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. [↩]

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.

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. [↩]

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.

Ezra Klein, in an attempt to analogize Chris Christie’s chances at a 2012 presidential bid compares it to Pepsi vs Coke.

In 1975, Pepsi unleashed “the Pepsi Challenge,” a blind taste test where subjects threw back an ounce of each beverage and reported back on their favorite. Their favorite was Pepsi.

You already know what happened next: Coca-Cola developed a more Pepsi-like product called “New Coke.” America rejected New Coke. Coke came back with “Coca-Cola Classic.” America celebrated the restoration of the country’s carbonated identity, and Coca-Cola’s disastrous decision ended up entrenching its original product.

Behind all this was a problem with the Pepsi Challenge. People liked Pepsi more in small increments. They liked Coca-Cola more when they had to drink a can of the stuff. And this, I think, is going to prove a problem for Chris Christie.

Arguing that Pepsi had a “flashier” taste that doesn’t stand the test of time sounds like a Coke fan going on the defensive over the obvious results of a blind taste test¹. But seeing as I prefer Pepsi, it would be useless to quibble over that point. Taste is totally personal. However, his post ignores a well-known fact about New Coke: people did prefer it².

In all the taste tests, New Coke beat Pepsi as well as Coke Classic. Unfortunately, brand identity was such a huge factor in Coca-Cola’s dominance, consumers took the rebranding and reformulation as an affront to their national history.

It may be that Chris Christie is best taken in small doses, but that has nothing to do with the Pepsi Challenge or why New Coke failed.

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Footnotes

1. A taste test that convinced America. Before the Pepsi Challenge, Pepsi was struggling, now it’s a formidable opponent to Coke. [↩]
2. Ezra could still argue that winning taste tests has no relevance to real world drinking, except that Diet Coke is quite popular, for both its flavour and its calorie cutting, and its formula is based on New Coke. [↩]

Watching the television bloggers unleash the expected criticism on Rubicon I’m reminded once more that criticism in the television realm still has a long way to go.

A guest-blogger over at Alyssa Rosenberg’s blog wrote about Rubicon echoing the common complaint, that the show is too slow. My issues lie not with her distaste for the pace, but with a tack-on statement that feels very wrong to me:

Rubicon needs some adjustments if it’s going to attract and keep viewers.

I think it’s true that Rubicon will likely draw a meager audience — though the inherent sexiness of conspiracy theories will probably entice a few people who would not otherwise watch a show of its caliber — but I think a better question is, “Is it any good?”

I understand that ratings are what keep shows alive, but I don’t think it’s too much to expect criticism of a show to be based on the merits of the show. Any related punditry about the politics of television renewal is similarly valuable — TV by the Numbers is one of my favourite television blogs — but they are two wholly separate endeavours.

There are certain shows and types of shows that will simply never be a huge success¹. Rubicon is not a common denominator show, and probably wouldn’t get big ratings even if it were the best conspiracy theory show ever made. Critics should be judging it from within that rubric, not aiming to nudge it into another. Movie critics don’t argue that slow cerebral thrillers should have more action sequences, why should television critics?

If you don’t like a certain genre or style or aesthetic, that’s fine. Make that preference clear. If you think a show is moving slowly, say so. Explain how your suggestions would improve the show’s quality. But don’t argue it needs to change in order to increase its ratings.

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Footnotes

1. Exceptions like Lost and The Big Bang Theory, both shows that seem targeted at niches small enough that they have no right to be so successful, are obviously exceptions to the rule. [↩]

This will be the third post about Lost’s finale in a row, and my first post in over a month¹, but I found this paragraph hidden inside an X-Files review on the AV Club to so perfectly summarize my thoughts on the answers Lost gave us²:

As Lost was winding toward its conclusion and it became more and more apparent that not all of the series’ big questions were going to be answered, it touched off a bit of fan discussion about just how much needs to be tied up to make a satisfying ending. I realize that my position on these things is a bit unlike most other people who watch this sort of stuff for fun or a living, but, officially, I don’t care. If the story just keeps getting bigger and bigger and more nebulous, fine. Pile mysteries on top of mysteries until the groaning weight of the artifice topples in on itself. So long as the character stuff and the plotting are generally tight on an episode-by-episode level, I kind of LIKE it when things get so big that they seem to encompass all of human existence.

Exactly.

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Footnotes

1. New job, new projects, blah blah blah, I need to stop being lazy. [↩]
2. Well, as I’ve said before, I think Lost gave us a lot more answers than most of the fans give it credit for, but the sentiment of this quote is dead on. [↩]

Watching Lost come to an end was a spectacular event. This show has rocked me each season with its complex storytelling, bizarre mythology, and emotional heft.

The very first episode I saw — I ignored the show at first because ABC’s early marketing made it look really really stupid — was “…In Translation” and I watched it totally unaware of what show it was or any past relations for the character. The episode focused on Sun and Jin, and when it ended I thought it was one of the best hours of television I’d seen in a long time. Following that I went back and watched Lost from the beginning, quickly becoming a die-hard acolyte.

During those early years, I was one of those guys that theorized all the time, I’d discuss with friends my thoughts about what The Dharma Initiative was all about, why there were Egyptian hieroglyphs, and why it was that you couldn’t find the Island.

I don’t know when it happened, though, but somewhere along the way I realized that I could answer most of those questions myself, and it was probably more fun to not get definitive answers. What I really ended up caring about was the characters. I actually don’t really remember caring about characters all that much before Lost; I’m sure I had some understanding of it before Lost, but it was certainly during the time Lost was airing that I grew more and more interested in how characters grow, and how a show can service them rather than the other way around. It’s entirely possible that Lost was the thing that made me realize that television was about more than filling a half-hour with jokes or constructing a clever murder mystery to be unraveled.

And so, Lost ended tonight. And it’s final moments were about — what else? — the characters.

I think it’s easy to criticize Lost for not giving enough answers to its mythology, but it’s also pointless. Those sorts of answers will always be, in some very important ways, arbitrary. We’ve seen this throughout Lost’s run when big questions are answered, two from this season in particular are the explanations for The Rules and The Numbers. This is absolutely intentional on the writers part.

What could possibly be a rational answer for the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 constantly showing up in the characters lives? There is none, it’s just something to signify that these people are connected in important ways.

So much of the mythology of Lost is ultimately unimportant; all that matters is that these people were brought to the Island for a reason — to protect it — and the Island is a very special place. Anything else is merely an extension of those two fundamental principles.

It’s less important what these people do than why they do it. Watching Lost, you learn who these people are, and you come to see each of them as a flawed person seeking resolution, seeking redemption, seeking some meaning. Basically, they’re real people.

I think that almost every action a character has performed during the run of this remarkable series had come from them, not from some need from the writer¹, and the show has been much stronger for that reason.

Trying to talk about the finale that just aired is essentially impossible. People who haven’t watched the show before will be baffled, and the people who have watched it for years are mostly trapped between two positions: the finale didn’t answer anything, and the finale gave us all the answers we need. These two positions are surprisingly not actually mutually exclusive, they’re just the expression of two different types of fans. Some people are here for the mythology and others are here for the characters.

People are absolutely right that the finale didn’t answer anything. Nobody was sat down and told the history of the Island, nor where the mechanics or the Donkey Wheel explained or the power of The Source. There were no long drawn-out scenes explaining why the Island needs protecting, who created it, why it was special, where it came from or anything even approaching that.

But a lot of us really didn’t care about that. We were much more interested in knowing if Kate will ever declare her love for one of her two lovers², or what will Jack do now that he’s the new Jacob, or if all the pain and suffering the survivors have gone through really had meaning.

To that second group, we were inundated by answers. Kate finally fessed up to loving Jack, just as they part ways for the rest of their lives. Jack risked the Island in order to finally kill the Man in Black and then heroically sacrificed himself to save the Island, and by implication the world. And yes, all the hardship and pain these people went through, it was worth it; completely ignoring the flashes sideways, which I’ll discuss in a few moments, those people grew from the shallow self-serving people they started as into fully realized people who were part of a community. They all came to be part of a larger whole, and that community is what ultimately gave Jack the strength to sacrifice himself for them, for their memory, and for the world they all left behind when they crashed on that Island.

Aside from that long-term schism, the finale has opened a new idea for fans to be divided on: the flashes sideways³. I’m not entirely sure what people were looking for out of the flashes sideways, I’m not sure what I was looking for. My basic metric was that I wanted them to mean something, I wanted them to matter in some way. I think that the flashes sideways being an ethereal staging ground for the survivors to find each other so they could go off to some sort of afterlife together probably works. Going over the season with that knowledge at hand is probably necessary to really see if everything that happened needed to be there.

For the moment, I’m gobsmacked. I wept through the closing scenes where all the castaways reunited across time and space to essentially die together. I don’t know if it will really work in the long term, but right now I’m more than satisfied. I can’t wait to watch it all again.

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Footnotes

1. Obviously, the layer above that is that these characters were given these traits and character arcs precisely because the writer’s needed those characteristics for future plot points, but that doesn’t negate that their actions, in and of themselves, were internally consistent. [↩]
2. I know a lot of Lost fans hate Kate fervently, but I like her character a lot and I think her open declaration of Love in tonight’s episode was one of her bravest moments in the series. [↩]
3. I pluralize that shit like a classy motherfucker. [↩]

I get sometimes when people have legitimate criticisms of a show. Even a show as good as Lost, it’s possible to not like at times, maybe because you can think a character’s motivation is weak or maybe for some other wrong¹ reason.

What you can’t do is whine like a petulant child when something you don’t like happens.

Tonight’s episode was absolutely amazing. The story raced along, the characters were all playing in their wheelhouse and their emotions felt true. Nobody behaved out of character². What happened tonight is what had to happen, even if it’s not what you think should have happened or what you would’ve liked to happen.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go cry for a while.

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Footnotes

1. I didn’t say your criticisms were correct. [↩]
2. I want to talk more about why the particular actions that occurred make sense for the characters, but I won’t do that tonight; this post is mostly about venting over the vitriolic hatred some Lost fans are spewing about this episode. [↩]

A huge chunk of television lives on the will-they-won’t-they romance, and most shows never consummate that relationship, keeping the romantic tension omnipresent but never too explicit.

A recent addition to this group of series is Doctor Who. Two of the last three companions have had romantic feelings toward The Doctor¹ and the most recent companion, Amy Pond, has continued the trend with gusto. Which is where the angry fans get involved.

Many² fans are angry that every companion since Russell T Davies rebooted the show has been a potential paramour; I think it’s probably less than ideal if every companion is like this, but at the same time I’m much more interested in how it works for each individual case and I think the way they’ve handled Amy Pond’s infatuation with The Doctor has so far been pitch perfect.

But going a step farther, I think the new dynamic that has been established since the show returned is a more realistic one. A brilliant, intelligent man brings you around through time on fantastic adventures; do you expect anyone to not fall in love with the guy?

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Footnotes

1. Some people claim that even Donna Noble had romantic tension with The Doctor; maybe I just hate Donna Noble too much to see that. [↩]
2. I know that’s a weasel word, and I’m not linking to any specific critiques, but I don’t feel like looking them up; they’re out there. [↩]

I don’t think anyone would ever call John Gruber a critic of Apple¹, but his bashing of Gizmodo with regards to their scoop on the next generation of iPhone is getting pretty ridiculous.

A recent post on his blog, Daring Fireball, asserts that what Gizmodo did was theft because the person who found the lost prototype didn’t contact the bar, where the Apple engineer who lost the phone inquired a few times as to its whereabouts, but that seems like a pretty arbitrary standard to follow. The person who found the phone — and in turn Gizmodo, who purchased the phone from them, because of the laws in California — is only guilty of theft if they don’t try to return the lost item to its owner, and the wording of the law seems intentionally vague, stating that the efforts undertaken to return it should be deemed “reasonable.” Were the phone calls with Apple employees informing them that he had a prototype phone — phone calls which were completely ignored by Apple, at least in part because Apple’s overly tight-lipped procedures left no-one aware a phone had been lost or that a new iPhone existed in any form at all — not reasonable? They seem quite reasonable to me.

Granted, maybe he should have contacted the bar, but not contacting the bar is not an inherently malicious act, it’s not the subtle machinations of someone hoping to feign ‘reasonableness’ when asked later while still scoring a payday from their discovery. It’s human error. Hindsight is 20/20.

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Footnotes

1. I personally don’t consider him a fanboy for Apple, but rather an apologist, a distinction worth making and perhaps worth clarifying in a later post. [↩]

Insane Clown Posse is insane and so despite how much they enjoy the miracles¹ of the natural world, the operational mechanics of magnets continue to elude them. But they’re not alone.

It’s easy to say that magnets emit a magnetic field, but when you get down to it, that statement that needs more explanation. What is a magnetic field, and more importantly why does it cause that repulsion and attraction. The strange truth about most things we take as a given is that there are scads of underlying assumptions we ignore because at some point it’s easier to just take it as a given.

That’s not to say there aren’t people out there who truly understand magnetism, but chances are you’re not one of them.

Feynman’s ‘explanation’ of magnetism via a chain of questions running down into more and more general and fundamental truths reminds me of this great bit by Louis CK:

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Footnotes

1. Miracle in this instance meaning things science has explained quite well, but are still ‘magical’ in the poetic sense. [↩]

Yesterday, when I wrote about that Insane Clown Posse song, I said “you can’t deny that they’re right about this one.” Now, obviously that’s not right¹. These guys, and this song, are wrong in many ways about many things. They have a line expressing anger about scientists lying to them about how magnets work²!

But despite their horrible music, and bizarre stances, they got it right that nature is pretty great. Law of averages, I guess.

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Footnotes

1. And the over-the-top title was little more than a lame reference to an awesome show. [↩]
2. Really, I think the line is supposed to invoke some Creationist anger against the scientifically valid theory of Evolution, but if you didn’t know the members of Insane Clown Posse were devout Christians — and who could blame you for not knowing that based on their profuse profanity and bizarre clown make-up — it’s easy to just imagine them hearing a scientist describe the way magnets work and getting super pissed because they the explanation was lame and/or confusing. [↩]

Michael Ian Black, a really funny dude, wrote up his thoughts about the whole Conan situation. It’s a great read, despite what I think are exaggerations regarding the fervor of “Team Coco,” though I wanted to expand on something he brought up and maybe pivot it a bit.

His early point that Conan is being treated like a working-class folk hero is questionable at best — Conan’s audience has always skewed young, and I doubt that’s changed during the recent surge of support — but his discussion of the origins of his supporters is interesting.

I think the deeper reason people are so inflamed by this petty war is that Conan in his own way has come to represent the aggrieved, the injured, the wrongly terminated. I think there is a sense in this country that giant corporations are ruining everything, even late night talk shows. Something so insignificant takes on greater importance because I think on some level, “The Tonight Show” actually has become a very flawed stand-in for all the jobs lost to corporate greed, arrogance, and stupidity. We see Conan as a victim because we feel as though, like us, he wasn’t given a fair shot. If a guy like that, a guy who has everything, can be downsized and demoted, what hope do the rest of us have?

One way of thinking about it is through the corporate world but, to my eyes, the return of Leno’s Tonight Show has much more relevance when analogized to the current political climate.

The world is shitty right now. Especially for the young, presumably liberal, audience of Conan O’Brien. We elected a vibrant young politician to the presidency a little over a year ago with the idea that he would fight for the progressive liberal goals he said he would. Instead he’s fallen prey to the idiotic desire to crawl to the political centre despite a strong electoral mandate to push the things he said he would push. What’s worse, each time his opposition fumbles he creates new compromises, weakens his position, claims that he needs to be more accommodating to the immovable objects he’s tasked with moving.

And here comes Conan. He’s a young vibrant comedian who’s given a chance to run The Tonight Show, to remake it in his image. And he did that. When he first started, he appeared semi-neutered but as he grew more comfortable with the show, he loosened and began to adjust his new surroundings to who he was and not the other way around.

What’s more, when the news came that he was being cast aside, he didn’t compromise, he became more like himself. And, yes, people loved him for it. Because that’s why they were excited about him being there in the first place.

I don’t know about any of you, but Conan going down swinging felt like a win to me. Maybe it’s a shallow one, but it doesn’t seem like we’re going to get any real ones any time soon.