In 1970-ish, “The Italian Elvis” Adriano Celentano recorded a song called “Prisencolinensinainciusol”. To the Italian ear it sounds like English, but to the English ear it sounds like gibberish, which is what it is. If the Joycean slurry of near-meanings wasn’t awesome enough on its own, it’s set to a stripped down, crazy-funky droning four-on-the-floor arrangement so that the whole setup prefigures both rap and disco. (That said, I think James Brown and Bob Dylan are the real influences, and there’s nothing magical about the song’s foreknowledge, but that doesn’t make it any less thrilling). Add to that the boss dancing, and you have a timeless classic on your hands.

I tried to figure out how the internets learned about this, but I can only trace back so far. There’s this, announcing an edit of the song, and giving a bit of history. (Here’s the mp3 of Greg Wilson’s edit BTW.) There’s this, which gives us the black and white original:

Which is then picked up by Sasha Frere Jones, then Metafilter, then BoingBoing, and then years later, your unreliable narrator stumbles into the whole mess via an Easter egg in the game Glitch. Anyway, the important part is when you search Youtube for Prisencolinensinainciusol and uncover gems like these versions with different sets of subtitles, all set to a mashup of the two videos:

Precinct Calling Ace Vantuso / Prison Colon ends in I choose all / Freezing culmination I choose all.
hope something / poke something / awesome babe!

It’s amazing to see how we project meanings onto sounds. It’s worth adding that in Celentano’s words, from the intro to the TV show staging, the theme of the song is incommunicability, that “we don’t understand anything anymore”, and prisencolinensinainciusol means “universal love”. I also love this karaoke staging of the song for drunken Portlandians, which seems to sum it all up.

Let me just say that when I added the song to iTunes, I chose the genre “heaven”.

There’s a nonstop trainwreck going on in Penny Arcade land, and it goes by the name of dickwolf. To summarize this timeline, in August, Penny Arcade publishes this comic. Some take offense. Mike of PA notices and responds in a fashion that leads to more offense. In October they start selling a “dickwolves” t-shirt in their store. There are more objections. In January, the shirt is removed. Many fans of PA are counter-offended that “they’ve caved in to pressure from a vocal minority”; “teamrape” and “DickWolvington” twitter accounts begin to harass opponents; Mike tweets he’ll be wearing his dickwolves shirt to PAX (Penny Arcade Expo), but also tells DickWolvington to knock it off. Many are noticing and commenting at this point – Leigh Alexander has a thoughtful, conflicted take and a followup, and there is a thousand-comment MeFi thread. Mike receives “joke” death threats. Jerry (other half of PA) comments for the first time, the closest thing to a cogent defense of their position that I can find.

Sheesh. It’s like a parable about American political discourse. First come the principles, then the overreactions, then the death threats.

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After the post about focus, a very thoughtful friend and reader got me the book Flow by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. It’s about something closely related. Based on interviews with thousands of people, it examines what came to be named the flow state, the “state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”

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I sense a theme through a bunch of recent articles. There is this lament in the New York Times for the lost attention spans of the youth, blaming the web and other modern technologies for students’ inability to read whole novels, focus in class etc. It’s not a bad article, despite some shortcomings.

For more detail, Henry Jenkins interviews Linda Stone (part two here), who coined the term “continuous partial attention.” She argues there is a scale of attention, and multi-tasking is sometimes appropriate, and not always bad. This passage is especially intruiguing:

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Here’s the first of three essays on BoingBoing articulating the case for being a stoic. The stoics were Greek and Roman philosophers who believed in the elimination of negative emotions through reason. The author – William B. Irvine, who not coincidentally has a book out on stoicism – makes a rather compelling case for taking a second look at the Stoics, if after your first look you dismissed them as grouchy buzzkills. He also gives some useful examples of stoic mental exercises. Enjoy the thrills of visualizing the deaths of your loved ones!¹

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When you write fiction you form models of your characters in your head. Even if these characters are based on real people, you create an abstraction, a model that describes how you understand that person to function. You then run simulations on it, ask it questions: how would Fred react if asked about his parents? If Jane slapped him, how would he react?

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There is this attitude in film and television, completely antithetical to the general position of the blogosphere, that you do not talk about your ideas. A great deal of this is the fear of others stealing them. It’s easy to say that the important thing – and the hard part – is execution, but unfortunately in film and other industries with more money than ideas this is not the case. Someone can take your idea, pay people to execute it, and even if the end result is shoddy, prevent you from executing YOUR vision of it. “Oh, the film about the leper fashion show?” the financier will say as he thumbs his blackberry, “we already did that. It bombed.”

This partially explains how projects that are important to me, and take some substantial portion of my time, find no representation on this blog.

I will attempt to remedy this shortly.

Twilight of the American Newspaper

We no longer imagine the newspaper as a city or the city as a newspaper. Whatever I may say in the rant that follows, I do not believe the decline of newspapers has been the result solely of computer technology or of the Internet. The forces working against newspapers are probably as varied and foregone as the Model-T Ford and the birth-control pill. We like to say that the invention of the internal-combustion engine changed us, changed the way we live. In truth, we built the Model-T Ford because we had changed; we wanted to remake the world to accommodate our restlessness. We might now say: Newspapers will be lost because technology will force us to acquire information in new ways. In that case, who will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with “I.” Careening down Geary Boulevard on the 38 bus, I can talk to my my dear Auntie in Delhi or I can view snapshots of my cousin’s wedding in Recife or I can listen to girl punk from Glasgow. The cost of my cyber-urban experience is disconnection from body, from presence, from city.

I don’t know if that’s true – I personally don’t feel less connected to Toronto now – it’s one of many neighbourhoods I live in. Then again, I read the newspaper every day in some form or another.

I wanted very much to like this book. I wanted to agree with everything in it. The general thesis is that the corporation’s influence has been so great that our entire society, our culture, our minds are now corporatized – we think like corporations without realizing there are other ways. The hook is almost irresistible, too: Rushkoff was robbed outside his apartment in Brooklyn, and when he posted about it on a neighbourhood mailing list, people wanted him to shut up about it lest he bring their property values down.

The book has many fascinating sections, especially the parts about the origins of corporations, the origin of branding (with Louis XIV’s minister Colbert, although some internetting has me questioning that passage), post-WWII home ownership and racism, and the bias inherent in central currency, to name a few. Unfortunately, all of these are awash in a sea of stream-of-consciousness ranting that makes it hard to discern the overall point at any given time. Certain ideas that need more room to kick their legs,like the bias of currency, simply drown.

Most disappointingly, Rushkoff reserves only a few pages at the end for suggestions of how to counteract corporatism. There’s only one real idea, about establishing local currencies, but as the problem with central currencies was so poorly argued earlier, it fails to impress. Likewise, it’s hard to tell whether his theory of corporatism is at all sound, since Rushkoff’s ranting distracts him from the legwork required to establish the theory’s subcomponents.

I bought my iPhone almost a year ago, shortly after it first became available in Canada. At first, ‘available’ was an exaggeration. I didn’t pre-order because at first I couldn’t even get a straight answer as to whether I could get an iPhone; I have a flat rate, legacy Fido plan called City Fido that Rogers hates, and at first it appeared I couldn’t have both City Fido and the iPhone. After the confusion passed, I was able to get the thing, but by then they were few and far between. Those of us who wanted them were calling random stores, getting on waiting lists, wandering around obscure malls. A friend at work got lucky in the basement mall of an office tower, but no joy for me. Eventually I did the boring thing and ordered over the phone. I got my phone some time in August.

The thrill of the brand new iPhone lasted quite a while. A smartphone virgin friend of mine just got an Android phone and emailed me to say “I feel like James Bond”. John Gruber called it “our flying car”. You can suddenly do things you couldn’t do before. Some of these are old things in a new context, like surfing the web on the streetcar, and some are simply radically improved old things, like texting without needing T9 input. But the most interesting things are things you have never done – following your moving location dot on a map, which I still find myself doing whenever I’m in a cab. Using Shazam to get the phone to identify songs. Google Voice Search. That shit blew people’s minds, mine included.

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Couple things. One was a discussion about GPS automated direction-giving, in-car and, in my case, on-phone. We talked about how everyone pretty much agree that GPS will get you there, it will just send you there in weird ways. It’s worth double-checking the directions, in other words. However, we concluded that in 10 years, it might be a different story. The ability to navigate will have become an obsolete skill.

The other thing was hearing on This Week in Photography that photographers are feeling pressure from computer generated images. That is to say, product shots that used to be done by whole teams of humans are now being made in CGI. Presumably the next step will be for human model shoots to be replaced as well – think of the poor unemployed models!

It’s tempting to argue that some areas will never be taken over by the machines. For example, we’ll always need photography for the news, right? Well, I saw a CGI re-enactment on US news recently, in a story about the arrest of the suspects in the recent domestic terror incident. It was horribly done (and lampooned on the Daily Show), but nonetheless it was there – the prospect of news without the footage.

Everything seems normal, but in the background that exponential evolution keeps on tickin’.

Sometimes I wonder if life isn’t procedurally generated.

Konami cancels Six Days in Fallujah video game. “Despite the active involvement of dozens of Marines in creating the game, critics said that Konami was capitalizing on a war whose wounds were still fresh.” This is a big shame. People still see video games through the lens of escapist-exploitative-money-making, and not as a medium with a lot of potential to teach about the real world. I still remember playing Balance of Power) as a kid.

We need more documentary games!

“We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.”

- Frank Sobotka, The Wire

- from Detroit vacant house panorama

“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”

- John Maynard Keynes

There were a couple news pieces about Detroit and the $100 home, following the Toby Barlow piece in the Times. Here’s one from ABC, and one from CNN.

Short version: artists are moving into Detroit, attracted by the low prices on vacant and gutted houses ($100-$3,000). These are houses in Hamtramck, which is still partially inhabited; it neighbours Highland Park, which is where Gran Torino was set. There are neighbourhoods in Detroit that are much, much worse.

I’m no expert, but the Anderson Cooper piece especially feels naive. Of course Gina Reichert and Mitch Cope will one-sidedly promote the opportunities in their neighbourhood. But at least ABC draws out the arson threat they had received. Remember that Detroit police can take 24 hours to respond to a homicide call, and realize you would have to gun up pretty hard to defend your nice new pile of wreckage. That said, a $14/month mortgage sounds pretty good right now. (via detroit unreal estate agency)

Two things recently. #1 was EndWar, a console real-time strategy game by Ubisoft that allowed for voice control of your units. It worked near-perfectly, and made a hell of a lot of sense. There have always been issues getting RTSes working on consoles because they are complicated PC games that are mouse-and-keyboard centered, and they tend not to work well on console controllers. EndWar just routed the fuck around that. After all, RTSes are games about barking orders at soldiers, and a mouse is a pretty arbitrary substitute for actual barking.

The second thing is the Google Mobile app on the iPhone. Despite it being developed by Quicksilver master Alcor, the first version wasn’t all that thrilling. The next major revision added voice search – hold the phone up to your ear, wait for the beep, and speak. However, I put it aside after a few failed queries. I’ve tried it again, though, and I think they’ve improved things on the server side because it actually works. It even managed to get “CRTC” right, which surprised me. Like the Shazam audio recognition app, it’s one of those head-turner iPhone features, but unlike Shazam, I actually use it all the time.

Both of these things are examples of using voice instead of keyboards in contexts where a keyboard is pretty sucky. No one wants to have a keyboard lying on their lap when they’re sitting on the couch, and similarly why mash tiny fake buttons on your iPhone screen when you can use your face to say things. Obviously they are also hugely dependent on audio pattern recognition algorithms and AI having advanced to a sufficient state. But what they signal is that they have indeed advanced, and we can now talk to our computers, and more often than not, they will actually understand.

On the other side, computers have gotten better at talking to us. Take the new Shuffle, released yesterday, which will tell you the song you’re listening to. Or, the Kindle 2, which will read your book to you. Sure, text-to-speech has been around a while; ask any Mac owner. But the new voice in Leopard beats the hell out of all the old ones, and judging by how computer technology has been progressing, I’d wager the voices will only get better.

I’m convinced that this means big things. If something can easily be turned into text from voice, that means that it can easily be searched. The new Google Voice will allow transcription and then tagging and searching of voicemails. Now imagine recording everything you say, and everything anyone says to you, and being able to search it. It’s not so far off – borderline achievable today with an iPhone, a 3G connection and something like Jott (unfortunately, the way-cool Jott has gone pay-only).

I can’t help but think about the storytelling potential for such technology, namely games. It’s not just bossing units around. Imagine no more dialogue trees and menus and simply engaging in natural language coversations with AI characters. It wouldn’t just be for RPGs; suddenly a game could exist where the central ‘gameplay’ is just conversation. Conversation is obviously central to human life and is something film, TV, novels, every other sequential art form can render in a manner befitting its medium, which is not true of games right now.

Finally, the shift is ultimately about the disembodiment of computers, paralleling the rise of cloud computing. Sure, we interact with plenty of disembodied computers already, like when we get up in the internets. But we do that through our desktops and laptops. As our computers get smaller – phones, pens, etc. and more ubiquitous, it’s increasingly archaic to interact with them only through screens and keyboards. They will become magic ghost butlers, like HAL (except hopefully less killy).

Next: a smell-based operating system.

Hell yeah

We already build incredible, vivid places, but feel the compulsion to pave over them with our attempts at compulsory pre-authored story structures. In embracing the immersion model of meaning, one’s approach would shift away from building games around a core of Hollywood-style narrative, and toward building unique, convincing, open, integrally full gameworlds, populated by intriguing people to meet and things to do, and providing the player with tools of meaningful self-expression within that context that he might return changed by his experiences.

In my view, this is not to say that narrative does not exist – far from it. Narrative would be tied to places and people and dispersed about a map. It is also far from an abdication of authorial control – it’s less controlled, but the author still creates the architecture that the player explores.

“Meaningful displacement” is another excellent turn of phrase.

I’ve been struggling with Fable 2 – struggling with a dying Xbox and some frustrating bugs – but enjoying it greatly. I was originally going to compare it to Fallout 3, but it seems somewhat unfair. Suffice it to say that even as someone who vastly preferred Oblivion to Fable 1, I feel Fallout 3 – as the belle of the 4th quarter Western RPG ball, earning review 9s and positions on “Best of the Year” lists – is tremendously overrated, and poor Fable 2 is fabulously under-.

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Via the funk comes a link that led to some interesting shit – this thread on Ask MeFi, in which the existence of houses for sale for the low four figures in Detroit and elsewhere, and the merits of purchasing same, are discussed. Up here in Canada the average house price is $300,000, so this was a jaw-dropper. Various points against such properties are discussed in the thread, but none says it as effectively as the keen eye of the lonely satellite:

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These properties are in abandoned neighbourhoods, where most of the houses have been razed by the city, and those that remain have been stripped of their guts by scavengers. Your $3,000 buys a plot of land in The Road by Cormac McCarthy. This related thread on BoingBoing brings up a nugget of hope, which is “this house in an apparently decent, still-peopled area of Detroit”: – a five bedroom mansion for $57,900. That’s not to say it will actually gain value, which is an assumption we Canadians are used to making about pretty much all property. But it did spur a decent daydream, in which I purchase four mansions for the price of one tiny condo in Toronto.

If you really want to understand what’s going on in Detroit, you have to read this article from Harpers. Fortunately or un-, where Detroit has gone, may other North American cities will go, as we wade into the bleak seas of the post-industrial, post-car economy (post-economy?). The article ends optimistically, with farms sprouting from the slums. You could imagine that in a possible future, where the 50s flight of white people to the suburbs has been eclipsed by the flight of all people to the internet, and one’s physical place of work and residence has been rendered insignificant, these rubbly fields could again see houses built. Why pay big money downtown when you can do that work from a dirt-cheap dirt field in Detroit. But in the meantime, there are better things for the thousandaire to spend their money on.

I’m struggling to understand why I’ve replunged into Etrian Odyssey 2, the roguelike-ish DS game from Atlus that I dismissed as “too grindy and random-monstery for me” the last time around.

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