God, I Hate Technology.

Let's start with the Zune HD I'm listening to right now (Carry the Zero by Built to Spill; my goodness, it's a beautiful song). I bought it for Barb last Christmas because she wanted a radio. Poor thing. She just wanted a radio, an FM radio to listen to KNRK and KOPB, etc. Given just this little bit of license ("I'd like a radio, please") I dug into the internet with the fury of a Viking attacking a hamlet of innocent Celtic fisherfolk.

I learned everything there was to know about latest-generation mp3 players, focusing specifically on the disadvantages of the monarchical iPod touch. I chose the mighty challenger, the Zune HD, which is a nice piece of kit, but frankly can't hold a candle to the iPod. Except, the iPod touch doesn't have an FM receiver. You've got to buy a docking station from Bose or someone else to get that. And if you want a decent one (e.g., a Bose) it adds three hundred bucks to the bottom line.

So that sucks. Apple offers the best product, but gimps it. Which seems weird, as their cheapy iPod nano has an FM receiver. Why not the bigger Touch? Oh yeah, because that's exactly Apple's business plan and it has made them the biggest tech company in the USA. That's why. They introduce very appealing products that have a short feature list. Then every year or two they add features, causing a frenzy of buying among their cultish fanbase.

Three or four years ago when I was looking for an mp3 player for myself I chose the Korean iRiver Clix over the American iPod Nano because the Clix had an FM receiver. And it was cheaper. And it had a voice recorder. And it didn't require proprietary software. Three or four years later Apple introduces a new Nano with, what do you know!, an FM tuner. Their business model is to inspire loyalty through fantastic design (they win in that category every time -- their products are beautiful), and then inspire their loyal fan base to trade in their products every year or two as they introduce new models with features that the originals should have had all along.

This business model irritates me enough so I don't want to ever buy an Apple product, even though they are indisputably awesome. I get a Clix, or a Zune, or a Gateway.

Now I want a smartphone. Bad. But screw Apple and it's effed-up iPhone!

Hollywood?

 

This looks like a still from a Hollywood disaster movie, but it's real. This isn't a news post, so I'm not reporting with any accuracy where it happened: Guatemala, if memory serves. Regardless, the image is striking, frightening, and apparently the very real result of subterranean waters creating a sinkhole.

Appearances

This guy J Allard (yeah, he goes by the affected name J without even a period) has been in the news a bit lately because he just quit or was fired from Microsoft, where he was a bigwig in the department that created the Xbox and the Zune (our family owns both of those products). He first came to my attention a few years back during the launch of the Xbox 360 because at some MTV event he infamously wore a sport coat over a hooded sweatshirt. Which seemed to most observers to be an absurd, maybe even pathetic, attempt to merge his middle-aged corporate self with a youthful-hipster image that MS desired in the person who would be pitching the Xbox 360.

The picture below is of J Allard as I've always known him: too-hip clothes and the shaved pate of a bald guy who doesn't want to appear to be a bald guy.


Kinda looks like a jerk. But whatever, he's a bigwig in the cutthroat world of consumer electronics. What do you expect?

Then I saw this picture, of J Allard before he got famous.


Besides leaving me with a vague feeling of depression, this contrast between the two pictures made me wonder whether this was a conscious decision on his part -- a midlife crisis, perhaps -- or direction from his people.

I imagine myself as the earlier J, a smiling goof in a plaid shirt (essentially what I am now), and then one of my bosses saying, "Andy, you need to spruce up the image a little bit. You're the face of the Xbox. Go to the mall. See what the kids are into, what they're wearing, what their hair is like. Try to skew a little younger."

And me thinking to myself, "I got it! A sportcoat over a hoodie!"

RIP, Beautiful Sue

My favorite in-law passed away. Suzanne Bracco was a sweet, gentle person whom I always enjoyed being with. I'll miss her.

RIP, Part Two

The falling maple obliterated our blueberry bushes. They were just coming into their own, a couple of years after having been moved from the (much too hot & sunny) front of the house.

Now they're kindling.

Damn.

RIP, Beautiful Maple

 

Our maple is dead. Oh, it still clings to life by a thread, but it's only a matter of time. Last night Barb and I were awakened by a mysterious crash. Turned out to be the maple, which had lost one trunk this summer, losing another. It narrowly missed the house, and now I'm paranoid as all get out (well, as paranoid as I get: mildly concerned) that the remaining 1.5 trunks with their attendant limbs will fall on the house. Specifically, on our bedroom, while we are asleep, running us through in multiple places with greenwood spearpoints, leaving Elizabeth Rose an orphan, bereft.

So I guess we're sleeping in the living room tonight!

The maple was our one big tree. I fear that the backyard is going to feel like a parking lot, baking in the sun all summer. But a part of me, small though it be, is excited by the change -- any change. Something good almost always pokes its head up through the piles of bad.

Bloody Disgusting!

 

Sunday March 14, 2010: Pat and Andrew Gaughan and I all ran the 15K Shamrock Run. Around mile three (of 9.2, for those non-Canadian readers of mine) my nipples were feeling a bit raw from all the bouncing up and down and rubbing against the shirt I wore under my fleece. They hurt the whole while, but not terribly so. Not more than my knees, for instance. But after the race when I stripped off the fleece, the bloody shirt, pictured, was revealed, causing shock, dismay, disgust, and laughter from those assembled (the aforementioned Gaughans, and Barb -- Elizabeth, thank goodness, was oblivious). Apparently the chafing went farther than I had realized. Guess I'm lucky to have any nipples left at all. If it had been a half-marathon they might have been sanded down to nothing.

Dad Was Right

When I was applying to colleges, my first choice was Syracuse University's Newhouse School. It's a communication school, specializing in writing, television, and the like. Bob Costas went there.

My father always said to me, "You want to be a writer, make sure you learn how to be on TV." This was 1988. I was like, "Dad, you're crazy. I don't want to be on TV. I want to be a writer." I'm thinking: I sit in a room in a Victorian mansion click-clacking on a manual typewriter. As with Johh LeCarre, no one sees my face.

Boy, was I wrong. Boy was Dad, Hovey Larrison (born in 1933), right.

He thought, he expected, he believed that everyone who produced media would be a video personality. He, who was barely aware of the internet when he died in 2001, was spot-on-the-nose right.

Take, for example, Penny Arcade. I love Penny Arcade. It's an online three-panel comic strip created by two guys, Jerry and Mike, one writer, one illustrator. They started off asking for donations to keep the strip going. Over the years they became wildly successful (as they should have, seeing as how awesome they are). Now they've got a fucking TV show.

Dad, if you can hear me, let me say the words you've probably heard a hundred thousand times: sorry, you were right after all.

Facebook Freaks Me Out

One time many years ago I took it upon myself to organize a bunch of old pictures that Mark had in shoeboxes (probably not literally shoeboxes, but you get the idea). Most of them were from Dad's childhood, or Mom's, but eventually I unearthed a strata of late-'70s-early-'80s photos of our family. I showed one to Mark: it was us and our cousins sitting around the dining table at Camp. Mark was sporting a Peter Frampton afro and grinning like the world was his oyster.

"I hate pictures," he said.

Now I get it. Or at least, sort of.

Fucking Facebook.

I want to use Facebook to stay in touch with those people whom I love but who I never talk to. My cousins, as a for instance. But then I log in and get hit with a friend invite from Eamon Lee, someone whose name is only very vaguely familiar. Was he that weird little kid from up the street, whose sister I kind of liked? When I was eight? Who the hell knows! It's the only Eamon I've ever had any contact with, so it seems pretty likely. So I click on his profile and get this photo of some world-weary chef -- goatee, crowsfeet, paunch. What the fuck?

Or follow the link for the Christian Brothers Academy Class of 1988 and find all these names attached to faces. The name -- Kirk Coyle? -- rings some faint bell and the face is like the image from a dream: the fatter, redder, hairier version of some kid I apparently spent four years with a long time ago. Nothing against Kirk Coyle or any of the others. I'm not exactly 16, either. It's not that we're middle-aged. Middle-aged is fine. It's that from my point of view, they aged from 16 to 40 in an instant, like a vampire dragged out of its coffin into the sun, withering and turning to blowing ash in the time it takes for the second hand to make its circuit around the watchface.

Perhaps this whole social networking thing is better left to the kids, who can grow up with it. If I had seen Kirk Coyle's profile picture change gradually over the years, as he sailed serenely into decrepitude, it would have softened the blow.

The World Ends With You... Finally!

A couple of weeks ago I finished The World Ends With You, the nonpareil DS role-playing game that I started playing in (wait for it) July 2008.

Yep, it took me 19 months to finish a 20 or 30 hour videogame. But, man, was it fun.

I'm not going to go plunging into the depths of videogame criticism here. I don't have the toolset. But in brief, this game is unprecedented (IMHO, as they say), because it tells a good story with interesting, sympathetic characters while being a very fun, deep, interesting, challenging game. Most games sacrifice story for gameplay; a handful do the opposite. TWEWY is the only game I've played where the story and the gameplay were a beautifully integrated whole. A shining, backlit oneness. And, yes, I've played Bioshock. Awesome game. No comparison.

The game aspect is very challenging indeed. For the first two or three months, I had really no idea how to play the game. But the fact that I could make progress, of a sort, while really not knowing what I was doing, is a testament to the monumental achievement of this game as an object of design. Someone (or, really, some number of people numbering maybe in the dozens or higher) went through an elaborate process to design a game with a ruleset that could do this: be very complex, very challenging, yet fun and forgiving.

It's really hard to communicate to non-gamers why and how games can be sublime. Frankly, most of the time they're not. But this game is so good that it makes me wish that everyone could experience it. Unfortunately, unlike movies, video games are a very active experience that require a certain level of skill and ability. Mom is never going to be able to play TWEWY. That's not really her loss -- books and movies and music already offer more than one human can intake in even a very long life -- it's the medium's loss.