Recently, I read The Hunger Games. I had heard the books were good and the movie was impending so I decided to get through them now. When I finished them I went to see the movie and was surprised to see that Rue was being played by a black girl¹. Granted, in the book she’s described as having “dark brown skin” so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Maybe it’s my fault for not having superb reading comprehension. Nonetheless, I was surprised and expressing that surprise led me into a back-and-forth on Twitter that resulted in a tweet of mine being retweeted by a few others, likely to demonstrate that I am an ignorant racist fool.

You may question my above remark about requiring “superb reading comprehension” but I think it is a fair assessment of the situation. I don’t know how it works for others, but I don’t think much about the way things look when I am reading books. Most of my dreams are vaguely formed, often with vistas and scenery only there when being directly observed. I can’t speak to how anybody else remembers, or dreams, or visualizes when reading. And I don’t. But others have chosen to when it comes to me. This bothers me.

Rue is described as having dark brown skin. Once. She is compared to another character with dark brown skin shortly afterward. So there are two reference points from which you can visualize her as black. Those came at a point when she is not known to be an important character, so they carried less weight with me. Additionally, when she is otherwise described in the book, she is compared to Katniss’ sister Prim, who is a young blonde white girl. Katniss is frequently reminded of Prim when in the Arena with Rue. If you’ve already successfully internalized that Rue is black, you can take that as a sign that Rue and Prim are similar in behaviour and personality. If you have not yet successfully internalized that fact, it reinforces the idea that Rue is a waifish young white girl.

I don’t think I need to be chastised for missing that fact, and I don’t think I need to be accused of having a racist mind because of it, or lacking in reading comprehension. I know better now, and it will enrich the book should I ever read it again². But the condescension I’ve seen on Twitter and elsewhere is a little galling. Not that this little venting will change anybody’s mind.

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Footnotes

1. Not surprised in the way many racist people on Twitter were surprised, such that it “ruined” the movie for them. I simply noted that I hadn’t pictured Rue as black and moved on with my life. [↩]
2. It’s also possible I would’ve caught the race factor the second time I read the books without seeing the movies; I can’t really speak to that. [↩]

I don’t talk about techy things on this blog too often, primarily because twitter serves as an excellent vent for most of my trivial glib comments about this sort of stuff¹. But I’ve got a thing to say that doesn’t fit into one tweet or even half a dozen tweets.

Big-O Notation lets you analyze algorithmic complexity so you can compare them. O(n) is better than O(n·logn) because as the dataset you’re working with increases the time the algorithm takes grows slower. In general, you don’t have to worry about other factors aside from n because that’s the most important growth factor.

But sometimes, it pays to pay attention to the other factors. An example given to me recently was taking a collection of locations and finding the closest 1000 locations to some other arbitrary location. I suggested calculating the distances for each item — a O(n) procedure — and then sorting the set by those calculated distances, and then selecting the first 1000 items in the sorted list. There are a lot of potential sorting algorithms, but let’s go with a solid general purpose sort, like quicksort or mergesort, that gets you O(n·logn) complexity. So, because the overall complexity inherits from the worst case, the solution has a complexity of O(n·logn).

But this other person offering the problem guided me to another solution that appears simpler at first. Why not go through the unsorted list taking out the smallest item — finding and removing the minimum of a list can be done in O(n) time — 1000 times? With that solution you have an algorithm that runs in 1000·O(n) time, but because you can typically ignore constants in algorithm analysis, that appears to run in O(n) time.

But is that faster? I’m still not sure, but I don’t think it is except in ludicrous scenarios. O(n·logn) is essentially equivalent to 1000·O(n) when logn = 1000. When you’re dealing with a binary algorithm, the log in that circumstance is base 2. To determine the n there you use logarithm properties:

logn = 1000
2logn = 21000
n = 21000

Now, 2¹⁰⁰⁰ is roughly equal to 10³⁰⁰. That’s a 1 followed by 300 zeroes. That is an insane number. Not in the realm of impossible-to-comprehend like Graham’s Number or anything, but it’s still such a massive number that I can’t think of a dataset that would require a collection that large. So yes. Theoretically, as n increases the latter solution will become a better and faster solution. But the circumstances in which the latter solution is worth it are exceedingly unlikely; even when working on massive massive massive datasets². The lesson being³ that looking for clever solutions in an attempt to optimize algorithm runtime is sometimes not really necessary at all.

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Footnotes

1. Also, because I often don’t necessarily have a huge amount of confidence w/r/t my programming prowess. That’s true in this case as well, but I still want to get my thoughts out there. [↩]
2. At least, that’s the way it looks to me. Feel free to correct me in the comments. [↩]
3. Provided somebody doesn’t come along and show me why I’m an idiot and the wrongest person in wrong town. [↩]

First things first: if you’re not watching Alphas you are missing out on a great show. What’s refreshing is that I don’t need to provide any caveats to that. Yes, I’m a science fiction nerd, so I’m more inclined to give these sorts of shows some slack when they underperform. That means I end up watching random mediocre sci-fi because it’s sci-fi. I’m glad to say that in this case, we’ve got a smart sci-fi show that is also genuinely good irrespective of the trappings of its genre.

The finale of this first season — SyFy has already ordered a second season — aired on Monday and it delivered on the promise of so many previous superhero shows with a finale that is explosive not for its action but for its words. Leigh Rosen, played by an inexplicable David Strathairn¹, ends the season with a dramatic action that will spin the story off into exciting and unknown territory that I trust the writers can follow through on. My one fear with the show’s direction is that it might hew to the path of The 4400, whose creator is working in the writer’s room on Alphas, because that show had similar stories to tell, but I think the creative team here is smart enough to resonate with that world without echoing it.

The second thought I wanted to get across here is that the existence of Alphas proves just how ridiculous the people who mock SyFy, or refuse to pronounce the name the way they want, or say the channel’s more interested in putting wrestling on the air than putting out good sci-fi are. This is the sort of show they want to make — technically they want to make this show and have it be a wildly popular and critical hit but let’s not split hairs in this moment of triumph — and when there are people out there who explicitly refuse to watch a show simply because it’s on SyFy, it infuriates me. It infuriated me even before this show was put on the air, but it’s now obviously a stubbornly ignorant position.

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Footnotes

1. I’m so glad he’s doing this show, and I hope that the events of this finale aren’t a way of writing him out of the series barring the occasional guest appearance, but I never would’ve guessed his next move to be a jump to a SyFy series. [↩]

Recently, I’ve been putting down fewer and fewer thoughts on my blog. The biggest reason for this is Twitter lets me throw out quick thoughts and then my pent up thoughts tend to dissipate¹.

With that out of the way, I guess it’s time to talk about Pan Am, the new period drama about a flight crew aboard a Pan Am plane in the 60′s. I’ll be talking obliquely about certain plot points that aren’t obvious based on the short description above, so if you’re wary of spoilers and have yet to watch the premiere, this is where you stop reading.

I really enjoyed the pilot, a lot more than I ever expected to, even when early summaries started talking about the spy subplots, something that would normally guarantee a positive reaction from me². The flashbacks were a clever way of moving the action outside the frame of the plane, and continue to prove that flashbacks are awesome sauce. All the characters felt unique in a way that often doesn’t happen this early in a series run.

And from a purely aesthetic perspective, I loved the look of it. Even if Mad Men weren’t well written, acted, and directed the look and feel of the 60′s would make the show enjoyable, and that is if anything more true of Pan Am. The old school stewardess look is fantastic³, and the sheer pleasure the show exudes when showing a plane boarding is escapism in its own right given the current depressing state of air flight. This was a time when flight was a fancy, and the show excels when it’s selling you on the glamour of it all.

Of course, everything is glamourous at this point. The show is selling itself, so its best foot has been put forward. You’ve got sexy women wearing a fetishistic uniform, the intrigue of cold war espionage, and the hints of intrigue in the characters’ pasts. It all comes together to make a show that is incredibly enjoyable. The question that remains is whether or not the show will follow through on its promise, which is what next week will be all about. I know I’ll be there.

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Footnotes

1. A related reason is that posting those smaller thoughts on this blog wouldn’t look right in its current incarnation, something I’m looking into fixing but it ultimately a fair way away [↩]
2. To be fair, when I did ultimately get to those parts of the story, they were immensely exciting to me. [↩]
3. Maybe it’s for the best that flight attendants can be of any gender, and they no longer have to wear girdles and fit into specific weight to height ratios, but it made for a very pleasant flight. [↩]

There’s a fairly common argument made among Apple fanboys that the difference between Apple and Microsoft is that Microsoft responds to user demands by fulfilling the demand and Apple responds to user demands by fulfilling the underlying demand that the users didn’t even realize they were asking for. It’s a cute way of saying that Apple doesn’t do what you want, it does what you need. On the surface it’s an interesting concept; of course, it’s also one that fails the test of history. No user was asking for the Ribbon UI when Microsoft started integrating it into their interfaces. They came to a decision about the Ribbon UI through extensive user testing but ultimately chose something that they thought answered the underlying needs. Apple doesn’t do user testing. That’s the big difference. Apple doesn’t care about users in the same way, they do things the way they want and expect their user base to follow them or for their new way to lead to new users in numbers that will offset the loss from their existing base. In other words, Apple don’t care, Apple don’t give a shit:

But I’m not here to incite an argument about whether or not Apple cares about their users. I’m more interested in the idea that what a person thinks they want isn’t necessarily what they actually want and how that relates to what’s happening in television right now.

What people who like television want is to pay less and have more control over what and when they watch. Those goals are generally achievable but with caveats that a lot of people don’t really think about. We might want to pay less but that will make our shows cheaper, it will make some shows not exist in the first place.

I’ve already written about the way television works and how the current system of advertising drives most of the financials for the networks, but there’s another side to this equation. The countless cable stations that mostly air syndication repeats that have flooded the market in the past couple decades, the channels that get placed in cable package bundles in annoying distributions that make you purchase five bundles of seven channels each to get the eight channels you really want to watch, are a large part of how cable providers make money as well. Those annoying distribution packages, the ones that force you to buy channels you don’t want or care about to get the ones you do care about, are a way of offsetting costs from expensive channels. This is, as far as I know, a much smaller part of the cost of generating original content, but it still factors into the cost calculus of a lot of the smaller cable channels that do produce original content.

A consequence of making cable options more flexible might be that channels that you really like, that produce shows you really like, stop being bought in generic packages by people who enjoy other channels that you don’t care about. This leads to fewer cable providers supporting that channel and that channel having less money to work with. I’m not necessarily saying this is a good way of socializing the cost of television¹, but this is the way it works now and changing that can have undesirable outcomes. But if you still want to get rid of the annoying lack of flexibility in cable packages² you have to accept the possibility of paying more for some of your preferred viewing. Either that or change your viewing, which brings me to my next point.

Earlier today, Alyssa Rosenberg argued that there should be more shows like Louie. Now I’d love to see more shows like Louie, though if it were the only type of show around — something that would basically have to happen if users get what they currently want³ — I’d have to stop watching television⁴. But Louie is certainly a poster child for a cheap⁵ show that still provides humour and pathos in strong doses, but its system of operation is not one that scales. Louis CK is a true anomaly, and I mean that in the best possible way. He is brilliant and prolific and willing to work cheap; he was offered other show opportunities and turned them down because of the limitations of network input. The only reason his show exists is because he worked for less. The only reason his show exists is because he can construct all these stories and write and film and edit them all on his own. Put simply, Louis CK works harder and better and cheaper than pretty much anyone else, and there aren’t a lot of people with both the inclination and the ability to do the same. Resting our hopes for the future of television on Louie is ultimately foolish.

This race-to-the-bottom mentality of seeking out cheap shows above all reminds me of our current political landscape⁶. Everybody wants the good parts of government, the infrastructure and public resources, without the bad parts, the taxes. Unfortunately, we have to take the good with the bad. It’s true that television can have a different configuration of good and bad, but there will be bad, and I wonder if the people who rail against the backward ways of the cable providers and networks really understand that the new economy they are demanding will fix their existing ills but introduce new ones, ones that are possibly worse. I wonder if they’ve really thought this all through⁷.

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Footnotes

1. As much as I hate Reality Television, I’ve come to accept that without it, there would be many shows that the networks would not be able to afford to make. [↩]
2. This argument also holds for shows that are produced for a specific channel with cheaper shows socializing the cost of the more expensive fare, and is what my earlier piece mostly discussed. [↩]
3. Rosenberg’s piece talks about the stratification of television into super cheap shows like Louie and very expensive affairs subsidized by foreign markets, the latter of which is simply another unsustainable source of funding that will have to be supplanted over time as other nations get the very same options we are having to adjust for now. [↩]
4. Or maybe catch up on the great shows of the past decades that I’ve yet to see. [↩]
5. At $250,000 an episode, it’s basically cheap enough to produce while still making money at the $1 an episode price point that people seem to have decided they won’t go beyond. [↩]
6. Geeze, did I really have to shoehorn politics into this discussion? Looks like. [↩]
7. Spoiler alert: they haven’t. [↩]

Gizmodo, of all sites, published a piece today written by Alyssa Bereznak, a woman who ventured into online dating, specifically OkCupid, and came out with a story¹ about a date with a man who is really good at Magic: The Gathering.

I’m divided on this whole thing. This woman is clearly not interested in nerdy pursuits, but the actual substance of her piece isn’t really about hating nerds, it’s more about the sort of information that gets put in dating profiles. Now, in her particular case, the information she wished was there was about a nerdy pursuit. And it could be argued that the sort of deep passion for any subject that is required to become a World Champion of it can be considered nerdy — car nerds, fitness nerds, politics nerds, et. al. — but you don’t need to unless you are intent on casting this woman as a hater of passionate interests.

Common interests build relationships, and discordant interests contribute to strife, that’s true whether it’s you not liking their interests or vice versa. There are countless shortcuts in the modern world of dating, all of them mildly distasteful when discussed openly and plainly, and if the worst one this woman is guilty of is too hastily deciding that she has nothing in common with this man, then she is hardly outside the norm.

Now, that doesn’t mean she isn’t at least a little deserving of the scorn she’s received today, just not really for the supposed nerd bashing. She published this piece. She “outed” this person, when it would’ve been fairly simple to alter some details and leave certain points vague enough that his particular identity didn’t matter, simply that she felt she had nothing in common with him and felt he should have made his level of involvement with Magic clear in his profile; it would have been a dubious point, and fairly demeaning to “nerdy” pursuits, but it would have been presented with a degree of tact. She chose not to do that, and she should bear the consequences of the very public way in which she disclosed and presented this story, but let’s not turn this into a war on nerds.

It’s perfectly fine not liking someone because you don’t think you have anything in common; it’s marginally acceptable to write a piece about it on an incredibly popular blog; it’s decidedly not OK to include the sort of specific details that she includes. That’s just being a bitch.

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Footnotes

1. You can google it if you like, but I don’t see the need to contribute to its search rank by linking to it. [↩]

Do people actually understand how television is funded? I’m asking this genuinely. I see people commenting online about how ridiculous it is that PVR viewings aren’t accounted for by the Nielsen ratings: first of all, they are they’re just not as highly valued as live viewings; second, the reason they’re not as highly valued is because people watching on PVRs skip commercials. I’m going to say something shockingly obvious just in case there’s someone out there who doesn’t realize it: commercials are the ENTIRE REASON networks care about how many viewers a show gets. They don’t care if you sit down to watch a show, they care that you sit down to watch a show and sit through commercials.

I think I’m one of the few people who has never been bothered by commercials, which means they will not survive as they currently exist, so another method of getting money from the audience needs to be sussed out. And unless people are willing to start paying — and we’re not talking about $0.99 an episode, it would depend on the type of show because one hour dramas and period pieces and sci-fi stuff is more expensive, but given that the biggest shows nowadays pull around 10 million passive viewers, it would probably have to cost somewhere between $5 and $20 per episode to be able to exist from viewer pre-orders — for episodes of a TV show months in advance, with nothing filmed to sell the product even, I don’t see any alternative that will really work.

Buying episodes as they are released is a possible solution, but there are a lot of problems with it. First of all, networks get a lot of the money they need to produce shows from preselling ad time — the reason networks have upfronts is to give the advertisers a sneak peek at what they have airing next year, hoping that the more impressive projects will garner higher ad rates, all of this of course using the previous year’s ratings for any given time slot as the baseline for ad rates — and if we move to a world where the only revenue is from individual episode purchases that revenue stream disappears; second, if the only revenue stream comes from episode purchases/rentals, profits from that would logically be invested into future seasons of those shows, so it’s not at all clear where the money for pilots comes from, and fans of a show would probably complain if their show that “they pay for” suffers budget cuts because nobody watched some other show, which already happens right now, but people don’t connect it as readily; there are other problems related to this, and they’re not that hard to discover if you think about it for a few minutes.

When we talk about adapting to a new online purchasing paradigm, we talk about the music industry and the books industry. Books adapted fairly readily but books have considerably smaller start up costs. I can write a novel in my spare time on a $200 computer. A TV show requires orders of magnitude more capital to put together. An album of music does have a decent investment requirement, though still not anything near what a typical show requires, and the shift to online purchases has effectively killed the album as a piece of art. Musicians still put out albums, but album sales have absolutely plummeted just as singles purchases have skyrocketed, and that’s going to be the unit of work for a musician soon enough. Bands won’t put out albums anymore, they’ll put out songs. They can make money on this I think, but it means a lot of the artistry of putting together an album of music that comes together as a piece greater than its parts will soon be an even more endangered species. This isn’t really possible with television. Some shows can operate without continuity and simply put out episodes as a unit of work, but most shows today offer up some semblance of continuity over the course of a season and throughout the series. If we try to chop up shows into smaller bits in a rush to get people to buy those bits, we will lose one of the strongest aspects of television, the one that I think makes it an incredible medium to work in.

I’m not totally pessimistic. I think we’ll figure out a way to make money off of the type of content television puts out even if the television itself doesn’t survive as is. But I think it’s going to be a rough transition, and too few people really understand the unique complications of the television industry. Put simply, you probably haven’t really thought about this enough, and it’s not as easy as you think it would be.

Alyssa Rosenberg, who I respect but very frequently disagree with (if not for her conclusions than for her path to those conclusions), has come out against Andy Serkis winning an Oscar for his work on Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I didn’t want to comment at first, because I haven’t seen the film yet, but my issue with her stance lies in a fundamentally flawed assumption on her part about the nature of film.

Film is a collaborative art form. When someone is nominated for Best Director, they are receiving praise for the costumes, for the lighting, for the lenses used, for the performances, for the script, for the way it was shot, for the way it was edited, and yes for the way they championed all those things to make a final product. I’m not saying that Directors don’t offer up tremendously valuable work or that they shouldn’t be considered for awards because they rely on others to make a final product.

Serkis is one of the few actors who has figured out motion capture as an art form. He acts through totally fictional characters, but if you were to compare his work to any of the wholly CG characters you see in other films that don’t have an actor providing a base performance, it would be laughable to claim that he contributed nothing to the film.

Should we create a new category called Best Baseline Performance for CG Character? I guess we could, but I don’t see the point. What Serkis does is acting. He acts without little balls tapped to a spandex suit just as frequently as with. However they altered his performance in post production is a part of post production and should be examined as a separate act.

I came across a piece written by one Brandon Nowalk in which he posits that one hour dramas have lost their sense of humour.

In truth, the two big shows he seems to have a problem with are The Killing and Game of Thrones. The Killing is definitely too serious for its own good, and if it doesn’t improve I’m going to find it hard to return for a second season, but Game of Thrones, while telling a very dark story, still manages moments of levity, at least as many as Rubicon, a show he offers lenience to for its attempts.

But the odd thing is that he’s taking criticism with a specific set of shows and attributing it to the whole of television. What seems to be happening here is that television writers are being afforded the opportunity to tell stories that the old guard of television wouldn’t have allowed. Funny dramas aren’t being replaced, at least not entirely, but there is greater variety now, both in content and tone. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Not long ago, two people I follow on Twitter were talking about Star Trek.

The first was, based on my knowledge of the tweeter and the context of the here and now, I see as (most likely) a comical remark about the nature of our current culture of politics and how distrustful we are of foreign powers¹. The reply was less clear. It seems pretty obvious that, in the context of the Star Trek universe, the Federation is a peaceful organization. The only wars we’ve seen them take part in have been defensive, and they establish political and economic ties with neighbouring civilizations, including former enemies.

The only two rationales I can see for that second tweet are 1) that he agrees with Matt Yglesias that the Federation is not to be trusted and he misspoke intending to say it is absurd that they insist on claiming to be a peaceful organization; 2) he believes that an organization as large and powerful as the Federation should be a non-peaceful organization, perhaps expanding and annexing nearby planets and civilizations by force. The former is ridiculous when you look at the canon of Star Trek, which clearly shows the Federation as a benevolent force. The latter is ridiculous for a few different reasons.

Arguing for any nation/organization to be aggressive and possessive toward non-members is very odd to me. I’d thought the days of moral superiority, Manifest Destiny, or American Exceptionalism — all the sorts of ideas that lead to thinking a people are above another in some fundamental way — were gone but I can reluctantly accept that some people still linger on some of those thoughts. The even odder thing is that we’re applying 20th century precepts to a fictional 24th century organization, created by a man trying to construct a futuristic utopia. The political realities of today probably won’t apply three hundred years from now, and they definitely won’t apply to the fictional, preconceived-as-peaceful, time of Star Trek.

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Footnotes

1. It’s entirely possible he is genuinely positing that the Federation doesn’t deserve to be trusted, but if that’s the case, this post remains relevant. [↩]

Some people see that this blog is called “Everything Is Amazing” and get confused, because so much of it is intense criticism and downright hating. Well, a part of that is that I genuinely do think that the world is amazing, and it would be foolish to besmirch it by ignoring the bad things within it¹. But one of the more persistent threads in the negative remarks on this blog is that fandom is shitty.

Drew McWeeny wrote an excellent piece today, after a long increasingly aggressive twitter argument with Harry Knowles, head of Ain’t It Cool News, describing why we can’t simply throw all the blame on the studios for the increasingly derivative and lazy film marketplace we find ourselves in. One of the problems, he notes, is that targeting a nerd audience doesn’t seem to work.

There is a fine line between serving an audience and shamelessly pandering to them, and when the studios decide to go whole-hog and pander without hesitation, and the result is box-office failure after box-office failure, the message seems clear: chasing the fanboys isn’t working. They are unreliable, they are ungrateful, and they aren’t turning out for the “sure things” that have been greenlit specifically for them.

This is one of the reasons I find myself unable to visit Ain’t It Cool News anymore. As much as I like nerd-focused films, it seems like they’re never good enough for the online bastions of nerdery. The problem of course being that there is no such thing as ‘nerd-focused films’ because every nerd has their own idiosyncratic and extreme stance on what should happen to their film. Nerds, like too much of society today, are too self-centred to realize or appreciate the amazing things that happen on their behalf².

When a Captain America movie comes out, they trash it because his helmet doesn’t have wings, or when a Thor movie comes out they trash it because one of the characters is played by a Black man. They ignore the quality of the film, the writing, the directing, the performances, in order to feed their pointless minutiae-driven rants.

There’s no real solution to this. There’s a chance we’ll hit some critical mass and nerds will grow up a little bit and the world of film and television will be able to get back to creating good television regardless of nerd-based fan-service, works that can broaden the minds of all viewers not just satisfy the narrow expectations of the “fans.”

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Footnotes

1. Another perspective here is that it’s amazing how bad some things are. [↩]
2. That doesn’t mean that things can’t improve; they undoubtedly can in almost every aspect of life, but that doesn’t mean things are bad. [↩]

It’s Garry Shandling’s Show was Garry Shandling’s first big break, and it was a weird one. The show was a traditional multi-camera sitcom except that the characters on the show were aware they were on a show, Garry opened every episode with a monologue to the live studio audience and the audience was encouraged from time to time to interact with the cast and the set. In other words, it was not a traditional multi-camera sitcom.

The show broke the fourth wall at every opportunity and shattered virtually every convention of traditional sitcoms, it set a bizarre precedent and its influence on sitcoms can still be felt today. In short, it was one of those gloriously weird ahead-of-its-time shows whose existence we tend to mourn after a pitifully short life in recent years. But It’s Garry Shandling’s Show lasted for four years, first on Showtime and eventually being rebroadcast on a prime time network. I don’t know if it got cancelled at that point or he chose to end it so he could go do something else, but either way four years is a respectable run for a show as strange as this one.

In today’s market there are so many more channels, offering such a wide variety of niche entertainment; weird shows that used to survive by virtue of a lack of competition are now being supplanted by stuff people want to watch. The truth is that most of the time, weird experimental shows have an audience of a few million at the most. A few million is the very peak, and anything less than that is rarely considered viable in our current market — even though with more than one channel per million people, having an audience of that size should be considered quite respectable.

I’m not sure I’ve articulated this before, but I think we’re coming to a point in modern time where the increased access to increasingly targeted material aimed at increasingly narrow niches will make most of that content too economically risky to produce, except in low budget fare produced cheaply perhaps on and for the Internet. This isn’t the end of this sort of content, but we might see networks taking fewer risks and producing blander content hoping to reach the greatest common overlap of audiences. Yes, they already do that, but they still experiment with genre shows, and weird meta-driven comedies, and rich character driven serials. All of that could be shunted away from television to the internet, where everything is cheaper to make.

And make no mistake, as shows budgets get slashed, their ability to tell large stories, the type of stories people want to see from expansive experimental television, will fall away. Sometimes a limited budget can produce beauteous brevity, see The Twilight Zone, but there are some things that simply can’t be done on a small budget. Lost, for example, could not be made on a small budget. A show that explored similar ideas, maybe even with similar characters, could be made but too much of the scale would be lost — the dangers would feel smaller, the climaxes less earned — the show would no longer be Lost.

(It’s possible with the recent success of True Blood and The Walking Dead — and one hopes similar success for Game of Thrones — we will see a renewal of interest in interesting genre storytelling from the cable channels, but even premium cable channels have their limits: HBO cancelled Carnivàle, one of the best and potentially expansive¹ shows they’ve ever made, because of ballooning costs due to the fantasy nature along with it being a period piece, which tends to require larger budgets for the props departments. So don’t expect the cable channels to rescue us from network television mediocrity forever.)

But if the market speaks, there’s not much we can do about it. People will watch what they want to watch. Enjoy the good times while they’re still here. Watch Fringe maybe?

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Footnotes

1. The show was cancelled before the scope of its story was fully widened, but from the rough sketches of the future of the show made available to fans, the story was headed to big places. [↩]

It’s worth saying, from time to time, that while our world is often harsh and cold, it’s better than it was. The slow progress of humanity seems painful to us, but it inevitably leads to a newer and brighter place.

This is why I’m always so shocked when people reject without any thought the idea of living forever. I’ll never see my world truly become the world I want it to be, I’ll never see humanity spread out into the stars; but it will happen, and that’s something I’d give anything to see.

There has been a lot of talk about how Google’s decision to remove H.264 support from Chrome will end up regressing the progress HTML5 <video> tag has made thus far, but I find a lot of it is too short-sighted and doesn’t consider the implications of H.264 remaining the de facto web standard video format.

People argue that dropping H.264 is going to lead to an increase of Flash. News Flash: Flash is already active on every browser that matters. Flash will stay there until there is a convenient usable alternative for its biggest use cases: specifically video and graphical rendering. HTML5 handles those through the <video> and <canvas> tags. The problem is that having a video tag doesn’t mean people can use it, because not all browsers support the same codecs and nobody wants to go around encoding their videos in half a dozen different formats for each browser permutation.

H.264 costs money for distributors and producers. In a world where we’re all slowly becoming producers this is troubling. It also has a deep patent pool backed by dozens of large companies waiting to sue someone.

WebM is open, unencumbered by patents, and royalty free. Hardware acceleration is being built into the next generation of CPUs. It has quality comparable to H.264 and has fewer caveats.

The truly baffling thing about defending H.264 is that it is equivalent to arguing for the death of Firefox. I mean this. H.264, as a closed source patented video format, cannot legally be included in Firefox because of its licensing model. If you want everyone to standardize around H.264, you don’t want Firefox to be a player in the web browser game any longer.

Some people argue that they’re not “backing” H.264, they’re simply against Flash. I don’t really know what to say about that; Flash is all-pervasive right now. H.264 didn’t make it magically disappear, precisely because it wasn’t allowed in one of the more popular browsers. For Flash to disappear, it needs viable alternatives that are as simple. When you put the burden on the user to make sure they have the right codecs installed and they’re using the right browser for the right website, that’s not as easy as Flash.

Here’s something maybe people don’t know: Google, Opera, Mozilla, and Microsoft have all promised WebM support in their browsers. The odd man out here is H.264 proponent (and patent-holder) Apple. Apple has made no comment on WebM, but they will soon have to; IE9, Firefox 4, Opera 11, and Google Chrome will all have WebM support this year.

Of course, the mobile landscape is different — Apple is dominating there at the moment — and tied relatively tightly to hardware cycles, but chips are already being prepared for hardware accelerated WebM video, so if Apple really cared about making HTML5 the Next Big Thing, it would start looking into integrating WebM for their next generation of chips. Then we can finally start the work of obsolescing Flash for good.

Today, there was a shooting in Arizona. Numerous people were injured and killed, among them a federal Judge and a congresswoman. Based on an eyewitness description of the events, the shooter first approached the congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, and fired at her point blank shooting her in the head before beginning to fire indiscriminately on the crowd that was there to have a public talk with the congresswoman.

For some reason, much of the news describes this as only a shooting, but beyond that it seems quite clear that it was also an assassination attempt. The merits of calling it a terrorist act are less evident — terrorism naturally has a goal of instilling terror to alter views, whereas this seems much more like removing a powerful person with dissenting views, something quite horrifying but perhaps not terrorism. Nonetheless, this is a horrible act and one that should, and is, being roundly condemned.

Unfortunately, I can’t expect the actions of today to effect the decisions of tomorrow for the Republic machine that routinely attacked the Democratic party’s policies with rhetoric calling it un-American, anti-Democratic, telling their constituents to be “Armed and Dangerous,” and building a hit-list of Democratic congresspeople.

I make no claim that the shooter was a Republican, or even that he heard these extreme statements — based on what Gawker has collected about him, he was a genuinely insane fellow — but it has to be said that this is a toxic environment to live in, one that can push a mentally ill person over the edge. But nobody on that side wants to say that¹. There’s a great deal of condemnation of the act, but nobody seems to be expressing regret over their phrasing or tone or the Manichean lies they used in attempt to jockey for political power.

People that make this connection are already being accused of political rhetoric, but actions have consequences irrespective of politics. Obviously, I mourn the people murdered today, and I hope for swift recoveries for those injured, Congresswoman Giffords included, but to ignore a sad truth seems wrong especially at a time like this when a madman seeks to remove a voice they dislike from the world.

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Footnotes

1. It says even more that, when a clearly disturbed individual is able to legally buy a gun, the topic of gun control is seemingly verboten. [↩]