This is not: “You Try to Live on 500k in This Town,” a NY Times article that explains why Obama’s proposal will make life unlivable for the executives whose daily life is inexorably tied to wasteful extravagance. When you don’t follow your own advice and save some of your 1+ million dollar salary, it’s harder for me to take your mortgage seriously. Just the same, when your necessary annual expenses include paying your Tom Daschle-style chaffeur, it keeps America firmly on the revenge train. If extravagance is required by corporate culture, then the culture-change brought about by salary-caps or (better yet) progressive tax increases can be a good thing.
If I were still in college, and if I spent my time in college with a schedule that allowed for such awesome frivolity, then I would want to take a class that did in-depth (with some calculus!) analysis of StarCraft. Homework would never be so fun again…
There’s no surprise people are realizing and writing about the low-value of advanced degrees. Schools have used grad students as educational fodder, producing far more than the demand for academics can keep up with. People hoping for their PhD to be something beyond their pursuit of an intellectual interest unfortunately will continue to be disappointed when tenure remains forever out of reach.
Is it the fate of the internet to endlessly combine two words to make memes? Will these neologisms always make normal, everyday people throw up in their mouths, just a little? I recently discovered twiction, a combination of “twitter” (for the microblogging service) and “fiction” (as in fiction). Twiction, AKA twitter-fiction or (even worse) tweetfic, is fiction in a maximum of 140 characters, which usually translates to somewhere between 1 and 3 sentences. It’s been around for a couple of years and seems to fall somewhere between kinda popular and vaguely interesting. It comes in two forms:
First, the more common form, standalone microfiction: stories told in a sentence, usually feeling like something in between Ernest Hemingway’s famous “story in six words” experiment (For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn) and more traditional flash fiction. Given the inherent limitations of the Twitter service, writing Twiction is a sort of writer’s challenge—can you write a compelling story in a sentence? Can you fit a character, a conflict, and a resolution in a line? Or, in another view of what makes a story: can your character change from the beginning of such a story to the end, all in less than 25 words? The answer? Sometimes.
Any twitterer trying to write twiction comes across the problem that it is actually very difficult to produce a lot of super-short stories with distinct plots, characters, and resolutions. 140 characters isn’t a lot. What I’ve noticed in reading around is that one common crutch is to resort to melodramatic endings (“and he was never seen again” sort of stuff), like this piece from the now defunct twitterfiction:
The poison cut deep rivulets in her flesh, her blood caught fire and her heart slowed. Soon she would be dead.
Death is an easy resolution, but it doesn’t make for a very compelling or thoughtful piece. Who is she? Why is she being poisoned? It’s impossible to fit in everything, but all we have here is an ending—not a story.
Another common “mistake” is to paint a scene or a scenario, but not a real story. After all, it’s much easier to write a character sketch or a lyrical description of a forest in 140 characters than it is to write a complete story. An example from 3S Stories:
Karma can be a bitch. Ike wasn’t sure what he did to deserve being reincarnated as a function call in Vista, but it must have been horrible.
It’s funny, and I actually rather like this one, but there’s no motion. There’s nothing inherently displeasing about it (and new writers struggle with the same issue even with no artificial restrictions), but it does mean a sizable chunk of twiction is more like the creative writing of interesting sentences than true standalone stories. In some ways, twitter might be more suited for twitter poetry, where an image alone—well painted—can stand on its own.
A second type of tweetfic is the serial-story (two examples), a more conventional length piece written in 140-character installments (like the serialized novels in magazines that were common in the olden days). The biggest issue here is writing a story that moves along at a decent clip in small segments. Writing a bunch of entries back to back defeats the purpose entirely. Pacing becomes a problem because there is a tension between condensing action too much (boring) and not making any progress per entry (also boring). On top of that, it’s impossible to go back and alter tweets. The story must go on, no matter if you think you’ve made some serious mistakes in previous entries. A strong detailed outline probably couldn’t hurt. Still, word-choice and character-limits will never be as frustrating as in the first type—if something can’t fit, then move it to the next installment.
So what we have in twitter-fiction, I think, is a challenging medium that is almost at odds with the nature of Twitter (in the sense that Twitter users generally post frequently and have conversations with other Twitter users). At best, it’s a literary diversion in the blink of an eye with at least some degree of artistic merit. More often, just words. Though, after seeing the content of your average “tweet,” just words might be just fine.
For the first time, there is a phone on my carrier that genuinely interests me: The Palm Pre, a brand new smartphone that has, at least at first glance, a winning combination of features.
It’s a touchscreen phone, and it offers all the fun gesture support of the iPhone. While some press members noted that the touchscreen functionality wasn’t quite as responsive, that doesn’t really matter because…
It has a full slide-out keyboard.
Perhaps most significantly, it has a brand new operating system, “WebOS.” Hands-on impressions have been uniformly positive, and there a few aspects that make me a little more than curious to see the final pricing when the Pre comes to market:
- Its programs are based on a combination of HTML, CSS, and Javascript—the same technologies that make up most of the web (Flash being the major exception). Remember the widgets that made OS X cool a few years back and then popped up everywhere? Same idea. It means that developing applications will be fast and straightforward. It also means that the internet will look and feel like the internet, something that cannot be said for browsing just about anything on Windows Mobile.
- Like Android, Google’s new open-source venture, webOS can multitask (unlike the iPhone)–meaning you can open more than one program at a time. The task-switching mechanism in webOS is called the “Card System,” and it’s apparently quick and awesome.
- It’s going to have a more open and tolerant app store. Unlike Apple, which has iron-fisted control over what you can and cannot run on the iPhone, Palm plans to be permissive: anything that can run on webOS eventually will, without the need to “jailbreak” the handset or anything else dramatic. They won’t block Flash just because it will cannibalize their own software sales. This is also a perk of the Android Market.
- Palm plans to unveil a way to convert old PalmOS programs to webOS. How? I don’t know, maybe an emulator (which could be pretty slow). But, if the method works well, the Pre will instantly have a back catalog of useful software. One of the big perks of Palm products has always been the software and development community—incidentally, two of the things recent Palm phones have lacked. If you see a correlation between those two attributes, the iPhone’s success, and Palm’s downward spiral, so do I.
WebOS just looks slick and the UI looks effortless—which is exactly how a phone should be. Two notable shortcomings: there’s no video capture (which could potentially come as a software update), and Adobe has yet to definitively confirm that it will be Flash capable. Flash has already been demoed on Android, and if it comes out on both competitors, it’d be a distinction that would really speak against Apple’s for-us-by-us attitude about critical software.
Now, if an Android phone finds its way to Sprint around the same time, it might be a harder choice. Of course, if my contract runs out first, then I may just switch to get the G1 on Verizon anyway—it has a lot of things going right, and the software perks are only going to get better. Still, I always had a fondness for the PalmPilot I had sometime around my Bar Mitzvah…if Palm can wrangle up some of the old cadre of PalmOS devotees and get them excited about devleoping software for webOS, we could see an interesting battle in the smartphone market this year. I think there’s a good shot: I haven’t coded outside of CS50, and even I want to develop for this thing.
As I type this on my msi wind “netbook,” it occurs to me that some otherwise very smart people are getting a very odd message from the explosion in this new computer category’s popularity.
Farhad Manjoo, Slate’s tech guy and author of a book that has received very respectable reviews on Amazon, wrote last week that the netbook craze means that the public wants small tablet computers (preferably made by apple), and not cheap laptops with a small factor.
When I see the huge popularity of the new netbook category, I see it rooted in a new combination of small, light computers and cheap computer: People have a desire and use for this novel combination, but there haven’t laptops in this niche until last year. Nothing is easier to carry around to class, the library, or around campus than a netbook. While ultralights would do the job even better, the cost is prohibitive. Tablet’s aren’t desirable for taking notes, writing emails, or any other active text-input–it’s not an interface best suited for the job. When I bought my MSI wind, I needed a computer—not a bigger version of the iPhone.
While netbook’s are not an ideal as a everyday desktop replacement, they are great second computers and get the job for basic productivity software. And let’s face it, PC computing has been on the decline for some time now. My new MSI wind is roughly as powerful as the $2000 Powerbook G4 I bought four years ago. It runs XP beautifully with Firefox and Word open. That’s sufficient for 95% of my computer usage.
Would I want to sit at a desk starting at the 10″ screen at all times? No, of course not–but did I enjoy lugging my powerbook to class everyday? Nope. The keyboard gets the job done, but it’s an even better size for children and women with smaller hands, two groups that some people have said have really taken a liking to these small laptops.
Let’s be clear here. Netbooks don’t represent some new edgy crossover device. They are computers that sacrifice glamor in exchange for great value and a small form factor, nothing more.
It’s a joke, but a fantastic one: the Onion’s “World of World of Warcraft,” a veritable nerdgasm of meta gaming. Amusingly, I imagine this game would actually be more fun than Second Life.
I came across an interesting article by Henry Blodget, who attempts to reaffirm the original idea that Wikipedia is indeed a product of crowdsourcing, as opposed to obsessive work of a few hundred (or few thousand, it turns out) or so “fanatics, ” as Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales has previously said.
The gist is that most of Wikipedia’s content is the result of countless individual additions—a paragraph here, a sentence there—often from users who never do anything else on the site. One imagines these contributions are few-of-a-kind labors of love. The vast majority of edits, however, are the result of the fanatics Wales refers to: people whose contributions take as much of their time as their jobs, doing things like spell-checking, linking to related articles, moving-things around, tidying the language, etc. So, Wikipedia is written by the many, edited by the few.
Of course, if you were to read the comments made on the first article (one of the quickest paths to depression you can find on the internet), Wikipedia also seems to inspire a special kind of vitriol. One flavor refers to the (lack of) quality of the content, the other to the supposed iron-fisted control by the top editors.
It’s true: errors abound on Wikipedia, as they will on just about everything. And, there are certainly examples of bias, corporate tampering, and pranks. That said, the quality is quite good on a incredible variety of subjects, much more than on a traditional encyclopedia. People complain that it’s not good enough to be cited on papers in high school and college. Well, I hope so. It’s an encyclopedia. Was Encarta? Britannica? Not in many classes I remember, and never by itself.
If I were to tell someone that in medical school, I’ve learned probably 75% of my knowledge for class from Wikipedia, some potential patients might be scared. Instead I’ll argue that when I need to know something in a pinch (or because the homebrew psuedo-textbooks my school provides are often terse and mystifying), Wikipedia is fast and almost always right. It’s often more clear than the textbooks I’ve used and offers interesting and useful information that’s not usually considered relevant enough to include in the already crowded curriculum. The internal links ensure that when there’s a term I’m not familiar with, I need look no further than a click away—saving me time and helping me cement my understanding. It’s not ideal or perfect, but it gets the job done. It’s a springboard and a resource, not the irrefutable source of all party trivia.
Perhaps a group of tight-fisted editors squelch useful new articles or reverse valid changes without warning or justification. Maybe it’s a sacrifice that is necessary in order to cut down on tripe and attempt to maintain a level of cross-article consistency. It’s understandable that someone who makes a one-time contribution gets snubbed and then gets angry, but it doesn’t negate the fact that I think the world is a better off post the wiki revolution than before. Mob wisdom might not be more than the sum of its parts, but it’s still useful.
It’s always a strange thing to start a site, especially the first post. It’s a bit of a quandary, how to strike a balance of tone and content, not to wax too self-important or with an excessive amount of false-modesty (because the truly, truly modest probably wouldn’t be publishing anything in the first place, really). Achieving such a balance seems a bit too troublesome, so I’ve come to terms with being tacky.
When I started publishing my thoughts online in college (in a different, now defunct Harvard-centric blog), it was for me a situation with unique but altogether easier to manage problems: It was exam period, and I had two history papers to write. I was ridiculously bitter, 1) because it was a very cold January in Cambridge, MA, and 2) because I had exams after a two-week winter break in December, whereas my peers from other colleges were still enjoying vacations at home. I started a blog to complain, and I did. That first post was already determined, spurned on by the desire to avoid real, required work. The hard parts, the subject and the motivation, were done for me. I lost both over time, and I updated less and less frequently until finally, I graduated. Both that chapter of my life and my discourse on the subject came to a natural and relatively fulfilling close.
Two hundred words later, and we get to the point. I’m feeling motivated again. There is no work to avoid yet and no theme to rely on, but those were, I think, crutches I need not rely on now. After one semester of medical school, I desperately miss the catharsis of a productive hobby (or two, or three). Reading textbooks and reading the news, even the Daily Show and Colbert Report, is not enough. So, with this new year, and at the dawn of a new semester, what better time than now to say: I will write. It will be a hobby, a release, a distraction from drudgery, and I will enjoy it.