Theatre: Memorial

 Here There Are Blueberries by Moises Kaufman and Amanda Gronich Conceived and Directed by Moises Kaufman, Seattle Rep through 15 February.

Yes, here's another review for the Rep. And a big part of it is that we were late attending The Heartsellers (see next entry), so this one is next in queue. And the comparison is pretty darn amazing, showing the huge range of what theatre can do.

So. Nazis. 

Here There Are Blueberries is about a photo album sent to the Holocaust Museum in 2007. The photo album, a relic of WWII, has photos of Auschwitz. But not photos of the prisoners, but instead of the guards and administrators. Julia Cohen (Barbara Pitts) is a junior curator who gets the initial offer of the album and follows it through, unpeeling the onion of who had the album made (an officer at the camp) and what the album showed. 

And what the album showed was the banality of evil. It did not show the prisoners, the showers, the crematoriums. It did not show the dead, the victims, or the survivors. Instead it showed the guards in their everyday lives of picnics and visits from the top brass. Posed pictures and candid shots, captured with the Leica cameras that were coming into vogue at the time and made affordable for most Germans (in America, the Kodak cameras were much the same). The photos are of the type that show up on the social media these days, of people laughing and enjoying themselves IN THE CAMPS THEMSELVES.

The album poses questions - who are the people in the photos and how could they condone the extermination of others? Plus, what to do with the photos from a group dedicated to commemorating the victims, not the oppressors? We follow not only the discoveries in the albums (like size of the Auschwitz complex and the lodge on the far end, used to reward the guards and workers with days off from their monstrous tasks). And the post-war effects of the individuals and descendants of the criminals - the silence about the war years, and the denial of the participants. "How were we to know that the crematorium right next to our living quarters was used to incinerate people? That the air we breathed was the carbonized remains of our prisoners?".

The play touches on the mechanization and compartmentalization of the Holocaust. It was a genocide made possible by the technology of railroads and record-keeping and modern poisons. It was a crime against humanity of which each individual person in the chain had but a small part and as such could not consider themselves completely culpable. It was very similar to people talking about lynching here in this country. "I didn't kill him, your honor. I just held the rope for a little while, and sometime in a the confusion, the victim just died". These people held the rope.

So yeah, it a sobering, stunning play. The presentation is matter of fact, aided by the pictures themselves presented in multimedia. The stagecraft supports but does not overwhelm. The ensemble switch from museum workers to descendants to the victims themselves. Against the current background of ICE, authoritarianism, detention centers and Nazis once more marching in the streets, it hits harder. The only change is that the Leica cameras and Kodaks are replaced by the cameras are on our phones, recording atrocities in real time, giving us no excuse to say "How were we to know" when the butchers bill finally comes due. 

A tough play. Go see it. More later,

Plague Books: TED Talks in Text

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, Revised and Expanded Edition, Basic Books, 2013

Provenance: I was part of a online seminar a while back, and one of the other participants, Brannon Boren, recommended this book strongly. Picked it up via Amazon, and soon discovered that it was a bit of a Bible among those engaging in games design, in particular UX (User eXperience) and UI (User Interface).

Review: Even before this book, I was sensitized to UX/UI, due to my job. In part, an Amazon goal is to make processes (ordering stuff, playing games, watching a video) as frictionless as possible, and I am as a result aware of every bump, hiccup, and obstacle on the net and in real life that gets in my way. Just as an example, I am calling out those self-checkout kiosks at the grocery store, which are so bunged up they require live employees to stand by to help out us troglodytes who flail away at them.

But trogs we are not, says Norman - it is primarily the fault of bad design, that does not take into account how people actually use the things they use,communicate with them easily, and can handle when the user does not do the expected thing. And this book is filled with examples of bad design, good design, and evolving design, and the challenges that one faces when trying to create utility for objects that will be used by people who are not in the same room as you, and whom you cannot yell at ("No, turn the knob to the right. Clockwise! No, the OTHER clockwise!").

And this is familiar territory. You've hit things that don't work the way they should - doors that look like they push when they pull. Knobs that don't map directly to the burners on the stoves. Light switches that are not even in the same room as the lights they control (I have a LOT of these in our house, much to the frustration to guests who walk into a darkened bathroom and don't realize the light switch is Back Out in the Hall). The book has a lot of examples, and Norman returns to them several times to push various points through the text.

The book itself is written in bite-sized, readable bits, and is better for reading over a section, considering it for a while, then moving on to the next. IDeal  if, say, you're commuting on a public transport. Or between meetings. Or, well, in the bathroom. This is (I have to admit) where the bulk of my consumption of the book took place. It is like a bunch of short videos distilled down into a readable bite-sized form.

And it has a lot of organizational buckets for its ideas - The Seven Stages of Action. The Five Whys. The Three Levels of Processing. Yes, they sound like competing Martial Arts Schools, but Norman makes they all explainable and how they all fit in together. Indeed, he has the bits that look they evolved neatly into the "Flywheel" process that Amazon and other companies have adopting for product development and adequately using feedback loops.

And he lays out Norman's Law, which summarized, says "As soon as a project starts, it is behind schedule and over budget". Because I've been there, too.

Does he get everything right? Not completely. He uses his own book's organization as an example of text that can be read in any order, because non-fiction is different in fiction in that it is not yoked to a narrative through-line. However even nonfiction has a narrative flow in that it is making an argument and building its conclusions on previously presented material. You go immediately to the back of the book for answers, and you miss out on the logic that gets you there.

The Picturephone - 1970.
Yes, I was alive at that time.

Also, amusingly, he sites as a example the continuing failure of the videophone, which showed up at the end of the 18th Century as a concept for long-distance communication, and continued to never take hold up through the 21st Century (There was an ad for the videophone that was shot in Pittsburgh, and they wheeled it out whenever they were pushing the idea). Of course, in the past year, that entire concept has blown up not by a dedicated device, but by the fact that everyone HAD to teleconference, and with it, the rules changed and suddenly people were zooming/chiming/discording/tiktokking and what have you, even though this expanded volume came out less than a decade ago.

However, in general I am looking at a great little book that is easily consumable, and packs a punch on design issues, and I will strongly recommend it for everyone in "da bizniss", as it was recommended to me. Go forth and be sensitized on the issues.

More later, 

Truth and Theatre

Introduction: (You can read this in an Ira Glass voice if you like).

I haven't posted for a couple weeks now. Part of it has been the day job. Part of it was a nasty cold that has left me drained at the end of the day. And part of it is this particular essay.

I regularly write entries for this blog that do not see the light of day. I tend to over-think things sometimes, and I find that, in covering everything, my argument spreads out into a fine, thin film and my central points get lost. Or I put it off and then find that the rest of the world has moved on and everything than can be said, has been said. But this particular piece has been hanging fire for the better part of two weeks, and I need to get it out of the way so I can talk about other stuff. Because it tends to get into a subject I've already been talking about a lot - the nature of truth in threatre.

So I have a presentation in a standard three-act structure. Act One: An Opportune Death. Act Two: The Wheels Come off. Act Three: Lessons are Learned. And I'm going to try to cover the facts of the case without getting too deeply into the weeds, because some people know a lot about this already, and a lot of people may have caught something in passing. Further research, as I have discovered, is always encouraged.

So. We begin.

Act One: An Opportune Death

I'm a fan of monologist Mike Daisey. I've talked about him a number of times in this space, most recently in a review of The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, in which he weaves the history of Apple and our own technofetish impulses for new toys with his own experiences in China, talking with the workers about the oppressive and dangerous work making those toys. It was a dark piece, a political piece, a strongly emotional piece. And it was great theatre.

And great theatre does not stay in the theater. For most plays, the house lights come up and the crowd shuffles out and the cleaning crew preps for the evening show. Great theatre can stay with you days, weeks, and months after you see it, but for most of us, the impression fades, it is added onto the rest your life experiences, and everyone passes on to the next thing. Another group may be enraptured, or you can go back to rekindle the experience, or sometimes the work is photographed for a small shadow of its previous glory. But theatre, even great theatre, can fade over time. And that could have been the fate of The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.

Except a very strange thing happened - Steve Jobs died. You may have read something about that.

It is not strange that Mr. Jobs passed on - such in the nature of all things mortal. But rather what happened next was strange, almost theatrical. There were obituaries and eulogies and that apotheosis where the mortal is raised to godhood. And people looked around to find someone who knew about Steve Jobs and could speak eloquently about him and Apple, and found - Mike Daisey.

Mike Daisey, who has been talking about Jobs and Apple and the factories at Foxxcon, where the toys are made under armed guards and oppressive conditions. Underage workers and maimed employees. Daisey had met with workers and heard their stories and came back and told about his experiences and built a bridge between consumers and producers. He did interviews on his experiences. Op-ed pieces. And he got a lot of attention on This American Life, from WBEZ in Chicago, which excerpted parts of his Chinese sojourn for the show, then fact-checked him at the end of the program. They checked out the stuff they could, and found out that yes, there were accidents and yes, there were long hours and labor law violations and the like. Underage labor exists, though cases are not as common as Daisey indicated. The idea that the show checked out Daisey's statements, then presented what they found, strengthened Daisey's arguments. It was pretty impressive.

But here's the thing. It turns out that what Daisey said on the stage, reproduced on the radio as journalism, wasn't quite .... accurate. Or truthful. To be frank, he made stuff up. He lied.

Act 2: The Wheels Come Off

The nature of the lie is layered - yes, he went to China. Yes, he talked to workers. Yes, workers in the major factories work bone-crushing hours in repetitive actions. Yes, the official unions are government controlled. Yes, we aren't aware who the elves are that are making our toys. Yes, to get in, he posed as a businessman.

This American Life factchecked Daisey's piece, as I said. They asked for his translator's contact info. Daisey said it was no longer valid, and besides, he changed the translator's name for the piece. The radio show took him at his word (other things checked out) and ran the piece.

But then, a reporter from ANOTHER NPR show, Marketplace, an "Old China Hand' thought there were some things in the report that didn't add up. Yes, there were worked injured by hexane, but they were in a plant far away from the ones Daisey visited. The idea of unionists meeting in a Starbucks sounded odd. So this journalist started digging. He found the interpreter, the one Daisey said could not be located. It turns out she did have the same name as Daisey had reported. And she disagreed with a lot of the interactions that Daisy claimed to have with the workers.

But there were no armed guards. He did not meet with hundreds of employees at the gates, but rather only fifty or so. He may not have met with someone who worked there underage, but it was unlikely. Some of the facts were right, but the interactions were wrong. And that's a problem.

This American Life chose to pull the original show, which was one of their most popular, and to run a retraction, because what they said was the truth was suddenly suspect. And they didn't just run a retraction at the bottom of the blog on a Sunday morning, they did an entire show on the retraction, including interviews with both the Marketplace reporter and with Daisey himself, in all its uncomfortable glory. Its good reporting and good radios - go give it a listen.

Act 3: Lessons are Learned

In the weeks since the revelations there has been a great lamentation and rending of garments about this, a strange form of kabuki dance in which people a shocked, simply shocked, that a writer misrepresented himself. But the story feels more nuanced than at first blush and several of the actors involved are acting out of character.

Marketplace, the way the script it supposed to work, should have sprung this on TAL with an expose that shows up and challenges their facts. Instead, they offered what they learned to TAL and gave them the chance to break the story on their own. That's nice, but its not normal.

TAL, were it a traditional media company, could have stonewalled (we stand behind our sources), then, when overwhelmed, squeaked out innocuous retractions and then redesigned their site, so that the offending piece mysterious would go down the memory hole. They instead did ANOTHER show on their mistake.

And Daisey himself could have doubled-down in the best media tradition, and thrown his translator under the bus. Of COURSE she disagrees with me, she's in a country committing all these labor abuses! Reduce it to he said/she said, which makes the media believe things are balanced. Instead, he admits to some sins, stands by his badly-damaged word on others, and seemed to be honestly trying to figure out where things went wrong. In the end, he apologized on his own blog.

It seems almost precious in the modern media world. We have a media where daytime talkers and morning shows go off at length with obvious falsehoods, pounded into believable shape through continual repetition. Where political candidates will tell blatant lies, get called on them, then go off to their next speech to tell the same lies again. Where a lot of reporting is pressured by time constraints to little more than rewriting press releases and canned interviews filtered to the speaker's talking points and the audience's expectations. And here we have a passion for finding out the truth. In the wake of these revelations, there seems to be a lot of pearls being clutched by a lot of sensible souls.

And here is what it boils down to. Much (but not all) of what Daisey said about conditions in these factory towns was true. Much (but not all) of what Daisey said about his own role is false, or at least deeply questionable. And the moment when everything went south was when he stepped out of the theater and onto a larger stage, treating his creation as reality.

And here's the personal connection, which has stalled me for two weeks. In my own reviews of the Seattle Rep this season I found myself coming back to the nature of truth, and the trustworthiness of those on standing on the boards.Humor Abuse was a one-man memoir. How to Write a New Book for the Bible goes into detail on what happened and what didn't - what was memory and what was nudged one step closer to believability by quoting from the author's diary. I Am My Own Wife deals with the question of an unreliable narrator, yet leaves the audience curiously beached. Red featured real-world painter Rothko doing real-world Rothko things and saying real-world Rothko quotes, but is a construct, the pacing and lines shaped for the purposes of presentation.

Yet regardless how they acknowledge the presence of the truth, they do bend it, and because it is theatre, that bending is accepted. That there were no modern clocks to strike the hour in ancient Rome does not weaken Shakespeare's Julius Caesar one wit. Ditto Hamlet attending a university founded 700 years after his time. The membrane grows thin when you hit a monologue, a play in which the writer is portraying a character with the same name, you tend to believe that this is the truth. But I've also read a lot of Hunter Thompson, and I doubt the everything reported about the adventures of Hunter Thompson, writer, written by Hunter Thompson, writer, is absolute truth. It does not stop stop the enjoyment factor, though I would hesitate to quote him in an argument.

It is a weird dualism that perhaps lies at the heart of art, writing, and theatre - the ability to lie, or misrepresent, or alter, to get to greater truths. This particular season has scraped up against this basic fact a number of times, and now my concerns have spilled out over NPR about at which point it turned from being art and into being a sin.

And I feel no closer now than when I've begun. I've targeted examples, and planted a few markers, but they are markers in a soft and shifting sand. This is one that won't go away for a while for a while.

More later, without a doubt.

Genre is Marketing!

Let me get all ranty on something. This happened a little while back, but I've been busy.

Here is an article that has been making the rounds. Go read it (or not), and the come back.

So what do we have here?

Well, the summary is that the BBC is running a show where a fan of literary fiction (supposedly the high-brow, top of the shelf stuff) reads genre and best-sellers (what the rest of us apparently read - the literary version of junk food, empty calories for the mind). And an SF writer (one Stephen Hunt) is upset that when they talk about genre on this program (sorry, programme), they talk about adventure, romance, and thriller genres, and give the short shrift to SF, fantasy, and horror.

There is so much wrong here on both sides that I don't even know where to start.

Author Stephen Hunt, just to even things up.

First off, the article talks about an author with a problem about a BBC show, and then runs a picture of the star of that show. What, no author photos available? The article does this without running any quote or comment from the host of the show in this matter. So it is pretty much free advertising for the show and host, where the base complaint is that the show and host don't provide free advertising for some forms of genre. Irony abounds.

Then let's look at Sue Perkins, the host who is supposedly dissing SF, shown in said photo, looking hot and intellectual and all with her glasses and battered copy of a Penguins Classic. The first time she's mentioned in the article she is listed as a comic who prefers literary fiction. OK. A comic. Nothing wrong with that. I don't think that Ms. Perkins insights should be invalidated by her profession, but her main job is to entertain, make people laugh, and maybe think (but that's an option - they aren't all George Carlin, you know). I could get a quote from Gilbert Gottfried about nuclear safety, and while it may be entertaining, it is hardly the final word on the subject.

And what is the problem here? Literary fiction, which is the snotty girl with rich parents (that would be the genre, not the host), deigns to invite some of the lower-class kids to her party (where the girl with wealthy forebears will compare her life with theirs and make fun of their clothes). And this author is steamed that HE DIDN'T GET INVITED.

Harrumph, I say. Harrumph!

And what grinds my gears is that this tiff is all about genre, and genre is a product of marketing. Heck, let me be direct. Genre IS marketing. It is more about where you go into the bookstore than value of the work. Separate animals.

Genre is the ultimate form of "If you liked THAT then you'll like THIS!" It is the ultimate form because it references beyond the mere borders of author and publisher, which can be used for these references, but are more finite. The author only produces so many works. The publisher only publishes and keeps in print so many titles.

Genre casts its net wide. Genre gets a section in the bookstore. Genre has wide skirts that a horde of titles can hide under. Genre greases the wheels, eases the load, and makes for an easier sale from the author to the publisher, from the publisher to retailer, and from the retailer to you.

And genre evolves over time. Let me go back to Kaufmann's department store, which I visited in this post mortem for Borders. It is 1969 or so, and I am standing in front of the science fiction section, which consists of a low bookcase of four or five shelves. Here were find Asimov's Foundation series, Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, and Clarke's 2001, new in paperback, along with some Ace doubles and the Perry Rhodan ghetto and some James Blish Star Trek novelizations. Tolkien is here, and a couple books "In the tradition of Lord of the Rings". Fantasy doesn't really exist yet on the retail level. Conan is here, but he isn't defined as fantasy. Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser won't show up for a couple years yet in paperback,nor will Steve King. Here's some of Del Rey's Lovecraft collections. And there is Tarzan, which doesn't feel too SFie, but is next to John Carter of Mars and the Pellucidar books so it makes sense.

In short, it is a grab-bag of popular fiction. Hardly an official literary work in the lot (there were and are arguments about Tolkien's literary merit over the years). These are children of the lesser god, forged in a different foundry for mere payment, as opposed to more lofty literature. Horror was not strong enough to stand on its own at this time, nor was Fantasy (which in those days was still searching for its definition). Yet out of this literary Burgess Shale came, twenty some years later, a couple aisles of books, including RPGs, shared world fiction, art books, comics and manga. SF never gave way entirely to Fantasy, though Horror jumped over to its division in the bookstores, and kept SF/Fantasy/Horror from being a Cerberus, a three-headed beast of "If you liked anything on this bookshelf, you'd like SOMETHING ELSE on this bookshelf.

Genre is marketing. This is not an accusation, but a fact. When I go into a bookstore, I don't go to the Horror or Thriller or Romance or Literary Genres - I seek out my comfort food in the SF/Fantasy section. And because of ALL the books available are here, I may find something I wasn't looking for, without the narrow focus "recommendations" of the Web sites. Example: from the Borders (still open) at SeaTac airport, I found a copy of Nightshade Book's collection of the short stories of Paul Bacigalupi of Windup Girl fame. No website would get me to this book, since I wasn't looking for anything dark, dystopian, and well-written at the moment. I didn't even know it existed. I found it because the store is defined by genre.

If you like THAT, you'll like THIS.

But even that was not enough to get my bee in a bonnet. Nope, it was a comment form Mr. Hunt (who sounds like an otherwise rational human being who has made his mark in Genre: SF, Subgenre: Steampunk, Personal Genre: "Flintlock Fantasy"). Here is the quote that sent me screaming to the keyboard:

The vast majority of novels that are read in this country fall far outside of the contemporary fiction genre – they very much include the three genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror, which has produced everything from classics by HG Wells, Bram Stoker, Roald Dahl, Mary Shelley, George Orwell and JRR Tolkien, to modern best sellers by such authors as Iain M Banks, Sir Terry Pratchett and JK Rowling – these three genres being totally excluded from the BBC’s World Book Night coverage.

HG Wells never wrote SF - there wasn't SF when he wrote. Ditto George Orwell. Bram and Mary defined modern horror, and Tolkien defined what we call traditional fantasy today. Dahl was always over in the children's section (Thank you Gene Wilder) and Rowling first appeared over in YA areas, and moved into SF when it got bigger, heavier, and more popular.  Genre has the ability to determine its own ancestors as well, installed like famous people retconned into your family tree. Ian Banks and Terry Prachett are definitely in the SF Genre, their works written with the intention of reaching their main audience by this SF genre vector, and so the circle is complete with them.

But genre did not produce most of these authors or their works. Genre is the mechanism by which these works are later presented. It showed up late on the seventh day creation, when Adam walked through the back stacks and declared some work to be literary and some to be genre, and never would the two meet.

There is genre work that has literary merit. There is literary work that would be separated from the rest of the herd and condemned to the purgatorial domain of genre. In general, "literary genre" pretty much boils down to "tough to read, but I like it" for a lot of cognoscenti - books that are supposed to be a challenge to get through, to be conquered. In short, books that encourage people to do other things than to read books. And yes, you can make the case that "literary" is a genre with just as many limitations and opportunities as any other.

Now I'd interested is seeing this BBC programme (which probably is not going to happen), and I'd be interested in reading some of Mr. Hunt's works (which is much more likely). But I cannot join in being offended that the former has chosen to snub the latter. I can endure such grousing, but you have buy me a beer first. 

OK, rant over. More later,

Busy Box

So Mark Evanier, over on his blog, always posts a picture of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup whenever he's busy, a state that lasts one, maybe two days at the outside. I've been busy for the past week and feel like I'll be busy for some time to come, so you guys get Campbell's Cream of Tomato. Why? Because I like Cream of Tomato better.

I am busy because of:
   A) The Day Job
   B) The Novel
   C) Christmas
   D) The new season of Iron Chef.

And the answer is:
  E) All of the above, plus I now have an iPad.

This last was a Christmas gift from the company (yes, I will pause for a moment as everyone says "I wish -I- worked for a company like that). A couple years ago it was a Kindle, which brought me into the world of E-books, something I would not likely do of my own volition. So I am dragged, with only modest kicking and screaming, into a new thing.

And to be honest, I am still discovering what I want to do with this new device. How it fits into my personal cosmology. The Kindle turned into my travel book, and has not slowed my purchase and consumption of dead tree editions. The iPad is still up the air, and has been used primarily so far for 1) impromptu access to the Internet, and 2) playing games. For the former, I've ended up installing a WiFi hotspot up here at Grubb Street, and for the latter, I've started slow (because of the other four things on my list). I started checking out Rogue clones, and ended up with a very good descendant called 100 Rogues - more compact and colorful than the original type-face version. But beyond that (and the free planetarium program), I really haven't had much chance to explore.

So where do I go with it? I don't know quite yet. It feels like it could be a large chunk of life in 2011, or just a interesting distraction. I'll keep you posted, when I have more time.

More later,

Gaming Tables

One more dip into nostalgia, but I promise to return to the present and show a cool future before we get out of this.

I started playing D&D in 1975 at college, and brought the game back with me at Thanksgiving break to my friends in Pittsburgh. By 1976 we had a number of campaigns set up, including a weekly one at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) - Wean Hall, in one of corner conference rooms overlooking Panther Hollow. We used that meeting room so often that one of my housemates and I...um... borrowed one of the folding tables from that room. And by the time we got around to returning it, well, that room was no longer a meeting room and CMU didn't use that type of table anymore.

In any event when I got an invite to see the Microsoft Surface D&D table, I had to accept. The demo was created by the SurfaceScapes team, a group of students from CMU using Microsoft Surface technology to play the game. Thirty-five years ago, the big projects from the CMU CS departments were things like the driverless van and the hopping robot, so this is a pretty cool thing.

The Surface device itself is about the size of a small coffee table, with a projector beneath and four IR cameras on the corners. The projector displays the map (any size - it scrolls). Items on the board (like your miniatures) have IR tags beneath them, so the program can track their movements. You can hook the table up to the DM's computer, where a program can control the monsters, maps, and other sundry.

Where the challenge lies in this sort of thing is the surface itself, the interface between the programs and the users. What the CMU team has done (incredibly well) is identify how much and what types of information the players want on the table. Your miniatures are on the table, the monsters can be either part of the display, or can be miniatures as well (at the close of the demo, the DM dropped a dragon on the table to fight. As he put the dragon down, dust kicked up from the table and there was a deep audio thump of it landing - very nice use of interface).

Now I remain deeply aware of D&D and its minutia, but I am very trailing edge as far as tech is concerned (my phone, for example, is only used to make phone calls - it's so retro). But I quickly got the hang of how to use the screen, and was incredibly impressed by the amount of raw D&D material they made available. That's another challenge of D&D - you may not need to know you AC all the time, but when you need to know, you need to access it instantly. How they made the information available was pretty darn elegant.

According to the CMU team, the Surface was originally created with an eye towards board games, but that did not pan out, and the CMU team was looking at more real world applications, when they showed it to the Penny Arcade guys (yeah, the comic strip guys). Penny Arcade walked through the original demo, and said, "you could play D&D on this thing". And so the wheel turned back. Plus the fact that 4E is the most computer-friendly version of the game yet, while there is programming for every new spell and ability, it is easier than in the eldest of days.

Here's the thing - this is a student project. It is unfunded (and they could use a few of the newer D&D books (hint hint)). The device itself is more commercial than home use (Surfaces are in use for information kiosks and the like). A D&D table would likely work better in game stores than in the home. It is a demo, so there are pieces that are still work in process (Version 2.0 is going to be ready for GDC and PaxEast, in case anyone is interested in seeing it live).

The big question I thought of was: In the home, what piece of furniture would this replace? The device we played on was about the size of a coffee table, so I could see it in the middle of the living room, surrounded by low chairs. A larger version would replace, say, a pool table (oh, you don't have a pool table? Me neither, but that's part of the problem), and would be priced accordingly.

The "Ultimate Gaming Table" has been a Holy Grail for DM's since the publication of the first D&D box. This project has done an incredible job bringing that day forward.And it is a great improvement over a folding table liberated from Wean Hall.

Oh, and that original gaming table we ...um .. borrowed from CMU? It's still in my basement. You guys can come and get it anytime.

More later,

Update:Monkey King was with me, and has a great writeup of the device and the app as well.

Book: Tin Type

Boilerplate - History's Mechanical Marvel by Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett, Abrams Image, 2009.

Where I got this book: Spy Comics. It was a light week for my regular comics pull, and the cover of the 168-page hardback shows Pancho Villa posing next to a Victorian robot. Call me an easy sell.

Boilerplate is a pictorial history of the robot of the same name who made its debut at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and disappeared in action during WWI, and during its brief time experienced just about every important moment of that age without changing history in the least. And it makes for a very entertaining book.

Boilerplate the robot is the creation of Prof. Archibald Campion, constructed in the wake of the death of the fiance of his sister, Lily, in a military action. With the aid of fuel cell inventor Edward Fullerton, mad-science genius Nikolai Tesla, and the brilliant Frank Reade Jr, who had previous invented a steam-powered man, Campion created Boilerplate, a free-standing, self-propelled, talking robot who was supposed to replace man on the battlefield.

All those people in the previous paragraph, with the exception of the fiance and Tesla, are fictional. Furthermore, they are the ONLY fictional people in the book. In fact, Frank Reade Jr was a fictional character from earlier source: the early Edisonades, the star of Frank Reade and his Steam Man of the Plain,. Everyone else is a historical figure, including Hugh McKee, the fiance, who did die in a military action in Korea in 1871.

And that is the strange thing about Boilerplate - he and his creators Forrest-Gump their their way through the First American Age of Imperialism without leaving much of a ripple. Here is Boilerplate making his debut at the Hall of Machinery in the Chicago Exposition. Here are Archie and Boilerplate in the Klondike. Here is the robot is working with TE Lawrence, Black Jack Pershing, posing with Pancho Villa. Here is Archie dealing with the house arrest of Queen Lili'uokalani of Hawai'i. Yet in no case do they jostle history in the slightest. It is all sort of "And here is Teddy Roosevelt and the Roughriders charging up San Juan Hill (actually Kettle Hill), oh, and Boilerplate is there as well."

Boilerplate, for being a weapon of war (created so men would not be lost in battle) is extremely progressive, even for his age, and Archie and his marvel hobnob with buffalo soldiers, suffragettes, Pullman strikers, and child laborers. They peel back the cultured veneer of that gilded age and get to the human beings that the beaux-arts columns are resting upon.

The book itself is lavishly illustrated, with pieces either duplicating the artistic styles of the age (Boilerplate in a Winsor McCay piece) or using period photographs (identifying the original photographers) and inserting Boilerplate and Archie. The latter is usually targeted as being some mustachioed individual, while the latter is tucked in the background somewhere, oddly ignored for what he is.

And through it all, the book is historically accurate, once you, you know, ignore the robot, which is what a lot of those present seem to be doing. The history is rock-solid, peeking into areas forgotten by modern Americans. Yet the robot does not affect that history, other than to give it the same result as we have in our timeline. Boilerplate passes effortlessly through the process, a quiet tour guide, an excuse to pay attention to the era, but remains unchanged and changing little of the world around it.

I highly recommend this book as an tour of the Age of Imperialism and Gilded Age of America, a time when America was mechanizing and dealing with larger social issues. The period from the end of the Civil War to WWI is blipped over to a great degree in our schools, with only a head-nod to the Maine. It is an excellent history book, sheathed in the cladding of a imaginary robot, and brings a lot to the table.

More later,

Travel Book

So since I spent a good chunk of the past month out of town, it is a good time to revisit my old friend, the Kindle, and note how it has turned into the (pretty-darn-) perfect travel book.

Good points:
Portability: Let’s not quibble about this – it is easier to carry around a kindle in its case than to lug about a Neil Stephenson epic. Add to the fact that I could (when I chose to) carry a NUMBER of books and be able to cart them all around.
Anonymity: One of the things that get you to buy a book (a colorful or interesting cover) also works against you reading it in public (You want everyone to know you read that stuff? Or worse yet, it invites others to TALK to you about the book). A simple screen is very nice, and lets you read alone in a restaurant without attracting any attention – it looks like you could be taking notes on PDA.
Expandability. Finish a book? Buy a book. Talk about your instant gratification.
Battery Life: Enough to last a week, which carries it through most business trips. If you’re going to be longer away from home base, then you should bring the charger.

Bad Points:
Air travel: It is an electronic device, so off it goes on takeoff and landing. Bit of a bummer.
Accessibility: Was reading Anathem, which has a glossary and several chapters of back matter. Referring to it is a pain from the main narrative flow.
Art: OK, let us be honest - Kindle does text well, art, not so much. The screen emulates my old Macintosh SE as far as screen graphics. Even simple drawings have a case of the jaggies.
Inadvertent button pressing: I have developed the tendency to shut everything down (not a difficult thing) when I do anything else, even to carry it about. Otherwise you may leap ahead dozens of pages. I have lost my place a number of times, and had to search through numerous identical pages to figure out where I was.
Electricity: The battery can hold out for a good week, but you still need to recharge.
Lack of Sharing: Great, you finished the book and want to pass it along. No, sorry. You just have that bundle-o-bits, deadended into your machine. Not good for infecting others with the meme of reading.

End result: Not a bad thing, all in all. I'm not abandoning the Big Pile of Books next to the bed, but it is a nice thing to travel with. I suppose the next thing is to get my portable computer shrunk down as well.

More later,

Your Technology Meme of the Day

So this week is going to involve a lot of stuff, so I'm quickly reaching into the meme mailbag for content. This one - When did you get the following tech?

0. Wrist watch: First one I remember was in late grade school (60s). Black plastic strap and it had glow-in-the-dark numbers and hands. Went for several years, then had a spate of smashing watches inadvertently. Current wear my watch on my belt.

1. Record player (mono, 16/33/45/78 rpm): Never had one of these. Probably a reason I never worried much about records.

2. Cassette recorder (mono): There was one bouncing around the house. Recorded some songs on it back in Jr. High. I live in feat that the tape will someday be discovered.

3. Record player (stereo): This is interesting - I won this. Big cabinet version. Won it at a home show at the Civic Arena when I was, like 12.

4. Typewriter: My first was an old Royal portable from the 50s owned by my folks. A beautiful machine that I miss to this day. My first "own" Typewriter was a Smith-Corona Selectric with those plug-in correction cartridges and a rumble that sounded like a jet taking off. Because I learned on a manual, I type heavy, and have destroyed three keyboards so far at ArenaNet.

5. Stereo radio-cassette recorder (ghetto blaster): Never.

6. Computer: Atari 800 borrowed from TSR for a project. First one I purchased was an Atari ST. Early 80s.

7. Hi-Fi separates: I think I got these in marriage. The bride came with Hi-Fi. Still have them and occasionally get needles for the records (yes, we still have vinyl).

8. Cassette Walkman: Had it, wore it, broke it. I think it was also TSR era, so that made in mid-80s.

9. Color TV: I remember when all the shows went color (Bewitched, F-troop, Gilligan's Island), so it was about that time.

10: Real computer: Mac SE, a "portable" only by the fact you could lift it.

11. Compact Disk player: Another purchase in Wisconsin. Had some, but none of them were memorable.

12. Car: My parents gave me the family car when they bought a new one - a powder blue Cutlass Supreme (License plate" LEETAH") which I ran into the ground. My brother got the next family car, which was a Dodge Omni. There has been some friction between us ever since ... First car I purchased was a tan Cutlass Sierra, which I ALSO ran into the ground, such that when we traded it in, I could only get it to the dealership by driving in second gear.

13. VCR: Wedding present from friends - a Betamax and a box full of Doctor Who tapes taken off of WTTW in Chicago.

14. Laptop: Hmmm. A Mac portable, probably late TSR period.

15. Modem: Old fashioned version with clown-anvil logon noises, sucking up the phone lines. Yeah, that was mid 80s as well.

16. PDA: Never. Friend bought one of the first ones, spent a full day loading info into it, put it in his back pocket, and sat on it, destroying it utterly.

17. Mobile Phone: Less than ten years ago. I just got a new one, and the dealership asked if they could keep my original, since it was such an heirloom.

18. MP3 player: Don't have one yet.Lovely bride loves her iPod and uses it when she goes walking.

19. eBook reader: I've mentioned the Kindle, but now I've left Anathem alone for a few weeks, and now will need to recharge before I start reading again. One downside for electronic media.

More later,

Dead Trees versus Kindling

I didn't make any resolutions to engage with new media this year, but that's just the way things are working out.

Case in point: My company gave its employees Amazon Kindles for Christmas. For those of you who don't glom onto the techno-gadgets, the Kindle is the new hotness e-book reader from Amazon.com. And it was a really cool gift, as it was definitely in the category of something I would not get for myself. And after staring at it for about a month (as it sat there, on my desk, in its box, mocking me with its cutting edge techno-goodness), I broke down and broke it out.

And its pretty good. Not something I would buy for myself(for reasons below), but something that I can use.

First off, the physical design is surprisingly sleek - an etch-a-sketch like screen with wide broad buttons for turning pages and a tiny keyboard at the bottom for those people who can type with their thumbs (as in ... not me). A roller/clicker that allows you access menus and move up and down the page. The screen is clear and the typefonts used very readable, and dare I say it - printlike. It is much easier to read than a computer screen.

The logic for using the interface takes a bit of poking about (remembering to click the previous page button, not the back button, for example), and you can choose your font size for readability. And it has limited access to the web, making it the perfect device to have on hand when you need to settle an argument in the bar (most useful site - Wikipedia).

Down sides - Its web access is pretty limited and clunky, but I think of it as a bonus, not a feature. To download books you need to have an Amazon account, and the Amazon website itself comes out pretty muddy on the screen. Screen size is not that great and it does not handle graphics well - I don't see this being used for gaming rules anytime soon (though the idea of being able to access your D&D rules with it would be kinda cool). The Amazon site is set up for computers, not Kindles, so you are better off finding what you want to buy on the computer, then downloading the exact title on the Kindle. The book choices are a mix of new titles right off the presses and shovelware just ported into Kindle format without any formatting (I almost got a complete collection of Twain, but it doesn't have any breaks between stories - instead being just one long file).

I bought a copy of Neil Stephenson's Anathem, which is pretty much the killer app for this device among SF fans. Stephenson's bug-smasher of a book shrinks down to a fairly containable size (along with a potential 199 more books), so in this way portability works in its favor. So I can carry around a book without the added weight. I'll use this for books that I don't really feel I need a hard copy of, or don't want to lug.

Since you can set your own font size, the concept of pages sort of goes by the wayside. Instead you can set bookmarks as you see fit (and write notes), but remembering to set them in the first place may be a challenge. Good news - it picks up exactly where you left off, so none of that fumbling about looking for the page you remember.

One challenge, as for all e-readers, is battery and storage. I can set a dead-tree book down by the side of my desk and not pick it up for months or years (yep, I've done this), and find exactly where I was before. The kindle needs charging every couple days (on sleep mode) or every week or so (if you turn it off). That's a point in favor of bulky, disposable dead trees.

So initial verdict? Interesting, better than anything else I have seen in the field so far. Good for a particular class of book (big, bulky, no illos or tables, and not intended to be permanent). Limited web features for the patient. Needs to grow its library further.

I'm in this for at least the first book - we'll see where it goes from there.

More later,

iDiot

So, about a year ago I broke my computer. It was a stupid thing, a drop of some 4 inches with the computer in its supposedly-protective case, but the Fujitsu design (by no means unique) is such that any sharp impact breaks the the thin glass tube used to light the back screen. This was the third time it had happened, but the first time when the computer was out of coverage, which meant pricey repairs.

Soon afterwards, the Lovely Bride needed a machine to access some web sites (her iMac dates from before the millennium). Instead of doing the smart thing (getting a new machine), we chose to slave my broken machine into service. Which means I had to attempt to get the machine repaired (which was interesting, but, alas, a failure), then hook it up to another monitor (which took a little longer, since the monitor in question was also stone-age tech).

And after it was all said and done, the sound went dead. Further mounting frustration. In attempting to make repairs, did I kill something important on the sound card? I checked the various control panels and programs and, as far as they were concerned, it should work. So I felt even crankier about it - not only had I fobbed off a blind machine on the Lovely Bride, but a deaf one as well. It was as if the machine was purposefully seeking its revenge on me.

Then, in the past week, the LB started to hear faint sounds from the machine. Nothing definite, but small pings and sounds from the web sites.

Now I was driven to full-bore madness - not only had I given my bride a busted machine, but NOW it was somehow healing itself and trying to communicate (the other option was that the LB was experiencing dementia, an option discussed and reluctantly discarded). It was a technological ghost, a condemnation of my inability to repair it. So I sat down one more time with my old foe, and strove to figure out what I missed this time.

And it was at that point I found a little disk on the side of the machine, with faint numbers far enough apart that they didn't show up. And spinning the dial, the computer left the world of the mute and rejoined the world (to the tune of Nowhere Man by the Beatles). The Lovely Bride had jostled the dial moving the machine around. Yet finally, I had triumphed over it. And so just for good measure, I got her set up with iTunes as well.

But now I'm angry with myself for screwing up and not catching this sooner. Argh.

And speaking of the Beatles - Here, enjoy this.

More later,

Totally Spies

So let's talk about surveillance. And by surveillance I'm not talking about our government's penchant for turning more and more cameras and microphones on its own people, such that, starting at the beginning of next month, they now take requests from local governments to swing the satellite cams around to snoop on US (because, unlike the terrorists, the government DOES know where we are, which, I guess, makes it the easier task to tune in).

No, I'm not talking about Big Brother. I'm talking about the latest tool for Little Brother.

I'm watching the tube and I've seen a couple ads for different types what is being billed as "directional hearing aids". The commercials go along the line that you, the hard-of-hearing consumer, don't want to be a bother to others by insisting on turning up the TV, or asking people to repeat themselves, or missing lines at the movie. How much easier would it be if you had a pointable hearing aid that could pick up just what you wanted to hear.

Sounds good? But then there's always that little "bonus" they include in these ads- you can hear neighbors across the street, or find out that your granddaughter is preparing a surprise party.

Or, say, hang out at coffee shop and just eavesdrop on your unsuspecting neighbors. They don't say that, but I am.

So I am of two minds of this on this development. Cyberpunk is supposedly where technology meets the street, and something like this bit of mirrorshade tech would be a boon to snoops everywhere. And there is no law against overhearing a conversation. And maybe it will be used to head off a couple robberies or murders. Concerned citizens in action and all that. Until some politico gets caught in an off-mike moment and THEN we see all manner of laws coming down. That's one thought.

The other is a movie idea for a higher-tech Rear Window, one which might star Valerie Bertinelli and be on Lifetime. A woman who is losing her hearing gets one of these little gems as a gift, then quickly starts using it to dip into everyone else's business. Sort of gives her a little superpower that makes her feel more up on things, able to keep up with the grandkids, get the juicy gossip. Then she overhears a murder being planned.

And of course, if its Lifetime, she goes to the cops, finds the Head Detective is extremely attractive and separated from his wife, then discovers that the murder being arranged is for the Head Detective's wife, and now she is a witness and the Head Detective is coming for her, and she defeats him by pushing him off a lighthouse, but nevermind about that. The point is that this is surveillance society moved to the street level, both in fiction and real life.

And Little Brother may be more motivated to act on your foibles than Big Brother.

More later,