75th Tumblelog

“Today, we're going to do something pretty bold.”

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 23:11:00 -0400

One of the first things that people think of when they think of Steve Jobs is his alleged “Reality Distortion Field”. Traditionally, that phrase referred to Steve’s ability to get Apple employees fired up about and on board with his latest idea.

Apple haters later applied the term pejoratively to his keynote addresses; supposedly the Stevenotes were the key to maintaining the hypnosis of the “Apple faithful”. But a less cynical look at his presentations gives one (well, at least it gives me) the impression that Steve was simply sincerely passionate about Apple’s products. He wasn’t trying to hoodwink Apple fans into thinking everything Apple did was amazing, he really thought it himself. And other than his constant use of superlatives, he never really said anything overly hyperbolic and got away with it unquestioned.

…With, I believe, one exception.

On September 7, 2005, Steve Jobs introduced the iPod Nano. A major theme of the pitch was that Apple was boldly, and at great risk, replacing the iPod Mini with the Nano. The iPod Mini was Apple’s best selling and most profitable product. What company would replace their best selling product at the height of its popularity? Only Apple would make such a daring move!

So would they have had you think. And so everyone did think; almost everyone, even prominent members of the Apple and technology cognoscenti who don’t usually buy marketing hype, bought it without question.

But what was the iPod Mini, and with what did they “bold”ly replace it? The iPod Mini was a smaller, cuter, more colorful, cheaper iPod. The first iPod Nano was an even smaller, even cuter, more colorful, cheaper iPod.

So: Smaller. Cuter. More colorful. Cheaper. Smaller! Cuter! Are you getting it? These are not two separate devices!

The original iPod Nano was an iPod Mini. It was the iPod Mini (3,1). It was the iPod Mini (third generation). Apple did not replace the iPod Mini in 2005, they renamed it! They simply renamed it at the time of a significant chassis upgrade. The iPod Nano was just an incremental upgrade of the type Apple has since become famous for.

It was a significant upgrade, to be sure; the iPod Mini sure wouldn’t have fit in the pocket Steve pulled the first Nano out of. But it occupied the exact same place in Apple’s product lineup, was targeted toward the same audience, and was in fact the same concept in every possible way. It was just a better iPod Mini.

Apple eventually did replace the iPod Mini — in 2010, when they turned it into a square touchscreen. This was the first actual rethinking of the iPod Mini concept in its history. But you didn’t hear anyone talk about how bold or risky it was, because by then no one cared about iPods anymore and Apple already owned every dollar of US currency in circulation.

It’s mostly irrelevant today, of course; the original iPod Nano and the man who introduced it are now but memories. But it still pops up in columns and posts from time to time, and I find it curious that this one event from long ago continues to keep the haters’ beliefs about the Reality Distortion Field from being purely mythical.

Update: I originally said that both the Mini and Nano were Flash-based; in fact, the iPod Mini used a hard drive. In any case, this is an implementation detail, so I probably shouldn’t have brought it up in the first place. (Thanks, Sören Kuklau.)

Harry Potter and the Worst-Case Scenario

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 21:41:00 -0400

It is written: “Every change which strengthens the protagonists requires a corresponding worsening of their challenges”. In Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Harry Potter has been strengthened over his canon version to an extreme degree in many ways. And while he has already faced challenges that rival the worst of his challenges from the novels, I don’t feel like his challenges have yet been correspondingly worsened. I feel like there is a time soon coming, perhaps a long time, where “All is lost” won’t seem to cover it.

One of the first pieces of rationalist advice Eliezer and Harry gave us in this story was to always try to anticipate the worst possible thing happening, to try to undershoot reality, so that we are pleasantly surprised by what happens. With so many dominoes falling in the Taboo Tradeoffs arc, I think we should all do this for Methods now, before things get too much worse.

Allies

Canon Harry relies on his friends and allies to a fault. It’s not a large exaggeration to say that Dumbledore hands him all the information he needs, and Hermione casts all the spells he needs cast. Harry’s only real strengths in the books are his goodness and, occasionally, his courage.

Rationalist Harry doesn’t use his allies the way Canon Harry does. Yet he does have them and gets some good out of them. Hermione and Draco each in their own way keep him focused on staying away from his Dark Side. Dumbledore gives him wisdom all the time, if only Harry would listen to him.

Quirrellmort’s plot in Taboo Tradeoffs certainly seems to be to rid Harry of his allies. We don’t know how successful Harry will be at averting Hermione’s doom in Chapter 81. But regardless of what happens in that one chapter, I think to be properly pessimistic, we need to consider that a time may be coming where Harry has to go it completely alone.

Harry knows precious little about Voldemort right now. He’s had hints from Quirrell, but he doesn’t even know the word “Horcrux” yet, and at the moment he considers the Horcrux concept to probably be a specious part of Dumbledore’s “religion”. Imagine, then, if he were to somehow lose Hermione, Draco, and Dumbledore for a while or forever. He would have to figure out everything he needs to defeat Voldemort himself, from scratch.

“He would still have Minerva,” you might say. But what if Harry is responsible for neutralizing Dumbledore? What if one of the Taboo Tradeoffs involves him sacrificing Dumbledore in some way? (Not a literal blood sacrifice, but maybe getting him sent to Azkaban, or making it so he has to go into hiding for a while.) If he were to turn on Dumbledore to achieve one of his goals, his Light side allies, including Minerva, would desert him immediately. And this is precisely the sort of thing that Quirrellmort would love to make happen.

Goodness

One of Methods’s primary themes from the beginning has been Harry’s struggle between his Light and Dark sides. The first big climactic moment of the story was in Chapter 10, where the Sorting Hat begs and pleads with him to go to one of the “warm” Houses because he’s such a ripe candidate to be the next Dark Lord.

But this hasn’t really been that much of an issue for Harry so far. He’s had some minor struggles with Darkness, but the longest he’s ever been in his Dark side was for five minutes, and he was dragged there unwillingly by an external force (the Dementor). He went a bit more subtly Dark during the Azkaban breakout, but that was also due to outside influence, and he was able to Rationalitize his way out of it in a few seconds.

All the above is kids’ stuff. What we really need to make this a story is for Harry to actively choose to go Dark for an extended period of time. I think this is Quirrellmort’s secret purpose behind his plotting. Dumbledore thinks Voldemort is neutralizing Harry’s allies to make Harry an easier target; I think Voldemort is actually doing it to sever Harry’s ties to his Light side, to cause him enough pain that he willingly goes Dark forever. Voldemort isn’t trying to subvert the prophecy by defeating Harry; he’s trying to do it by making him a permanent ally.

At the very end of Chapter 80, Harry goes fully Dark to try to rescue Hermione, “offering his dark side anything if it would only solve this problem for him”. I think we must prepare for Harry’s Dark Side to make good on his offer.

Waiting

Methods has been getting steadily darker, but I don’t think it’s quite there yet. All is not and has never been lost. If all the above happened — if Harry went Dark, betrayed Dumbledore, lost all his friends, ran off to be Dark with Quirrell, and had to overcome all that by himself to even get started defeating Voldemort — then we might be to an acceptable level of challenge for our favorite Jedi Frodo. I think an irrevocable, permanent loss of at least one ally — say, if Dumbledore died or Hermione got Kissed by a Dementor — would definitely do it.

Unfortunately, while that may be enough challenge for Rationalist Harry Potter, that’s not quite enough challenge for Rationalist Harry Potter’s readers. Because we have an additional challenge, an additional foe, that is beyond Harry Potter’s wildest, most pessimistic imaginings: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s brain.

Through the Author’s Notes we’ve seen his struggle in motivating himself to write new chapters in a timely manner. This happens to everyone when a fun project becomes an obligation to people, and even at his Rationality Level he is not immune. He tried setting hard due dates for new chapters; he tried making sure he never had due dates for new chapters; he’s created new litanies and mantras (“People like my writing even when I don’t. People LIKE my writing EVEN WHEN I DON’T.”).

But Eliezer has foes, as well. Ungrateful and impatient readers needle him with hostile reviews, accusing him of toying with chapter publication dates to willfully tease his audience. And as for his friendly readers… well, if I saw legions of ridiculous, cockamamie theories about my story get treated with absolute seriousness on web forums and TV Tropes, I might purposely spoil the ending in my sarcasm-dripping condescension. I certainly could not graciously smile to myself and mutter “Just you wait.” like Eliezer seems to.

Eliezer’s stated current strategy is to write long arcs over the course of several months and release them within a month or so. And so not only might we have to see Harry succumb to Darkness and turn willfully evil for a time, not only might we have to see everyone we care about die a horrible death, but we might have to see all that, and then wait half a year to see things get better again. We may have to think about Methods for months on end with a sick feeling in the pits of our stomachs, knowing that Hermione is an unthinking vegetable and that Harry will do much worse to many more people before it’s over.

I certainly hope I’m being properly pessimistic.

Translation from Mild PR-Speak to English of Excerpts from Mike Chambers's Letter to the Flash Community

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:43:00 -0500

Just to be very clear on this. No matter what we did, the Flash Player was not going to be available on Apple’s iOS anytime in the foreseeable future.

“No matter what we did, the Flash Player was not going to perform acceptably on any mobile device anytime in the foreseeable future.”

In general, users do not look to the web on mobile devices for finding and consuming rich content (such as games and applications).

There are a number of reasons for this, including:

Differences in screen sizes, resolution and interaction models between mobile devices and desktop PCs

“Flash doesn’t scale, literally or figuratively”

Generally slower, and higher latency network connections (which is [sic] often metered) on mobile devices, which makes it cumbersome, sometimes expensive, and sometimes impossible to repeatedly load rich content from the web on demand.

“Flash movies are way more bloated than equivalent native or HTML5 apps.”

The tight integration with the underlying operating systems that native applications provide.

“Flash movies look, act, and feel like crap on mobile devices.”

The tight integration between mobile app stores and the mobile operating systems, which removes most of the friction for discovering new content.

“Our attempt at cramming Flash movies into native apps didn’t work out so well for anyone.”

Essentially, users’ preferences to consume rich content on mobile devices via applications means that there is not as much need or demand for the Flash Player on mobile devices as there is on the desktop.

“Essentially, users’ preference to have both good experiences and good battery life means that there is no need or demand for the Flash Player on mobile devices.”

So, just to be very clear, contrary to what many have declared, Flash is not dead. It’s role and focus has shifted but we feel that it still fills important roles both on the web and mobile platforms.

“I am high as a kite.”

We feel that for the foreseeable future, Flash is particularly strong in delivering advanced video

“We’re very, very, very glad that the desktop browser vendors can’t agree on a common video codec…”

as well as providing a robust, and graphically rich gaming platform.

“…and we’re very, very, very thankful for Zynga’s success, regardless of its shady ethics.”

A lot of the things that you have done via Flash in the past, will increasingly be done via HTML5 and CSS3 directly in the browser.

…

I am not suggesting that all Flash content should or will be done in HTML5. You have to look at each project on a case by case basis and make a decision based on development costs, target platforms and user experience. Regardless, your customers are going to ask about HTML5, and you should put yourself in a position to best meet their needs, regardless of technology or platform.

“I’m not as high as I was five minutes ago. I’d really like you to think that Adobe isn’t as high as it was five years ago, but I’m not sure whether that’s true. We can all only hope.”

Scared stupid

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 15:32:00 -0400

As soon as the first tower fell — or maybe even sooner — people knew that September 11, 2001 would be a day they’d remember for the rest of their lives. I myself remember the first class I had that morning. I remember some of the conversations I had with my girlfriend at the time.

But most of all, I remember how stupid everyone was.

People were idiots in the hours and days after the September 11 attacks. I mean, people are always idiots, but it was bad after September 11.

I remember how in my Trumpet Techniques class that morning, Emily Heern got a phone call from a relative, informing her that the Palestine Liberation Organization had taken responsibility and declared war on the United States. Such a notion is preposterous to anyone with an even cursory knowledge of Palestine’s recent history, but somehow that rumor got started and spread within an hour of the first attack.

I remember how one choir guy walked up and down the halls of the Fine Arts Building, talking loudly and resolutely on his cell phone to a relative who, didn’t you know?, had close ties¹ to the Pentagon, and this guy assured us all loudly that there would be “a major retaliatory response within the hour.”

I remember stories from Poplar Bluff of gas stations hoarding fuel and pawn shops hoarding weapons, and one in particular of a gas station owner who shut his station down because “The ground war will probably be fought through here and our tanks will need the gas.”

And this is to say nothing of the national news media, who, smack in the middle of the deadliest attack on US soil in sixty years, tried to characterize it with hilariously stupid and inappropriate puns like “911 — NATIONAL DAY OF EMERGENCY”.

A while back, Glenn Beck started a campaign he called the “9/12 Project”, a call to return to the way we felt after that fateful morning. He and many like him would have you believe that they want that because on that precious day, we were all, for once, united.

But if something united us after September 11, 2001, it was simple fear. We were all quite literally scared stupid. And whether they know it or not, all those that want us to return to 9/12’s mindset want it precisely because we were at our most fearful, most idiotic, most vulnerable, most impressionable.

We’ve willfully given up a lot of essential liberty in the name of a little temporary safety in the last ten years. We can’t put the twin towers back together as they were, and we can’t reclaim the lives that were lost that day, but if we ever hope to put this nation right again, we must take our mindset at least as far back as 9/10, if not considerably further.

We’re nowhere near being able to do that today. I fear for our country’s future.

I believe his father was the cousin of a guy who worked for a contractor who laid the concrete for the steps down to the nearby subway station — or, y’know, of some similarly dubious connection. ↩

Promises’ Peril

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 20:20:00 -0500

If you are a software developer, please repeat after me:

I will never promise free stuff to my customers that I am not giving away starting right now.

No, really; you need to say this, over and over, until you believe it. Call it Heidbreder’s Litany if you’d like.

I will never promise free stuff to my customers that I am not giving away starting right now.

I will never promise that a product in early beta will remain free when it hits 1.0.

I will never ever promise that the next major release of my software will be free when that release is more than one week away.

I will never make a promise of any kind to my customers that I am not capable of keeping immediately.

If I make the foolish mistake of promising something to my customers, and I realize later that I am going to have to break it, I will, with great humility, constant self-deprecation, and profuse apology, preannounce that I will someday break the promise several weeks or months before actually breaking it.

Too many companies have made this very basic mistake and lived to deeply regret what happened with their customer relations when they broke their promise. They all had their defenders, who would fling accusations and platitudes at the complaining customers: “Cheapskates!” “Freeloaders who don’t want to pay a nickel for anything!” “Developers have to eat!”

Such defenses come from ignorance in the best cases and deliberate deception in the worst. None of these uproars are rooted in cheapness, in the desire to get everything for free.

The seeds of all such discontent are sown when developers make promises they can’t keep. Then they blossom into revolt when they break their promises with zero warning. Other developers, who have the benefit of witnessing these unfortunate occasions, should acknowledge their true cause and vow to avoid repeating them by making no such promises themselves.

A brief digression on video games and compulsions

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 00:39:18 -0500

Modern Zelda games have a tendency to roughly follow a pattern:

Go to a village for an event.
Complete the event and get sent along your quest by the village chief.
Go through a (major or minor) dungeon.
Go through another (minor or major) dungeon.
Go back to step 1.

In The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, after the first cycle, you’re sent to a small village with six people living in six huts. You solve a little puzzle there that involves talking to everyone in the village. When you get it right, you’re told where to go next and dismissed by the chief.

Some gamers might leave the village immediately; but the more thorough and compulsive types like me go talk to the entire village again. The idea is that you might get earlier-than-intended access to a reward, a mini-game, or a hint about where that chief is sending you off to.

What actually happens, most of the time, is that you see a bunch of useless throwaway text the developers had to throw in to keep the game from breaking.

I was somewhat irritated as I pondered this fact while compulsively talking to all the residents of the village. Imagine my surprise when this last villager offers me something:

Hey! Guy! I hear you’re headin’ for that crazy tunnel.

If I were you, I’d say ixnay on the unneltay.

Ya wanna know why?

The game cartridge, enchanted with the malevolent spirit of the developers, then laughs evilly to itself as it presents me with the two options of this dialogue tree:

No!
Don’t care!

Choosing “No!” makes the villager beg you to reconsider, then ejects you from the conversation, giving you no option but to talk to him again, at which point he says the same thing and the game offers you the same choices.

Choosing “Don’t care!” makes the villager call you a jerk, then ejects you from the conversation, still giving you no option but to talk to him again, at which point he still says the same thing and the game still offers you the same choices.

Consider what has happened here. The behavior of checking all the conversation trees after an event has been intermittently reinforced — something interesting and novel happened, which is the primary form of reward in the explorative aspect of games that have such an aspect — ensuring that I will continue talking to every villager multiple times in the future.

But the reinforcement is actually a punishment, and a form of ridicule at that. The game developers have actually just made fun of me for trying to get the most out of their game, and they’ve done it in such a way as to make sure I will make myself available for any future such humiliation they should wish to dole out.

And so, like the rat in the Skinner box, I will continue pushing the Response Lever that is this game and all video games. But my explorative side has not escaped unscathed, and I may think twice before again trying to enjoy any future Zelda titles too much.¹

1. This sentence, like this entire entry, is written with tongue firmly in cheek.

"Jackie cannot tolerate embarrassment, which means it is very important to her that she is never..."

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 22:06:59 -0400

“Jackie cannot tolerate embarrassment, which means it is very important to her that she is never wrong — almost as important to her as pointing out when others are. Bad Jackie has got it in her head that this is where her value comes from. If she is right and others are wrong, then they are bad and she is good. So if she were to accept being wrong — even due to having been innocently deceived — then she would be bad. And she knows that deep down she has a good heart and so that can’t be true and she must be right after all. She must be.”

- Fred Clark, killing it as always.

Numbers

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 21:43:46 -0400

Days the website has existed: < 7
Members of the website: 17
Articles on the website: 10
Emails received by me today about “followers” and “friend requests” from the website’s sixteen other members: 3
Karma points accrued by all seventeen website members so far: > 2000
My desire to be part of a local community of like-minded people: 100%
My desire to be part of a local circlejerk: Way less than 0
Chance that people are just testing all the website’s features and aren’t taking any of the above numbers at all seriously: Hopefully way more than 75%
Percentage at which I mean this post in frivolous lighthearted jest: About 80
People I will offend with this post: 100% too many

Myst Movie Mollification

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 17:37:59 -0400

The Mysteriacs responded wonderfully and graciously to my previous post and have me quite optimistic about the Book of Ti’ana movie again. To summarize their post:

They completely agree that the animatic trailer is boring.
It was the very first piece of conceptual anything they did and does not at all reflect their actual vision for the finished product.
Its sole target audience was Cyan, for whom “boring” was a good thing, more or less, after their previous Myst Movie experience.
They only shared the trailer with the world at all because they wanted to share as much of their process as possible, not because they thought it compared favorably with other real movie trailers.

I will confirm the implications of that post and its commenters and admit that I haven’t kept up very faithfully with mystmovie.com over the last few years, as my presence in the community has waxed and waned several times since its beginning. So yes, if I had read the site more thoroughly, I might not have been ill at ease about the trailer in the first place.

But I’m glad they made that post, as it is very confidence-inspiring, and also since they make a couple of tantalizing revelations in its comments. I hope they post some Big Good News soon.

Myst Movie Malaise

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:18:00 -0400

A year or so ago, I listened to a series of lectures on CD about Tolkien and other fantasy literature. The narrator recounted a story from his childhood: He was in elementary school, and he decided to take a crack at writing a play based on a scene from The Lord of the Rings. He chose as his basis the Council of Elrond, and in his lecture he says something to the general effect of “Given the entire breadth and depth of this epic journey, I chose to reenact an Elves’ faculty meeting.”

I fear that the Myst movie might become something similar.

In their most recent production-related blog post, the Mysteriacs react to the Prince of Persia movie’s shoddiness. They rightly say in that post that a big problem with all past video game movies is too heavy a focus on superficial action, and too light a focus on a solid story.

But my concern is that the Book of Ti’ana film may not have enough action to keep anyone who’s not reading this post from walking out of the theater. Personally I would certainly be happy to watch a faithful reproduction of the Book of Ti’ana. But, well, just watch their concept animatic trailer.

I understand that these are animatic stills and are not completely representative of a real trailer; however, while there are maybe a couple of stills showing action at the beginning and the end of the trailer, the four entire minutes in the middle strike me a little like this:

Blah blah blah COUNCIL blah blah DECISION blah blah blah COUNCIL blah COUNCIL blah blah WILL OF THE PEOPLE blah blah blah SPEAK blah blah LET ME SPEAK blah blah COUNCIL blah blah YOU WILL SPEAK blah blah blah!

Do you see where I’m coming from here? It’s a lot of people talking to other people, who then decide to let other people talk to them, and not a lot of anyone doing anything in particular.

I realize that the movie is still early in pre-production, and that undoubtedly the script will go through many revisions between now and production. I very much appreciate the Mysteriacs’ thoughtfulness and their loyalty to the original story. But a trailer is supposed to be a teaser of a film’s most interesting moments, and from that perspective the current concept trailer gives me pause. I hope the Mysteriacs add a little action to the film before Hollywood gets its hands on it, because there’s no telling what they’ll do to it if they find the script wanting.

Repost: A Yeesha quote you'd never heard

Thu, 13 May 2010 21:49:00 -0400

I didn’t intend for this to be an all-Myst all-the-time blog, but that’s what it’s turning into.

From time to time, people ask me about “that old Yeesha speech” I posted years ago. It’s in an old, broken ExpressionEngine installation now, so I thought I’d repost it.

The character monologues you hear in Uru weren’t always as they are now. Originally, for instance, Jeff Zandi was the actual voice of Jeff Zandi.

Back around version 0.6 of Choru, there was a different version of Yeesha’s opening speech. As the game took further shape, it was rerecorded with new information. But I’ve always loved the speech as it was, and with all the Yeesha-quoting going on, I dug out my archived sfx directory and listened to it. I think the parts that were changed are particularly pertinent to the events of this week¹, so here, with permission, is Yeesha’s introductory speech, circa 2002, copyright of Cyan Worlds, Inc:

Once again, the stream in the Cleft has begun to flow… it was dry for so long. The water is flowing in from the desert. The storm is coming. But I’ve been preparing. D’ni awaits everyone who goes there. Some will seek more there… and they’ll find more. But the water will flow where it wills. It seeks its own path, uncontrolled. …Except that it flows downward, always downward. That is beyond its control.

You can’t imagine what you’ll find. You won’t understand all that you will learn — only now for myself has it become who I am, only now have I realized my own purpose in this plan. I’ve learned things they never thought possible. I’ve lived in lands beyond their boundaries, and shattered the rules behind their laws. I’ve become more than I even thought possible. But none of this for my own gain, no. There are much greater things than me.

The water flows downward, and there it pools and collects, and finally once again it reaches the roots. And the tree begins to grow again.

I’m Yeesha. My parents brought me to this place.

Copyright 2003, Cyan Worlds, Inc. Used with permission.

This was posted, I believe, when it was announced that Cyan Worlds would remain in business and bring Uru Live to Gametap. I’m not entirely sure what pertinent meaning I saw in the speech, but I still like the speech regardless.

The Stranger: A Hare-Brained Theory

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 20:41:00 -0400

I wrote 1000 words on this, but that was excessive and self-indulgent, so here’s the short version:

When Uru got cancelled, Cyan had only To D’ni and Path of the Shell to give us whatever backstory information they felt most important before Myst V, which they thought would be their last hurrah. But rather than develop their Bahro story much further, they instead dealt with the fate of the Dr. Watson character, and then dropped some really strong hints about Yeesha’s time travel abilities.

We know that Cyan knew, while they were developing Myst V, that Dr. Watson was its player character. It wasn’t a retcon they came up with during GameTap Uru. We know this because the Myst V in-game journal uses the same font as Dr. Watson’s Uru journal.

So if they knew what they were doing when they made Myst V, what if they also knew what they were doing when they had Atrus call Dr. Watson “my old friend”?

We all wrote that line off as artistic license at the time. I believe Kha’tie even wrote it off in the Myst V strategy guide as due to Atrus’s senility. But I doubt Cyan would portray Atrus as senile, even in his old age.

What if somehow Dr. Watson is The Stranger? Maybe Yeesha had him go on a time travel journey during the two years between Path of the Shell and his freeing of the Bahro. Maybe the Bahro that flew off with him at the end of Myst V flew him straight to the Cleft, circa 1806. I don’t know. But I do know that whenever I assume Cyan did something stupid with their mythology, I often end up being wrong.

There are of course problems with the theory. Yeesha speaks to the player harshly at the beginning of Myst V. This is consistent with how she’d treat a DRC member, not with how she’d treat her family’s persistent savior. She could be speaking in disbelief that this guy, this leader of an organization she’s somewhat opposed to, would become that savior.

But her Myst V journal poses another problem, because she strongly implies that she has no idea how Atrus’s lost Myst book was found. She would’ve known by the time she wrote that journal that Dr. Watson looked suspiciously like her old family friend, and probably put two and two together.

One last problem: It seems uncharacteristically self-serving for RAWA, the D’ni Historian, to have his alter ego be the main character of the whole series. But if it was Rand’s or Robyn’s idea, maybe he went with it.

So. I did say the theory was hare-brained. What say y’all?

In Which I Become a Hypocrite and Suggest Laying Off of Cyan Worlds Slightly and, Perhaps, Temporarily

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 21:38:00 -0400

I’m pretty quirky, to put it one polite way. Everyone who knows me knows I’m quirky, and those who know me from the online Myst community are no exception.

One quirk of which some Myst folks are very aware is that I have historically tended to be somewhat hotheaded. Even today, I can rarely resist lambasting those who I believe deserve a comeuppance. There is a perverse part of me that thrives on conflict, dissent, and malcontent.

I don’t hang around the Myst Online Forums that much, but I have watched as the outcry and bitterness about Veralun, a Myst Online Forum moderator, has grown to a fever pitch over the past weeks.

Though I don’t follow the forums closely, the examples I’ve seen of his behavior are damning. I like, believe, and completely trust the people raising the outcry. The voices most passionate about this issue are those of longstanding pillars of the Myst community: chucker, Tweek, amonre, Whilyam.

The silence of Cyan Worlds on this matter has frustrated everyone, and I completely agree that they are showing themselves to be woefully unequipped to do proper community management.

Today, finally, RAWA made a substantial post on the forums about the problems. To a point, I agree with chucker above: It sounds a bit like it was written by a corporate douchebag, which is very uncharacteristic of Cyan and of RAWA in particular.

But I don’t think it’s as uncharacteristic as the alternative.

The community seems to be demanding Veralun’s termination from his post as a Myst Online Forum moderator. This would indeed end the problems people are upset about. But crucifying a member of the community¹, however misguided or inept he may be, is even less Cyan-like than writing vague prose like RAWA’s post.²

Real People associate corporate douchebaggery with an intent to obfuscate the truth; this association is often correct. But sometimes, roundabout language and PR clichés are meant to be not deceptive, but rather inoffensive. Such language is annoying to Real People, who just want blunt truth and direct action. In this case, though, direct, unapologetic action would likely mean the the public excommunication — not to mention humiliation — of a member of their community. And that goes completely against Cyan’s nature.

The community that has gathered around Cyan is composed of strongly-opinionated and notoriously temperamental fans, many of whom are children, or not far removed from childhood. If you’ve been around a while, then no matter which sub-clique you consider yourself a member of, you can undoubtedly think of a handful of stupid controversies and misguided fan initiatives that have been brought to Cyan’s doorstep.

There’s often one side of these issues that’s right, and one or more that’re wrong. But from Cyan’s perspective, it probably just seems like “Oh, great, another angry mob.”

“Is the mob right? Is it wrong? I don’t know, but one thing’s for sure: We’d better think long and hard before taking any action advocated BY A MOB.”

Given the community’s history, can you really blame Cyan for remaining silent as long as possible? If I were Rand Miller or RAWA, I would probably give in, make my opinions known, and take the drastic action.

I probably would have demoted Veralun. And then what would I have had? The mob — which was based on a completely valid and correct cause — would have been satisfied, but at the cost of one humiliated ex-fan, who would feel betrayed by the company he loved and tried to support.

Are we really saying that that’s what we wish Cyan had done?

When you read a marketing piece by any company, you have to read between the lines to get the real meaning — or any meaning — out of it. RAWA, in as delicate and, yes, as roundabout a way as possible, has told us that he’s had a talk with Veralun. He’s told us that he’s instructed the moderators to follow the forum rules more strictly, and more overtly, than before.

Maybe, for now, we should try giving them the benefit of the doubt. Let’s see if the forum moderation does improve. If it doesn’t, we can let Cyan know again. But if it does, maybe we can just forget about this whole thing.

Any similarities between my language and any events celebrated on the Easter holiday are purely coincidental. Really. I promise.
Indeed, anyone who’s ever heard Yeesha speak knows that vague prose is a specialty of Cyan these days.

One day in a university music class, our professor asked an...

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:40:00 -0500

One day in a university music class, our professor asked an off-hand question that he expected everyone to know.

(Actually, I take that back: He did that every day, just to show us how very, very smart he was.)

And but so anyway on this day, he asked us which kind of musical scale was innate to humans: which scale was hard-wired into our brains. I thought it was the diatonic scale (like the major and minor scales we’re all familiar with), but our professor, aghast as always that we would be ignorant of such an obvious, elementary fact, proceeded to play the major pentatonic scale on the piano. “Oh. Well, okay,” I thought.

So last week when people were linking to the above video, I was very curious. I watched it.

It’s utter rubbish.

Okay, okay, that’s too harsh. I think it demonstrates something. But it certainly doesn’t demonstrate what it claims to demonstrate: that the major pentatonic scale is innate.

He starts by having people sing two notes repeatedly after he sings them himself. The notes are a whole step apart, and he starts by emphasizing the lower note, establishing it as the tonic of the scale.

He goes back and forth between the two notes he gave them — 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2 — until, at 0:42, he gestures for them to sing note 3, without singing it for them first.

The audience sings a perfect whole step higher than note 2.

“Oooooh!” you say! “Ahhhhh”, the audience says! “You really showed us something!”

But what did he show? Did he show us that any particular scale is innate?

Not at all. At this point, they could be singing any number of scales. It could be the major scale, the major pentatonic scale, the whole-tone scale, the Lydian scale, the Mixolydian scale… the list goes on.

No. So far, he’s merely shown us that if you give people notes 1 and 2 separated by a whole step, then they’ll give you note 3 a whole step higher.

But now he has his chance. Now, if he were a good scientist (this is a science festival, after all), he would have people repeat notes 1, 2, and 3, until finally gesturing for note 4. Once the audience sings note 4 by themselves, we can start crossing scales off that list — or, if the audience sings badly out of tune on note 4, we can start questioning our premise of any full scale being innate.

So what does he do? At 1:06, he sings the note a minor third below the tonic for them. He just gives them note 5.

And now his experiment is ruined. At this point, the audience has been overtly told what kind of scale they’re in. At 1:58 the audience gets to figure out that note 4 is the dominant, but that’s little consolation. It’s just another whole step, just as the only other note they figured out was a whole step.

Then they go up and down a couple of octaves of this major pentatonic scale he’s given them, which proves nothing other than, perhaps, that humans innately understand octaves.

It’s a basic fallacy: McFerrin told the audience what scale it was singing, when the whole point of the experiment was to prove that they didn’t need to be told at all. He hasn’t let them figure out anything but a couple of whole tones, when the flavor of any scale is determined by where the explicit and implicit semitones are.

He’s got a good idea going. But in its current state, unfortunately, his experiment is nothing but Bad Science.

"My next CD Organizer will be a cardboard box and whoever wants it."

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 16:13:05 -0500

“My next CD Organizer will be a cardboard box and whoever wants it.”

- Merlin Mann

This used to be my blog. It had ExpressionEngine, it had some bad writing, it even came close to...

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 20:15:00 -0500

This used to be my blog. It had ExpressionEngine, it had some bad writing, it even came close to having a finished design one time. It was almost like a blog.

I have a hard time finishing things — indeed, I have a hard time starting things — and so, years ago, when I was sick of it never being complete, I erased the whole site.

Several times in the last few years I’ve really wanted to write stuff. Stuff that’s too long for Twitter. Stuff that I didn’t want to relegate to the ghetto of Facebook notes. Stuff that I just forgot about, because by-golly I deserved to not write as long as I couldn’t finish my site.

Well screw that. I’m going to write stuff here. Maybe I’ll have a real blog someday, or maybe not. At least now I won’t be the only wannabe web developer who leaves his URL field blank on Twitter.