My internet energies remain committed elsewhere, but I would like to at least register a couple of cranky complaints about the commentary surrounding Palin:

• To everyone asserting that the Democrats just don't get it, and that only you, the author, have a privileged insight into what makes real Americans so gosh-darn real — and they're going to love Sarah Palin! — please, shut the fuck up. You're just guessing, you out-of-touch elitist, exactly the same way that I am. Show me some polls. Even if you dismiss the fact that the early returns don't agree with your analysis, you should temper your statements with the realization that the odds of the vice presidential pick having a significant impact on the race's outcome are very, very small.
• To those using Twitter for non-humorous political analysis: you should probably stop. This applies doubly for Democrats who employ it to compliment Republican machinations in an attempt to paint themselves as bold, contrarian truth-tellers in the tradition of — what, Alan Colmes? The instantaneous, abbreviated nature of the medium makes this a tough act to pull off; you'll usually just come off sounding credulous and reactionary. The good news is that if you're reading this you're almost certainly not who I have in mind. But really: if you want to play contrarian, do it in a macroblog format. That will at least afford you enough characters to express your dumb observations in a clever-sounding way.

Whew! I sure am cantankerous this morning.

ALSO: Somewhat less emphatically, let me add that I (predictably) don't really buy the argument that going after Palin will prompt a meaningful backlash. In terms of media narratives, sure — but nobody should care about that. The depressing truth seems to be that the first mover advantage overwhelms the final result of most societal deliberations.

Ryan and Ezra and Matt are talking about cars that can't go faster than 75 miles per hour, the idea being that mandating such a change would save lives. I'm not sure what to think about that. I probably shouldn't bother thinking much — the idea is clearly politically impossible.

But it's intriguing nonetheless. In particular, it's interesting to consider this theoretical speed limitation as an analogue of DRM — a means of crippling devices so that consumers don't misuse them. As you might imagine, I'm not a fan of conventional DRM. I think it's inevitably circumvented and accomplishes nothing other than inconveniencing users.

On the other hand, I do favor some sorts of restrictions on the devices that consumers can buy and that manufacturers would like to sell to them. I approve of some forms of gun control, for instance, including limitations on the mechanical capabilities of firearms. I think that such restrictions are less easily circumvented than copy protection, and of course the consequences of a single successful circumvention do not represent a system-wide failure in the way that they would within the digital realm. That makes the undertaking a bit more worthwhile in my eyes.

Cars fall somewhere in the middle. There's already a thriving hobbyist scene devoted to swapping out engine timing chips for less efficient, more powerful alternatives. And of course more generally there's a ton of aftermarket automotive components that performance tuners can buy. I have no doubt that speed restrictors, however implemented, would be easily beaten by motivated individuals.

But would the inconvenience of upgrading from the default limitation save lives? Probably. I'm not sure how many, though, and it's conceivable that a speed limitation may cause deaths in ways that this debate's participants aren't anticipating. I remain generally suspicious of efforts to cripple devices that consumers can buy.

Mostly unrelatedly, during some preparatory spooky-story reading this weekend I came across this quotation from The Gold-Bug, which I thought sums up the DRM situation pretty nicely:

[I]t may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve.

Until recently public key cryptography arguably provided a counterexample, but quantum computing seems poised to prove Poe right once again.

Alex Balk:

Why does John McCain tell so many lies? Because lying works! If you didn't read that AP analysis we mentioned earlier, you really should. It makes the very instructive point that even if the press actually does its job and shows that the lies John McCain and his surrogates tell are, real, honest-to-God lies, it doesn't make a difference. Noting how the media had debunked many strands in the giant web of lies the McCain team has put out over the last two weeks, the article goes on to admit that it doesn't really matter:

Major news outlets have written such fact-checking articles for years. "But in the last two election cycles, the very notion that the facts matter seems to be under assault," said Michael X. Delli Carpini, an authority on political ads at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. "Candidates and their consultants seem to have learned that as long as you don't back down from your charges or claims, they will stick in the minds of voters regardless of their accuracy or at a minimum, what the truth is will remain murky, a matter of opinion rather than fact."

Now, real-life evidence. Check out this comment, from a Wired post about the various Palin spoofs — it's whole point is to catalog parodies, and it's quite explicit about this!

Hi,
just a question:
http://sarahpalin.typepad.com/
is this real??? I read and read and have a very hard time struggling with the idea that she is really this dumb that she can write this.
Come on, War with Russia, Creationism, Anti-Abortion, but admitting to ban and steal books from the libraryfor those reasons? that's not at all a sane woman. Please answer: how are u sure it's her blog??
Thanx

I have read a lot of comments like this over the past few weeks. And while they're sort of funny, they're also deeply depressing. I suppose that says as much about my sense of humor as it does about the electorate. But one of those things results in awkward moments at parties, while the other will ultimately lead to the death of thousands, if not millions, if not the destruction of the entire planet.

Doomed, I say!

It's been a while, and so a backlog of musical tidbits has been gathering at the top of my spine, periodically releasing pleasant shivering waves. I've been enjoying listening to some things, in other words. Hey, let's direct some of that energy at the internet!

The song from the new iPod commercial will give you cavities, but you're not fooling anyone by pretending you don't have it stuck in your head:

Al3x tweeted this a while ago, and I've been meaning to pass it along: a Beach Boys mashup that adds yet another layer of harmony — or maybe shifts everything into a different key and uses the original melody as the harmony? Whatever's going on here, it's clear that it's beyond my pretending-to-know-about-music comfort zone. One thing I can say with confidence is that the process strips away the cheery, brave face covering the song's subtle plaintiveness. It also goes THUMP THUMP THUMP, which I find less exciting. But the net effect is pleasing.

SugaMotor – Wouldn't Nine Lives be Nice?
original link

Friday's Penny Arcade unveiled a world of amazingly competent videogame rock. Things have come a long way in the past few years — it's no longer enough to just channel 8-bit nostalgia through a six string (although that remains pretty fun, too). Most impressive are The Protomen, who seem to be in the business of recording Thermalsish epics about Megaman. Check out the flash video at their site. Things don't really get going until past the second voiceover, but after that point they get better and better. There's also this, their newest track, an unholy mix of Springsteen & Styx which actually works out quite well.

Also linked from that post: Man Factory's concept album about Street Fighter 2 (available as a free download). It's somewhat hit or miss, but the slow jam about Balrog is definitely worth your attention (as are the titles of all the tracks).

Talking about this stuff prompted Chris to send me a link to a project of a friend of his: remixed Megaman 2 themes. I haven't listened to them all yet, but Chris is right when he says that the Amen break-laden Airman track is solid.

Finally, it's been a while since I've engaged in any Wrens advocacy. I understand that some of you are doubters. However, I also understand that a number of you are having emotional crises about getting older. Hey, me too! I've been at it since I was about 16, in fact. If you're new to this you may not have noticed just how amazing The Meadowlands is when you first listened to it. The first five songs are the strongest block of album-openers I can think of — go listen to them. I've been revisiting Meadowlands after spending the past year or two with Secaucus, and it's just as good as I remembered.

I haven't really followed the local sports media much over the past couple of years. The last time I regularly checked in, Wilbon was still handling quite a bit of the paper's Redskins columns, and it was clear that he was intensely bored by it. A professional disdain for home team jingoism and fatigue from the formulaic but necessary cycle of columns that a bad local franchise necessitates combined to produce columns that were mostly about how much he hated writing them.

I figured the turnover since then would have improved things, but holy crap is today's Mike Wise column a piece of garbage. It's like he was having a competition with his colleagues to see how many sentence fragments he could get past their editor. Also, take a moment and contemplate the horror of the phrase "and who this team really cannot get the ball enough to". Is it possible to write that clause any more awkwardly? Did anyone even read this before it went to the presses?

I realize that many sports reporters get bored with sports. That's probably inevitable. But it's still a pretty cushy job — show at least a little effort.

HMM: Charles tells me that he thinks Mike Wise ran a triathlon on the day that he had to write that column. If so, its quality is a bit more understandable. Presumably his editor was similarly indisposed (boxing match?).

Hey, look! An exciting article about energy storage technology! Graphene ultracapacitors, son! As the piece notes, these new doodads offer "double the capacity of existing ultracapacitors", and "higher power capability" than batteries!

The article then goes on to discuss how off-peak power storage is a major problem facing renewable energy sources. Which is true! But of course ultracapacitors have absolutely nothing to do with solving that problem. Graphene-based ultracaps may be twice as good as existing ultracaps (although that leaves them lagging behind the still-maybe-not-imaginary EEStor offering). But a 2x improvement still leaves ultracaps capable of storing only about a fifth as much energy as a boring ol' chemical battery. That "higher power capability" refers to the speed with which they can deliver or take a charge, not how much energy they can hold. For some applications that's a crucially important attribute. Just not, y'know, the ones the article talks about.

As usual a misleading press release from a university (in this case: hook 'em ultracapacitors!) has been gleefully adapted by a credulous reporter. Somewhere along the line a claim that this may solve our energy problems and/or cure cancer will invariably be added. The poor professors and grad students being given the credit for saving our society will have their quotes — in which they honestly explain the legitimately impressive but not immediately world-changing work they've done! — placed in a context that they must find deeply embarrassing.

My suggestion: get your tech news from MIT Technology Review and Ars. And if something sounds amazing, go find the associated Slashdot thread and read it. You'll usually find at least a few surprisingly informative comments from engineers with expertise relevant to the alleged breakthrough.

Not bad, right? And that's resized and compressed to a lossy jpeg. Take my word for it: the original looks fantastic.

It turns out that tivodecode is near-miraculous (the GUIs for it... less so). If you've got a recent-model Tivo you can visit its https interface, download the stored .tivo files and convert them to mpeg, easy as you please. Of course, the files are pretty big — several gigs for HD recordings — and I haven't currently got a machine on my network beefy and idle enough to transcode up iphone-ready files on a regular basis.

Still: pretty neat. It's nice to know that I've got a very high quality capture box sitting under my TV if I ever decide I badly need to put some televised video online. And it's just fun. Do any progressive media watchdogs want to pay me to help them create automated, annotated archives of cable news? Because with this gadgetry we could totally do it on the cheap.

BoingBoing reminds me of this video, which I originally saw in January when the MAKE blog first posted it. It's long but fascinating, and maybe even a little profound.

Fabrication d'une lampe triode
by F2FO

Tonight! Black Cat! Word on the inter-street is that they go on around 11 — that's right, it's a headlining spot. I think I'll be in the Red Room by 10 or so. See you there? Of course I will.

CORRECTION: A more recent notice from the band says they may be on as early as 10:30. Are they just saying that to make your dilatory ass show up on time? It's hard to fathom their mysterious ways.

So! Halloween is fast approaching, and as some of you know, preparations are well underway. I'd like to try something new this year, though: let's have a spooky story contest. Folks will submit their stories — anonymously, if they'd like — and we'll all read and vote on them during the week leading up to Halloween (non-robotically, I hasten to add). The winner gets a $100 bar tab, or bottle of scotch, or, if you're one of those professional writer types that needs some sort of compensatory justification for wasting time writing about ghosts, a small green portrait of Benjamin Franklin.

Let's say that the deadline is the morning of Monday, October 27. That's a little more than a month — plenty of time to write, I think. It'll also give us all a few precious pre-Halloween days to read and vote on everyone else's work.

I realize the task may sound daunting — it does to me, too, at least a little bit. But I'm inspired by the example of the Salon d'Avent, which indicates to me me that you guys are capable of it. Plus I've already talked to a few folks who've said they'll come up with something.

Besides, it doesn't have to be a sprawling masterpiece. I've read terrifying stories that are less than 300 words. You could write a sonnet to a dead girl, or a business letter to that vampire who's been giving you trouble. Or, if you're Wolfson, you could write in some archaic form that leaves me feeling both terrified and dumb. It just needs to be made of words, spooky in nature, and able to appeal to your fellow blog reader. All you have to do is start thinking of scary things for the next couple of weeks, then take half an hour or so to write them down. It's easy money!

To serve as inspiration (and an occasional reminder), over the course of the next month I plan to post some spooky stories that I'm personally fond of, hopefully in a variety of media. Let's start off with an easy one: a comic. Don't worry, we'll get at least somewhat more literary later on.

This is a nine-page standalone story from BPRD vol. 6: The Universal Machine (BPRD is a Hellboy spinoff, and has become an excellent title in its own right — go buy it!).

This little story probably took no more than two pages of script, but it's one of my favorite things from the Hellboy universe. It's wry, and short, and sad. And of course it's spooky, too. Click the graphic below to open it up as a Flickr slideshow.

Looks like the labels went after Muxtape faster than I'd expected. Relaunching as a direct competitor to MySpace's music player functionality strikes me as a smart move — the fidelity offered by MySpace is pretty terrible, and bands are willing to spend a few bucks, I think, for better promotional tools. There are plenty other services out there that scratch this itch, but most haven't got the brand cachet or design sense of Muxtape. I think this could turn into a nice little business for Justin, the site's creator.

On a side note, reading about the licensing challenges faced by Justin should underscore the impressiveness of the Hype Machine's continued existence. I don't know the details of whatever arrangement Anthony worked out, but he obviously did it a while ago, when the labels were presumably less resigned to the importance of the internet. The Muxtape saga shows that threading this particular needle is still a difficult task; it must have been nearly impossible when HypeM did it.

Although everyone's keeping a low profile so far, I'm encouraged by the interest expressed to me privately about the Halloween story contest. I think this'll be fun.

So let's press onward! As promised, I'm going to post a bunch of spooky stuff in order to provide both inspiration and a gentle kick in the ass. I think I'm going to start this process by heading back in time from the Hellboy comic that started the process.

The Hellboy universe has a lot of influences, and Mike Mignola swings between them pretty wildly. But more than anyone else, the book owes a debt to H.P. Lovecraft. Sometimes this is explicit — the BPRD Plague of Frogs storyline could be fairly called an adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth (which we'll get to later). But the most important idea taken from Lovecraft is atmospheric in nature.

Lovecraft's probably best known for making our pop fright-fest aesthetic include more tentacles than it used to. That's not his real innovation, though. Before Lovecraft, horror was mostly about deviation from the normal — about the horrible things that might exist, things which put themselves at odds with virtue and far from god. Lovecraft pointed out that if there is a god — well, first of all, that should probably be pluralized — and second of all, it's pretty presumptuous for us to assume that they care for mankind or the world we've built. Human society and its idea of goodness is a pleasant anomaly; one we're born into loving and defending, but one that has little in common with the essential cold vastness of the universe. We are so, so tiny. It's probably too much to ask for even indifference from the unknowable forces that dwarf us. Why should we be the only thing with intents and ends? We may just be the only thing that flatters itself by bothering to call those ends benevolent.

Put another way: if you've ever found yourself standing outside on a dark, cloudless night and paused to imagine the radio waves from our civilization and the heat from your body commingling as they radiate into space, the photons soon to be lost forever in endless cold — and better that than for them to be noticed by something else, something incomprehensible and uncompassionate — if you've ever thought something like that, shivered, and then hurried inside, you probably owe H.P. Lovecraft a royalty payment.

Lovecraft said that the story he liked best of those he ever wrote wasThe Colour Out Of Space. Although it's not directly related to his more famous works within the Cthulhu mythos, it is as emblematic of his sense of cosmic dread as anything else I've read. Here's the text:

H.P. Lovecraft – The Colour Out Of Space

iPhone owners may also be interested in installing Stanza, a free book reader application that has The Colour Out Of Space available through its Feedbooks catalog.

Boo!

Last night, after watching Vampire Show by Alan Ball, some of us got to talking about haircuts. Like "which candy is best?" and "[now-beloved cynical marketing campaign from childhood TV]", I find this to invariably be a good conversation topic. Pretty much everyone has developed their own dearly-held system of hair maintenance, and they are almost always anxious to explain it in detail. Plus most people will have some self-deprecating anecdotes to share regarding ill-advised haircuts of yore.

But I wasn't just looking to make small talk; I really have been looking for a new place to go. The lady who cuts my hair seems to have recently instituted a fuel surcharge, and that, along with the ever-more-absurd photo of George W. Bush that decorates her work area (and the increasingly uncomfortable discussions about Iraq that go with it), has got me looking for a new head maintenance technician.

It turns out, though, that I exist in an entirely different hair-cutting continuum than the rest of the world. I forget how it came up, but I somehow made it clear that I like to get a shampoo, or at least a rinse, at the end of the haircut. If I don't, tiny bits of hair fall down my shirt and make me itch. When I finished explaining this, everyone looked at me like I'd just casually expressed my personal system for visiting prostitutes.

Apparently this post-haircut-shampoo behavior is shocking: they all place childlike faith in that stupid paper smock, and laugh at the idea of tiny, asbestos-like hair particles causing anyone sort of discomfort. Also, it seems that they get their hair washed immediately upon arriving for their appointments — and by an entirely different person than performs the cutting! Also: they make appointments!

This is all very strange to me. I'm not claiming to be an expert, but I have had my hair cut several times now, and at a variety of different establishments. What Sommer, Emily, Kriston and Charles described is not in keeping with what I've observed at any of them. The female hair maintenance experience I can easily dismiss as irrelevant to my own. But... et tu, Kriston and Charles?

I have no choice but to reluctantly conclude that everyone is crazy but me. They've no doubt been unavoidably warped by the debauched, coastal salon culture that they were unlucky enough to be born into. I think that, without realizing it, I've been getting my hair cut in America — the real America. Places that dare to use the word "barber", and which honor our troops and their commander in chief — the sorts of places where they keep dirty magazines on top of the coat rack, by God!

I will abandon this foolish attempt to find a new hair-cutter. I didn't realize the chasm that yawned before me. Now I just count myself lucky. And non-itchy.

Incidentally, I hear that post-haircut shampooers are the key voting bloc for this election.