Category: Serious Stuff

Categories
Serious Stuff

Against SOPA and PIPA

I don’t often get overtly political in my little corner of the web. It’s just not something this site is built for, in many respects. But this is one of those occasions where I think it’s necessary.

When Congress resumes soon, two pieces of legislation waiting on the backburner are the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act. I’m writing this today to convince you that these two bills are badly written, deliberately vague, and dangerous pieces of legislation.

The fact that I’ve been reviewing, for many years, brand new episodes of Doctor Who and other British shows before they reach American shores (if they even reach them at all) is probably a dead giveaway that I do a little bit of downloading. I’ll cop to that. No surprise there. In the past two years I’ve been liquidating my entire DVD and CD collections, both to raise money and to save space. It’s been standard practice for me to rip those discs prior to sale, which falls into the same admittedly grey area as buying a record (remember those?), running a copy off to tape, and then selling the record again. The studios and labels make their money, because I bought the stuff in the first place, and I don’t go handing their material around to one and all in digital form.

And before you act appalled and disappointed, keep in mind that you’ve downloaded stuff too. Yesterday on BitTorrent. A decade ago on Napster, before the first hammer fell in the digital-age copyright fight. So you can just cut it out with the shocked look of righteous indignation. A very useful tool has been making headlines of late, a torrent-tracking website called YouHaveDownloaded.com, which allows one to punch in an IP address and see exactly what torrents have been downloaded. This site has even shown us that someone on the offices of the House Of Representatives has been downloading stuff like pirate copies of Windows 7, and that someone at the Recording Industry Association of America (one of the biggest corporate backers of these bills) has been downloading entire seasons of Dexter. Stay classy, RIAA, you’re already in the twilight of your usefulness to either artists or labels, what with the whole failing-to-keep-pace-with-technology-and-constantly-lobbying-for-the-world-to-revert-to-1994-settings and all. You’ve held them back while trying to hold the rest of the world back, and you’ve failed, to the detriment of those you’ve pledged to represent.

By the way, when I look up my last several dynamic IP addresses with YouHaveDownloaded… they show nothing.

These laws are incredibly (and, in all likelihood, deliberately) vague as to their precise aims and the means by which those aims may be reached. The Constitution has provisions against unlawful seach and seizure, while SOPA and PIPA would have local and regional internet service providers ignore those laws, and counterless laws against illegal wiretapping, just to check up on everybody and make sure they’re not being naughty. Most ISPs and search engines are actively lobying against SOPA and PIPA. They won’t protect jobs or create jobs. They give the Attorney General of the United States the power to sign orders to knock entire sites, or uncooperative internet providers, off the backbone of the ‘net, without creating adequate procedures for justifying such decisions. Censoring the internet worked so well in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen. It may yet backfire in China. Do we want to be on that list? (And make no mistake, as relatively tame as the “Occupy [insert placename here]” protests have been, they should serve as a warning shot to our own government that the Arab Spring may simply be the tip of an iceberg whose dimensions encompass something far larger than just the Arab nations. In other words: it can happen here too.)

SOPA and PIPA just create another intrusion into our lives. The age-old (and, I’ve always thought, damned cowardly) fallback position of “If you’re doing nothing wrong, then you have nothing to fear” doesn’t wash here. (Nor, really, does it ever.) Rest assured that these bills’ vagueness will be exploited and their powers will be abused, probably sooner rather than later. When the aim of legislation is to fight something as vague as “piracy” or “terror,” that legislation in practice becomes a whack-a-mole exercise in trying to nail smoke to the wall. All it really does is leave a lot of holes in the wall – assuming the mallet can even be constructed.

Another part of internet life that stands to be clamped down on, unjustly, is the “mashup culture” that has arisen. Budding singers on Youtube covering their favorite song by an established artist. Fan films. Parodies. Sites filled with incisive critique and analysis, just because they’re heavy on material that discusses properties that are someone else’s copyright. (Oh, wait, that sounds familiar.) Far from simply trading in the works of others, some people engaged in these acts of creativity have launched their own careers – careers whose output result in other people being employed to produce, publicize and distribute said output.

Freedom of expression is in danger, and due process is in danger here. Reasonable alternatives which salvage the piracy-fighting portions of SOPA and PIPA have been floated in Congress, and to be fair they still need work, but such trade bodies as the RIAA and the Motion Picture Association of America have been actively fighting these more level-headed measures in the piracy fight. The conclusion is easy to reach: these organizations don’t want to have to resort to conventional weapons that might leave those caught in the crossfire alive. They just want nukes, and they want them now.

They want to take extreme measures to protect their heavy investments in outmoded methods of content delivery, and to cover their butts for the fact that they have failed to keep up with alternatives to those methods. A few years ago, the media trade organizations treated YouTube as the greatest threat that their livelihoods had ever seen. They tried to create a viable alternative in Hulu, but ultimately they’re finding themselves having to cut deals with Netflix, which did keep up with the technology almost in spite of what the studios were doing. (And it wasn’t so long ago when the MPAA and its member studios were trying their damnedest to stonewall Netflix to keep it from ever launching its paid streaming service… which now accounts for fully one-third of American internet traffic – more than three times the amount of bandwidth used by pirates at last count – and puts money in the studios’ pockets.)

SOPA and PIPA, as they are currently written, need to dead-end in Washington, because they’ve become shining examples of doing more harm than good. The studios and media conglomerates, who are throwing gigantic wodges of money at Congresscritters they want to endorse SOPA and PIPA, are fully prepared to eject both baby and bathwater at the same time.

Join me in respectfully, but persistently, urging your Senators and Representatives to kick these bills in the head and bury them quickly – emphasis on “quickly,” because there are so many more big fish to fry in the next ten months. Let’s get this done and over with and move on to the big battles – but let’s get it done, because as a wise man once said, “the first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.”

The fact that SOPA and PIPA could curb our ability to quote or replay the above very concise and cutting scene from a now-20-year-old episode of a television show as inspiration and fodder for discussion should be an eye-opener. The baby – and our freedoms – don’t have to be fired out of the cannon with the bathwater for Hollywood to get the protection that it wants.… Read more

Categories
Serious Stuff

Thank you for not sm… um… saying …much of anything

THANKSI finally got a response, after over a month of waiting, on a job I’d hoped to get at the only TV station that’s still maintaining any kind of credible presence south of the Bobby Hopper tunnel. And the answer was no. Ah well. To be honest, with the lengthy wait, I’d given up and started carpet-bombing the whole city with my resume and applications anyway.

But it was nice to hear a “no.” Which brings me to this thought.

Since when has it become the accepted behavior model for businesses who don’t hire you to simply never let you know one way or the other? KFSM sent me an e-mail (and a personalized one at that); AETN never failed to mail me a letter every time I’ve gone tilting at windmills in the direction of Conway.

I could count the number of instances of e-mails, phone calls or rejection letters from other local businesses on one hand.

I know that there are often single-person HR “departments” that don’t have the time for phone calls or the budget to send out letters. And I’m sure the current ratio of people-seeking-work to job openings is probably a staggering ratio. But it does make me think much more highly about the ones that do bother.

In vaguely related news, it appears that the station group that owns KFSM has reserved a new set of call letters for KPBI when the deal finally goes through for them to buy it: KXNW. They may not need me as a promo producer now… but sooner or later, they probably will. It’s a pity that the KPBI callsign will be disappearing though. A minor chunk of local history whose significance ceased at some point in the early 2000s. Not unlike myself.… Read more

Categories
Funny Stuff Serious Stuff

Stop that quakin’ ’till I’m done with my bacon!

OtisburgBefore anyone asks…

Nope, I didn’t feel the 5.6 earthquake in Oklahoma here. I felt the 4.7 earthquake in central Arkansas earlier this year, but that was closer.

However, my cats and dogs have been going nuts since it happened.

A little bit of research (and I stress: only a little bit) and a general lack of sleep led to this funny but (hopefully) informative forum post, which may wind up having amused me more than it will amuse anyone else, but hey, give it a shot. I’m of a firm belief that communicating information with a healthy dose of humor helps to cement that information better in the mind of the listener or reader. Not everyone I’ve ever turned in a research paper or a paid writing assignment to has agreed with me, but hey, this is why I’ve got a blawg.

It’s just one of those little pieces of writing that I’m (insufferably) happy with, so I thought I’d share.… Read more

Categories
Serious Stuff

Dream Jobs

Anyone who knows me via Facebook or, well, just knows me, will probably not be even a little bit surprised to hear that the semi-frantic hunt is on for a new job. It’s been made official to those of us who pushed the buttons that run the ads (and make the money) at the Fort Smith teevee station have been given a firm drop-dead date after which our services will no longer be needed. That date is Friday, October 7th. … Read more

Categories
Home Base Serious Stuff

Steve Jobs

It’s almost certainly not news to anyone here that Apple co-founder (and Pixar investment angel) Steve Jobs has died. I’m pretty confident that I don’t need to explain the guy’s background.

I wasn’t the biggest fan of his business practices, but it’d be nigh-on impossible for me to try to deny the huge influence Jobs (and Steve Wozniak) have had in my life.

AppleMy first computer was an Apple II clone. Okay, maybe that didn’t feed any money into Jobs’ bank account at the time – at least not until Apple sued Franklin and the other clonemakers – but the thing’s lifeblood was Apple II software. I learned to program BASIC and some machine code on an Apple II. I was convinced I was going to start cranking out games on that machine.

As it so happens, I also discovered bulletin board systems on an Apple II, and that’s why you’re reading this here, because that fascination – with reaching out and writing stuff that other folks could read – can be followed straight to the front door of this web site, whose oldest content started out as a series of files handed from BBS to BBS. All written, at least at first, on an Apple II (or a similar facsimile thereof).

During some of my most troubled teenage years, games like Ultima IV and Project Space Station occupied large swaths of my time and kept me out of trouble that I could’ve been getting into at that time (heaven knows I didn’t exactly have a strong parental influence guiding me at the time). Those were made for the Apple (and run by my trusty Franklin ACE) too. Then there was a very early desktop publishing program, The Newsroom, which helped me to further my interest in writing for print. Both my copy of The Newsroom at home and the one at school, ran on an Apple II.

Eventually time, and the diminishing availability of software, caught up with me and I reluctantly retired my Franklin ACEs from active duty and started writing my stuff on a PC instead. Only it was my stepmother’s PC and, as she commonly did, she let me use it and then yanked it out from under me just to cause me grief. All she really did was make me shrug and go back to writing the early LogBook files on a machine compatible with an Apple II.

Ten years ago this time, I was producing TV spots on a Mac-based Avid system, and was cursing its incessant ability to take forever to render, or just completely crash. Let’s skip the Mac. It wasn’t my friend.

The Android tablet that travels with me everywhere is not an Apple product. I’m consistent, if nothing else: it’s kind of like the modern day equivalent to the Franklin ACE. It’s also something that I’m sure nobody would’ve bothered to make if they weren’t trying to get the budget-minded portion of the market for Apple’s iPad. I use it… a lot. I’ve passed on the iPhone revolution, and I sat out several rounds of iPod in favor of a cranky old minidisc player and, more recently, the aforementioned tablet, but one would have to be perilously close to the crazy end of the scale to deny the huge cultural impact of those products. As Variety.com noted, the iTunes Store virtually single-handedly created the paid digital content market at a time when internet piracy was running rampant and outstripping the studios’ and labels’ ability to keep up (let alone comprehend) the changes taking place around them on the media landscape.

Oh, and my kid loves the Toy Story movies. Jobs brokered the deals that made those happen, too, having bought Pixar from George Lucas when Lucas needed a cash infusion in order to – and let’s be honest here – avoid feeling any impact whatsoever from a massive divorce settlement.

Now, to be sure, the hardware that made the Apple II happen was Steve Wozniak’s invention, and the design of the iPod/iPad/iPhone/iEtc. was driven by guidelines laid out and fiercely championed by Jobs, but he didn’t create the machines in either case. Jobs’ genius was that he could stride out into the middle of the American consumer landscape and convince us that, yes, we need personal computers in our homes, and they might as well be Apple IIs. Yes, you need a personal digital music device to replace your CD Walkman, and here’s the iPod. Yes, you need a phone that will grow tendrils that intersect every possible part of your life. Yes, those little flatscreen touchscreen computers they had on Star Trek: The Next Generation? Let’s move the timetable on those up from the 24th century to rightaboutnow. And, oh, by the way, you need one.”

He may well be the most successful carnival barker in history, because everything that Jobs’ company has cranked out since the introduction of the iPod, we’ve needed. Considering how ubiquitous everything since the ‘Pod has become, the man either had a deal with the devil, or he was a stark raving mad genius.

My money’s on the latter. Thanks for being a stark raving mad genius, Steve Jobs. Look at you. You went and changed the world. You made geeks out of everyone, even the folks who swore up and down that they’d never become geeks. And speaking as a fellow nerd… that is the sweetest revenge.

(Tapped out on the onscreen keyboard of my decidedly non-iPad tablet.)… Read more

Categories
Gaming Serious Stuff

Please cancel the Game Doctor’s appointments…

Bill KunkelThe Game Doctor is out.

One of the founders of Electronic Games Magazine, the very first publication devoted entirely to video games and computer games, Bill Kunkel and his cohorts Arnie Katz and Joyce Worley created the field of video game journalism, at a time when no publisher thought an entire magazine could be devoted to a topic and support itself with both advertising and subscriptions. Electronic Games Magazine managed to prove them wrong, and Katz, Kunkel & Worley were suddenly on the ground floor of a whole new field of entertainment journalism. Oft-imitated by copycat publications that occasionally managed to look cooler but never quite read like they were written by the Katz/Kunkel/Worley team, Electronic Games was suddenly making its publisher a boatload of money. As with the rest of the video game industry, it flamed out in the mid-1980s, mired down by indecision on the publisher’s part on whether or not to ride out the apparent crash of the “fad” industry on whose coattails it rode. Its three founders moved on to pastures new. Bill Kunkel eventually moved on to a whole new field of publication, getting aboard the strategy guide train when the getting was good.

It would be a disservice to imply that Bill’s entire career was wrapped up in video game journalism. He had already done seminal work in other areas of entertainment reporting that dwelled, like Electronic Games, in areas that no publisher would’ve thought profitable – until he proved them otherwise. He had covered professional and semi-pro wrestling, and written comics in the company of some of the greats in that industry, among other things.

Of course, it was Electronic Games that I latched onto as a kid, making its debut when I was almost ten years old and had come down with a bad case of Pac-Man Fever. The writing in EG was funny, to-the-point, and called a spade a spade. You could trust the opinions in those pages. The art direction was near-legendary, with incredible painted artwork depicting scenes that the games’ own graphics weren’t quite up to showing us yet. (The art department also came up with that nifty E-and-G-in-a-circle logo that I misappropriated back then, since it happened to be my initials, and continue to “borrow” now. In case you’d missed it somehow.) To put it mildly, I was in love. I still maintain to this day that, somewhere between Electronic Games, Starlog Magazine, Douglas Adams and some Harlan Ellison books I had as a kid, I learned more about how to write than I ever have in any journalism or creative writing course I ever took at any level of my education.

It didn’t ever even occur to me that I’d have a chance to thank Bill personally for his part in that. I just went about my business writing for print, the web and broadcast, eventually winding up as one of the frequent-flyer freelancers for Classic Gamer Magazine about a decade ago. (Indeed, there was one issue where apparently there were a couple of complaints that I had written too much of the issue. Oops.) It was understood by everyone on the staff of Classic Gamer that we were trying to evoke a little something of the “feel” of the long-defunct Electronic Games – unapologetically so.

To my amazement, our editor-in-chief, Chris Cavanaugh, made contact with Bill Kunkel himself and got the man himself to critique our little magazine. I went back to dig up the e-mail that Chris forwarded to me to see exactly what was said that made my day back in early 2001:

…on first look, my favorite piece was Earl Green’s superb overview of
the Odyssey2.

Not to toot my own horn – and to be fair, there was a fairly even-handed critique of my article to follow – but I’m not sure it’s even possible to get better validation than that from someone whose writing I looked up to with intense admiration from a very young age.

Oh, but it gets better. A couple of years later at the 2003 Classic Gaming Expo, I was lucky enough to win a drawing to hang out and dine with the special guests (i.e. the ones who we were all paying to show up and hear from) the night before the show actually started. There was an open bar shortly before a really great meal – the kind you spend the rest of the weekend recovering from – and I did my best to blend into the wallpaper. I wasn’t even in the industry. What in the world would I have to say to these guys? Fortunately, the feeling wasn’t mutual: Steve Woita got me out of hiding and took me around to introduce me to everyone else in the room. Finally, Chris Cavanaugh made sure I was introduced to Bill, who stunned me by remembering exactly who I was and what I’d written (keep in mind, this was two years after Bill’s critique of Classic Gamer Magazine), and insisted that I join him at his table for dinner, where we were easily the most boisterous table for the entire evening. Every year that I was able to make it to CGE after that, there was no question and there wasn’t even time for me to ask permission – it was just assumed I’d be hanging out at Bill’s table year after year (though I don’t think were ever got around to quieting down). And sure enough, I did.

Nobody – nobody – could tell a story like Bill. When he later put some of his best anecdotes in print in Confessions Of The Game Doctor (Rolenta Press, 2005), my only beef was that the book could’ve been twice as long – and it should’ve been an audiobook, because the only thing better than reading about Bill’s misadventures in the industry was hearing him tell those stories personally. Here’s a pretty good example of Bill preserving the oral history of the early video game industry, as he read a chapter of his then-upcoming book at CGE 2005:

[audio:https://www.thelogbook.media/phosphor/about/cge05/media/kunkelcge01.mp3,https://www.thelogbook.media/phosphor/about/cge05/media/kunkelcge02.mp3,https://www.thelogbook.media/phosphor/about/cge05/media/kunkelcge03.mp3,https://www.thelogbook.media/phosphor/about/cge05/media/kunkelcge04.mp3,https://www.thelogbook.media/phosphor/about/cge05/media/kunkelcge05.mp3]

I wish I could pass along some of the stories from the CGE dinner table discussions, but I’m not sure I could. Not that there was any priveleged information exchanged, but I couldn’t do justice to the way Bill told his own stories.

They say you should never meet your heroes. I think you should, on the off chance that they’re as cool as Bill Kunkel. As starstruck as I was initially, it quickly dawned on my that he was as much a fan of my work as I was of his. He was as interested in hearing about my unlikely adventures (namely the horses) as I was about his. Once we got that obstacle out of the way, he was more than just a childhood idol. He was just my friend, Bill Kunkel. And this is in no way a name-drop on my part: everyone who approached him at Classic Gaming Expo, or e-mailed him out of the blue, seemed to have the same experience. Bill was just Bill.

Bill Kunkel died unexpectedly this weekend at his home. That particular piece of news is still busy kicking me in the gut with steel-toed boots. I wish our paths had crossed sooner and that we’d had more time, but I’m proud – and I consider myself lucky – to have had the mutual friendship that we had. I have yet to see a tribute from anyone who doesn’t feel that way about Bill. He’ll be keenly missed.… Read more

Categories
Serious Stuff

So what you’re saying is that we need to book a bus to ride into hell

The 2:15 bus to hellWith the whole credit downgrade debt doom business in the news lately, I’ve repeatedly seen the following phrase in print, on TV (in on-screen graphics and closed captioning) and on the web:

“unchartered territory”

…which makes no sense. It’s uncharted territory. It hasn’t been charted. It hasn’t been mapped. We don’t know where we’re going, and we don’t know what’s next. Uncharted.

In this context, “unchartered” makes no sense.

Really, so much about this whole situation makes no sense. But at least I can get my head around using the right word in an attempt to land somewhere in the same county and/or parish with the right meaning.… Read more