijah Wood on the mouth toward the show's hinting that Wilfred might be less of a force of good and more of just pure chaos.

The show opens on the fairly boring note of Wood's character, Ryan trying to kill himself with a pill overdose. Of course, it fails, (We find out later his OBGYN sister only prescribed him sugar pills.) but he is immediately asked by the hot neighbor, Jenna (Fiona Gubelmann), to watch her dog. This first scene of confusion between Wilfred and Ryan is thankfully short-lived, leaving the rest of the episode time to deal with Ryan's first steps toward taking control of his life. Mostly this means breaking into a loud neighbor's house to steal his weed plants, pooping in that neighbor's boots, and eventually turning down the job his sister got him in an office at her hospital. In all Ryan ends the episode celebrating his new found freedom without knowing much of where to go.

It will be interesting to see where exactly the show is willing to go. At this point the writing is sharp enough to keep everyone who saw it watching, but outside of a concept and awesome leads the show doesn't seem very sure of itself. Mostly, I feel like the writing is pretty boring. Wood can squeeze any amount of pathos out of an awkward laugh, but he needs actually interesting things to say the rest of the time. I am sure after next week we will be able to get a better sense of the series's overall writing.

Doctor Who: S6 Ep7, A Good Man Goes to War

2011-06-12T12:06:00.000-07:00

Doctor Who excels at misdirection. This is kind of the fun of the show and why it, sort of like Lost, is so much fun to talk about. How unlike Lost, Doctor Who also has fewer rules that are hard and fast. Ironically, I guess that is why the Doctor is actually a good man. The misdirection of this episode though was on a more meta level though. What we expected to be a plot heavy episode turned out to be one full of simple yet meaningful character moments.

So the Doctor starts the episode totally pissed off and rallying troops to take over Demon's Run, then takes the place over with the kind of flare we are to expect from the Doctor. Of course, they save Amy, but the baby is in another castle. Oh, and once and for all the air is cleared over just how River and Amy is connected.

The plot of the episode fells even more rushed than that summery, but speeding things up like that let them fit in more character moments than they could have otherwise:

--Amy's story about the man who was coming to save her daughter shows us that the same traits that drew her to the Doctor once before are the same traits that she now sees in Rory.

--As the Doctor forced Colonel Manton to tell his troops to "run away" we have a clear moment of insight into just how the Doctor becomes the stuff of myth. To be punished to become "Colonel Run-Away" is like personally. Sure Manton will have small children mocking him in his old age, but he will also become remembered for all of time by that name. The power of such an action is stronger than any weapon known to man.

--As Commander Strax is dying, Rory tries to comfort him telling him that he is a warrior and might make it yet. Strax simply reminds Rory that he is a nurse, not a warrior but has had a good life. It's easy to forget that companions have lives outsides of the TARDIS (other than Martha did any of 10's companions have a steady job?) so this reminder that Rory was also once a nurse is somewhat unexpected. While he must still search the universe to save Amy, he is probably becoming more aware now that his adventures as the Last Centurian are nearing an end. Soon he will be a father for as long as he can be to River and a good husband to Amy. At one time he would have been happy with this, but now it seems like he might have doubts.

--The Doctor loves a good surprise doesn't he? I think this is part of why he left Demon's Run so quickly. He now understands that the events that have been happening to him since he picked up a bow tie have been more closely connected than he might have once expected. Leaving so quickly just means that he sees something that he doesn't want to explain to everyone else just yet.

This was a short recap, but I am busy thinking about video games and art so TV is taking a bit of a break in my head right now. I did write this out on an iPad using Pages though. If anyone knows of a word processor for the iPad that lets me input basic HTML tags more easily let me know.

Doctor Who: S6 Ep6, The Almost People

2011-06-04T12:36:00.001-07:00

Sorry this is a bit late.

I guess if the Flesh had only been in one episode instead of this two-parter I would have felt less like Amy’s sort of pregnancy plot twist wasn’t some kind of total cop out. Maybe this was better than some timey-wimey thing being the cause, but I don’t feel like it. As it is I can just kind of be angry at the Doctor for not being very comforting when he dissolved Flesh-Amy causing Amy to wake up in her pod. Also, after so much talk of saving the Flesh, the Doctor must not count them as living beings if they are still connected to the original person.

Before I can get to the rest of the mostly enjoyable episode, we have to think about Amy’s pregnancy timeline. She must have been knocked up before getting the the invitation to go out to America, but does that mean that she was a ganger then? Or was there a point in the first episode of the series that she was replaced? If this is the case then it has been around 5 or 6 months since the day of the moon, relative to the TARDIS residents. My money is on somewhere within the first episode, if only because I feel like Moffat must have left some kind of small hint to that nature somewhere. It’s really no good to guess at this sort of thing in Doctor Who considering the flexible nature of all of the show’s rules.

The rest of the episode was pretty much as expected. The two Doctors work together to get both sides of the conflict to recognize their common humanity, while the ganger leader Jenny ends up turning into a monster straight out of Silent Hill. This last part is really disheartening considering her blatant manipulation of Rory, who will probably never learn to trust again. I don’t have much to say about this episode. It was poorly written, but once again Matt Smith’s acting kept things afloat.

doctor Who: S6 Ep5, The Rebel Flesh

2011-05-26T07:51:00.000-07:00

Answering another distress call the TARDIS has decided that the Doctor is too worried about Amy’s pregnancy and should instead go focus on some acid miners who live in a monastery and play Dusty Springfield. Getting there they find (what was already established in the cold open) that the people running the place are copying themselves (making “gangers”) in order to perform dangerous acid harvesting tasks. Anyway, after a storm disrupts the power in the castle the copies get disconnected from the originals and everyone starts freaking out because they are suddenly being forced to deal with an existential crisis that was barely even all that edgy when Christopher Nolan made a movie about it.

So, of course, the two sides break off and start trying to kill each other. Everything is rather rushed though, so the only really fun part of the whole episode comes from the Doctor asking for some new shoes since his other ones got eaten up in the acid pool that the TARDIS is in. At least, with the introduction of the Ganger Doctor at the end of the episode we have a setup that might force the next episode take a few twists.

The best thing about this episode was Rory’s sudden gaining of a backbone. After a season and a half of clinging to Amy trying to just be safe, he seems to finally be taking some heroic initiative in trying to help one of the gangers whose plight as someone who has been uploaded into an imperfect body. This is clearly something he can relate to, and it doesn’t hurt that she’s a cute woman who is prone to hugging him and kissing his cheek before telling him how lucky Amy is. This all leads to him actually actively choosing to wonder away from Amy multiple times during the episode. Clearly, he and Amy are going to have a talk about this in the near future.

While many felt that The Curse of the Black Spot was a bit too simple and hokey, it was at least fun. This episode was far from fun as it was too busy just trying to make sure we were all kept up with the situation. This made it feel like the most un-Moffat Who yet, considering even the most complex Moffat episodes are all full of a good fun. Here’s hoping that next week will give us more whimsey since it already has the plot mostly set up.

Oh, and Eye Patch Lady popped up again. This is an even less subtle runner than Bad Wolf. Let’s hope we meet this woman soon.

Doctor Who: S6 Ep4, The Doctor's Wife

2011-05-23T19:52:00.001-07:00

I know that most people who enjoy Doctor Who also love Neal Gaiman, so the two of them coming together for even just one episode seems like a possibility engineered to win over every geeky fan ever. And this week’s episode delivered exactly what we could have expected from such a pairing. For me, as someone who has never really understood the appeal of Gaiman, it was an episode that fully tested my love for the Doctor.

Seeing Matt Smith suddenly become full of joy is something I could have set the stage for every episode of Doctor Who, so starting out with the Doctor getting mail in the form of a floating cube was nothing less than a delight. The sudden revelation that there might be another Time Lord out there could have easily been a return to what looks like the season’s main arc, but instead we are taken to another universe that is attached to ours sort of like a little bubble attached to a bigger soap bubble (but not really). And once we’re there we find that the Doctor and the TARDIS were lured there so that some alien force going by the name House wants to eat the TARDIS.

This is all really promising, but the bubble universe is so Gaiman-y that it becomes almost painful. First, the place is an industrial graveyard. Second, it’s whole population is made up of patchwork people who have no souls and look like faux-steampunk 19th century Grey Gardens residents. Third, the place is basically a big trap. This kind of place pops up so often in Gaiman’s work that I wonder if he didn’t actually wonder into a junkyard inhabited by gypsies in his youth and suffer some kind of horrible trauma. Maybe if I were not so aware of Gaiman’s other work I would be totally simpatico with this, but as is, I spent most of the episode waiting for the wise creature that was going to hold the key to the Doctor’s escape. Luckily that last part turned the TARDIS into that creature, but they had to cut the script down considerably after Gaiman turned it in, so I wager that there was also a talking bird or something that was left the writers’ room floor.

Anyway, the part of the whole script I have to give Gaiman credit for is the dialog between the Doctor and the TARDIS, Sexy (that’s what the Doctor calls her when they are alone after all). Once the zany kissing and biting are done with we get to some awesome dialogue that really works to show us that the Doctor’s love for the TARDIS is not one way. They choose each other to runaway with, and Sexy always makes sure that the Doctor gets to where he needs to go, even if it isn’t exactly where he wants to go sometimes. Why the whole episode was not just the two of them building a TARDIS and flirting is beyond me. The whole ending where they end up in the old control room only to go to the main one when House makes the old one disappear wraps things up almost too quickly, making the Doctor and Sexy’s last words to each other happen so fast that by the time she is a spaceship again, the whole episode feels just too sudden.

Of course, because we are in the middle of a season we still have Amy and Rory around to get locked in the box under House arrest, if you will. Wondering around the halls of the TARDIS the pair keep getting separated and Rory keeps getting old and dying. The whole sequence does show just how wacky the inside of a ship that is bigger on the inside than the outside can be, but it is also even more pointless than the drama the couple is already used to.

As much fun as this episode is, the build up to it was more fun. The Internet had already figured out the whole TARDIS as wife thing so all of the rest of the posturing by Gaiman et al about how they couldn’t talk about the episode made me hope for something more. Years from now if I rewatch this episode I will likely be happier with it because I will be so totally without expectation or as worried about it being a Gaiman story.

Doctor Who: S6 Ep3, The Curse of the Black Spot

2011-05-14T09:31:00.000-07:00

Last week's Doctor Who was fun if only for the few lines about the Doctor's desire for a pirate hat. Most of my original write-up for it has turned into a rant about pirates, and the episode was too boring to recap. In fact, the only thing about this episode that I really enjoyed was the little kid and the way he reflected the Doctor and his companions' childishness. So that is what I will focus on here.

If the whole of last season was about mending the past so that it might finally be possible for Amy (and maybe the Doctor, thanks to River) to grow up, this season has forced everyone to wonder just what it means for everyone else to grow up. For Amy this means knowing that the Doctor might not be able to grow up since he is going to die. For the Doctor this comes to the question of Amy's yes/no pregnancy. In each case the characters are keeping something upsetting about the other's future from each other with a kind of blind hope that they will be able to change the future without ever having to worry the other one with "spoilers."

Of course, this leaves Rory out. Poor Rory. The Boy Who Waited.* His angst this season comes not from a sense that he might not be able to change the future or that the future is in flux, but that he has no control over anything. Because of this, he actually wants to grow up. He wants to know where he stands in the universe, but he wants to do that with Amy (and sort of with the Doctor). In the first two episodes of the season it was all about whether or not his love really loves him no matter how long he stands guard of her. He knows he has her hand, but can never be so sure that he has her heart. This episode it was his inability to do more than hide after Amy's pirate play leaves him cursed. He later can only rely on Amy to save him from drowning. This lack of control is what Rory wants to grow up away from, but can't so long as his best friends are busy pretending to be pirates.**

*Everyone is a boy or girl in Moffat's Who. This is why I constantly doubt that it is the Doctor whom River kills after all he is the "greatest man she has ever known."

**The Doctor's obsession with hats is just the tip of the ice berg in the Doctor's long history of dressing as a very specific part. Just going back so far as the last two Doctors, Nine dressed like a 2000s version of the knight from The Seventh Seal and Ten who dressed like some kind of young private school teacher. However, Eleven seems much more comfortable adopting much more flexible in taking on play roles that can be traded quickly, thus denying himself the need to be sincere and authentic in any absolute way. Amy has picked up on this it seems having found it necessary to put on a jacket and hat before saving the Doctor from the plank. It is also worth noting here that Moffat and his directors seem to be very aware of this considering the extremely long establishing shot of the coat as Amy finds.

This is why River's presence is so wonderful. She is a grownup going the other direction. She is becoming less of a grownup all the time. This both seems appealing to the Doctor and Amy while at the same time is a reminder that they are growing up whether they like it or not simply because they will soon start to become more experienced than River, making their relationship suddenly become reversed. When that day happens, that will be the day I expect Amy and the Doctor will be forced to do what Rory has wanted this whole time, and become a little more mature.

Doctor Who: S6 Ep2, Day of the Moon

2011-05-07T12:17:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the tardiness of this post. I had most of it written out, just never got around to finishing it. Thanks to other stuff this week.

The second part of this season’s opening two parter will either be remembered as the point that Stephen Moffat broke Doctor Who or we will all look back at this episode at the end of summer and realize just how detailed Moffat’s idea of the Doctor really is. No matter what though, we will hopefully remember just how silly this whole episode seems now.

The actual events of the episode start to get silly after a bit. Richard Nixon starts popping up in various locations to make officials stand down which I guess makes as much sense as psychic paper, but is distracting thanks to just how bland Stuart Milligan’s Nixon embodiment is. Canton Delaware on the Doctor’s side, but it doesn’t even seem like he really understands just why he is working almost against his government to help the Doctor. Also, why do they have to act like Amy, Rory, and River are enemies of the state? Any reason why that building the little girl was calling from wasn’t sealed off after they had to escape is beyond me. Oh, and how did the Doctor figure out that whole post-hypnotic suggestion thing?

Putting all of that aside though, the Doctor sends his companions out all around the US (but mostly the Southwest and some random urban local) to see just how vast the Silence’s network really is. Turns out they have been around since the stone age getting humans to build stuff for them, most likely because their hands seem kind of useless. The Doctor seems to have figured out that the Silence give off, even through video media, not just forgetfulness but suggestion. That’s how they are able to control humanity. So the Doctor goes off and puts a transceiver in the Apollo XI going to the moon soon.

Meanwhile, Amy and Canton go in search of the girl, something it seems like someone would have already done (or maybe they did…). So they go to an orphanage, because Moffat knows that orphanages are as scary as bow ties are cool. There they find a guy who has been driven a little mad by having constantly forgotten the Silence who have taken up residence there. After a scary scene in a room with the Silence sleeping upside down on the ceiling, Amy finds a photo of her with child then encounters the little girl in her space suit and is quickly taken by the Silence. Luckily Canton is a little more competent (and actually has a weapon). He shoots a Silence and calls the Doctor for backup. They also find the astronaut suit and Amy’s recorder which is not a little radio for everything she is saying.

Down an Amy, up a Silent and a astronaut suit, Canton takes the wounded creature back to the Doctor’s prison to fix up the alien and record it basically saying that Canton should “kill the Silence on sight.” River and the Doctor find that the suit was some kind of life support unit that could make distress calls to the president of the United States. Rory spends his time uselessly trying to figure out if Amy is using vague insults to talk about him or the Doctor. Why Amy is talking as if someone could hear here…?

Using the chip to find Amy the Doctor shows up shows the Silence that he has just used their own powers to tell every human watching the moon landing to kill the Silence on sight (thanks to the Doctor’s transceiver he couldn’t have known he would use and Canton’s lucky recording). This makes the Silence mad, but River shoots them all as they untie Amy and all get in the TARDIS.

In between all of this there were a few other things going on, but they all amount to the kinds of unanswered questions that the Doctor always seems all too comfortable with. Most crazy is the child. Outside of her life support suit she is wondering the dark alleys of Florida dying. She reveals to a vagrant that she okay though because she can just regenerate, and proceeds to do just that. Considering the Doctor just left her in 1969 he seems to be okay with having no idea why this girl was so important, so it will be a while before the Doctor meets whomever this person is (the Master?).

Amy’s is/isn’t preggers. The Doctor probably made sure to pop a few Allegra after finding this out, since last time that happen it was just allergies. This time it is probably safe to say that everything Amy and Rory have been through have clearly time radiated their reproductive parts so much that this was bound to happen if they tried to have a child.

Rory needs to get over his jealousy of the Doctor. Amy loves him, and seems to only have eyes for him. This has been established.

At this point it seems like River and the Doctor’s Benjamin Button relationship just hit a milestone: their last/first kiss. River has made it pretty clear what the Doctor’s next stop in River’s life will be up to this point, but she didn’t this time, other than that they will be on kissing terms. There can’t be more than just one time period in River’s life that she and the Doctor make out for serious right? Otherwise, the next time the Doctor stops in on River will be just as awkward as that last scene with River was this episode.

Other stuff I expect to see later this season:

The Doctor’s Perfect Prison - There is no way that something so pointless is going to mean so little to Moffat as to just let it sit empty in a government building in 1969.

Hand Recorders - When they weren’t turning Rory into a creep they were useful as a plot device, and serve to echo River’s fate.

The Eye Patch Lady - This one is obvious, but I didn’t mention it before now. While searching the orphanage, Amy sees a woman with an eye patch looking through a slot in a door. When she goes up to look at it, she finds that the door has no slot nor are there andy women with pirate accessories to be found.

The whole episode is a mess. Moffat seems to have been desperate to fit so many little hints and clues into episode that, unlike the whispers of the Silence in the last season, it is too obvious that he is setting something up. During Lost many talked about the long treks across the island as the piece moving that was so vital to making anything happening. Here we are not just seeing every piece move, we are being told in explicit terms that those pieces exist. Unfortunately, we don’t have any reason other than some love of the show to care about the pieces. The little girl may be a Time Lord, but who cares. Same for the Silence’s underground network, Canton, and the Eye Patch Lady. Amy’s pregnancy is something meaningful to me, I guess… I just hope next week is less smug with itself.

Doctor Who: S6 Ep1, The Impossible Astronaut

2011-04-26T19:52:00.000-07:00

I would have had this up sooner, but notes were lost and I don't really have much time for extra rewatches these days. Hopefully, over the next few weeks these posts will happen within the day of the US airing.

Considering the amount of hype that has been generated over this season of Doctor Who (that I am partially responsible for) I was ready to feel let down. Fortunately, I didn't quite feel that way.

Before I start, I should mention that this is the first season of Doctor Who that I have ever watched live. I came to the new series only after David Tennant had left and spent the time during Matt Smith's first season watching the Russell T. Davies era. I have finally caught up though, and have been ready for this season to get started for a long time. Partially because this is one of the few fantasy series that keeps me coming back, and because I think that Steven Moffat's idea of who the Doctor is, is closer to what I want him to be. That is, I want him to be a silly person who is really smart, but still playing with forces he doesn't quite have full control over. The key word there is playing.

Anyway, on to the season opener which has had most of its details hidden under wraps for a while. The things we did know going in were few: the whole Moffat gang is back together, the Silence are the bad guys, and stetsons are cool. So the opening which features the Doctor getting caught under the dress of an English woman whom he was modeling for then escaping from the Tower of London seems a bit random at first, but knowing Moffat it will be important latter. Then Amy and Rory get a letter at their flat inviting them to a picnic, and centuries later River gets a letter too. Quickly after that though we find the Doctor and his current set of companions picnicking in the Southwest US when an astronaut comes out of a lake and kills him. After a sad funeral pyre on the lake (to which the astronaut returned to) the companions quickly see that their invites were numbered and one person is missing. Walking into a 50s themed dinner they quickly discover the last invite belongs to the Doctor, but a Doctor much younger than the one that just got killed. This whole need to keep secrets thing seems at odds with what they want to achieve, but I guess keeping a person's impending/past death from him means that it doesn't become a self-fulfilling kind of thing.

Going back to the TARDIS they convince the Doctor to trust them and go back to 1969 which was a year mentioned by the dead Doctor. This basically amounts to the Doctor acting cross at not being let in on what they know until Amy swears on fish sticks and custard just how important this jump is. So they end up in Nixon's office and find that he has been getting strange phone calls from a girl who can only respond with the cross-streets of where she is (as the Doctor figures out, even without a fez). As this is happening, Amy sees a creepy figure who looks like what Buffy's Gentlemen would look like if they had eaten a bunch of lemons, but quickly forgets him the moment she stops seeing him. Of course, she saw this same thing in the desert right before the Doctor got killed, but forgot then too. She ends us going to the bathroom with a stomach ache and finds the figure there again. After a crazy scene in which Amy snaps a photo of the creature on her phone and watches a woman basically perform a kind of amnesiac slapstick before getting blown up she runs out of the bathroom forgetting the whole thing.

So the Doctor, his companions, and a CIA agent who in the future brings the gas to the picnic to light the pyre hop in the TARDIS and go to Florida where they find a place full of creepy and sticky alien technology. They all then split up because that's exactly what you do in situations like this. River goes down a manhole and finds a bunch of Silence but comes back up saying nothing was there. She then goes back down with Rory sent down with her at the Doctor's suggestion. They end up finding a bunch of ancient caves that seem to basically be all over Earth, yet no one seems to notice them. Eventually, they find a room with one of those control rooms that was on the second floor in "The Lodger." River touches something and makes an alarm go off. Rory sees the Silence but when he turns around to tell River he forgets. Very quickly after we hear noises that sound like the Silence might have gotten to River and Rory.

Meanwhile, our CIA agent, Canton Delaware, has wonder off and yelps out. Luckily, Amy is trying to give the Doctor some big news as this happens. Standing over Delaware's unconscious body, Amy tells the Doctor she is pregnant. Suddenly the astronaut appears again and lifts her mask to show that she is a child in the large suit. Amy's maternal instincts kick in and she shoots at the girl thinking this might save the Doctor in the future.

One of my favorite Moffat themes is at the heart of the Silence, the use of our objectifying gaze and the gaze act's production of memory. Last season was filled with this theme, both in Amy who was made overtly sexy and in the baddies. Prisoner Zero made it difficult to actually look at it, and when you did it would take another form preventing direct gaze. The Angels had to be constantly looked at, and very literally objectified, in order to keep them from attacking. Even the Daleks last season needed to be named in order to survive. Now though, we have something even scarier in the Silence. A thing that which can not only slip out of our gaze, but also out of our memory, even without a crack. I want to leave off this thought here until after next week's episode so I can hopefully talk about the Silence in more detail.

As a bit of a side note though, this fear makes the Silence make sense thematically with the American Southwest where the show's overhyped first act took place. The most complex monsters to come from that area are the Greys. These creatures, like the Silence watch us quietly, and if we ever see them the experience usually comes with the sensation of lost time. They Greys are also the ones that supposedly crashed at Roswell in 1949, an event that has become more about the need for the surfacing of institutional memories within the government over any sort of public memory to legitimize it. All of these notions tie very closely to the Doctor as a friendly alien who also controls time. In other words, I would be willing to bet that the Southwest will be coming back as a meaningful setting later this season.

Photography, Death, and Memory

2010-10-27T11:06:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine made this video for a class we are in. It is a good summation of a lot of ideas from the class. I cannot recommend it more highly.

Expanding on iTunes

2010-10-14T12:22:00.000-07:00

iTunes started life as one of those little programs that was made to let you rip your CDs and listen to your music via your computer. As an app it was pretty quant back in the day. However, with its purchase by Apple and its pairing with the iPod the app suddenly became useful and with great meaning. Then the iTunes Store opened and that made sense. Why bother buying physical if you are just going to rip anyway?

However soon the iTunes Store began offering movies, TV shows, and apps for iPods and iPhones! Of course, if you are going to buy something in the iTunes Store it is only logical that the iTunes app be where you access them. Right?

Well, with the newest section of the library, Books (which has a whole separate app, iBooks, on the iOS) I am pretty fed up with iTunes being such a catch-all. So I propose some kind of closely knit set of apps in OS X that might best be called the iLibrary.

(It is either this or overhaul iTunes into some kind of iMedia program that melts in iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD. That would be a bad idea for many reasons, including the before mentioned bloat of the app. Of course, they don't want to alienate Windows users.)

The iLibrary Apps:

iTunes - Has your music, podcasts, audio books, ringtones, (better than now) streaming radio stations, and maybe even music videos.

iVideos - Has your movies, TV shows, music videos, and has a robust Internet video viewer that can let easily watch and download videos from YouTube and other sites.

iPhoto - Like it is now, but with a less odd library system and a more full integration into my life. Yeah, I use it now, but only because it is there. Most of the time it seems like Finder's abandoned child/frame.

iBooks - Can store any form of text document from .doc to .PDF to any of those other crazy ones AND it can read most of them so that you could theoretically search for specific passages within documents. It would also be able to provide you with bookmarks, highlighting, personal side notes, and other meta-editing. I would also hope that Apple might be able to introduce a new ebook open standard that puts these sorts meta-edits into a common file type.

iApps - Where you iOS apps are. I would hope that pretty soon we can run iOS apps across platforms from the iPhone to the iPad to OS X. This is an off the wall prediction, but I don't feel like it is too crazy.

iKnow - This is only kind of silly. Redo the Address Book app and turn it into something more socially connected. Connect Twitter, Facebook, etc to make my contacts more dynamic and useful.

Each of these would have a permanent app in iOS. Because we would be used to the apps being separate on our computers it would stop being so jarring to find that I have to close my iPod app and find my iBooks app to read a book then go back to my iPod app to watch a movie. Considering that all of this media is in one central library app right now does anyone else find this annoying?

From here the "iLibrary Apps" would include a number of editing and creation apps that should do more than the quick adjustments that might be around in the storage and meta-data management apps.

They would also be able to easily interact with the media libraries that our computers seem to be becoming more and more these days, at least if you are a Mac user. They would also be easily integrated into both iOS and OS X as apps both places.

iBand - Keeps the usefulness of GarageBand, but also can provide a simpler interface for people just wanting to make ringtones or to edit down any other .mp3. This will give GarageBand the respect it deserves while at the same time eliminating the need to hunt for Lifehacker articles on how to make a ringtone every time T.I. drops another single.

iMovie - It exists now in both desktop and iOS form and is actually pretty good for what it does. If Apple just keeps these apps up to snuff they will stay useful to people like me who just need to edit simple raw video.

iProgram - Apple should buy out GameSalad and turn it into a native app. I think we have reached the point where Apple can loosen its stranglehold on its apps and the AppStore. This would also encourage Apple and larger programers to keep their own products fresh.

We also need something that deals directly with the settings on our Apple gear:

iDevice - Directly reads and deals with any iDevice connected to the computer. Looks like iTunes is sort of doing this right now with AirPlay, but this is more. Here you will edit your iDevice's settings (be it pod, pad, or phone), manage what is stored on it, etc. No more having to go to iPhoto if I want to put any photos from the device onto my main library. It can just do it. Also, I should be able to use it as a kind of flash drive, gotdangit.

While I am expecting some major iOS integration into 10.7 (Lion?) I would like to see these things added in as well. We are still several years away from OS 11 which I can only see merging together OS X and iOS much more fully, but until then these updates to the core functions of the Apple software could make the entire product line into some much more functional.

The Age of Deep Mystery

2010-08-19T14:33:00.000-07:00

Today we feel so smart. We know how brain chemistry effects our desire for things like gambling or why companies give us choice in our pick of spaghetti sauces even if it makes us all crazy. We are always on the lookout for that Nash equilibrium. Min/Maxing is not just limited to RPG players any more. We are cracking the secrets of ourselves. We are finding out just how we all tick and how to tweak ourselves to get what we want out of life.

This is all mostly a process of demystifying our lives. By figuring out all these little things so we can profit from them, or at least be aware of them, we are working toward a kind of understanding of the world, but this is not just some kind of modern age enlightenment.

With every look at just what might sum us up we always admit there is a wall. This wall comes in many forms. We can't see that far out. We do not know how to directly observe that. There is no pattern in the noise. We can't observe its spin and position at the same time. In every case it is the same. There is a point where the universe becomes unknowable.

Most of the time this unknowableness is acceptable. We have already found the practical answers to things like sickness or marketing. Because of this, these are the things we romanticize now. Just think, we have cracked how evolution works, but we still have no idea how cells are able to make the proteins they need to survive. It's a random process. Not something we flick a switch on. This is not just beautiful to us, it is the way we find beauty in the world.

This mode of thinking is drastically different than any other way of thinking before. The thinking that there is a wall to what we know and no matter if we break through that wall in our knowledge there will only be another wall is unique. The Enlightenment could not predict no end to these walls. The Romantics were busy building walls. Einstein hated that this was suggested by his ideas. The only people who could have seen this were those who just assumed it was turtles all the way down.

The fundamental problem of our times is coping with this. How do we accept that there is no base to the world? If there is always going to be something we don't have the ability to figure out, then does that mean we have to have some kind of spirituality? Organized religion has yet to provide any kind of way of thinking that doesn't blatantly ignore this. Does this mean that not even God is immune to this fear?

Scott Pilgrim vs. Video Game Logic

2010-08-05T11:37:00.000-07:00

If there is one thing that should be in more movies, it is 8-bit sound effects. While likely less realistic, they are strangely effective at communicating abstract sounds. That said, here is my review of the movie.

Scott Pilgrim is not a movie about a guy trying to win over a girl. It is about a relationship between the guy and a girl, as told from his perspective. In Scott's case that perspective is something of a guy that that recent NYT article was talking about. He is self-centered, disconnected from any relationship that does not seem to contribute to making himself better, and generally a sweet but asshole-ish dude. Also, he clearly was a child of the late 80s with constant thinking in terms of Video Game Logic. This VGL is actually very important to the movie so lets talk about that.

As a disclaimer, I have not read past the second book in the series of comics. I know this makes me a bad nerd. Oh well, I got distracted watching Doctor Who or something…

VGL was first named for me as a bunch of my friends and I were playing the XBOX game Ninja Gaiden. A remake of a beloved NES game, Ninja Gaiden was pretty awesome but used a seemingly strange way of telling us if a door could be opened or not. It had a red or green light. These sort of thing might have worked if the level was some sort of industrial site, but we were on a kind of passenger ship. And the lights were HUGE. In real life these lights would never exist, but here they were. From there on my friends and I began to notice all sorts of things that made perfect sense in video games, but not in real life. These include but are not limited to total easy changes in jump momentum, wondering into people's homes in strange small villages, and one use keys. All of these things would be questionable in many ways if the game space was the real world, but in the Mushroom Kingdom you just accept it and move on.

Scott has a bunch of what might be considered non-diegetic (to anyone but him at least) concepts like character stats, hit counters, "vs" displays, points, and even scene title cards. In VGL these are simply a part of playing the game. Mario does not see the timer that we do that forces him to finish a level quickly. That is just something we know about, thus non-diegetic or outside of Mario's world, but still a part of the game as a whole. These are unfortunately the only things that most people seem to be focusing on when it comes to the gamic influences on the movie as a whole.

Instead, I want to focus on why anyone would join together to create a League of Evil Exes to prevent Ramona (and Scott) from being free from the past's grasp. To this, I propose, that the League is nothing more than another projection of Scott's as he dates and gets to know Ramona. VGL then can become what is truly is, an easy oversimplification of the world in order to better make sense of it. After all, we have to simplify the world in video games because of things like graphics and simply user mechanics. It is for our sake that we don't have to manage every key we find or have a fight staged with health meters. Scott just takes it one step further. Each time a bump comes in his relationship with Ramona, Scott sees it as tied to a past trauma of an (evil) ex who he must defeat in order to get closer to Ramona and produce a sort of fairy-tale romance. The fights with her exes, like the applause in one scene are all in Scott's head.

This introduces a concept played up this summer by the last scene Christopher Nolan's Inception, but seems rarely brought up if not made explicit: the unreliable narrator. While there at first seems to be a omnipotent third-person narrator, maybe The Voice as played by Bill Hader, visual cues of everything revolving around Scott, the applause scene, and the lack of any subject of conversation but Scott all suggest that this whole thing is from Scott's view only. This is not that bold to suggest. However, we cannot trust Scott to not inflate his own story. Especially when even the version of himself he is presenting is so untrustworthy! The movie can then only be seen as what this shallow and kind of selfish dude understood his relationship to be.

This is kind of disturbing because this actually paints the very crowd it is meant to appeal to as a bunch of people who see relationship baggage as bosses on some quest to get laid or fall in love or something. Seriously, is coming to accept that a new partner was a school bully, a bit too ready to dump someone, bi-curious, or still kind of mad for a former lover so hard that we have to think about these things as personified forms that we can beat until they explode into bus fare?

Even the last "fight" between Scott and "Nega Scott" was nothing more than Scott putting off a confrontation with a part of himself that he simply doesn't see as something he needs to deal with. Going to brunch with a dark part of yourself is nothing more than saying that you are going to wake up hung over some time soon.

This Scott-sided view limits our ability to have any absolute understanding of the relationships or girls in them. Ramona and Knives overlap for Scott much longer than I think Scott, our narrator, lets on. Considering the way that time seems to skip forward throughout the movie, this should not be a shock. This would definitely explain and even validate the extreme reactions of the women when the find this out. This is important to consider because it would also serve to explain why Knives felt so totally wronged and why Scott ended up feeling that he had cheated on both of them.

Individually, both girls are clearly not ever remotely understood by Scott. Knives is constantly seen as only a silly love-struck teenage girl with a crush and a single minded desire to have Scott back. While it seems likely that Knives did hold a grudge against Ramona, it is never totally easy to assume that any of her other actions are simply to get Scott back. After all, she is still dense enough to talk nothing but good things about Scott's big ex in front of him. That seems like something that a girl out to win back a boy would try to avoid. While it might make him sad enough to return to you, it could also just piss him off. By the end of the movie it is clear that Knives might still like Scott, but has moved on to the wider social life he introduced her to.

Ramona is THE girl with a past. Being with Scott is in many ways totally escapist for her, just like moving to Canada and getting a job as a delivery girl.* It is clear that by the movie's end she is not over her exes. They may be coins to Scott, but to her they still exist as memories of times that have a version of her that she does not like any more. Her hope was that by going someplace new she could simply bottle those memories, but of course they had to come out for Scott to deal with. Besides feeling naive for thinking she could run away from the past, at the end of the movie she is nothing but embarrassed for having shown just who she once was to Scott. Her fights were only just beginning.

*The delivery profession is clearly seen as the lowest non-blue collar job out there. This is why Fry and the rest of the cast on Futurama are so easily depicted as sad and lonely people. They are just working for a delivery service. Yeah, it is to other planets, but still all they do is take packages across the galaxy, return to Earth, and watch TV. Likewise Ramona makes her job seem cool because she rollerblades while wearing goggles, but that is just a superficial look to make the job seem less like something that requires no skill.

The video game logic Scott applies to these girls prevents him from ever seeing these romantic interests as dynamic characters who have more complexity to them than just their color pallet changes (hair dyes). Accepting all this, we are able to see that the movie is not anti-feminist at a core level, but simply depicts them all as Scott's pixilated versions of themselves.

These are not totally naturalistic assumptions to make about a movie. This is why the movie was a box office flop. However, I expect that in the very near future as video game logic becomes more common Scott Pilgrim will become a classic.

Essays by Wallace Shawn

2010-01-14T17:42:00.000-08:00

I got this as a Christmas present from my lovely girlfriend so I felt like I should write a review, just to show how much the gift has gotten in my head.

Wallace Shawn is a name whose face and nasally voice is likely very familiar to us to the point that whenever he shows up in some movie or TV show we all say, "Hey, its that guy, you know, [insert role and movie he was in]!" Before reading this I didn't realize that his most interesting reasons for being known were in his own writings as a playwright and essayist. This role as a New York creative type is given voice in his book Essays.

A compilation of fifteen previously published works including two interviews, dating from 1985 but mostly writing in the early part of the 2000s, the book is broken into two parts. In part one, Reality, Shawn is trying to come to terms with the end of the American century and his feelings on his own affluence. Both thoughts mingle together to the point of eventually becoming one as in the book's third essay "Morality." The second part, Dream-World, questions just how and why we access art in this day and age. While less seemingly focused compared to the first part these last few essays provide the breadcrumbs of thoughts that if reflected on will lead us into a deep thicket of the mind that Shawn seems content to frolic in.

The book is kind of a downer, overall. It would be hard for me to like Shawn if I did not already relate to him in some way. He is not afraid to bring up (albeit in a tame way) the suffering in Africa or the Middle East. It is a quick read, however, that I will likely pick up again from time to time knowing that I will likely find something new.

Mailbag

2009-10-22T08:08:00.000-07:00

Due to the recent comeback of the blog I have received many questions that I will try to answer now.

Dear FJohn,

I love singing karaoke. I could probably even tell you which bars have karaoke night all over NYC every day of the week. My only problem is that the list of songs I enjoy singing is getting a bit tired. I love to sing Michael Jackson and other pop. Would you mind suggesting a few songs for me.
Someone Interesting Needs Guidance

SING,

I would recommend looking to expand outside of your basic genre. Try some Elvis Presley or Roy Orbison. Even better just jump to country for a night or two. Most country songs are about drinking so pick one that really captures how you feel you are drinking that night. If you are singing in bars that only do karaoke every so often this is a surefire way to get people to dig you getting up on stage.

I would also avoid any kind of ballad. This seems like a good idea because they are often songs that most people know, but if your songs hit the 3 minute mark no one wants to know you.

Dear FJohn,

My roommates and I are in a heated debate. Which is better for you cake batter or brownie batter? I say cake but they tell me brownie. Which is it?
Batter Eating Teenager

BET,

It is unwise to eat batter of any kind in large quantities, even if you don't add eggs. Batter is made up of a lot of baking chemicals that are made to create the sort of sponginess of both cake and brownies. During the baking process these chemicals are reacted and become good to eat without causing gastrointestinal problems.

That said, brownies do have a slightly lesser amount of most of these chemicals so I guess they are "better" for you. But you really should just cook them both (preferably before you get baked yourself).

FJohn,

I love your blog. I just have a quick question.

I am in a relationship with my boss's daughter right now. He was my boss before I was dating her so it isn't like he got me a job through some kind of nepotism. I have been a pretty good boyfriend and a great employee, however I am pretty sure my girlfriend has been cheating on me for the last few weeks, and is planing on dumping me.

Her dad, my boss, is a nice enough guy, but it is unlikely that he would be willing to give me the time of day if it went south with his daughter.

I really need this job. It is a stable stepping stone toward my dream job and would hate to have to start over again somewhere else. What can I do?
Dipped In Company Ink

DICI,

You don't say if you have confronted your girlfriend with these heavy allegations yet. This should be the first thing you do. Try not to get too defensive or mean about it. Just tell her that it seems like she wants out of your relationship, and you are willing let it end peacefully if she makes it clear to her dad that you and her ended on good terms.

Parents more than anyone know how difficult it is to be a major part of their children's lives. This is sort of the way that most parents in this day and age bond with their children's significant others. "Yeah, when Soandso was growing up she wasn't a morning person ether." So long as you haven't hurt his daughter he will be understanding of what happen.

There you have it. If you have any questions please send them to fjohnrickert [at] gmail [dot] com.

Roommates as Citizens

2009-10-21T10:32:00.000-07:00

I must be a crazy liberal or something. I constantly feel that individual citizens deserve privacy and respect inside their homes. I do, however, feel that a well regulated public sphere is needed out in the world where people interact with each other everyday.

I feel this way because I live with roommates.

For the better part of the last few years I have shared living spaces with people who I am in no way related or barely know. For the most part these sorts of situations are not too bad. There is always some common ground for us to connect on, and because we all have been students, we really don't have to interact with each other that much.

When I am not interacting with my roommates, it is because they are usually in their bedrooms with the doors shut. I do not go in their rooms unless I am trying to be friendly or inform them of something going on outside that is of relevance to them. This is because I do not care what they are doing in there, from watching TV to any number of unspeakable things. As long as they are being fairly quiet and not causing any kind of hindrance or annoyance to me or anyone else they can turn their rooms into altars to Cthulhu for all I care.

The problems between roommates come in then when dealing with the idea of common spaces: the kitchen, the bathroom, and the living room. Each of these we all use in close to equal amounts, or at least in amounts that are too close to really be able to measure. But we cannot treat these places like we treat our rooms. If I leave a dirty dish in the sink I am not the only one who has to deal with that dish. The time cost to me of cleaning it after I dirty it might be more than if I waited until the next morning to clean it, but this ignores extrenalities. The cost of waiting to clean a dish is also shared by the rest of the roommates, who likely get less than zero benefits from it being dirty. This less than zero comes from having to clean another's mess or worse yet (in extreme cases) not feeling as if the kitchen is at all usable to them.

This creates a benefit deficit for the entire apartment!

In a political system, to solve this problem individuals and companies are denied by law to take the option that creates the most cost to the public. This is why littering has a fine. This changes the decision to litter from one of little cost to the bug to one of a much higher cost than finding a trash can.

To solve this in an apartment, the person who makes a dirty dish must not be allowed to deviate from a reasonable amount of time between making a mess and cleaning it us. This means that it is understandable that the a meal should be enjoyed warm or that the stove must cool down before being cleaned, but beyond the time of these mostly practical things cleaning should be done.

Sure there are roommate contracts and personal agreements that can be made, but who is going to follow these things? The problem here in an apartment is what is lacking from a political system, enforcement. The trick to regulating room mates is something that has yet to really be mastered by anyone without getting too far over the top in terms of the costs of the enforcement apparatus. There are no cops, no fines, and no good punishments for causing problems in the public sphere. Instead individuals must become vigilantes, reminding everyone to do their part in keeping the public spaces clean. No one likes this role though. It makes you annoying and it shouldn't fall to you to tell a roommate that what they are doing is a bad thing.

So this is where I am. Looking for some kind of legal enforcer for my apartment. It must be cheap, and not be the responsibility of just one person. By this I mean that it must also enforce its own enforcements by making sure people not only stay within the system but also help to maintain the system.

I will let you know when I have the answer.

Ironically a Post on Twitter

2009-01-27T15:39:00.000-08:00

Since I am forcing a bunch of students to write blogs for my own personal amusement, I figured I might as well make one myself.

Today I saw my girlfriend, went to class and made smalltalk with the people there, but spent most of my day sitting at my computer reading the news and other such things. Funny thing is that I feel like I have been sitting with a bunch of people.

Thanks to Twitter I am connected to so many people. For example, my co-TA Whit and I have probably never been closer since we started twittering. Likewise, there are many people whom I know but rarely see in person whom I feel like I know way too well thanks to Twitter. On top of this I am in very close contact with some of my favorite writers, bloggers, and artists who all let me into their lives with every twitter they make.

To be so close to these all these people is amazing, but the most interesting thing about it all is not what Wil Wheaton had for breakfast that day, but that we are all part of the same culture.

We are all feeling the same things for the deaths of people we cared about, for the little news articles that move the world slightly, and for everything else that we are all seeing and experiencing all at once. it is sort of like if the Borg were able to have individuality and share their thoughts all at the same time.

I was never truly convinced of all the Web 2.0 technologies that we had before, but Twitter is showing just one, very simple, way in which we are all connected. This feeling is no where for me in blogs or social network sites or anywhere else on the Web.

This is because twittering is spontaneous for all of us. It isn't edited beyond the moment it is written. Few twitters are worth reading too far into the past as well. Each twitter is just like so much of our lives, seemingly unimportant unless watched continuously. And as we follow each other we begin to develop a deep sense of community that is not intrusive, but totally comforting.

I'm Just Sayin

2008-12-07T11:41:00.000-08:00

My Honors thesis has been justified or shown to be worth nothing by three New York hipsters.

Being Thankful

2008-11-27T21:40:00.000-08:00

Life is pretty good. I have good family, good friends, and good food. I also had a $15 beer today. Life is pretty much wonderful.

Thanks to all who made it so.

This was an okay Monday.

2008-11-24T21:58:00.000-08:00

I have a little more work to do before I can take most of tomorrow off, so I have to save my writing for places were I get grades.

- I presented the presentation over Saudi Arabia today. For having been so quickly put together it came out quite well.

- I went to the Bear's Den twice today. Once I had a few drinks before my afternoon class. The second time I had a few more drinks right after my afternoon class. There is just a really good felling about drinking with friends that I forget sometimes.

- I saw a foreign film. It was pretty good. Not depressing like so many others.

- I totally disagree with Donna's and Hannah's score for HIMYM tonight. While I might be willing to give it a low B, I don't see how anyone could give it an A. There was something about the pacing of it tonight that just didn't feel right, but I guess that was just me.

Late Night, Early Morning

2008-11-23T21:23:00.000-08:00

I often debate with myself over which I should choose. One one side there is the idea of staying up to get things done, but the other side of just sleeping so that I won't be distracted by being tired also seems swell.

This never ends well. No matter what happens I will sleep at some point and I will get the work done. Just whether or not I get done when I wanted to is the thing.

To all of this I decide often that it is just as well that I sleep. At least then I will not have to have the debate anymore because that won't be an option.

Getting Cold Enough?

2008-11-22T21:43:00.000-08:00

I always find that my sinuses seem to be much more sensitive to the temperature than I ever am. This creates a period of two or there weeks in which I am in a constant state of confusion as to why my nose does not want me to get that precious, precious oxygen.

I am pretty sure that this could be fixed if I could just stop changing the temperature of my surroundings. If I could know that going from building to building for class and the temperature for the short dashes between buildings would all just be the same I would be happy to take a more extreme temperature even. Just so long as it is the same.

Playing AMUN

2008-11-21T21:38:00.000-08:00

Today I got to co-chair the Security Council for simulation involving a bunch of high school kids. I will continue to do so tomorrow.

I started doing this a few years ago as a way to make a few extra points in a class on the UN, but then I found that it was basically something that I really enjoy. It is a role playing game that gets the people playing to play as world leaders. The delegates then get to solve the world's problems by using their powers of coercion and compromise with their fellow delegates. Meanwhile, I make sure Robert looks down upon us and sees order.

For me this is the closest I have ever gotten to playing any kind of table top RPG. Mostly this is because I have never really found anyone that shares the same mix of love and ironic disdain for a game like D&D to play with. But, I love the way that you have a group of players all out for themselves but being forced to work together by a powerful force in the Dungeon Master. If done well everyone involved feels pretty good. The players with a bit of luck and skill have conquered the challenge, and the DM has made a fun story that will be remembered by all who got to be a part of it.

With the AMUN this is hard to do. There are so many people playing that compromise is rarely going to lead to action, but there is always the chance that you can get Russia to at least not disagree with what's going on. Or maybe you can get the France and China to but author a bill about Africa. Sure it might not be totally in character, but it can still be rewarding.

Chuck Klosterman and "the illness"

2008-11-20T13:47:00.000-08:00

I was really quite sick last night. So sick that as I lie in bed about to pass out I thought, "I need to blog." But I could not for, you see, I was close to falling apart if I had moved.

Lucky for me Mr. Klosterman had already left the state and I was not being called to attend any kind of events in his honor. I would have gone. I just would have been afraid of passing out or worse.

If anything became clear from his visit, it is that Chuck Klosterman is the most transparent person I can even remotely think of. Everything he says and does, he means. Worse yet, he has probably already written down his feelings about most everything he has experienced. As he was telling a story about his first experience with metal he did not provide any kind of side not, he almost told a story verbatim from his book. Either this is just a mundane story that he has talked about way too much or it is just that he is such a good writer that his written words have not filter.

I did learn from him how to talk about popular culture though. Because we experience each new thing as a part of everything we have seen before we cannot judge anything without bias. This bias is not right or wrong so much as it is simply the baggage that we bring with us from all of our past experiences. This means that we can only talk about things from our own perspective. This turns each of us as selves into part of the dialog itself.

I am also glad that he dislikes Family Guy.

Coffee, Apples, and Clydesdales

2008-11-19T01:25:00.000-08:00

Due to Chuck Klosterman sending me on extended personal rants between me and various people I know, I am forced go to sleep without sending out a proper blog post today.

Tomorrow there will hopefully be a much longer one about my interactions with this Gen X hipster and his views on life, the universe, and everything.

What is there to say?

2008-11-17T21:44:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow I get to meet one of my all time heroes in terms of success in life. As a writer Chuck Klosterman is not really any different than most other Gen X music critics, but when he branches away from here he becomes interesting.

He looks at pop culture as if it can actually tell us something about ourselves, as if it is more than just the fluff we fill our heads with when we aren't being productive. He writes as if we are actually affected by the music we listen to and the movies we see, and all the celebrity gossip that we listen for. Unlike most other people he doesn't seem to make judgment calls on just how good or bad it is.

Part of this has to do with his ability to look at overall ideas hidden in the way we watch YouTube or root for sports. He is trying to be a fan of the culture unlike so many others who try to cut themselves away from extremely personal subjects they talk about.

As such I try to write in a way that he might see as interesting when I write here on this blog. I try to write a blog that lives up to the spirit of the essays in his masterpiece Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. This is an evening blog. This blog is written in the moments before sleep and meant to be understood in context of the world around it.