james holloway

Being an editor

I commissioned my first feature story for Gizmag – an examination of new-fangled wind turbines and why they’re not always as innovative as they might first seem. Mike did a great job with it. I hope he writes more for us. It all came out of a suspiciously informed comment he left on one of our other wind-related stories. We decided to get in touch. People seem to have liked this article. We’ll try to do more stuff like that.

Much ado about filming

We went to see Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing today. I thought it was excellent. And proof that all you need to make a film is … I was going to say talent and a camera, but I think I’ll go with an idea, a camera and some friends.

Here’s something you probably don’t know about me: I did quite a lot of Shakespeare at school. As in acting in plays, and as in voluntarily. This qualifies me for sweet FA, I realise. I’m just trying to put across that I love Shakespeare. And I think Whedon, the precocious Yank, brought the language to life more than any film director I’ve seen take a crack at Shakespeare.

It feels as if every single line was deliberated for rhythm, and rise and fall, so that the meaning of the words wasn’t swallowed up inside metaphor or verbosity. And you know you’re in the hands of a competent director of Shakespearean comedy when every joke from the original text gets a laugh, and more are wrung out where not originally intended (I don’t think) with a judicious pause, facial expression or creative staging.

Go and see it. Then make a film in your house. I’ll watch it.

Smartphones and urban decay

Next time you’re in a cafe or a Chinese takeaway, take a look at the TV. There’s a chance, an increasingly good one I think, that you won’t find one, but will see the rather sorry TV bracket where it used to be.

I’m assuming you’re British. Here in the UK, televisions have always been part of the furniture in Chinese takeout waiting rooms and in the seating areas of a certain sort of cafe (or greasy spoon caffs). People watch them for 10 or 20 minutes at a time while they eat their sausages and fried bread, or wait for their crispy beef and chilli. Or the front-of-house staff will watch in the downtime between customers.

But where I live in East London, both my nearest cafe and my nearest Chinese have the tell-tale bracket where a 12-inch CRT telly used to be (rarely if ever have I seen flat panel TVs in such places, there presumably having been little need to upgrade).

The lady who runs the counter at my Chinese explained that she gave the TV to an elderly lady in the neighbourhood whose own TV was rendered defunct in the great analogue apocalypse (which in London, was put off till 2012). She explained she didn’t need it any more in any case, adding “mobiles” by way of explanation. At first I assumed she meant customers’ phones until she promptly returned to her own generously-proportioned smartphone. But she probably meant both.

I haven’t asked the local cafe their reasons for the lack of telly. It’s not my regular cafe of choice, and they don’t seem very chatty (which is fine). But anyone in their alone tends to have their own screen to read or poke.

Waiting room tellies were always a bit of a stop-gap technology, when you think about it. Smartphones make much more sense as a means of self-distraction for 10 minutes or so, not least because you can choose what’s on the screen. So for this reason, I assume the current TVs in these places will be the last. They won’t be proactively taken down, of course. Not unless a better use for it crops up. But if I’m right, they won’t be replaced when they finally give up.

That being the case, come the first redecoration, refurbishment or takeover, the brackets will come down too. I don’t know how many years will go by before the last redundant bracket comes done. Perhaps it will be many. But when they do, will people remember that there used to be tellies in Chinese takeaways? Does that even warrant a footnote in the history of television? Or retail? I hope so because, do you know what? They jolly well did.

I’m trying to think of other examples of minor infrastructure that have stuck it out for a while after their usefulness, and after the really purposeful bit (the equivalent of the actual TV) has been reused or cashed in for scrap. I can’t think of any straight away, but I bet there are a few.

Another short collection of things I have read and enjoyed online, lately. However, linkage should not be interpreted as total or even partial agreement:

• News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
• BioShock Infinite’s Combat Mechanics Regression (Dry subject matter, but a detailed and insightful look at game mechanics, which is the sort of thing which tends to explain why games sometimes aren’t as fun as they should be. This one via Dan.)
• Stop externalising your life (On what one might call hyper-sharing, I suppose. Via Paul.)
• Find The Thing You’re Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life (First class sarcasm.)
• In Conversation: Robert Silvers (Excellent and insightful interview with the long-time editor of The New York Review of Books, also via Dan.)

And finally a useful link more than an interesting one, though it’s that too:

• Matt Gemmell on designing blogs for readers (Reading this shamed me into another hasty Tumblr theme change. I’ll probably do another when I have the chance to look through this in more detail. Also via Paul.)

Wizards and wires

I’ve read another book! It was The Midwich Cuckoos, written in by John Wyndham in 1957. Two extracts stood out, what with, you know, the internet, drone warfare and all that.

Here, the narrator, Richard Gayford, visits Gordon Zellaby, who is listening to an “excellently reproduced” Bach recording on some new-fangled audio gear (an all-transistor phonogaph, perhaps? They first appeared in 1955, apparently). Without speaking, Zellaby invites Gayford to sit, which they do in silence until the recording is finished, whereupon Zellaby explains.

“‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he apologized. ‘One feels that once Bach has started his pattern he should be allowed to finish it. Besides,’ he added, glancing at the playing cabinet, ‘we still lack a code for dealing with these innovations. Is the art of the musician less worthy of respect simply because he is not present in person? What is the gracious thing? – For me to defer to you, for you to defer to me, or for both of us to defer to genius – even genius at second-hand? Nobody can tell us. We shall never know. We don’t seem to be good at integrating novelties with our social lives, do we? The world of the etiquette book fell to pieces at the end of the last century, and there has been no code of manners to tell us how to deal with anything invented since. Not even rules for an individualist to break, which is itself another blow at freedom. Rather a pity, don’t you think?’”

The other extract crops up in a speculative conversation about the cause of the so-called Dayout, an event in which the people of Midwich were rendered unconscious for a time, leading to the strange events which follow (problem children, to put mildly). A Colonel Latcher observers:

“Soldiering’ll soon be nothing but wizards and wires.”

Perhaps that wasn’t a particularly foresightful or controversial statement in 1957, but still, if you look past the superficial meaning of the word wires (metal string, if you like) to the underlying thrust of what wires do, i.e. allow change to be effected remotely, it’s a rather good line.

There.

RSS hauntings

This old photo popped into my feed reader a few months ago. The article it was attached to was mundane filler that Russell Group universities tend to use to pad out their news feeds, but something about it stuck, and so I starred it to come back to. But somewhere there’s a glitch between my RSS client and Google Reader, which it syncs with (they haven’t terminated it yet, have they?) and though I can unstar it, it doesn’t stay unstarred for long. Every day, after I check my feed subscriptions and star anything which seems potentially interesting, I go over the starred items to see what I’m actually likely to write about. Every day, at the very end, there’s this black and white photo of the Victoria Building at Liverpool University. It opened 120 years ago, I am reminded. I can’t help feeling it wants something, but I’m yet to find out what. Consider this memo an escalation of the issue; a mental moving up the agenda. Nice photo, though.

Failure, within and without games

I recently finished reading Jesper Juul’s The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games. Here are some extracts that stood out:

…sports writers often celebrate the top player who claims to consider winning a minor detail compared to his or her love for the game. For example, a recent New Yorker profile of chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen notes with some admiration: “Carlsen wasn’t thinking about being the best, he recalled: ‘I was just enjoying the game, really. I don’t think I’ve ever really been much into setting myself these goals. It hasn’t been necessary. I mean, just playing the game has been enough for me.’” Of course, this is an ideal—this is not how most people behave most of the time, and it may be that top athletes deliberately play up to the ideal in interviews.

I’m not sure why I made a note of this, except I’ve read a few articles recently on the benefits of living a life with no goals. Those articles appeal, but I suspect only because I want them to be true, and not because I believe them to be true.

A study of video games in the classroom observed similar differences between students who saw failure as an opportunity for learning, and those who were discouraged by it. 17 I was stuck, discouraged by failure, unable to let go, but not learning as much as I should. My behavior would surely have appalled any sports psychiatrist.

Without going all autobiographical, I can relate to this. For whatever reason, I spent a long time thinking that a puzzle or a problem was something you either could do or you couldn’t, and that you could tell which within a couple of minutes (at the outside.) This was fine at the earlier stages of my education, but certainly problematic by A level time, when, for whatever reason (again) I chose completely the wrong subjects. Luckily, the internet was starting to hit big around that time so I could continue my education through other less formal channels, which looking back I think suited me down to the ground. My advice to all teenagers is now do what you like, and try harder than the other guy. Fortunately, my failure then was relative rather than absolute.

Designer Soren Johnson of the Civilization series describes it as a general problem that players seek out the optimal path to play a game but stick to it even when they find it fundamentally uninteresting. The strategy of lumberjacking in Civilization III is one such example […] Chopping down a forest gives 10 hammers to the nearest city. However, forests can also be replanted once the appropriate tech is discovered. This set of rules encourages players to have a worker planting a forest and chopping it down on every tile within their empire in order to create an endless supply of hammers. However, the process itself is tedious and mind-numbing, killing the fun for players who wanted to play optimally.

My recent experience with container opening sim Bioshock Infinite means this resonates with me even more than it otherwise would, though the Civ series itself is another fantastic example. To play a video game strategically is too often to sap the joy out of it. That’s always a design flaw, never a player flaw. On the subject of lumberjacking in Civ III, it would have been excellent if the game detected a player reforesting a tile for the third time, and popped up with a message saying “It looks like you’ve discovered forest management. Press the M key on a tile to automate this procedure”. Hindsight and all that.

In contrast, Jonas Heide Smith has documented how players of multiplayer games frequently handicap themselves when ahead in order to maintain excitement in a game, effectively exposing themselves to failure. Perhaps multiplayer games and open sandbox games such as Grand Theft Auto IV encourage us to undertake more challenge-seeking behavior, to seek out the depth of a game on our volition.

Every game I have ever spoken to does this, but though imposing self-set limits does make things harder, I think we really do it to make things more interesting, and force video games to feel more different from each other than they otherwise might be. I like that imaginative games designers have embraced achievement systems to set rewards for these sorts of things. Playing through Half Life 2: Episode One using only the gravity gun is an example. But it’s more fun still imposing the limits yourself. I’m creeping through the original Bioshock with no guns at all at the moment. I don’t know why this quote limits it to online and sandbox games, though. You can just as easily try to clear a Pac-Man screen saving the power pills till last, or clear only four lines at a time in Tetris. Or perhaps those are sandbox games.

New Hack City

New Habitat’s invitation to hack a house this weekend sounds as though it should be open to programmers and computer security types given a free pass to crack a smart house’s building management system, and make the lights spell out rude messages in morse code flashes.

As fun as that would be, the hackcity event in Brooklyn sounds as though architects and (non-software) engineers will be just as welcome. The idea is that the architecture is the API, so perhaps there’s potential for more fundamental ideas to come out of it.

I have no idea what this all means, really, except to say that, if I was anywhere near New York, I’d go.

Plumbing the depths of ad-supported journalism

An interesting debate about ad-supported writing unfolded yesterday. It took place in the sphere of video games websites, but the underlying arguments apply across subjects. This is fundamental.

It started when Penny Arcade Report’s Ben Kuchera argued that you need disposable quick-to-write link-baity content, giving the somewhat unfortunate example of “sexy cosplay galleries”, in order to support proper reporting. The quick-and-dirty stuff earns you the unique visitors which bring in the ad revenues which pay your staff to have the time to write the good stuff. That’s the idea. It’s not a new argument, but Kuchera’s take on it is detailed. I even partly agree with him when he sidetracks into ad-blocking software.

On his personal blog, Rock, Paper Shotgun’s John Walker (who wrote the excellent The Life and Death of Skyrim’s Lydia which I linked to the other day), Walker makes the case for doing things properly: writing quality content. If you’re at all interested in this stuff, do please read what he had to say. I agree with all of it. Here’s an extract:

Were that true, RPS would absolutely be tailored to suit the stereotypically perceived gaming audience, posting endless list features and galleries of half-naked women, because the reality is, that WOULD bring in a ton of hits. It’s gross, we hate it, so we don’t do it. There are better ways.

It’s difficult, but it can be done, and RPS is an excellent example. Kuchera, on Twitter, highlights RPS’s partnership with Eurogamer, but success begets business interest, be it acquisition or partnership. Does that scale? Perhaps not to all aspiring news sites. But how many do we want? RPS differentiated itself by being the best video games website (of those I know of, at least). If Kuchera turns out to be right… I suppose that’s the day I’ll find something else to do.

Perhaps more could have been made of the gender equality questions Kuchera’s post raises, but RPS (and Walker, in fact, looking again at the bylines) has nothing to prove in this area as far as I’m concerned.

Photo of sexy cosplay man: Michael Mol

Uncertainty as a feature (and the blogger ethic)

Do people have features? Non-physical ones, I mean? I suppose not, but traits are too immutable for my meaning. I want to make the case for uncertainty being a good thing, behaviourally speaking. I don’t know, but I get the sense that a lot of science and technology writers are encumbered by the need to be certain.

Facts are wonderful things, but they’re dwarfed by the set of possible things, and the set of conceivable things. Seeking out fact is probably quite a good description of journalism—especially if those facts are somehow hidden. Conclusions have to be supported by the evidence, though. If you read something, and you can’t connect the dots between the evidence and the writer’s summing up, then really they’re asking you to take their word for it.

What’s wrong with picking up a subject, poking it, smelling it, sniffing it, and hopefully shedding a bit of light on it, and then putting it down again for the next person? When I feel I’ve genuinely found things out, I end up with more questions than when I started. Yet conclusions to articles tend to have more answers than questions. Perhaps I’m reading the wrong ones.

The more certain you pretend to be, beyond what the facts support that is, the more risk you’re taking that your article is wrong. A few times I’ve felt under a little bit of pressure to be certain, and I think I prefer low risk journalism. Not low risk in the sense that you’re in safe territory, or not asking questions; but safe in the sense that you’re putting the subject down again for the next guy when you’ve taken it as far as you can without risk of dropping and breaking it—misleading the reader in other words.

Maybe my view is informed by my background as a blogger. But I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.

Darkness visible

Dan and I visited Light Show at the Hayward Gallery on Friday. It’s an exhibition about light, with two dozen or so works which all shine, glow or otherwise emit light one way or another. I didn’t really know what to expect, but thought several of the pieces were really rather good.

As usual, photography was forbidden, and the only shot I managed to snaffle out of there was this grainy iPhone snap of Anthony McCall’s You and I, Horizontal. It’s a wonderfully simple thing. A projector shows a film of curved white lines moving slowly over a black background in a darkened room filmed with artificial mist. The projection isn’t so much the thing; it’s the planes of light the film describes in the mist. If you’ve seen the sequence in Alien when John Hurt’s character first comes across the xenormporh eggs, you’ll have some idea of the sort of effect. People are quite free to wander round the room and play with the light as they see fit. The effect is much more disconcerting than you might imagine, and at first people are clearly hesitant to “touch” the light. In a near pitch black box, it seems the most corporeal thing there.

Slow Arc inside a Cube IV was a great example of how an apparently simple idea using a few simple bits can create an almost overwhelming reaction in the observer. It’s just a single light source on a robot arm inside a cubed cage. The sides of the cage have an isometric cube pattern and the top and bottom have simple squares. The light casts these shapes in vivid shadows on the walls of the room (also a cube, or cuboid at the least). As the light moves these shadows race, and grow and shrink in size, creating the impression that the walls of the room are somehow warping and shifting. Fix you eye at a given point on the wall, and the effect is almost nauseating. While I was there someone bumped into the cage, knocking it out of alignment with the walls of the room. This lessened the effect.

Jenny Holizer’s MONUMENT was by far the most arresting piece on display. A tower of illuminated LED tickers, the sort you’d expect to show the latest news headlines, exchange rates or weather forecasts, instead displays extracts from declassified US government documents pertaining to the war on terror. As I watched, an account of an interview with a weeping 9/11 suspect, name redacted with blocks of asterisks, scrolled and flashed its way across the screen. The testimony is shown on two lines, repeated over and over up and down the cylindrical tower, but blinking and scrolling out of sync in phased patterns, making it rather difficult to read. You can’t help but stare. And think. Staring and thinking: not a bad brief for a piece of visual art, really.

And lastly, James Turrell’s Wedgework V was maybe the most intriguing work there. Unfortunately, I think the Hayward’s approach to this piece puts visitors in entirely the wrong frame of mind to enjoy it. Somehow, natural light is allowed to divide a room diagonally, creating the impression of a physical form that isn’t really there. You approach the work via a pitch black corridor, and because they say it takes 15 minutes to really appreciate it, there’s a queue. Unfortunately, people are herded in and out like cattle, told where to sit with a pointed flash of a torch, and wait, distracted, while the room is filled with other visitors. It feels like you’re waiting for a performance to begin. When it doesn’t, people inevitably feel deflated. The queue is fine, but if they let people come and go in a one-in, one-out system, people might actually stop and look and think. Are slightly power-crazed staff at museum and art galleries a thing? They were the one minor blemish on an otherwise excellent trip to New York, recently, too.

Anyway, overall: yeah – good.

List: Kravitzes (in order of fame)

1. Lenny
2. Ted