This (via Ezra) is a pretty fun little toy — it uses this clever hack to figure out what sites you’ve recently visited, then compares it to demographic data from Quantcast to determine whether you’re male or female. My results:

That’s right: my overpowering masculinity extends far; yea, even unto the document object model.

Actually, though, I think I probably got this result in a nontypical way, as my browser history currently contains no links to ESPN. The most incriminating domains on my list include jeroenwijering.com, digikey.com and, um, washingtontimes.com (I don’t read it for the articles! I swear!).

That, or maybe the script noticed that yesterday I read an article about Tucker Max. Based on that datum alone the script should not only be able to tell that I’m male but also that I’m an asshole.

Due to professional entanglements it would be inappropriate for me to comment on these allegations other than to say that I find them troubling, and that I have complete faith that the good people behind the Teen Choice Awards will continue to do everything in their power to uphold the finest traditions of our democracy.

I’ll be up front with you: it’s nothing but exposition, the art is so-so, the display software is terrible and it ends with an irritating cliffhanger. Still! If the Sunday NYT article wasn’t enough for you, go read HBO’s True Blood comic. If nothing else it serves to quickly establish the ground rules for the upcoming series’ world. Vampires, people! God, it takes so little to get me excited.

I realize that our national conversation about Batman is already more or less over, but the weighty responsibilities of internet citizenship can’t be shirked so easily. So: Emily and I went to see the new Batman movie on Friday, with Jason, Gen, Sarah and two nice folks who disappeared so quickly that I’m not sure they were ever there at all. Mr. and Ms. Soze, we’ll call them (now and then not again).

Emily hated it, and at the time this prompted me to stick up for the movie in an attempt to defend the institution of comic book adaptations. They’ve only grossed, what, a billion dollars this summer? Clearly this struggling art form needs our support.

But now, thinking about it some more, I have some complaints.

Here’s the thing about the Batman movie: I want to signal my approval. Christopher Nolan is clearly thinking about Batman in the right way; the actors associated with the franchise are all doing an excellent job of adapting an awkwardly large and sometimes-cartoonish mythology into a filmed perspective that is as realistic as is realistically possible. The basic thesis of the movie was a good one, too, and an appropriate arc for the second movie of a Batman reboot. The movie looks right, it sounds right, it moves right.

My only real problem with the film was everything that happens in it. Spoilers:

More »

Last night I finished Spook Country, William Gibson’s most recent novel. Twittered snark aside, it’s actually quite good — probably the best Gibson novel I’ve read, although it’s mostly a do-over of Pattern Recognition, and of course will never be as influential or noteworthy as Neuromancer.

It’s definitely worth a read, I think, if only for the unsettling sensation of being unsure whether Gibson has figured out how to relate to the present or if it’s just that the present has become more compatible with his style. It’s also a book that, when all is revealed, seems well-suited to the particular moment of our 9/11 coping process.

Anyway, I say all of this by way of introducing the following passage (which is spoiler-free, I think, although others might disagree):

“I remember seeing proofs of a CIA interrogation manual, something we’d been sent unofficially, for comment,” the old man said. “The first chapter laid out the ways in which torture is fundamentally counterproductive to intelligence. The argument had nothing to do with ethics, everything to do with quality of product, with not squandering potential assets.” He removed his steel-rimmed glasses. “If the man who keeps returning to question you avoids behaving as if he were your enemy, you begin to lose your sense of who you are. Gradually, in the crisis of self that your captivity becomes, he guides you in your discovery of who you are becoming.”


“Did you interrogate people?” asked Garreth, the black Pelican case under his feet.


“It’s an intimate process,” the old man said. “Entirely about intimacy.” He spread his hand, held it, as if above an invisible flame. “An ordinary cigarette lighter will cause a man to tell you anything, whatever he thinks you want to hear.” He lowered his hand. “And will prevent him ever trusting you again, even slightly. And will confirm him, in his sense of self, as few things will.” He tapped the folded paper. “When I first saw what they were doing, I knew that they’d turned the SERE lessons inside out. That meant we were using techniques the Koreans had specifically developed in order to prepare prisoners for show trials.”

I have no idea if the above is true, but it’s certainly an interesting idea: that, when it comes to torture, black & white bellicosity is a meme capable of self-preservation, rather than just a manifestation of the torturer’s ignorance and imcompetence. Failing to get results, forcing everyone to play their assigned parts with conviction — that’s actually the point.

Marriage-induced name changes! Everyone’s blogging about it, so allow me to briefly chime in with my brilliant, completely foolproof solution to the problem. First, everyone keeps their name when they get married. That seems kind of obvious. Second, male children take the father’s last name and female children take the mother’s last name.

In this way each parent gets to preserve their family name, giving it to offspring of the gender that said parent secretly believes to rule (at least relative to the inescapable truth that the other sex droolz). Yet nobody has to mess around with hyphens! And, as an added bonus, if the practice ever became popular we’d soon have distinctly female and distinctly male surnames, which I think would be sort of neat.

More practically, of course, less-than-total adoption means that this would disadvantage female names. But that’s all the more reason to embrace and fiercely espouse my crackpot idea immediately!

WHOOPS: How heteronormative of me! Obviously this wouldn’t work for same-sex couples. In that case, I suggest alternating kid-by-kid, with first dibs going to the winner of an American Gladiators-style obstacle course. Or, failing that, rock-paper-scissors (3 out of 5).

Important business:

1. Via Matt S.: Leonardo DiCaprio as Captain America!? No no no. That’s the wrong kind of earnest. He looks wrong, is a pretty atrocious actor and has never pulled off a convincingly alpha-male leading role.
2. Hulk is about the Cold War? I have to defer to Spencer’s greater familiarity with the franchise, but this seems all wrong to me. The Hulk is afraid of himself and his lack of self-control. He’s defined by rage, isolation and the hopelessness of ever achieving normality. He’s a teenage boy, in other words, Peter Parker but with a worse temper and gloomier attitude. Hulk is for anyone who’s felt like the anger welling up inside of them could destroy the world, and been unsure if they liked the idea.
   
   
   I mean, yes, radiation, etc. But that was just the unknowable technology of the day.

Matt links to Nicholas Carr expressing concern over the diminishing length of the texts he consumes. Is the internet killing our collective attention span? C’mon, sing along if you know the words.

Well, as Matt says, probably yes, in the aggregate. That’s probably okay, though. It’s easier to consume stuff, there’s more of it to consume, and so we’re going to adopt strategies and purchasing criteria that maximize our opportunities. But this won’t come exclusively at the cost of intellectual depth — there’s plenty of fat to be trimmed. Books and albums are typically somewhat padded in order to make consumers feel that they’re getting their money’s worth. As the digital age makes media cheaper (and physical delivery methods less relevant), that concern will diminish. More novellas, short films that actually succeed, mass-market EPs, nonfiction books that top out at 150 pages. That’s all sounds fine by me.

But the larger point I want to make speaks to what Matt says at the end of his post: on an individual level it’s not clear to me that this progression is a steady or irreversible one. Matt says he’s meticulously rereading The Brothers Karamazov, despite a level of online immersion that should have left him unable to finish sentences, much less books. For my part, I’m currently reading a lot more novels and long-form articles than I have since I was being graded on it.

Part of this is about getting older. But a big part of it is also about a cycle of getting bored with the internet, which I believe to be an underappreciated phenomenon. I think there’s an infradian rhythm to internet use — a repeating cycle of enthusiasm, engagement and consumption; boredom, disillusionment and retreat. The period of this cycle is different for everyone, and depends on their age, professional situation, technological sophistication and who knows how many other factors. In itself this is not so different from waxing and waning enthusiasm for any other pursuit. But, crucially, for a large proportion of online citizens/proponents, these rhythms were more-or-less synchronized at the beginning of this decade, during a time marked by (if not causally related to) the explosion of blogging.

That synchronicity led to a lot of shared enthusiasm, unsustainable cordiality and utopian dreaming. Now our cycles are drifting ever further out of sync, sometimes in waves and sometimes individually. This leads to reflections like James Joyner’s much-blogged observations about the changing nature of the political blogosphere, and to more meetings where people like me shift uncomfortably in their seats as junior associates suggest that creating a Facebook application for a client will change everything, man.

Of course it’s important for people like myself, who (at the moment) feel a little burned out on the net, to realize that their lack of enthusiasm isn’t necessarily more rational or sophisticated than the alternative. There’s a tendency to complain:

“The internet was supposed to change everything, man.”


“It did change everything. It is.”


“Yeah, I guess. So what?”

But that’s self-evidently dumb. Those heady early days are gone, but their collapse was inevitable. A roiling convection of enthusiasm and burn-out is probably healthier, ultimately. For those of us drifting back to the bottom of the pot, the only solution is to read some books and unillustrated articles in badly laid-out magazines (the sorts that one could never explicitly name as being badly laid-out, lest one invite lengthy, godawful discussions of typography). The people riding the upward current will handle building widgets and integrating with social networks and reading everything via RSS for a while; I’m confident we’ll rejoin or replace them soon enough.

Don’t make me pick a favorite:

• McDonald’s “Southern Style” Chicken Sandwich As the commercial points out, this is less a fried chicken and pickle sandwich than an ascendant generation’s rallying cry. These people have different habits — and tastes! And they’re not going to submit to the tyranny of traditional breakfast, old man. Also, the chicken is juicy and perfectly seasoned, two points which I’m mentioning in an entirely ordinary, conversational way.
  
  
  I wanted to reach out to the screen and plaintively tell these hip young sandwich consumers that I, too, have eaten chicken for breakfast. I understand! Oh god, take me with you! But their faces would have been no less implacable had they been in the room instead of on the screen. My time is over. I must go into the West, and diminish.
• Liberty/Freedom/Independence Disposable Catheters: DID YOU KNOW that a recent Medicare decision means that you no longer have to suffer with reusable catheters? I sure was sick of the tedious boiling and sterile procedure associated with my reusable catheters. But it was hard for a comparatively sexy, somewhat vivacious catheter user like myself to find time to call. Finally, my mother (STILL ALIVE) convinced me. Boy, am I glad I did! The folks at Liberty/Freedom/Independence were so friendly (YOU WILL BE LESS ALONE), and now I have much more time for my active lifestyle, pictured here (GINGERLY BENDING DOWN TO PET CAT). I use Liberty/Freedom/Independence every time I “cath”! (EW)

Julian posted about F for Fake yesterday, which prompted me to watch a few more clips of the film scattered around the internet. I have to admit that I’m not familiar with much of Orson Welles’ body of work beyond Citizen Kane and his famous War of the Worlds broadcast. So I had assumed that there was no more complete and cruel affirmation of Welles’ final, nihilistic hopelessness than his next-to-last acting credit: the voice of Unicron in the Transformers movie. But it appears that history has come up with innovative new sleights since then.

Within F for Fake there’s a monologue about Chartes Cathedral in which Welles expresses the idea that our individual impermanence doesn’t imply futility — that there’s dignity to be had in the moment and within our collective history. It’s quite beautiful.

Anyway, be sure to check out the associated Youtube comments, which together form a convincing rebuttal. I especially like the one comparing Welles’ work (unfavorably) to that of Quentin Tarantino.