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.

---

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.

---

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.

I have a problem with follow through, it seems. A while back, I wrote a post claiming that Heroes wasn’t as bad this year. And I’ve been silent on the subject since, even though anyone watching the show knows that whatever faint silhouette of potential improvements the show dangled earlier this year have disappeared, which might make you think I still think Heroes is improving. That’s a mistake.

Heroes is without a doubt the worst show I watch right now. I say that as a regular watcher of Smallville, a show that should have been thrown off the air a few years ago. This season started with some promise, but it quickly evapourated; characters returned to their most annoying of ways, plots twisted and turned aimlessly and lifelessly, and the desperation of the writers fouled every frame of the season.

NBC has yet to renew Heroes for the new year, and I hope it doesn’t. Some people are talking about giving the writers one more season to wrap up the show, but not only do I have no faith in the writers to actually accomplish that goal, I also think there’s really nothing left for the characters to do, they’ve spent four seasons repeating the same arcs over and over.

The general ineptitude of the writers makes me think they stumbled upon winning characters four years ago and don’t know how to make those characters grow and so they try to duplicate the characteristics that first made them popular with horrible results.

Heroes is a sickening festering wound on television, one that it beyond repair or recovery and it must be excised before it can do more damage.

For a long time, I’ve valued reading books, except I didn’t really read books myself. I bought books, I planned to read books, but that’s as far as it went. When I decided to read Infinite Jest along with the Infinite Summer website this spring, it was an active decision to reevaluate my reading habits.

I’ve read perhaps a dozen books in the last five years, most of which have been read in very quick bursts followed by long lulls in reading, and that’s an abysmal rate in my opinion. So I’ve started being more proactive in my reading of late, trying to jump right into a new book each time I finish one.

Related to that, I recently finished Last and First Men, by Olaf Stapledon, a book not considered science fiction by its author but widely seen as one of the most influential early science fiction novels. It is written as a chronicling of the future iterations of humanity for the next two billions years.

The time scale is exponential in nature; the first four chapters cover a mere five thousand years, whereas the last three chapters cover a full billion.

Some of the initial ‘history’ is obviously wrong. His ‘predictions’ that France and England would war to such an extent that both nations would be decimated, that Europe and America would come to violent throes leaving Europe a biological wasteland, were both quickly proven wrong by World War 2.

But the end result of those early events is that Russia’s Bolshevik revolution slowly morphs to a capitalist nation and grows stronger connections with America. China also develops into a communist nation working not as a vassal of America but a strong economic competitor. These details aren’t quite the world we live in, but to consider them outlandish is also cutting Stapledon short.

From there, the world goes through epic changes, the rise and inevitable fall of countless world governments, cataclysms that shatter the world, and much much more. Humanity evolves into 18 unique forms, some more advanced than us, others vastly more primitive, even more so foreign as to barely recognize their origins.

Having read this book, my old post about people’s terrifying pessimism seems not strongly worded enough. These are troubling times, but every time in history has been troubling. The world isn’t ever going to magically become a utopia. We’re going to continually struggle against our needs, our wants, our vices, our neuroses. But we will, in the long run, improve.

The global temperature might rise five degrees, destroying island nations with rising sea levels, crippling the economy and agriculture of the world, but we will adjust. We all won’t adjust because a lot of us will be dead. But we will persist. I think that any one who is so pessimistic as to look at the state the world is in rate now and imagine it can only get worse, or that it’s just not worth it to live a longer life in these dire times, or any of these sorts of things suffers from an extreme, almost hysteric, lack of imagination.

I’m still not sold on immortality, I still suffer from the belief that life would eventually get boring and I’d prefer the nothingness to continued life. But this book has shown that there’s so much more out there than we can even imagine, from the sheer quantity alone. If any one person lived forever, who knows what they’d discover, what truths they’d develop, what intractable problems they’d swat away with a few millennia of concerted effort.

I’ll close this post with a video that, every time I see it, reinforces the idea (among others) that even immortality isn’t enough time. There’s simply too much to experience, too much to do.

I’ve been rewatching Scrubs recently. So far the thing I’ve noticed the most is that JD is a huge dick, and he never really improves despite every episode being about confronting one of his (many many many) flaws and weaknesses.

In the episode that marks his brother’s first appearance on the show, the moral of the story is that his brother is a pathetic person and JD’s being ashamed of him is a good thing.

He treats women like shit — the most egregious case being his treatment of Elliot at the end of the third season, when he fought to get her back from Sean only to cast her aside literally the second she comes back to him.

He’s incredibly selfish. I mean, that’s obvious given that the premise of the show has JD narrating his own life. But even still, everything about the show is him him him. People will be going through real problems while his petty bullshit that has no real significance is exaggerated. Sometimes that contrast is used to make a point. But really, you can only make that point so many times before your character should just grow the fuck up.

Here’s the thing. I like the show. Scrubs is very funny. And on occasion it has a serious story that isn’t offensive and/or shockingly obvious. But most of the dramatic conflicts come from characters overreacting or some other contrived mechanism. Oh and JD is a dick.

I know some of you are going to be scoff at my remarks and tell me that Scrubs is only a comedy. But when I watched this show as it aired, I loved it for its realistic characterizations, romantic subplots, comedic wit, and the way the show brought that all together like no other show at the time. But going through the series again with a more mature eye, I see most of that falling apart.

And another group of you will surely reply telling me that its JD’s flaws that make him a realistic character. That’s true to a point. But it’s only true to the point at which any realistic person would start to look at these flaws and grow beyond them (for more than an episode), something JD never does, at least not until the last season when he magically grew the hell up. Its JD’s inability to grow and change that make him not a character but a caricature. And a dickish one at that.

Thoughts? Rebuttals? Overly aggressive attacks on my sexuality? Bueller?

P.S. In case you need something else to hate about me, I thought the Musical episode was lame (even though I love musicals and was very excited about a Scrubs musical) and I remember thinking at the time that the Princess Bride parody episode was possibly the worst episode the show ever did.

P.P.S. This was originally written on the IMDB forums, but I’ve been meaning to write something about Scrubs here for a while so here it is. I also changed some sentences from the IMDB version for clarity. And I de-beeped the curse words. WTF IMDB?

I intend to write a full post about the phenomenal start to Dollhouse’s second season, but I need some time to formulate my thoughts. In the meantime, I want to reiterate some of my issues with the unaired 13th episode “Epitaph One.”

My biggest problem is it’s not a cliffhanger, it’s an ending. It’s not a flash forward in the vein of Lost’s third season finale, giving us a glimpse of the future to entice the audience, it’s an epilogue, meant to offer up a few closing notes on the themes the show wanted to explore.

Joss Whedon has walked back the significance of Epitaph One, claiming that, while it is canon, the memories we saw of the Dollhouse’s future are not set in stone. But the memories are the least of my concerns. What concerns me is that the show now has a guarantee that, ten years from now, the Dollhouse universe will be a fractured world with middling tribes of humanity surviving away from all technology as the world falls apart around them. It’s a powerful message, and Epitaph One expresses it brilliantly, but it’s better suited as a separate story, not as a part of a television show’s larger universe.

And yes, the nihilism of the ending still troubles me. I don’t need a happy ending, but I do need one with some heft to it. The ending of Dollhouse, as it stands, is that technology was a failed experiment. We tried it, but man’s vainglorious desire for knowledge led him down a nearly fatal path and what remains now is a small group capable of rebuilding mankind, but without all that icky technology. That, to me, is an extremely lazy ending. Granted, they only had an episode to delve into this but it still strikes me as hollow, and slightly hypocritical.

Indeed, one of the commons threads of the Dollhouse’s first season, and one that seems to be persisting into its second, is that while the Dollhouse’s technology is an attempt at rewriting a human from the ground up, it is only an attempt. The mind reaches out despite its removal and/or deletion. This is a repeated theme, something that has imbued all the glitches the Dolls have experienced with a greater meaning. But this episode leaves you with the message that those moments of significance weren’t really all that significant, the world will go to hell, and the only solution is to run away.

Again, this isn’t about the ending per se, though it is to an extent, it’s more about earning the ending. I don’t think they earned the ending they gave us. Let me know why I’m wrong in the comments, because I haven’t really seen anyone address my complaints with Epitaph One yet.

I still love it as an hour of great sci-fi, so long as I think of it as separate from the rest of the Dollhouse universe, but I can’t brook its existence in the standard Dollhouse canon. It would’ve been a great (though not amazing) ending to Dollhouse had the show ended then and there, but Dollhouse went on and now it feels out of place and best left out of canon along with the original unaired pilot.

I’ve probably written about this, or a similar enough variant, before, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve used this particular trope myself over the years as I’ve formulated my voice and the style of writing I try to employ consistently if not constantly, but this point deserves some repetition. It’s not your humble opinion. It’s your fucking opinion. If you don’t think your opinion is important, then why the fuck are you writing it?

There’s been a really great ongoing debate happening over at The Daily Dish surrounding atheism. It started when one of Andrew’s temporary replacements likened atheists such as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins to fundamentalists and religious extremists.

As it’s developed, I’ve read many intelligent arguments on both sides. But the truth is most of the religious side of the debate presumes a level of deference to religion. Atheists, it seems, are not allowed to compare religion to belief in Santa Claus or similar fanciful beliefs. At first it was attacked for being glib, but that does little to alter the fundamental similarities in the belief in Santa Claus and the belief in God.

Subsequently, the argument was made that people spend a great deal of time developing their religious stance, whether it’s through thorough readings of the philosophies of theologians across the ages or merely an internal conflict, and so the comparison is unfair. Admittedly, there are people who examine their beliefs thoroughly, break down all the preconditions of life that their parents instilled in them to arrive at a self-determined philosophy, one which includes God, but those people are a far and away minority. For many people, religion is a part of their life because they’ve never thought about it¹.

Similarly, following an atheist argument that religion can undermine the “development of logical thinking” in children, a religious reader responded with:

I have an 18 year-old and a 15 year-old which my wife and I have raised in the church. They are both at the stage where they are questioning and challenging everything. The idea that I could possibly “brainwash” them into believing anything is specious.

Which isn’t wrong so much as it is unsophistcated. The fact is that the reader almost certainly could “brainwash” their children if they wanted to. We always read of the children who escape from a cult they were born into, but we ignore the fact that many children remain in the cult, contented and certain that their way of life is the true path to salvation.

I use cults as an example, but parents with enough religious zeal can just as easily cause many problems for their children. Home schooling children that the Earth is the centre of the universe and that it’s only 6000 years old and evolution is a lie — all things that Christian parents do² — absolutely affect the child for years to come. No one is claiming that the damage is irreparable — after all, there are atheists out there — but to ignore it because it lacks 100% efficacy is exceedingly naive³.

The problem with having a religious debate is that when atheists argue with fundamentalists nothing is accomplished, but when they argue with reasonable, temperate theists like those reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog, we get nice nuanced arguments which describe God in a manner very different than the norm. The theists seems to forget that atheists are mostly arguing against the edge cases.

I’m staunchly atheist, and confident that there is no God. But when I attack religion, I don’t attack the muted and temperate version that intellectuals believe in, the kind where God is a passive observer, or where he sets the pieces up and has spent the past 12 billion or so years watching them all fall around him like a massive set of dominoes. I attack the religion that forces genital mutilation, stonings, oppression of women, ignorance of science, and all the stuff that the brainy version of religion has eschewed in its development.

Often, atheists (and theists) are accused of ignoring the moderates of the debate, instead focusing on the fringes of their debate, but one thing I’ve noticed as time goes on is that even the extreme atheists, so far as I know, do not argue for the abolition of religion. What they argue is that religion is irrational and that the world would be a better place without religion. The first half of that argument is absolutely true. Religion is the belief in something for which there is absolutely no evidence, an inherently irrational stance. The second half is much more contentious and an argument that I personally don’t accept. That said, the “atheist fringe” is much less extreme than the religious fundamentalists, so to act as though they are equal criticisms seems disingenuous to me.

The edge cases matter⁴. So don’t call upon the “civility” of atheists to sit down and shut up when it comes to the pernicious ills of religion.

---

Footnotes

1. I speak from experience; many members of my family have no actual philosophy with respect to their religion, they merely accept it as what they’ve always “believed.” [↩]
2. Obviously not all Christian parents, but these extremes do exist [↩]
3. I’m not advocating the abolition of religion here, nor would anyone suggest state-enforced atheism, but ignoring the problems of religion accomplishes nothing. [↩]
4. On both sides of the discussion [↩]

Wow. I didn’t know I had it in me. I had no idea I felt so strongly about the character development deficiencies in erotic novels.¹

For the past few weeks, I’ve been taking part in the grand experiment that is Infinite Summer. But reading Infinite Jest, even in 75 pages per week chunks, can be draining. So recently, to kill some time avoiding reading Infinite Jest, I decided to read another book: Secretary’s Punishment.

A little back story is needed here. A few months ago I bought a few adult erotica books because I wondered how good the books were. If they weren’t well written I was thinking about writing my own, cashing in on my unremarkable writing capabilities. Now that I’ve read one of them, I thought I’d write up my thoughts.

The book centres on a young woman named Emily Robinson. She’s just moved to a new city, away from her abusive fiance, and just started a new job that she needs to keep or she won’t be able to stay in the new city away from her troubled past. The only problem is that her new job is as an administrative assistant (though he abhors the term and prefers the anachronistic ‘secretary’) to a demanding man named Edward Caudry, who has yet to find a secretary up to snuff.

That’s the basic premise. And while it’s a diaphanous one it’s enough to establish the early structure of the story. In a format both delightfully and disappointingly like the silver screen Secretary, whenever Emily makes a typo in the documents she writes up, Mr Caudry (as he is known exclusively for the first half of the novel) brings her into his office, has her bend down onto his desk, face pressed to the red-ink circled typos, and gives her an increasing number of spanks to her ass.

Obviously, it doesn’t start as that; it begins as an alternative to being summarily fired, which she accepts somewhat credulously due to her financial dire straits. Her arousal over the entire scenario forces her to masturbate in the bathroom of her office, until he begins to exert more and more control over her; he begins demanding that she not wear pantyhose, that she wear ‘approved’ panties (which he examines every morning), that she not orgasm when not in his presence (a simple demand given how readily she seems to orgasm from his spanks).

So there’s three aspects to this: is the story credulous? Is the writing arousing? And is the writing any good? Well, the story is, for the most part, believable. Though, the progression from a hostile work environment (the first day) to walking around the office without any panties, giving the boss a regular morning blowjob, taking of her skirt while seated at her desk, and some light-to-medium bondage (all by the end of the second week) is the most hastened aspect of the story. Each new day at the office was a new level to the dominance and submission, which to a degree works, but it is the most unbelievable and at times troubling part of the progression. Spreading it out over the course of even a month would’ve made it seem more realistic.

And, yeah, the writing is arousing. Well, for me anyways. The descriptions are very good, and the author tends not to use the annoying euphemisms — trouser-snake is one that comes to mind — that make most erotic writing tiring². Of course, generally speaking it’s not hard to arouse the male mind, even with simple prose. Mention a vagina, perhaps a clitoris, include reference to an orgasm rising within the woman’s loins and that’s really all it takes: rinse and repeat.

And the writing isn’t bad, but it isn’t great either. One thing that I pondered over as I read the book was if the spelling and grammatical mistakes in the book were intentional or not. I could imagine an inventive couple taking the book and using it in their own BDSM role-playing, highlighting the mistakes, and doling out spanks. Then, again the novel might just have had a shitty editer.

The book is mostly dialogue and descriptions of sex, with the rest internal monologue, almost all of which is dispensable. Does that mean I could write an erotic novel? Well, it’s not impossible. The skills required are little, and if this book is any indication of the genre, it’s in dire need of good characterization.

The novel is split in two halves with the first being written from the perspective of Emily and the second from that of Edward. The first half is fairly well written, with Emily at constant conflict with her confusing desire to be punished, to be controlled, to be dominated. It’s not high art, but the internal dialogue allows the reader to see the character slowly shifting from her rather innocent beginnings to her “true personality” as a submissive. It gives the story a little bit of class and respectability.

And most importantly, even though the story is ostensibly that of a boss taking advantage of his position to garner sexual favours from his assistant, the internal monologue keeps the story from feeling degrading or sexist. Which brings me to the second part of the novel, titled Edward.

The second half is much much worse than the first. The first flaw is taking on the persona of the male dominant Edward. For the first half of the novel he is portrayed as a masterful Dom, able to spot that she’s orgasmed in the bathroom, capable of bringing her to mindblowing orgasms with the slightest twitch of his fingers, perfectly gauged in the way he slowly brings her submissive side out. He was exactly the type of character from whose perspective you should never narrate, so already switching voice was a mistake for that reason.

The novel quickly takes us behind his veneer of self-assuredness into his neuroses about how far he should push her, caused by his last relationship in which he didn’t push his Sub far enough fast enough, and all sorts of things that bring him down to earth so to speak. I understand why the novel tried to do this; by humanizing him, it makes the final ending, with Emily and Edward in a stable relationship, a little more appealing. But the final ending could have been just as satisfying if he remained a cipher on the surface. Even the implication of Emily’s understanding of his inner machinations would have made it clear they were on level footing. This more explicit path is harder to swallow.

But that’s not the worst flaw. Much of the second half of the novel is like Hard Sci-Fi for fetishists, discussing the nuances of the relationship between a Dom and a Sub, the levels of power the must be exerted from both partners, how trust can be re-established when a Sub begins to fear their Dom. There are numerous scenes that reiterate these points in a very lecturey way, as if the author wanted to inform the perverts reading the book about BDSM³.

But after all that opinion, there’s a strange, for more than one reason, shift in the story near the end of the novel. The following paragraph appears not long after Edward has managed to coax Emily back into his life:

She was his girlfriend at that moment and Edward had a sudden revelation. The submissiveness was more like a game, he realized. Adriana [Ed: the ex who wanted more domination than Edward could offer] had never been the woman for him because she was a true submissive, one who required a strong, firm master to guide her. Edward was more like an actor who took on a role now and then. That didn’t mean he wasn’t a true Dom when the time came. It simply meant they didn’t have to live the life 24/7.

So once all the rules and boundaries of BDSM have been delicately laid out for the reader, Edward seems to abandon them as a lifestyle, instead twisting them into a game. That in itself is not surprising; aside from the most extreme scenarios, all BDSM is relegated to a subset of your life. But this shift is not made manifest in Edward’s demeanour in the remaining pages of the book. He has the realization that their Dom-Sub is closer to role-playing than it is to the full-on Dom-Sub lifestyle. Yet, he still has her work nude with her arms bound, he still has her spend her nights naked and giving him sexual acts when demanded of her, enforcing her diet and her wardrobe at all times. If it were truly just a game to him, they’d have a normal life, perhaps with innuendo and flirtation throughout the day, leading to some BDSM role-playing at night. But that’s not the situation the novel ends on.

And finally, there’s the closing paragraph:

“Now, I feel like two halves of the same coin. You challenge me, you love me, you take care of me.” Her eyes twinkling, she added, “What more could a girl want?”

Again, this isn’t visibly sexist. But, “a girl” might want many more things. Many girls might want independence, financial stability, someone to converse with, someone who “challenges” them in a form other than in their pain threshold. In fact the novel starts off with Emily leaving her abusive husband to fend for herself and it ends with her being completely controlled by another domineering man. But this time, we’re told, it’s a good thing. Maybe that’s what she wants. But it’s certainly not what “a girl” wants, it’s what “that girl” wants. A minor quibble, but as an ending to the story it sticks in my craw more than the less general alternative.

All this points to one inevitable conclusion: I need to write an erotic novel while ensuring the characters aren’t diminished or degraded for the sake of the sex and that the story concludes pleasantly and logically. Either that, or I need to write something of value, like one of the dozens of half-completed short-stories I have sitting around⁴. Either/or, really.

So where does that leave us? Well, I’m still a week and a half behind on the Infinite Summer schedule, and now I’m sexually and artistically frustrated. This was a great idea.

---

Footnotes

1. For the record, this post, which is a far too serious about itself critique of an erotic novel, is written tongue firmly placed in cheek — though I won’t say which one. [↩]
2. Or at least subject to ridicule on television sitcoms [↩]
3. Or it’s the author’s attempt to legitimize some of the, in my opinion, sexist conclusions to the story [↩]
4. As an aside, I did write a story on Ficly not long ago, though the word limit (1024 characters) left me with a very ambiguous tale, one that even I have trouble grasping wholly [↩]

This post gets nerdy enough that you might want to steer clear. I also don’t go too out of my way to explain the jargon of the subject, so be forewarned.

A few days ago, it was announced that the W3C was discontinuing work on XHTML2, which was planned to be the next big thing for the web; it was going to bring real semantics to the web while improving the extensibility and accessibility of the content on the web. I say ‘the content on the web’ rather than ‘HTML’ because XHTML2 was not going to be HTML. It was not backwards compatible with HTML. In other words, it was doomed to fail.

People saw the faults of the XHTML2 standard years ago and began working on incremental changes to HTML that would improve the semantics — perhaps not as much as XHTML2 could theoretically improve them — of the HTML content and introduce numerous new APIs that enhance what can be done in the browser while retaining backwards compatibility¹. These improvements, along with adjustments to the HTML4 spec to align it to reality, are now known as HTML5.

Perhaps XHTML2 would have been better overall, perhaps not. That is a moot point now. HTML5 is happening, and XHTML2 isn’t.

But Shane McCarron, one of the people who worked on XHTML2 and the associated standards, decided to attack everyone he could in a post filled with a bunch of useless arguments.

The primary design principle for [HTML5] is “codify everything in use on the net, everywhere, no matter how broken, as long as Hixie has seen it at least once and thinks it is useful”.

These sorts of meaningless assertions, with an ad hominem thrown in for good measure, contribute nothing to the discussion. I’ve found Ian Hickson’s attitude on the HTML5 mailing list to be very brusque at times, but that has nothing to do with what the standard is about. Not only that, but the HTML5 spec does much more than codify existing behaviour; certainly it does that, but that is because the earlier specs were underspecified resulting in every browser doing things slightly differently.

But beyond this codification, the spec introduces a background process system for JavaScript execution, canvas elements for advanced graphical rendering, the video and audio elements to allow audio and video to be played in the browser without a plugin, with greater control and more openness, and that’s only a subset of the enhancements HTML5 brings. I don’t see how those things, which were specified before any browser implemented any of it, are mere codification of de facto behaviour.

There are between 5 and 15 actual user agent implementors in the world. There are millions of web content authors. How is it that the 15 (I’m feeling magnaminous) are more important than the millions?

This isn’t even the argument from popularity, it’s the argument from potential popularity. I’m a web content author. I wouldn’t want to write the content using the complexities defined in the XHTML2 spec. I was even one of those people that was fooled by the XHTML1 marketing that XML was somehow inherently better than SGML, and I still blanched at the sight of some of the things coming out of the XHTML2 working group.

In fact, of the millions of web content authors, I’m pretty sure that at most 15 (I’m feeling magnanimous) would be willing to work within the XHTML2 environment.

The people writing most websites are, unsurprisingly, writers. And whether they’re technologically savvy or not, the cognitive load that XHTML2, and all its associated extensions, would place on them is an unnecessary burden.

I know that some of the features of XHTML2 are useful for the machine-readability of websites, but you have to measure that against the extra effort required by content producers, text editors, and everything else involved in creating web content, to generate XHTML2 rather than HTML5. Machines will process things faster a month from now, and can use smarter algorithms to detect and discern human generated content. Humans don’t have that luxury.

But Shane doesn’t seem to understand that:

It was [Tim Berners-Lee] who decided to irreparably damage the brand(s) of the W3C by ceding control of the web to the WHATWG. What [was he] thinking? I assume [he was] under pressure from the browser vendors. I assume those 4 out of your ~400 members were saying “hey, we don’t want to implement XML-based semantic web. It’s haaaaaard (insert whine here)”.

I’m not a browser developer, but if I were I wouldn’t mind switching to a purely XML based system like XHTML2. It’s certainly easier to parse than the mess that is (the underspecified) HTML. Except that if I did that, I would no longer be a browser developer. I’d be someone that writes code, designed to behave as a browser, that is used by no-one.

Vendors possibly preferred to extend HTML4 rather than start over with XHTML2 but the difficulty of it would have been only one facet of the issue.

And developers like writing code. A well-defined spec, a text-editor, and a compiler makes many a developer salivate. And computers will always get faster. Those aren’t the blocking points, in my opinion. The thing that killed XHTML2 was the millions of voices crying out for improvements to the web who were at best amused and most often bemused by the complexities of XHTML2.

There are lots of other cheap shots taken throughout that post, but I’ve already shown you the gravest offenses; pointing out each individual baseless attack, accusation, and logical fallacy would only waste my time.

The facts are these. XHTML2 has been in development since before HTML5 was brought up as an idea. HTML5 is now in use in browsers everywhere with more and more of the spec being implemented with every new browser release. XHTML2 probably has a few experimental features that you can play with in Firefox. XHTML2 lost. You can blame that on the vendors for not implementing your ideas, but the fact is your ideas were shit. If they were good, if they were what users wanted, browser vendors would put more effort into implementing them.

HTML5 is not “shackling the web content developers into the tag-soup architecture of the 90′s.” Tag Soup was never about the language, it was about the philosophy. Did C++ shackle C developers into “goto architecture?” HTML5 was about giving web content developers what they actually want, not a bunch of buzzwords and disingenuous attacks. It’s not as if HTML5 is ready for prime-time. IE still doesn’t support most of HTML5, but people are out there experimenting with HTML5 because it’s cool.

XHTML2 is standards for standards sake. Nobody’s using it. Nobody ever will. So let’s all get over it².

---

Footnotes

1. It does introduce new elements which will not function correctly with an HTML4 browser, but nothing old would be broken. [↩]
2. I admit that this is a bit of a departure for me. I’ve been one of the silent (but full-throated) proponents of JavaScript2/ECMAScript 4 over ECMAScript 3.1/ECMAScript 5. But there are distinct differences here. First, ES4 was backwards compatible. Second, ES4 brought demonstrable advances to the JavaScript environment, whereas XHTML2 seems to mostly work towards normalizing the substructure of HTML without offering any inherent advances, only allowable advances. That said, the irony of me being such a staunch attacker of XHTML2 while such a staunch defender of ES4 is not lost on me. And it goes without saying that, at this point, I’ve gotten over the ES4/ES5 schism and am happy to be working towards advancing to ES-Harmony. [↩]

I don’t get Ross Douthat. People I know keep telling me he’s not a total idiot (obviously, being a conservative implies a certain level of idiocy) but I’ve yet to find any of his words of any value, except perhaps to his own ego.

His most recent New York Times column, for example, extols the “romantic excess” that liberals seem to lack. He claims that “modern relationships have been drained of danger and purged of eros.”

Except he doesn’t think modern relationships are passionless, he think modern liberal relationships are passionless.

Our hyper-educated, socially-liberal elite is considerably more romantically conservative than its blasé attitude toward pornography or premarital sex would lead you to expect.

…

This tameness has beneficial social consequences: When it comes to divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births, Americans with graduate degrees are still living in the 1950s. It’s the rest of the country that marries impulsively, divorces frequently, and bears a rising percentage of its children outside marriage.

…

Better, perhaps, if this dynamic were reversed. Our meritocrats could stand to leaven their careerism with a little more romantic excess.

Ignoring the self-pitying Douthat sneaks into that first sentence, as all proper right-wingers must, it speaks to a massive misunderstanding on his part of the difference between passion and responsibility. To say that I’m not passionate because I’m capable of putting a condom on or willing to not pick up the first girl I see at the bar — not that either of those statements apply to me personally; for the moment, I’m speaking for other liberals with more game — is an utterly foolish thing to say.

The idea that something is not passionate unless is it reckless and stupid and embarrassing, exemplified by countless romantic comedies over the years, is a childish belief that most liberals have grown out of. Put bluntly, passion isn’t a quickie marriage, it’s a safeword.

Piling on, I’m not sure why Douthat is cheering on reckless marriage, frivolous divorce, and bastard children (I’m a bastard myself, so no insult intended) seeing as he’s the conservative between the two of us. But, let’s not get bogged down with logic. There’s columns that need writing.

The discussions of Michael Jackson are coming from all sides now. I’m not going to exhaust much more of my time thinking about this, mostly because so many people have already spoken so eloquently about the subject, but I still have a few things to say before I try and put this event in my past.

I find much of the well-written reactions have the common trend of levelness. Our media enjoys the deconstruction of celebrity, which is why Jackson’s tortured personal life is such fodder. So let’s get that out of the way now: I don’t know if he was a pedophile, whether in thought or action; I tend to think that the damage he suffered as a child left him with a yearning to find the childhood he never had which, in turn, led to his desire to befriend young boys. But I make no illusions about his actions. They were troubling and it is not an unreasonable assumption to believe his love for those boys was not platonic but romantic. But I don’t. Roger Ebert put it best:

I have no idea whether Michael abused the children he “adopted.” It is possible those relationships were without sex; he seemed frozen at a time before puberty. Whether he touched them criminally or not, it is easy to see what he sought: To create, with and for these Lost Boys, a Neverland where they could imagine together the childhood he never had.

These words do not revel in the broken life of a man. Too often the need to have heroes and villains makes us think the worst or the best. We vilify or we justify, but we don’t analyze. We don’t try to understand, we avoid nuance.

I hope that Michael Jackson’s music survives his death without the stigma his life has brought to it in recent years. And I hope that his personal life is not turned into a darker more twisted tale as time goes on. But I don’t want either side of the story to disappear.

I tend to take these small things and expand them with dire warnings; I’ve written in the past of the dangers of guilty pleasures, and now I write of the dangers of fundamentalism, albeit in the guise of celebrity obsession. We must be able to take the good with the bad, and not reject the former because of the latter nor ignore the latter out of respect for the former. Because once we do either, we begin our fall into a world of extreme fundamentalism, whether its to purity or a lack of same.

Human beings are not easily understood, so we categorize, we typify, we stereotype. None of this applies to the wonders and horrors our kind can produce. And none of it should.

There was a recent article about Scientology, focusing on the bullying and domineering attitude that Scientology’s current leader, David Miscavige, injects into the religion. Here’s what I have to say about Scientology: whatever.

I maintain that the things Scientology have done, ranging from domestic espionage to extreme litigation to the death of church members due to negligence, are not acceptable. But I also maintain that they are not unexpected. Religions in their growth pangs often commit horrific acts in an attempt to establish themselves. You need only look at the violence, corruption, and manipulation of the Catholic church in the middle ages to see evidence of that. And the holy wars of expansion of early Islam are just as telling; no religion has a monopoly on such offenses.

Similarly, Scientology’s “wacky” beliefs, like the multi-trillion-year-old universe and Thetans and the like are no more bizarre than the base beliefs of the Abrahamic religions. The difference is that we’ve grown up in a civilization centred around Moses carrying divinely inscribed tablets dictating the rules of the faith, around Noah building an Ark that carried his family and every single species on the planet for 40 days and 40 nights, around Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt for the sin of looking back upon Gomorrah, around a man who was a god who was martyred and resurrected and ascended to heaven. These stories are not less outlandish, they are more familiar. They don’t carry the stigma of the Space Opera.

None of what I’ve written defends Scientology in any way, but I don’t attack it for doing exactly what countless other churches has done in our history. It’s a double standard that makes no sense.

I know you’re thinking right now that the crimes of other religions are in the past and that because they happened in the past either a) it was ok because it was moderate for the time or b) it’s useless to chastise them for acts they no longer commit.

The first point is wrong, in my opinion. Morals are morals. I don’t care if it was done in exceptional circumstances. Wrong is wrong.

The second point is more valid, and I agree with it wholeheartedly. But Scientology hasn’t committed domestic espionage in the recent history, so to attack them for it is equivalent to attacking the modern Catholic church for the Inquisition or the Crusades.

In the end, I think that, if Scientology survives this initial growth to become an actual religion, it will become less hard line, but that won’t happen due to external pressure. If anything, the continual attacks on the religion from the outside will allow the church to establish a line of defence, just as Iran’s Supreme Leader has for decades by invoking the spectre of American Imperialism. Over time, Scientology’s member will force the church to change. Or it will collapse on itself. And the rest of the world isn’t going to do anything to affect the outcome or its time of arrival.

I’ve been meaning to write a bit about Reaper, a show in the same vein as Chuck, ever since its season finale. One thing I noticed was the fairly significant similarities in their progression. Reaper ended its second season with what could be considered an evening of the playing field between Sam, the slacker Reaper looking for a way out of his contract with the Devil, and his pseudo-girlfriend Andi, who had shrinked from Sam this season after learning he was a son of the Devil: she had lost her soul to the Devil as well. Additionally, the season ended with a cryptic message from former demon, and current angel, Steve that everything that’s happening is happening for a reason, and the blueprints aren’t downstairs; the world was expanded, and Sam’s significance had increased.

Similarly, with Chuck the season ended with Chuck obtaining a newer more powerful Intersect which gave him physical capabilities as well; twisting this slightly to make the point, he was now on a level playing field with his pseudo-girlfriend Sarah, who until now had been the kickass super-agent of the relationship. And in the process of obtaining this new Intersect the scope of the story was expanded: the enemy of the last two years had been but one part of a larger machine. The parallels are striking.

That isn’t to say the shows were similar. In fact, the contrast between the two shows was much greater in their second seasons than their first, but the similarities in their arcs are  nonetheless notable.

Chuck and Reaper have followed similar paths on the production side of things as well. They were both affected, and truncated, by the Writer’s Strike and as a result both were “bubble shows” that made it back for a second season by the skin of their teeth. Of course, here their paths diverge slightly. Reaper was given a short season renewal. I’d initially read that it was a 9 episode season, but ultimately 13 aired; Chuck was given a full 22 episode pick up.

So Chuck returned in the fall and spent months developing its identity and fanbase to the point that when it was placed once again on the bubble (albeit as a likely renewal) the fans sprang into action. Reaper, with its shorter season, began airing as a mid-season replacement and didn’t have as much time to grow a fanbase. So, despite continual assertions of inevitable cancellation by TV rating analysts, the fanbase barely materialized and the show was killed, while Chuck’s wildly successful fan-driven campaign resulted in saving the show from the increasingly fickle chopping block.

But following the trend of cancelled shows being picked up by other networks, seen this year with Medium and (potentially) My Name is Earl, the execs behind Reaper were rumoured to be looking for a deal that would have allowed for a third season on a new network. Jenny Wade, who starred on this season of Reaper as a demon and Ben’s Anya-esque girlfriend, posted on twitter of an unofficial deal in the works, a deal that fell through rather quickly. Since then, I’ve been following her and she recently posted a video discussing Reaper. In it she, among other things, defends Tyler Labine and Bret Harrison, the stars of Reaper, from fans who said they gave up on the show. This is the first I’d heard of it, but I decided to hypothesize completely uninformed of the context of the comments.

Tyler Labine was cast in a new pilot which was subsequently greenlit for a season order. I can see how that can be construed as “abandoning” a show, but it’s simply the reality of the industry; in addition, his contract for Reaper almost certainly overrode any other deals and the pilot he filmed was merely “backup.” Bret Harrison is another story; he hasn’t quickly moved onto other roles or anything of that sort so the anger of the fans seems even more unjustified to me. What I think it boils down to, though, is Reaper’s unintended doppleganger: Chuck.

One of the more noted aspects of the Chuck renewal campaign was how vociferously some of the stars of the show encouraged the campaign: namely, Bret Harrison’s Chuck counterpart Zachary Levi. While at a convention in London, he took a group of Chuck fans to a nearby Subway and, following one of the ideas of the fan campaign, started buying five dollar footlongs. Subsequently, he appeared on CNN, and most likely other channels as well, to discuss the campaign and support the show and the renewal campaign. As far as I know, Bret Harrison did none of these things, so I presume that this is at least one aspect of why the fans seem displeased with Harrison. Which (finally) gets to the point of this post: are those sorts of actions the duty of an actor?

I don’t think so. An actor’s duty is to act. Beyond that, every actor does things differently. Acting, in the end, is just a job. To some people, their job is their life, to others it’s not. We’d all like to believe that all the actors in our favourite shows and movies ansolutely love the roles they’re playing, but that’s not always the case. And really, it’s not their job to love their job.

Maybe Zachary Levi really loves Chuck more than Bret Harrison loves Reaper. Or maybe that’s just who Levi is; maybe he will spend a week evangelizing all of his friends when he finds a great rib joint. I don’t know either of them. What I do know is that the both of them did a great job. They performed their roles well, and brought to life their characters. Beyond that, I don’t give a shit.

(Obviously, I care a little; personable and fan-friendly actors are better than the alternative, but I’m not going to chastise an actor for not being an acolyte for their show.)

And ultimately, Zachary Levi talking about Chuck on CNN did not renew the show. Zachary Levi would not have even been on CNN talking Chuck except for one thing: the fans. The fans created the campaign, the fans pushed the narrative, they renewed the show. Anything Zachary Levi did was ancillary, just as anything Bret Harrison could have done would have been. The only thing Zachary Levi did to renew the show was give a great performance, one that engendered such an enthusiastic fanbase. He did his job. And so did Harrison.