Virtual Thought

Here’s an interesting article that lays out the debate rather nicely.

Help me for I am in Hell.

Apparently the Media Powers that Be think an O.C. video game is a good idea. Taken from the CNN writeup:

The style of play is similar to reality-simulation titles like “The Sims,” allowing fans of the show to explore the “O.C.” universe by dressing to impress, joining the right cliques, dating the right people and striving to fit into the ultra-trendy community, [Gameloft president Michel] Guillemot said.

The emphasis is mine. Seriously, now, WTF? Not only do we have girls with body image problems in real life (thank you Tina Fey for accusing Lindsay Lohan of having Mischa Barton arms) and an increasing number of people who feel as though high school is an alien landscape not meant for them but instead for an inimical species bent on their very destruction… but now it’s also attractively packaged, costs $50, and will, in all likelihood, have shitty gameplay?

Yeah, no thanks.

NB: I’m pretty sure a lot of my anger stems from the fact that this season of the O.C. really, really sucks.

I read this article about how the Chinese government is increasing the restrictions on Inernet use in their own country and preventing their people from reading “approved” news sites. Previous to this, Chinese bloggers had to register with the state—this is just going to the next logical step, really. No surprise there.

I got really angry when I read this. Angry exclamations about freedom and personal choice rang in my head, and I left that page open so I could blog about how Chinese people should have access to any information they want.

Then I came across this article about Pennsylvania’s court battle over intelligent design and how the school board is being taken to court by a group of parents and the ACLU to prevent this thinly veiled attack on the separation of church and state from getting set into the school curiculum.

I got really angry when I read this. Angry exclamations about freedom and personal choice rang in my head, and I left that page open so I could blog about how Pennsylvanian students should not be taught intelligent design in their schools by their science teachers since this just isn’t science and how the court should rule against the intelligent design folks.

Then I paused for a sec.

“What’s the difference here?” my mind asked me (creepy, I know). “So Chinese people should be able to get any information they want but Pennsylvanian ninth graders shouldn’t hear about alternative theories in science?”

And that’s when the mystery cleared up for me: the key word in that last question is science. Intelligent design is not science since it has no hypothesis that can be tested through repeatable experiments. Also, the court isn’t saying that intelligent design as a concept is anathema and can never be spoken of or researched; they are saying that our schools will not teach it. This idealogy isn’t forbidden; it is just not available in schools.

So, yeah: the Chinese people should have the freedom of information access that they deserve and ninth-graders in Pennsylvania should have the science education that they deserve.

Wired has a neat article about the ramification of George Bush’s pee-break note to Condi Rice.

What I found most interesting was this passage:

But if Kranz is right, the thing that establishes the veracity of an image is not the image itself, or even the words that put it in context, but our relationship of trust with the person speaking those words… if you’re really intent on falsifying, the last thing you’d do is leave evidence of your alterations… The more I think about my own photography habits, the more I’m convinced that the idea of an “unmanipulated” or “unedited” photo is an absurdity. I’m manipulating and editing the whole time! I see the picture in my head, choose the focal length of the lens, zoom, frame the composition in my camera viewfinder, sense a “decisive moment,” press the shutter, then later open the downloaded images in Photoshop, select the best ones, rotate them, change the cropping, bring up the contrast, make the colors look more natural, clean them up.

I like the non-discrete definition of truth as a relationship between the producer and consumer of the media rather than measured against some absolute. Every play a game against someone (like Killer Instinct or Quake) and been accused of being “cheesy”? The complainer is, in fact, expressing two things: “I hate it that you are beating me,” and “I believe in an absolute standard of quality game playing that you are failing against.” The first statement is easy to answer: “Don’t be a wuss.” The second is harder: haven’t we all, in each of our fields (coding, playing games, writing music, etc.) felt that there is some Yardstick Of Truth out there measuring us? That if we could only stretch forth our efforts our measurements against this Yardstick would show progress towards some finite and reachable goal?

Bullshit. As that last passage from the Wired article indicates, there’s no fidelity to be gained by assaying the Absolute Truth of things whether its photography or fighting games or coding or whatever. That’s a much more interesting world to me.

Okay, no, not really. But in that funny and scathing way of his Joel says no to agile development practices.

So let me try on the Joel hat for a while. In the example he gives, Speedy doesn’t actually have a customer on site and doesn’t actually produce any stories about the user experience. Which agile method, exactly, proposes starting out by coding without talking to the user? If he was truly agile, Speedy wouldn’t go off and code in the weeds for three weeks. He’d have gathered some user input, generated user stories, defined some basic models and mock-ups… y’know, everything that an agile software developer would do.

And I’m glad Mr. Rogers at WellTemperedSoft had such a positive experience… unfortunately for him, though, he appears to have stopped talking to the user during those three weeks of development and has suffered from some requirements drift. Too bad Mr. Rogers wasn’t talking with his customer or else he could have noticed that drift. And, y’know, too bad Mr. Rogers has a disconnected relationship with his managers or else the managers would be more understanding when Mr. Rogers has to adjust the end product to meet his changing requirements.

To be fair, I don’t like searching for silver bullets and holy grails and I’m not a fan of zealotry. But I do think that the argument should be fairly represented, at least.

This is great. I’ve always wanted to be able to compare before and afters in photo session retouches… since media promotes the idea that celebrity is akin to the godhead it’s nice to see something that might be reality amidst the glam. ( =

In the “Heartless Yet Funny Sons of Bitches” category we have Katrina: The Gathering. Fan-fucking-tastic and totally deplorable. Right.

As a side note, they used this cool program to make the cards. Sweet!